Margaret Cezair-Thompson is a Jamaican writer and a professor of literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson is a Jamaican writer and a professor of literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, where she attended Saint Andrew's High School for Girls. She is the daughter of Dudley J. Thompson, noted Jamaican barrister QC, who served as a Jamaican Government Minister and then as a diplomat (Ambassador-at- Large to Africa, stationed in Nigeria) and Genevieve Cezair-Thompson. Cezair-Thompson acknowledges her father's influence in her work: "My father's life spanned almost a century of Caribbean and African Pan-Africanist history. Growing up listening to his many first-hand accounts of great events and people influenced me enormously." [1] He met her mother, Genevieve, in Manchester, England, around the time of the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Cezair-Thompson's maternal grandfather, Dr. Hubert Cezair, was a Trinidadian doctor who practiced medicine in Manchester, England.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson left Jamaica to study English literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at Barnard College (where she was mentored by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin [2] ). She then went on to complete her PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she wrote her dissertation on Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul with the help of legendary American critic Alfred Kazin. Although she has lived outside Jamaica for many years, Cezair-Thompson retains strong ties to her native country. Like many characters in her novels, she was a child when Jamaica became an independent nation in 1962, and she has witnessed the country's changes. She currently lives in Massachusetts where she continues to work and write.
Her work has been compared to that of William Faulkner, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid. [3] Among the themes in her work is the individual quest for place and identity within the tumult of history. She is not only interested in Jamaica's history but how Jamaica's history connects to history at large: "Growing up as a child in Jamaica, it never seemed as though my history was in any way connected to the great moments in European history except when it came to talking about slavery, but now I'm seeing all the ways in which [formerly marginalized] areas were very much players in world events and bigger history." [4] She feels part of a growing tradition of post-colonial writers "very much claiming back their part in a bigger history." [4] Many critics also praise Cezair-Thompson's ability to evoke the "genuine essence of Jamaica" in her descriptions of the Jamaican landscape, flora and culture. [5]
The writers (and books) of special interest to Cezair-Thompson include Virginia Woolf, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Jean Rhys, William Shakespeare, James Joyce ( Dubliners ), Joseph Conrad ( Heart of Darkness ), William Butler Yeats, and Derek Walcott
The True History of Paradise, Cezair-Thompson's first novel, follows Jean Landing on a drive across the mountains as she attempts to flee Jamaica for the United States. During the ride, she recalls memories of her own fractured past as she notes the increasingly violent confrontations between political factions of her island nation: [6]
The True History of Paradise was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2000.
Cezair-Thompson's second novel, The Pirate's Daughter, focuses more on pre-independent Jamaica, including the years that the famous swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, lived there. The novel, which imagines an affair between the star and a beautiful local, Ida, is a coming-of-age story not only of the female protagonist but of the island itself, and it subtly explores the legacies of colonialism. As one reviewer wrote, "Jamaica feels like another character in the book." Cezair-Thompson once described her choice of subject for The Pirate's Daughter, saying: "My mother told me how women in Jamaica fainted when they saw Flynn because he was so handsome. That story amused and fascinated me as a child without my realizing why. Now I think it's something to do with the impact of two very different worlds colliding: glamorous, mesmerizing Hollywood and small Jamaica which was still a colony at the time and more susceptible to outside influence." [7] Focusing on the transitional period of Jamaica in the 1940s and 1950s, immediately preceding independence, in which physical and psychological manifestations of a British colony still prevailed, The Pirate's Daughter won the Essence Literary Award for Fiction in 2008, People Critic's #1 Choice in 2007, and the ABA Book Sense #1 Pick for October 2007. It was also on the London Sunday Times best-seller list and a Richard & Judy summer pick. It has been translated into seven different languages.
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was an Australian-American actor who achieved worldwide fame during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles, frequent partnerships with Olivia de Havilland, and reputation for his womanising and hedonistic personal life. His most notable roles include Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), which was later named by the American Film Institute as the 18th-greatest hero in American film history, the lead role in Captain Blood (1935), Major Geoffrey Vickers in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and the hero in a number of Westerns such as Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail, Virginia City and San Antonio (1945).
Errol may refer to:
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she now lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence, Emerita at Harvard University.
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Jamaican literature is internationally renowned, with the island of Jamaica being the home or birthplace of many important authors. One of the most distinctive aspects of Jamaican literature is its use of the local dialect — a variation of English, the country's official language. Known to Jamaicans as "patois", and now sometimes described as "nation language", this creole has become an important element in Jamaican fiction, poetry and theater.
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