Jacqueline Bishop, showing off a couple of her quilts. - Contributed
Jamaican-born writer and teacher Jacqueline Bishop's philosophy is that great writing can be taught. It is a skill that can be mastered, if engaged consistently and tenaciously.
"I also believe in teaching writing from the inside out, to take a personal experience and contextualise it to arrive at some larger truth about the self, or about some aspect of society," she said.
Bishop spent many years at New York University, first as a student and later as a teacher. She is also the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters.
Fulbright Scholarship
Last year, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship that placed her in Morocco.
The Fulbright Program, established in 1946, aims to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States (US) and other countries, through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.
"Going to Morocco gave me special insight into the hard, but exciting work of international relations and diplomacy. I did a lot of work with the US Embassy, and this helped me see the world from another perspective. Interfacing with the diplomats in the public affairs section left me in awe of the hard day-to-day work of public diplomacy," she said.
However, the most outstanding experience she had in Morocco was "working to bring the great writer Claude McKay back to Morocco."
The renowned writer and poet Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on September 15, 1890. He moved to the US in 1912, and lived in Morocco for several months in 1928, and again from 1930 to 1934. Bishop explained that he wrote quite a few of his books there, in addition to essays, poems and short stories about that country.
"I have even come across an important group of letters he wrote from Morocco," she added. "Yet, he was virtually unknown in Morocco and, indeed, the people who knew of him did not know that he lived and wrote in Morocco, a country he loved so much!"
By the time she was to leave, there was much excitement about Claude McKay's time in Morocco, and students were even contacting her about doing dissertations and theses on this topic.
Claude McKay
"I remember once, at a speech I was giving, I asked a young woman to read one of his poems called Songs of Morocco and that just gave me chills, hearing his poem read in Morocco by a young Moroccan student, knowing how much Claude McKay loved that country. I hope to do some more work on Claude McKay's time in Morocco," she added.
She gave talks on college campuses all around the country. One group of students had read her first novel, The River's Song, and one of the most interesting things that she came to realise, through a student's question, was how American this Jamaican novel is, for, as the student pointed out, it was still in pursuit of the American dream!
Bishop, who is also a visual artist, held three exhibitions while she was in Morocco. The US Embassy in Morocco arranged one exhibition, the Fulbright Commission in Morocco arranged another and a small, exquisite gallery in Rabat, called Au Grain de Sesame, held the final exhibition.
distinct embroidery styles
She explained: "For the exhibition arranged by the US Embassy and the Fulbright Commission, I showed a series of quilts I had been working on that I titled, The Hand of Fatima, which were created around each of the seven distinct styles of embroidery in the country." At the opening exhibition, the celebrated Moroccan writer and thinker, Fatima Mernissi, showed up.
Early next year, all the quilts are scheduled to be exhibited in Italy as a story from Jamaica to America to Africa to Europe, and then back again to the Americas. "It is a triangular story, a diasporic story," she commented.
But although she formed some great friendships in Morocco, she said, "Unlike Claude McKay, I did not feel at home in Morocco. I was unprepared for the disparities between Africans of Arab descent and sub-Saharan Africans."
She said many people told her that the level of hostility that she was experiencing on the street was due to the fact that people were mistaking her for a sub-Saharan immigrant.
"Perhaps they are correct," she said. "Although there was no denying, for me, what a friend of mine so artfully called 'the politics of colour' at work in Morocco."
Because of all she was doing in Morocco, the lectures she gave, the mentoring she undertook, the book club she started, participation in festivals, she was considered for a UNESCO/Fulbright fellowship.
"It seemed I was always off doing something somewhere in Morocco, and I know that participation in outside activities in your host country was one of the considerations for the UNESCO/Fulbright fellowship," she said.
She is scheduled to stay in Paris for six months, and will be working at UNESCO in the Creative Industries section, which sponsors creative cities all around the world. "I am excited and looking forward to what I might learn in Paris," she added.
She is no stranger to that city, as she lived there for a year as an undergraduate. She is returning to a city that has always had a special place in her heart.
my greatest pleasures
"It was in Paris that I decided to follow my heart and become a writer. When I was there as a student in the early 1990's, it was still a reading culture and the more I read, the more I was transported back to a time in Jamaica when reading and writing were my greatest pleasures," she said.
Bishop has also been in touch with another Jamaican writer/visual artist, Alecia McKenzie, who lives in Paris, and she hopes they will get to do some readings and somehow have an exhibition together.
"We both have no idea where and how this will happen, but we do know that we would very much like to do this," she said.