Photo:Claire McNamee
www.clairemcnamee.com

Rather than poet or novelist or playwright, I prefer the moniker writer. My occasional essays and journalism and my everyday writing practice warrant it. Genre pieces emerge out of this daily routine (5 poetry books, 4 novels, a Channel 4 Film, a play published by Methuen and individual essays scattered in numerous publications).

My origin is not in itself of interest, except to say that Guyana, London and now the US provide a curious cocktail of ethnicity, history and Conradian horror unmatched by any other triple mix of sovereign states. I was born in London in 1960, a clock-stopping time and place, of Guyanese parents. And lucky to be sent back to Guyana at age two to be raised in Airy Hall in the countryside by my father's mother and then in Georgetown (the capitol) by my mother's mother. I returned to London at age 12 for secondary education, trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley Hospital in London then went on to tertiary education. I left the UK at age 32 to take up a series of jobs in the US culminating in my present post as Professor of English at the University of Miami.

A Caribbean country on the verge of collapse. A small town called Boundary. A rambling house inhabited by three generations of the Abrahams family. And a little girl who is trying to make sense of it all…

Bethany Bettany is five years old when her father dies and her mother leaves her to fend for herself in the Abrahams household. The place simmers with resentment: her uncles and aunts think her mother killed her father; her grandmother has not left her room since her grandfather disappeared. Bethany is the scapegoat for it all. Taunted, beaten, despised, she retreats into silence and learns to make herself invisible.

As she quietly nurses her wounds, she eavesdrops on the conversations of the adults around her. Soon she is piecing together answers to the questions that haunt her. How did her father die? Why doesn't her mother answer her letters? And who is she?

Fred D'Aguiar's wonderfully rich, evocative, fourth novel is a book about borders - between people and between nations. In Bethany he has created both a loveable character and a symbol for the search of a nation to make itself whole. If Boundary is Guyana, then Bethany Bettany - a girl torn between two names - is the spirit of its people poised for flight.