ON THE OCCASIONS I AM asked to look back and reflect on my own books, I realize it has been my lifetime’s purpose to try and understand what happened when I started working with Marjorie Quick. It started with me writing her eulogy, and has gone on from there. The preoccupations, the timbre, the shape of my writing have hinged on that short period of my life. My writing is the constant reconfiguration of how I myself was once reconfigured.
I often visited the gallery, specifically to see Rufina and the Lion, to stand with the public and admire its enduring power. What Teresa intended all those years ago, had, in its own way, come true. And yet more recently, as I have watched the sisters, I know that behind those eyes and underneath those brushstrokes there is another story, a story that is now partly mine,. One woman, her body buried by the roots of an olive tree. Another, fleeing and facing unknown waters. Then me.
The rediscovery of Rufina and the Lion in 1967 was bound up with my own awakenings: my understanding of Quick, Cynth and her baby, my affair with Lawrie, a growing confidence in my own writing. That painting set delayed time bombs, which carried on exploding – sometimes gently, sometimes with perturbing force – as the decades rolled on.
And last year, a question began to press inside me, as persistent as a lion who sets his sight upon you and will not go away. For years I had enjoyed the girls’ hidden truth, this extra privilege, this miraculous secret of a nineteen--year--old painting in the attic of her father’s rented house in Spain. And I wondered: might someone look at Rufina, at me, and believe such things? A new curiosity, rather than my hard--earned confidence, became the fuel to write.
Although any collective answer to my question remains to be seen, personally I feel quite certain of it. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: in the end, a piece of art only succeeds when its creator – to paraphrase Olive Schloss – possesses the belief that brings it into being.
Odelle Bastien
Wimbledon, 2002
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ART
Berger, John – About Looking (Writers’ and Readers’ Publishing Co--op, 1980) Bernier, Rosamond – Matisse, Picasso, Miró – As I Knew Them (Sinclair Stevenson, 1991) Bernier, Rosamond – Some of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) Chadwick, Whitney – Women, Art and Society (Thames & Hudson, Fifth Edition 2012) Guggenheim, Peggy – Out of This Century: Confessions of An Art Addict (Deutsch, 1980) Hook, Philip – Breakfast at Sotheby’s (Penguin, 2013) Mancoff, Debra N. – Danger! Women Artists At Work (Merrell, 2012)
LONDON
Reed, Jane – Girl About Town: How to Live in London – And Love It! (Tandem, 1965) Film
London – The Modern Babylon (dir. Julien Temple, 2012) SPAIN AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Barker, Richard – Skeletons in the Closet, Skeletons in the Ground: Repression, Victimization and Humiliation in a Small Andalusian Town – The Human Consequences of the Spanish Civil War (Sussex Academic Press, 2012) Buckley, Henry – The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic: A Witness to the Spanish Civil War (I.B. Tauris, 2014) Casanova, Julián – A Short History of the Spanish Civil War (I.B. Tauris, 2012) García Lorca, Federico – Romancero Gitano (1928)
Graham, Helen – The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (Sussex Academic Press, 2012) Koestler, Arthur – Dialogue with Death (1942)
Lee, Laurie – A Moment of War (Viking, 1991)
Lee, Laurie – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) Preston, Paul – The Spanish Holocaust (HarperPress, 2011) Woolsey, Gamel – Death’s Other Kingdom (1939)
TRINIDAD AND THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE IN BRITAIN
Braithwaite, Lloyd – Colonial West Indian Students in Britain (UWI Press, 2001) Chamberlain, Mary – Narratives of Exile and Return (St Martin’s Press, 1997) Dathorne, O.R. – Dumplings in the Soup (Cassell, 1963) Hinds, Donald – Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (Heinemann, 1966) James, C.L.R. – Black Jacobins (Martin, Secker & Warburg, 1938) Lamming, George – The Pleasures of Exile (Michael Joseph, 1960) Miller, Kei (ed.) – New Caribbean Poetry; An Anthology (Carcanet, 2007) Mittelholzer, Edgar – With A Carib Eye (Secker & Warburg, 1958) Naipaul, V.S. – Miguel Street (Deutsch, 1959)
Schwarz, Bill – West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (MUP, 2003) Selvon, Sam – The Lonely Londoners (Alan Wingate, 1956) Stuart, Andrea – Sugar in the Blood (Portobello, 2012) Tajfel, Henri and John Dawson – Disappointed Guests (OUP, 1965) Radio
Radio 4 (2015): Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen, presented by Lenny Henry – particularly episode 2, Caribbean Voices – writers and actors from the Caribbean coming to work in London Film
The Stuart Hall Project (dir. John Akomfrah, 2013) – Key domestic and international historical events feature West Indian migration to the UK, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Uprising, the birth of youth counterculture, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, and Hall’s mixed experiences with ‘Britishness’ as a post--war immigrant Fighting for King and Empire: Britain’s Caribbean Heroes (BBC4 documentary, producers: Marc Wadsworth and Deborah Hobson of The--Latest.com, first aired May 2015, based on the documentary, Divided By Race, United By War And Peace, also made by The--Latest.Com)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to: Francesca Main, Megan Lynch and Jennifer Lambert, who made this possible Juliet Mushens, who saw me through
Sasha Raskin and Sarah Manning, who brought up the rear Professor Mary Chamberlain, who gave her time and opened my eyes a bit wider Colin McKenzie, who lent his erudition and enthusiasm Also to:
Alice O’Reilly, Teasel Scott and my family; in less obvious, but equally important ways, you helped me write this novel and
Pip Carter, for everything