On this week’s episode we have BBC radio host and author Colin Grant. Colin digs into some of the stories that have come out in his novels and how he managed to find his way into writing. They also discuss the value of hypno-therapy and confronting the past.
Episode: 42
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Colin Grant, a BBC Host, Author, Historian, Associate Fellow in the Center of Caribbean Studies and a BBC Radio Producer.
Subtitle: “It was my mother who fathered me”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-42-bageye-at-the-wheel-w-colin-grant/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Colin Grant, a BBC host, author, historian, Associate Fellow in the center of Caribbean studies and a BBC radio producer.
He grew up on a council estate in Luton. He joined BBC and has worked as a TV script editor and radio producer. In this episode, Collin digs into some of the stories that have come out in his novels and how he managed to find his way into writing.
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Part 1
Part 2
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Colin 0:00
I do caution people about digging into their past because you have to feel yourself to be able to do it and to be considerate towards yourself, I suppose. But I think I’m really tough but also I recognize I’ve got great stories that I can tell in a way which aren’t going to be damaging to me that may be illuminating to other people and so I’m determined to do it and I will do it.
Norman 0:32
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I know this guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, like kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:03
So Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast?
Norman 1:06
All right. Do you remember Ian Thompson?
Hayden 1:09
Yes, I do.
Norman 1:11
That was a fun interview. I really wish we could talk more with him. But anyways, his referral was Colin Grant who is a BBC producer. He’s written a bunch of books. We’re going to be talking about Homecoming and I & I Natural Mystics route two really great books, so can’t wait to talk to him.
Norman 1:31
All right. Welcome to the podcast Colin.
Colin 1:33
Thank you very much for having me Norm.
Norman 1:36
It’s my pleasure. When Ian says that he knew an interesting guy. I take it for granted. It’s the most interesting guy he knows. So I’m really looking forward to talking to you today.
Colin 1:47
I know he’s a great guy, Ian Thompson, we are brothers in arms.
Norman 1:51
Ah, it was really incredible talking to him last week. I tell you that guy, he’s got the dry sense of humor. I didn’t know, like, are you serious?
Colin 2:01
Yeah, he has strong, dry wits.
Norman 2:07
He does. Yes. So anyway, I’m really interested to hear more about your backstory. So we always say, what makes Colin Colin. So would you mind going into some of your backstory?
Colin 2:21
So my parents are Jamaican, Ethylene and bad Guy. Bad Guy is his nickname. His real name was Clinton George. But he’s called Bad guy because he had permanent bags under his eyes and they emigrated from Jamaica to the UK in 1959 and I was born in the UK. My parents had a very strong sense of the fact that they were British. Back in the day, there was no such thing as a Jamaican passport. So they came to Britain on the British passport with the stamp in the passport right of abode. But when I was growing up in the 60s, I was born at 61. When I was growing up in the 60s, if anybody asked me where I was from, I’d say I was British by birth, but Jamaican by will and inclination and my father heard me or overheard me, he’d say, Stop, stop. Your body right here. You are English. I am British. Now let’s get that straight. Don’t let the man take you for a fool. So in honor of my parents, I fess up to being English and British. I was born in a town called Luton, which is a small town, perhaps 30 miles north of the capital of London and I’m one of seven children. I went to Catholic schools, my parents were Catholics, and in Luton, which is a migrant town and populated by Irish, Caribbean, South Asian people and English people, there was only one Catholic school that you could go to, you almost really had to be Irish to get in. So in the early 70s, my parents sent me to a fee paying school in St. Albans, which is a cathedral town, in Bersin, again, not very far from the Capitol and that school was called St. Columbus College and it was run by North American monks. They were brothers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and in a way I owe my time here in front of you Norm both to the school and to my parents, because I think my parents recognized when I was growing up that I had what was called good brains. They were feeding me all the fish that they could get their hands on, but it wasn’t going to work because I was destined for the failing state school because I couldn’t get into the Catholic school because I wasn’t Irish. So they saved that money to send me to this private school bus. There was only one wage coming into the house, as they say. My father worked on the production line of Vauxhall motors building cars and one wage feeding seven children wasn’t going to be sufficient to send me to a private school. So, I will say that actually, I owe my education and I hope you can include this but I owe my education to marijuana. My father was a small time ganja dealer and he scrimped and saved and collected money from selling ganja and small sashes to his Caribbean friends who arrived from the Caribbean with the love of ganja in tact, who fought is providing a social service as an 11 year old boy, I was his bag man, we’d go around dropping off the counter to his mates and that was sufficient to send me to this other expensive private school. I was always destined to become a medical student. When I was 10, in fact, my father sat me down and informed me that I was going to be a doctor and so all through my childhood that was the direction in which I travel and as I guess I didn’t continue that path, because I’m here now as a writer, but for many, many years, I’ve tried to live out the carrier’s pleasure, my parents took in me becoming a medical student, which I did in the early 80s and before I saw the light and dug my way out of hospitals, and I went into the world of broadcasting. But what’s curious to me was that I never had any great interest in literature when I was a young boy, that’s partly because I was steered towards the sciences. I was going to be adopted, and everything that I did had to be directed in that fashion. So in a way, I’ve departed from the path that was set out to me by my parents, as a young boy and I hope that they still don’t feel too disheartened by the direction I eventually took
Norman 6:57
When did you feel that you’re heading into the literary field? So you’re going and you were studying the sciences, when did that change?
Colin 7:06
Well, I was at medical school, in 1981 82, the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, in the East End of London. At that time, every intake had about 100 students and typically, there’ll be 90 blokes, 90 men and 10 young women. So the competition to get a girlfriend was fierce. Unless you were a rugby player, or a sports star of some sort, you have very little chance that I worked out that you had to have some sort of unique selling points and there’s a very beautiful young woman, then, I’m sure she’s still beautiful now, according to Cinder, who I had my eye on and I thought if I can write a play, and see whether she’d be interested in auditioning for the play, we might have the beginnings of a relationship, even if it’s only a platonic one. So I wrote a play, and I auditioned those people for parts, the center did audition, but she wasn’t very good and so I didn’t cast her. But at that point, now I’m 19,20 years old, and I got the bug, I got the bug of writing, plays and being in plays and being in the environment of the theater, which I found very, very stimulating. So that was my first interest in literature came through wanting to write plays and I, like many young writers, I looked at Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, people like that, lots of English players as well, Caryl Churchill and I began slowly to become more and more interested in literature and when I was in my second year, I had a bit of a tough time, I didn’t really enjoy medical school. In a way, I realized that I was in the wrong profession fairly early on and every few months, I’d have an audience with the dean, the head of the college, and he would advise you to just stick and stay. Just stick around and wait for obstetrics or wait for the renal medicine. It’ll be more interesting. But in that time, there were, I’d say three doctors who are very important to me, and in a way much more beginning to have an interest in writing and they were called Annie Burgess. Annie Burgess was an embryologist. She told us embryology in our first year of medical school, it is very theatrical, she would start her lesson something like this. The problem is in one wing of the stage, these spermatozoa are in the other wing of the stage, draw the curtains and then the fun begins. I was being interested in here that Kelsey and I kind of wrote a love message with her in mind as a possible audience in a way or possible reader and then we also had a woman who was a great surgeon who was called Rita Auden, and Rita Auden, specialize in thyroidectomy and that’s removing of the thyroid gland and the very long operations can take up to four or five hours and as a medical student, you’re tasked with the holding back the retractor, to hold it back something to allow the surgeon to see what they’re doing. But it is a number of hours and she said that every student who came in should come with a poem to help alleviate boredom. So she would encourage people to write their own poems and because they operate for so long, you have to run long poems. So she got me started in poetry or at some tasks and poems. But then the most important person to me at that time, maybe 82,83, was a woman called Wendy Savage, and Wendy Savage was an obstetrician and gynecologist but very unusual one. This is the time when most consultant obstetricians were men. They’re only six obstetricians who are consultants at the hospital, she was the only woman and she recognized that we had no real understanding of reproduction of women’s and women’s desires, women’s feelings, women’s sense of themselves and there’s a book that most people get when they’re studying anatomy, is called Grey’s Anatomy is a huge tome of 800 pages and we would arrive at the lessons on Wendy Savage for obstetrics and gynecology, and she would say, for a way, craziness, we hear the two books for you.
Colin 11:34
Germaine Greer’s, The Female Eunuch and Erica Young’s fear of flying and most students, most of them. Most of the men were rather bemused. But I read both books and was again drawn to this unknown world to me of literature and I’d say those are the three women that really propelled my writing and then lastly, what happened in I think, again, 81,82, I came across a book by John Berger, and anybody know him is a fine writer and he collaborated with a photographer called John Moore and they did a photo journal, which is called A Fortunate Man, what they did, John Berger and John Moore, they went to a place in England called the Forest of Dean, this special place in the West of England, they roll replaced with isolated place, and they found this general practitioner GP general doctor, a country doctor, who they called John Casal, that was his real name. But John Casal, they followed him around and the book is called A Fortunate Man because he was fortunate. He was doing a job which was intellectually stimulating. He was very well financially rewarded. He lives in a lovely cottage, and his patients adored him. He would mend broken limbs of foresters, he would sit with a dying, and it would help women give birth seems like an ideal man in the way and he’s also a kind of doctor philosopher and I was studying in my determination to try to stick and stay in medicine through reading about this man, John Casal and when I wavered the following year, through the book, there are various hints as to where this man was, where his practice was. So I worked out where he should be in the forest, the team. So I left my student accommodation in the East End of London and I went in search of this man, John Casal. But I couldn’t find him and when I returned, I picked up a copy of the British Medical Journal, which is the premier journal for doctors in this country and there was a big tree of John Casal and it was clear that he had killed himself and I had a moment that I thought, Wow, there was obviously a gulf between the expectation of what it was to be a doctor and the reality and in a way, that story made my mind up for me that I wouldn’t continue in medicine and I will try my hand at writing plays. So I left medical school after four long years actually, and going to send a company and workplace in my early 20s
Norman 14:37
Wow. So that was the biggest effect when you found out that, what was his name again? John Casal. So when he committed suicide.
Colin 14:47
I thought this is a possible path that I would go down myself. Not that I felt suicidal, but I thought that I was going down a path that was a trap. For me in terms of what it was I thought I would get from a career as a doctor. That this kind of romance about being a doctor and as a child of a migrant, we’re very determined that is the parents like my parents had and their generation equally, the friends who have migrants had, and they were determined to send their children to become doctors or lawyers, teachers, that kind of thing had very sub narrow ideas about what you could do in life and so I didn’t know anything other than that and it’s only when I started to read these other people that I realized that there’s other possibilities for life beyond these narrow prisms that I was seeing the world through.
Norman 15:34
It’s interesting that you’re talking about going through med school, and that you’re kind of forced into the sciences. I went through the same thing, not so much forced into science. I was going through film and radio at the time, this goes back 25-30 years, we’re almost the same age and it’s not that I was forced, but like, my dad didn’t have a ton of money. We were okay. But fifth semester, I just decided this wasn’t for me and the guilt, just the absolute guilt that I had going that two and a half years that you’ve spent and you put me through school, that’s not going to happen and wow, it was just a tremendous guilt.
Colin 16:21
How did you deal with that guilt? Did you pocket or did you process it?
Norman 16:26
You know what? I think I went into some form of depression. I think I did and it was very hard too because I didn’t know even though I quit, I didn’t know and that’s that was the hardest, because quitting is tough, I don’t like the word quit. But I knew it wasn’t for me and then trying to find something, it took years, really to try to figure out what I wanted to do and one thing I had in my mind, my dad had a factory. So I ended up working over there for a bit. I didn’t want to work in the factory, 9 to 5, and he was very tough on me if anybody else was doing like he had higher expectations for me, which wasn’t a bad thing. Like he wasn’t mean, he was just he laid down the law and he’s still living and the guy is a true entrepreneur, he’s great. But it was very hard. It took years because I hated doing a lot of what I was doing and getting into these jobs, and not feeling secure and that’s the part of it is you don’t feel secure. You don’t feel comfortable in your own skin and I don’t know, it probably took about 10-15 years, and there was a heck of a lot of depression. I’m just one of these people that you get into one job and it didn’t work, okay, depression, then you go into another job, and depression. I have become, I hate to say I haven’t become resilient against depression. But it takes a bit more to get depressed now.
Colin 18:00
You’ve exposed yourself to this question seven years, and you’ve dealt with them
Norman 18:04
Absolutely. But I have seen because people have been forced into doing things up into higher expectations. As students, I know students that have killed themselves. I know my sons know a few people. I’ve known friends that have killed themselves or lost their lives. We call it losing their life to suicide, not committing suicide, but losing their life to suicide and it’s because of these external forces that a lot of this happens instead of saying that one was a kid that was going through medical school, and he lost his life to suicide. But all you have to do is just tell your parents like, Hey, look, I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to go through and feel stressed out.
Colin 18:56
That’s a big thing to do, isn’t it? I mean, I have trouble telling my parents in a way. I kind of dropped hints for almost a year and so finally, my mother turned to me and said, You’ve left medical school, haven’t you? So I did the kind of cowardly way and enabled them to see and to tell me the truth. But in a way, I think, although I didn’t like my time in medical school, I learned a lot and I was exposed to some interesting people who I ended up writing about actually. One of the other people who kind of convinced me about the stupidity on my part, same as was a man I called Delma. I’ve been writing about for a magazine here in the UK called Granta Magazine stories called the recall of Herman Harcourt. So one of the disciplines you do when you’re in medical schools, you do some time in a sacred hospital. As a student, you were tasked with looking at the one patient for the thought of this elderly man who seemed old to me then years younger than I am now who’s in it 50s but he was was an old man and he was a Caribbean man who’d been a scholar of some sort, but ended up on a wing of a lot ruled of a psychic hospital and he was a core of phobic. So my job was just to walk with him to get him back into the habit of being in society. So one day would walk for half a mile, and then go back to the hospital. The next day, three quarters of a mile, a mile and we have these long discursive chats as we walked around the East End of London, about the life lessons he’d possibly been able to impart to me and I saw that actually, if I’d taken a wrong turn or two, I could equally have become that man. I was 21 also at the time, and on one occasion, on one of his walks, we walked for several miles and then he insisted that we stop off at his actual flats, to collect some things before getting back to the hospital. When we went to his flat, some termed and it’s clear that he was never going to go back to the hospital. He rifled under his mattress, as well as there being lots of dirty magazines, pornographic magazines, there were several 1000 pounds, several thousand dollars and he then tried to persuade me not to take him back to the hospital but to go with him to Heathrow Airport, on our metro system on our underground because he reckons that now that he’d been diagnosed as a man suffering from a psychiatric illness, there was never any chance for him to be defined in any other way. He was stuck and when he went to change the narrative for himself, he imagined I have to go back to Antigua to the Caribbean and would I come with him on this wonderful journey and I was getting a little bit project myself, and I was nervous about having to physically drag him back to the hospital. So I kind of indulged him, we went down onto the underground, this underground Metro that we have in London, under the line called the circle on which sort of circumnavigates London and we went round and round three or four times on the Circle Line for several hours with him, saying, Are we there? yet? Are we there yet? Are we almost there yet and eventually, we got to the stop where the hospital walls and I persuaded you at Heathrow Airport, he ascended, realized I tricked him, but surrendered to the notion that actually, there’s no use in trying to escape the life that he presently had, because he wasn’t well, but often I thought to myself, what would happen if I had gone with him to Heathrow Airport, if I had been mad enough to take him back to the Caribbean. So I was really touched and felt rather tended towards some of the people that I’ve met at medical school and again, almost in honor of my parents, I’m glad that I was able to write about some of these people and eventually, I joined the British Broadcasting Corporation. So the stigma of not completing this dream of being a medical student and doctor, but somehow lessened by the fact that I was able, after a few years of leaving medical school to join the BBC.
Norman 23:23
So your parents must have been very proud when you joined the BBC.
Colin 23:30
Kind of, well, I should qualify that by saying my mother is the most important person to me. My father made sacrifices to send me to a private school. My father should never have been a father. My father should probably never been married, my father was a big gambler and like most gamblers he was addicted to losing and so we were a strange actually, my father, and I didn’t see him for 30 odd years and what was peculiar was that when I did start to write books, I thought I’d actually write a book, which is a memoir about my time with my father growing up in a place called Luton. So I grew up on a counselor statement, which in Canada, not sure whether you have projects, but they’re similar to the projects in the United States. This is social housing, and quite poor accommodation for poor people, essentially and I was going to achieve social mobilization and get out of that place and bring my peers, my siblings and my parents with me. That’s the idea, I suppose and I suppose I have achieved that because I would be wrong just in school, working class, I suppose I’m middle class now. But when I wrote this book, I wrote a book about that idea about achieving social mobilisation through education, but living in this quite impoverished environment in Luton in the 70s book was called A Bageye At The Wheel. So as I mentioned at the beginning, as I mentioned at the beginning, my father’s nickname was Bageye because he had these bags on eyes. From lack of sleep he suffered from a condition called subcutaneous edema, which he had from the age of 16. He was a merchant seaman as a galley boy and some wag gave him that nickname and what was kind of clear to me growing up in Luton amongst these Caribbean people in the 70s. I’m sure some of them found their way to Toronto. But it was kind of clear that they were fantastic characters. This was a time when our family didn’t have any television and they were our entertainment. So that guy has these bags under his eyes shine like me was bald, Pumpkinhead had a pumpkin shaped head and Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear, always very anxious, Clock had one arm longer than the other and my all time favorite was a man they call Summer Work and when Summer Work came from Jamaica to England, in the 1960s, he insisted on wearing like summer suits, tropical suits, no matter the weather, come rain or storm and in the course of writing about this book Bageye At The Wheel of my mom, whatever became of summer when she did well, within a few months ago, the children died and so the book is a kind of bittersweet memorial of that time and the book was called Bageye At The Wheel because he owned a car because how embarrassing must it be to work on a production on making cars but not own a car. Back in the 70s, it wasn’t very affordable for many people like my father to earn a car. But this is a long story to point to the time, then 30 years after our estrangement, I decided I’m gonna write this book. But the publishers recognized that my father’s still alive and they won’t agree to publish the book unless he finds up on it, so he has to see the book. So I tracked him down after 32 years and bring that book with me but also some other books that I’ve written, or rather bring that manuscript, it was not published yet and I remember going to see this man and knocking on his door and this very small man open the door with this rather lovely lamp and eyes and he was smiling and it was a real shock to me, because I’d never seen him smile when I was growing up and I never realized he’s small, I was about a foot taller than him because he’s also giant in my imagination and what was curious was that he recognized that this is going to be a difficult meeting. So he had a friend with him come spa, because every so often, he turned to me and invited the spa, the friend to join in on the conversation and he said, Man, this boy. So my father made me and this boy have a deep, deep connection. It’s very awkward. I didn’t really feel that connection for 30 years.
Colin 28:01
As we can progress, it was as if I was auditioning to be my father’s son. It’s a very curious position to be in at a very reasonable time and to get rid of some of the tension, we went and walked around Luton, and went up into a pub, a bar. There’s a Western Caribbean bar in Luton called the Cheshire Arms. We went there, and sat down was talking to my father and it was clear that he was a bit of a catcher in that bar and after a while, he stood up and he held up the manuscript, which had his photograph on it and he announced to the people at the bar, very proud, Oh, my son has written a book about me. So I was rather pleased to hear that and then two young women came and sat with us in the early 20s and there were Caribbean women, we had a final time and eventually they got up to leave and my father got up to leave with him. I said, What’s going on here? He said, Oh, don’t worry. Those are my bookies. These two young women whom he would go to the place where you can place a bet once called corals that’s called Ladbrokes. So he would go with them to place a bet every week and after that meeting, the local newspaper heard about the rapprochement between my father and myself and decided they would write a story and they asked me what it was like to meet a man after 30 years, and I explained what I’ve just told you, but also, as I said that he was one for the ladies and even though he’s in his 80s, he still has an eye for them and they for him and when that newspaper article came out, I ran him from Brian ever living on the coast of England pedicled Brighton I rang him when his did in Luton, and he was in the streets. When he answered on his mobile phone. I said, Have you seen the story? He said, How dare you write these things about me? He was prompted by the fact that I’d written a memoir about him, but he wasn’t really fronted by the fact that I thought I talked about the fact that my education was funded by marijuana. He was fronted by the idea that there’s a scene in the book where I talk about a friend of his, a long distance lorry driver who’s fallen out of favor with him, my father and to make amends and to curry favor to come back to be his friend. My father’s friend is driving down the motorway one day in his lorry, and he sees a field of sheep and he kidnaps a sheep, he brings it back to my father as a kind of peace offering. So my father can butcher the sheep and we can have food for the winter and just by chance in the local newspaper, that day when I’m having the story about the 30 year rupture that’s been healed. Just by chance, there’s a story about a space of people feeding rare breeds of rams in and around Luton and the head on was would you believe it ewe. My father sees his head and is not related to him and sees the little story that is going to be about and he puts the two together and he’s ashamed because he praised me, He says, because I’m telling the whole world that he is a sheep wrestler and he’s much more ashamed about that and about the fact that he’s been this small time, marijuana drug dealer. So we had this difficult moment where he wasn’t going to give me a license to print the book and when I heard that this is going to be a difficult moment for me, I have my sister to come with me to convince him otherwise and she came my sister’s a lawyer and my father started to go off on one saying that he was going to sue me and it was libel and slander and my sister just reminded him about all of the terrible things that he had done, that I had not included in the book, because the book is not a revenge book, if anything, it’s kind of bittersweet comedy and she outlined and enumerated them and she said that if it were to go to court, you were to sue your son Colin, the judge would ask, Well, is anything that Colin is saying true or is it false, and you back will say it’s a pack of lies, Collins siblings, all of them and Colin’s mother would say, not only is it true, but Collins diluted it. He’s watered it down, he’s made you human and when you’re not human, my mother’s nickname for my father was Satan. I’m not in the mood for you today, Satan, she would say, and at that point, my father backed away, and said, I would want to do anything to damage the book. He came around to the idea that actually normal shows, you’ll understand this, there are very few of us on this planet who are going to have a book written about them. So in a way, I think he was rather flattered by the fact that even though there may be one or two critiques of him, he was still going to be an intention and in fact, one of the people that you’ve interviewed recently in Thompson wrote a review of that book and he said it was an act of filial devotion for the Bageye At The Wheel is an honor to my father, who was a bit of a road that only did what he could do according to his particular skill set and experiences that had shaped him and I’m sure that’s true. Remember, we can only do what we can, according to our abilities and our experiences and most people, even if they have failed as a father, or failed as a husband, is still a candidate for compassion.
Norman 33:27
How coincidental. Is that other article appearing in the newspaper the same time you’re putting out your book? I mean, I don’t know the odds of that. That’s crazy and oh, man.
Colin 33:44
It’s meant to happen that, wasn’t it? I mean, it forced the conversation. Well, maybe we would not have had some kind of question about what happened on that newspaper on the front page that day.
Norman 33:56
So what ended up happening when your sister came and talked to your dad, you talked to your Dad, did everything get resolved?
Colin 34:05
Yeah, because I think Norm, what happens to people who don’t understand the world of publishing, they assume that if you publish a book equivalent to JK Rowling and your loads of money, and so in fact, he has, I think some friends who are whispering in his ear, man, your son’s skanky, what’s your cut? Where’s your percentage, you’re providing the content, and you’re not being rewarded and when I was able to praise my father, the fact that I wrote books that didn’t make money, I wrote books that they may find a readership, but they’re not going to make any money, and I will give them 10% of my role is my role is that year, probably $1,000 and then he backed off and recognize that this is not a project that I was indulging in to make money. It’s just a project I was indulging in to portray this very interesting man and his wife and my siblings, but also to fill the void because I think often in migrant cultures, they get left behind, they’re marginalized. They’re not part of the mainstream and so when I was growing up there was this, there was this vacuum in the culture where the lives of people on my parents weren’t being written anywhere. So I felt a kind of responsibility in a way and I think my father understood that in the end, to complicate the narrative, to include these marginal people, and have them present in the center of the culture. So the book was published and in fact, my father died a couple of years ago and this is kind of an interesting moment to reflect on Norm because when it came to the publication of the book, there was still other people who were alive and the publishers were nervous and so I remember the day my editor just before the publication, he got out a sheet of paper and drew a line down the middle and said about who the danger people and who the safe people, the same people are dead because you can’t libel the dead and the danger people are the people who are still alive who may take umbrage. So we changed the names of all the people who were alive apart from Bageye. But when my father died, when Bageye died five years ago now, I went to the funeral, and I gave a reading from the book, Bageye At The Wheel and after the ceremony, every single person who’d been in the book came up to me and said, Whoa, why did you change our name? They wanted to be in the book, they were fooled by the idea that they better have a footprint in the sand, to show their children that and their children’s children and they recognized that I’d written with humor and I needn’t have taken that precaution, I could have named them actually. But I was really pleased that they saw themselves and they saw that this is an addition to the culture that would enlarge the culture and maybe would revive the culture and to see that people like me who write these kinds of books are not writing ethnic books, they’re just writing stories that are part of the culture. So the book was published and if that’s my next book, I’m on book number six now, my next book is going to be a follow up to that book, Bageye At The Wheel, it was just one year where I’m gonna go to this private school in 1972 and the next book is going to be the hybrid book, but it’s going to encompass what happened to me when I left school, started medical school and ended up becoming a BBC journalist, and it’s going to be bookended by left and right to my dead father and a letter that I will write to my children to give us some idea about what they might expect from life if they were to pay attention to what kind of life I’ve led and in a way, I’ve kind of borrowed from Tennessee quotes and people like James Baldwin, who’ve done similar things now.
Norman 37:53
Well, I want to just go back for a second and talk about your experiences when you were selling ganja with your dad. Did you have any crazy experiences or was everything pretty straightforward?
Colin 38:07
No. It’s all crazy. What was really weird was just the mechanics of it. So my father got his big stash of ganja, came into the house and stored it in the air and covered it quarters warm and there’ll be a set of scales that weigh a little like beachy pasture peach and powder stash. It’s not very big, and paper and medical packets. We put them into my little briefcase, my school board’s briefcase and I was back man and he got a car and we would go and drop the ganja off and as I said he was providing social service. That’s what he saw. He didn’t think of himself as a criminal. But there’s a moment when I think he wanted to cement the kind of father son relationship. Because I was always the one that was chosen to drive with him. Whenever we had to get stuff from his retailer, shall we say and so one day we went to get the stuff and then he was going to allow me to go with him to the woods to hide it because he didn’t bring it into the house immediately. That always be a lag. So we hid the ganja, the stash of ganja in the woods but a little trial he asked me to choose the place where we would dig the hole behind some bushes and we buried the ganja. So I was pleased and proud that my father’s allowed me to do this and then about a week later, we went back to dig up the ganja and there was no ganja there. It was gone. It was missing. My father was in a foul mood and I remember that terrible day going to the house and he rifled through all the drawers looking for the house money, the money that my mother kept every week to keep the house going to keep the children alive and she always knew that there would come this moment. She didn’t hide the money in the lining of her coat in us. They’d rip up the coat and take the money with us, we’ll cry. Then about a week later, a vanload of policemen arrived outside our door and they bounced through the front door, and they raided the house. I should back up a little bit between losing the ganja and the peace arriving just after a week. Every day I went back and forth looking for the ganja. I couldn’t believe that I was responsible for having lost it and I was bereft. But then one day, on the sixth day of going back to this place where we buried it in, Morocco says, there was the ganja. I found it and we bought it back at the house and my father was at work, came back. I still haven’t told him. That morning when I’m going to tell him is the morning when the police arrived, about a dozen policemen arrived in this big van and they rifled through the house they’ve been tipped off, haven’t they? Because what they’ve done, they found the ganja in the woods and they were looking to see who was going to pick it up and then they followed that person, me to the house and so the house have raided and this is kind of comedy, we’re all kind of passing that ganja in between ourselves, our brothers and sisters passing it around and eventually, my sister has up her skirt is all terrible and this has gone on for about half an hour, my father woken up by now and he’s embarrassed because he’s a man who has this notion of the importance of respect and he tells the police just the whole fire. He marches us all into the backroom and he says to, Okay, who’s got it, he’s got the ganja. He takes it from my sister and he surrenders himself and the ganja to the police and he gets arrested and he gets to trial. But miraculously, when it came to the trial, he didn’t get sent to prison, he got a huge fine, he got a choice, he can pay this huge fine, can’t remember how much was it, it’s a lot of money, it’s probably the sort of money you’d have to pay down to buy a house or you go to jail and all of his Caribbean friends, they club together. Because I think they recognize that he’d taken the risk on their behalf and they found the fine, he was spared jail. But that moment was a real turning point in my parents’ relationship, because of the other peculiarity that my mother, back in Jamaica, my mother was the daughter of the policeman. So she had a high regard for the police and for authority and then here was this big moment of disgrace. She must have known what my father was doing, obviously, but somehow she managed to put that to one side and not to reflect on it too much. But I think she was embarrassed and that led to the separation between my parents and in a way when I was very to myself, I thought I caused the split and if I hadn’t brought the ganja back into the house, things might have turned out differently. I probably wouldn’t have done it. I mean, there would have been another occasion where he would pray. But yeah, but for many years, you taught that guilt earlier Norm but for many years, I felt guilty for having brought upon our household, this great firestorm of opprobrium and the law and ridiculed and disgrace.
Norman 43:20
Well, yeah, that’s something you don’t want to be burdened with.
Colin 43:26
Again, I’ve let it go now, by the way. I forgive myself. I’m very lucky, I’m very lucky in life generally. I’ve been very lucky also to have this wonderful wife, who is the hypnotherapist, and she has enabled me through her own kindness and skill to recognize that the adult column must forgive the child column and to recognize that the child column was not responsible for his father’s actions.
Norman 43:53
I wonder what else she’s done to you when you were under.
Colin 43:58
There’s a good article recently, she’s called Joe Alderson, my wife and recently, I do some teaching now, some creative writing teaching for an organization called Avalon here in the UK, and through this COVID period, Joe and I have been doing some teaching together. So we were helping writers who are stuck with writer’s block and so we would do a double act, I would help them with the mechanics of writing and she would help them with her guided meditations in the morning and some one to one therapy to uncover what it is that’s really stopping them from doing their work, because people can write but it’s up here that the problem and so she’s been able to help me in that regard as well but also helped me retrieve memories which I thought were lost and could never be recovered. So that’s been very useful to me actually.
Norman 44:51
Now, I wasn’t planning on going down this path, but you are just talking about these memories. Sometimes you don’t want to remember things by going under and by working with your wife, has that triggered anything?
Colin 45:04
No, I think it’s a very important point because sometimes it can be traumatic for people. But for me, I have found the process to be really, really fascinating and I recognize that actually, even though our life may be hard as a child and young adult, it is very rich, in terms of the connection between my mother and me and my mother and my siblings, and in a way it has triggered, it’s triggered this idea that my parents were both candidates for compassion, because like a lot of migrants, they came to the country with a skeleton plan of what they will do and I think the idea was always to go back. But the idea is that you come in, and in Jamaica, you work some money, which means you work and prosper. But five years becomes 10, 10 becomes 15 and one day, we woke up and saw our parents changing the newspaper, changing the wallpaper. They didn’t change the newspaper occasionally and changed the wallpaper and then we knew we were here to stay. Well, I do caution people about digging into their past, because you have to feel yourself to be able to do it and to be considerate towards yourself, I suppose. I think I’m really tough and but also I recognize I’ve got a great store of stories that I can tell in a way which aren’t going to be damaging to me, but maybe illuminating to other people and so I’m determined to do it, and I will do it. But I recognize your point that triggers can be traumatizing. I was watching and reading actually through things. I was watching a series by James McBride. Do you know him? He’s a wonderful North American African American writer, The Good Lord Bird is cool and it’s a story about John Brown, the great abolitionist to let the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and sometimes, I am traumatized by revisiting the stories of slavery and recently there’s been this development I’m sure it’s happened all over the world, especially in Wales, where the British had colonies, these monuments or statues that signify imperial prowess, but also signify the brutality of of one group of people or another county distant former. I’m sure you’ve been aware of these sets have been dragged down, the status of people like Edward Colston here in the UK, the slave owner, slave trader, and sometimes, I’ve read a lot of slave narrative, but I don’t really want to read them anymore and I remember having a chat recently about post traumatic slavery syndrome, which is this idea that trauma sometimes comes through several generations, in a way that you can inherit genes, you can inherit a phenotype, you can also inherit means so I think you can also inherit trauma. So I think it’s important to pay attention to the possibility that you may visit trauma call you by writing about it. But I think there’s a way of processing that through the writing
Norman 48:10
I’ve never heard of that before. That’s very interesting, especially with everything that’s going on right now. But inherited trauma. I love history. I love reading about history. One of the things that I thought was absolutely fascinating about Jamaica, when it came down to Fort Royal or Port Royal and Henry Morgan was basically ran Kingston at the time, Port Royal prior to the earthquake and what I didn’t know was the privateers at the time were 100%, or at least Henry Morgan was against slavery, Jamaica did not have slaves. It was after the earthquake, or after Henry Morgan either was hung or any anyways, he was out of the picture where all of a sudden, now Jamaica was open for slavery. So the pirates, these people that you think of as criminals that have no morals were the people that were accepting of a multicultural crew, you get the job done. We split whatever the spoils, and we’re all good to go. Too bad that the world never thought about that at the time and still doesn’t think about there’s still racism everywhere.
Colin 49:27
Our parents were getting licensed by the state to be pirates and to plunder. So I can’t give them a pass. I can’t get Captain Morgan apart from afraid.
Norman 49:40
No, there’s no pass.
Colin 49:43
I mean, that was interesting to me. Is that, okay, slavery was terrible. Yes, it was traumatic, brutalizing trained, but equally, or maybe not equally, but there was also great trauma on the poor working class in Britain for instance. At the same time, that poor children gunned down mind’s eye color paint stays wet paint, but there was great probation and the only people who really capitalized on slavery were the wealthy people. I don’t think the poor, rich people capitalized on slavery. I mean, there were beneficiaries of the institutions that were built on slavery. I mean, some of the great houses and some of the great Institutes we have in this country were built on sugar. But I sometimes see the connection between the impoverished British white people in the 17th, 18th and 19th century, and the enslaved Jamaicans, enslaved Africans in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. That was kind of clear. I think what I really enjoyed about somebody like Jamaica is that they turn base metal into gold and they turn things around and when you think about, have you been to Jamaica, by the way Norm?
Norman 50:58
Oh, yeah, a few times.
Colin 50:59
Yeah. Well, would you agree with me Norm that everyone should get to Jamaica? Because Jamaica is one of the most vibrant places on the planet, and everybody is a star in Jamaica. I wrote a book, as you might know about the whale is Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer and when I went to search that book, and I would go to Trenchtown, I go to some of the areas where these people live, you’d find them versions of Bob Marley on the streets, they sing it all the time. There’s just so many of them actually. I was really intrigued by the idea that there’s a kind of a tradition of musicality that is passed on through the generations as well and I was delighted in the end to be able to track down this man Bunny Wailer, one of the original Wailer and in Aspen’s by hand way to be able to write about the history of Jamaica through people at Bob Marley, Peters Tosh and Bunny Wailer, when we write this sort of books that I write Norm, they’re difficult to write because often the publishers are not very convinced by them, because they worry about the commercial prospects of the books, who’s going to buy the things and even though I’ve written five books, every time I go into the publisher to pitch another idea, it’s not a surety. I really wanted to write a book about Jamaican about the history of slavery and about how the country was forged out of bloodshed and the country was forged out of plunder. But I knew that if I was to go to the publishers and say, this is the book I want to write, they would say, Well, the book does stand the door on the way out and so in a few years ago, I said, I want to write a book about Bob Marley criticism by the way, and they said, sign here. But having having got the commission, I was able to then use these three men to, in a way, portray the history of the modern history of Jamaica, because if you were to look at someone like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, you see that they represent three ways of being black in the latter half of the 20th century. Bob Marley was fair skinned, photogenic, accommodating. Peter Tosh was tall, very blackboards with dark glasses, intimidated people, and enjoyed doing that. If you went to see Peter Tosh, and he didn’t like the question, he might be peeling an orange with a machete or peeling a mango with machete and start waving a machete in front of you and Bunny Wailer famously, who never you want to go on tour he’d rather plant his crops than go on tour and there you have three versions of like people in Jamaica. You have Bob Marley, the accommodator, he’s not going to sell out, it’s going to be practical. Peter Tosh, the militant man, the rebel man who ends up being murdered 1987 and you have Bunny Wailer, the man who’s in retreat, he’d rather be non aligned, and not attached to anybody and away, I was able to write a book, a history book about Jamaica through those three men and it’s the most fascinating country, I think, one of the most fascinating countries on the planet because it’s one of the first modern societies of the way because you had these pirates, you have planters, you had four indentured workers, you had people from Africa. Nobody, ultimately, who lived in that region was from that region, because a lot of the characters and a lot of the native Indians were killed. So most of the people who live in those items are a foreign so they don’t blonder and the Rastas will tell you in some Jamaica is an island, but not on them. They don’t belong there, they belong elsewhere and so that sense of a society in flux aside, wherever everybody feels temporary, is a wonderful society to write about as a case study for the way that we are presently.
Norman 54:58
What is the name of that book?
Colin 54:59
Thank you very much Norm. Here’s the big Selma. My book is called I & I, The Natural Mystics in North America, the publishers weren’t confident about the phrase , they just shortened it to the natural mystics. As you know Norm iodized is what the rest say, iodice is me and God. So God resides in you, it was one of my favorite books. So we came with a bit of difficulty and it cost me something, not just in terms of the sacrifice I had to make in writing the thing. When I got the commission to write the book, I forget on the idea that I would track down the last remaining of the original Wailers. As I said, I’ve tracked down Bunny Wailer. It was a bit of a recruited character. He’s also a bit of an Obeah man, Obeah, kind of Jamaican Voodoo, so I was tasked with finding Bunny Wailer and I could never find him. I paid a lot of money to middlemen who said that they knew where he was with Oh, yeah, Bunny’s gonna be at Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue in French town at midnight, he’d be there, just get us up down there. He was never there and I spent more than a year looking for him. I wrote the book in about two and a half years and I actually submitted the manuscript before I found him. But then in the same week of submitting the manuscript, I got a call from one of these fixers, these middlemen and said, Oh, if you want to interview Bunny Wailer, get down to Gatwick Airport. He’s arriving in the UK at Gatwick Airport at the beginning of the European tour. I went there and I greeted him with a lot of people and his entourage at Gatwick Airport and he didn’t pay much attention to me and we all had to follow him to his tour bus . We just parked in the garage at Gatwick Airport and had some tinted glass. I remember I went there with my daughter who’s very attractive, very glamorous and very kind and sort of helped me with disabuse you of any notion that you constitute a threat to anybody. So I went with her, she was going to take photographs, and he’s softened a little bit. But he wouldn’t talk to me until he was kind of the most important x. This is the garage of Gatwick Airport, he opens a suitcase and gets out this shoe stash of ganja, he was the biggest spliff I’ve ever seen in the world. That’s the first thing you must do. We had a nice conversation, and I wrote it up and included that in the book and then about six months after the book came out, I got this email from someone who’s purporting to be Bunny Wailer and I just thought it’s a prank because that’s a weird email and I got another email and another got that half a dozen emails and it’s clear to me, that it was Bunny Wailer and the emails were rather horrible emails that were threatening me with the fact that I had a Jamaican policy escaped him and somehow robbed him by not remunerated him for the interview that I’d done with him and he’d been online or one of his mates had been online and it seemed that the book had done reasonably well and he wanted his share. But he didn’t come out clearly and say that I had to go further but each email got more and more violent and the last email from him and by now I’ve got my publishers involved because they’ve got a bit scary. But in the last email, he reminded me what had happened to Leslie Kong. So Leslie Kong was a producer, the witness and several producers in the course of their career and before they found pushback, or he found them added records before that. There’s a man called Leslie Kong and when Wailer starts to surface as a concept is going to bring out an album called the Best of the Wailers and Bunny Wailer went to see Leslie Kong and threatened him so don’t bring out that album because part of the word is longer represented by him. He said, Don’t bring out the album. If you do bring out our album, you will not live to reap the rewards of your transgression. Within three months, Leslie Kong had a heart attack and died. Suddenly this in an email to me and subsequently, the medical Timothy White, you may know who wrote the first book about Bob Marley called Katchafire and when Bunny Wailer heard about simply one book coming out, he again went to see Timothy White and warned him not to write the book, given the same warning and within three months, Timothy white suffered heart failure and died and he said, as for Timothy White, as for Leslie Kong, as for you, the binoculars of jar around you. He said to me, so he cursed me with an obeah threat and unfortunately, I was due to go to Jamaica soon after the threat arrived, and it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. So I did go to Jamaica, but also I was there I was waiting for the threat to be realized and to be to be murdered and I remember the day came when it was the first day after three months, and I was still alive. I thought Yes, I outlived the curse. Cuz all the threat is now extinct, and I’m probably never going to be in the same position as Timothy White and Leslie Kong.
Hayden 1:00:09
Thanks for listening guys and gals. That concludes part one of our interview with Colin Grant. Make sure to tune in later in the week to hear the rest of the interview. As always make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. It keeps you up to date with all things with I Know This Guy and helps us grow the show. That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:00
Hey there guys and gals, welcome to part two of our interview with Colin Grant. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and give that a listen. As always, make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. It’ll keep you up to date with all things I Know This Guy and helps us grow the show. Anyway, that’s enough for me and I’ll see you after the interview.
Norman 0:24
That must have played on your nerves every single day up to that three month period.
Colin 0:31
It did. Actually, why more because I remember saying to my friends because I had a lot of people always talking like a madman towards talking gibberish and I was very nervous because even though logically I know that obeah shouldn’t really work. Every educated person will say the same in Jamaica, in their heart, they kind of believe in it and I was kind of in that camp in a way. When I had this invitation to go to this wonderful literary festival called Calabash in treasure beach in Jamaica. I couldn’t resist going, that’s where I met Ian Thompson for the first time. Yeah. But when I used to go on the eve of my departure, my grandmother wrote me up and she said, Colin, don’t go to Jamaica. You will come back in a wooden box and had other friends who equally said, I’d come back in a wooden box, because you wouldn’t be the curse, it’d be the fact that that it’s very easy to pay someone a few $100 to find a gunman who will kill you and so wasn’t just I was waiting for some heart attack to arrive, unbidden with the fact that I feared that maybe there was a contract out of my life. Every time I was, I remember being on this Islamic beach hut every time in a kind of security guard walk path, I fear that it was the government coming for me. So it was a terrible time. But I got a short story out of it anyway through one of the journals. So you can always find a way to translate your horror into some remuneration. That’s what I’ve been doing for most of my life, actually, most of my life.
Norman 2:18
I don’t know what year was, I think it was back in the 70s. But I remember I was in my teens going to, I don’t know why my parents even let me go. But I was in my teens traveling alone and went to Jamaica and went to, I think it was called coming from wrong reggae sunsplash. Way, way, way, way back in the day. So yeah, that was quite the event. But I couldn’t even imagine just traveling anywhere. Just saying there you go, even when we were younger, like I lived outside of Montreal, about I don’t know, 15 miles and it was nothing just to hitchhike anywhere and my parents knew I was doing that and I was hitchhiking everywhere. I had one incident, I got the crap beat out of me. But other than that we traveled and going into downtown Montreal, going to Jamaica I couldn’t imagine Hayden saying, Oh Dad, I’m 16 or whatever age it was. I’m going to be going here or going there. Well, hold on a sec. Matter of fact, he did and he ended up, I can’t believe I let you do this Hayden but you were traveling all over France. You were traveling. I remember you rang us and said that you were sleeping on a beach and in the south of France or something? So I yeah, I did let you do that. My gosh. You were the oldest I guess you were,
Hayden 3:45
The thing is, I told you as I was doing it, and not before.
Norman 3:50
Right. Yeah. Oh, but that’s great.
Colin 3:54
Yeah, I’m gonna do it anyway. The trick is the trick is not to think the trick is just to do it and then worry about it afterwards. I remember reading a short story by JD Salinger. Rather catching the wrong there’s a short story about this boy who’s very good at playing marbles. You know the game marbles with a little ball, you click it, you hit another ball. Yep. You know the game? He’s an expert marble player, scores the top score every time and one of his friends asked him, How do you actually manage to do that? He says, The trick is not to aim. The trick is not to aim, the trick is not to think too deeply about something just to do it and you must be surprised by how wonderful you can do it without fear.
Norman 4:39
Let’s talk about that. Have you ever just gone and done something and thought about it later and then Oh man, that could have been really bad?
Colin 4:49
Yeah, I think I’ve had a few especially in Jamaica, moments like that, where I would go into areas where I knew that there have been battles between gunman and there be bullet holes in the walls, and I go there because I wanted to talk about the nature of in Jamaica, there is a kind of two party system and the phrase that you often hear the two part of the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party and the phrase is when your parties in each one the other party’s in, you starve and so there’s always this tension and I wanted to go to the kind of borderlines where those opposing groups are. Having gone there, I think we’ve been surprised when we felt that bad things have happened in the recent past and they may happen again. So just a terrible vibe and I just walked with trepidation down the street, actually, I went with the middleman and some priests, some very brave clergymen who were kind of selling the gospel on the street. But actually, they were trying to act as healers to repair the bridge between these two groups and wondering whether the verse rivals and it had got the message that there should be truce that afternoon and so that was a bit of a stupid thing to have done and again, that gave me a good storage worker. Sometimes you have to be cognizant of the fact that you can maybe be too comfortable or too uncaring about the consequences that may be for you. Yeah, so sometimes you need to do some due diligence and do the test before you bought or something.
Norman 6:31
So let’s talk a little bit about the BBC. What was it like and did you feel a lot of pressure working with the world’s largest news service?
Colin 6:42
Well, in a way, it was the reward I wanted to give my parents because I hadn’t become a doctor, I thought what can I find that is going to be close enough to the in terms of the kind of kudos attached to an organization, there’s not quite being adopted. So to be a member of the British Broadcasting Corporation, a lot of kudos without having more kudos when I joined and I joined at a time when there were a few black people. I work in the organization, I work primarily in the beginning for the BBC World Service and I remember joining as a trainee producer, I went to the newsroom, I was working in the newsroom. This is a newsroom broadcasting around the world and there were no black people in the newsroom. So that’s really peculiar. It’s almost like an arm of colonial expansion in a way. It’s almost like stepping back into the time of the empire and it was kind of clear that I had the same kind of trajectory through university to be in the newsroom. Because when people talk about diversity back in the 1990s, early 1990s, when I joined. Diversity in the BBC. I didn’t get to Oxford University, or Cambridge University. That was the diversity. So a person like me was very strange and there weren’t many people like me, when I joined. I was very conscious of that. I’d also be conscious of the fact that I had a kind of different cultural sensibility, or came with a different cultural, baggage or cultural way of looking at things. When I joined, it was almost as if I were the man who was steeped in reggae joining an organization where they only played heavy metal, there’s that kind of disparity. But I was enamored of the BBC, because I think they did have, they still do have some fine qualities and they drilled into me this notion that the most important thing is accuracy, accuracy, accuracy and I think that that served me very well in the course. But I worked in the newsroom for several years, and then I tunneled my way out of the newsroom into the arts. So I worked as an artist producer, for quite a few years and again, I had a great time, and I made some wonderful programs, and very lucky to meet and interview people at Philip Glass and Arthur Miller, people are that wonderful artists as well and work to pace that the Venice Binali and it was curious to me, and important to me that I also had to ensure that I would be cognizant of the fact that I could change some of the stories that were being written. A lot of the time the commissioners commission according to what they know, according to grant backgrounds, that can lead to a greater narrow way of broadcasting what is important, the authors and people say I was determined to broaden the outreach, especially when it came to the arts and there were various members’ attention when that arose. So for instance, I remember back in the 1990s, it was great to be on BBC, I did love being the BBC and I do owe the BBC a lot. But the BBC were very, very nervous about anything to do with race and often that’s when tensions arose because they didn’t know how to be level headed about it. So there’s one instance, when the man called Willard White is a great opera singer. We had a program called Master Class and he came in, we’re going to interview him. I was the producer and there was a very fine presenter called Harriet Gilbert, a white woman and it was important because it means anything other than this nervousness about white people or black people when it comes to any kind of broadcast material. So Harriet is interviewing Willard White about how things have changed in the BBC over the years because things have changed and things have changed in the culture and she said to him, Willard, when you first started back in the 80s, and 90s of the very few black people in the arts, there was no deliberate black actor at the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, there are no significant opera singers at the Royal Opera House. So, things have changed with it, because now you will find that there is a black Henry the fifth, you will find the National Theatre, that character playing Sky Masterson in cars, and also be a black actor. So things have improved, haven’t they Willard? White answered very slowly and said, Well, you tell me, Harriet, you’re white. You white people control things. I wasn’t in the room when they decided whether I would or wouldn’t get the job. So you tell me and there was this first on this, this sparks are flying is real bit of drama, and real tension and in a way it was the best part of the interview and at the end of the interview, both Harriet and I were delighted. We kind of gave each other high fives and Oh, we got some heat there and I remember taking the program to the playout area and the next day I had to California actually for another program and somebody up in the upper echelons of the BBC heard about the interview, and some of one of my friends to go and retrieve it and listen through to him, and then ordered one of my friends to cut out the heat. Cut out the argument, we just cut out that moment of discovery and I was incensed when I heard about it. Because they did, they just cut it out. They got some scissors back in the day, you had quarter inch tape with your reel unreal reels and you marked your edits with the China graph, you lit scissors and cut it out and you splice it together and when I got back from my trip, I think that led people about this now that much tension, I got led to my first disciplinary hearing, because I was effects and I didn’t show my face. But I showed in my maybe I signed too heavily in the presence of my manager or I would raise an eyebrow, or I’d look at the clock, or I dropped my fingers on the desk and I was then invited to a disciplinary hearing because apparently I had shown aggression to my manager. I was accused of being aggressive and I was shocked actually by that because all my life I’ve been schooled to be deferential and respectful, being the head boy school, I went to medical school and now the BBC do things which black people don’t ordinarily do. I was accused of being aggressive when I was summoned to a senior manager’s office and also said to myself, nothing, I’m not accepting that with it. I’m not aggressive. If I was white, and have been to Oxford or Cambridge, you say, I’m assertive. I said, I’ll accept the word assertive. But I’m not going to accept the word aggressive because aggressive is a word that you’ve been using why people in Britain, who are the descendants of colonial masters have been using to characterize black people over decades and centuries. So I reject that word. So this man’s attempt to me said, Oh, that’s interesting. So you’re accusing us of being racist, though. So let’s investigate your accusation of racism whilst we continue to investigate your aggression and it’s ridiculous. Anyway, it’s wrong. So they investigated me, it’s like being put on trial and I was still talking about six months and the hierarchy of the BBC, they interviewed every single person that I’d ever worked with within the BBC and I’ve been there for a number of years and after six months, I was getting summons to the manager and he had the verdict in front of him and he said, the case against you is not proven and that was it. So in other words, they felt I was guilty, but they couldn’t prove it. So I stayed and stayed for another 10 years actually, I did have lots of friends and allies there. But that’s the kind of culture whereby if you raise your head as a black person, and you introduce any kind of discomfort of a race, you can find yourself in hot water pretty damn quickly. So that’s one of the cool things about the BBC. But there are very many great things about the BBC. So I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is still a wonderful public service broadcaster, which does great things to that as I have Glue, a cohesive force for Britain. But also it sells a greater idea of Britain than maybe Britain hasn’t is. It sells that idea around the world to people who regard Britain who think highly of Britain through a little guard, they feel the BBC.
Norman 15:17
Outside of that incident, did you ever feel limited because of race?
Colin 15:23
Yeah, well, I recognize now that at that moment then, there are things I couldn’t say if I wanted to stay within the BBC. I felt limited, because I felt that people were racist and I would never use the word racist, actually. But I felt that actually the people who have hands on the leaders of social control needs to be changed. Because often those people are sometimes the commissioners. As I said earlier, they are very narrow in the world outlook, and mostly commission for people that themselves are Christian people who they imagine like themselves. So the challenges that I’ve had, I’ve been to try to rest away the levers of social control from the people who currently have their hands on them, but also to convince people that people like me are not the enemy. But in fact, that culture that the culture in Britain enriched by people like me, enriched by Caribbean people, and especially when you consider what’s been going on, I don’t really be familiar with the Windrush scandal that’s been going on in Britain over the last few years, whereby people like my parents of that generation have, late in the day, 50 years after they’ve been in this country have been wrongly classified as illegal immigrants and deported. When you hear those sorts of things, you recognize that actually, things haven’t changed that the hostile environment that was introduced in Britain by the Tory Party in 2012, back in the 40s and in even before, so I felt limited in that regard. But thankfully, things have changed and the very fact that I’ve been able to write books that deepen the story about the black presence in Britain, or deepen the story about the fact that I would say, in Jamaica all of ways one, we’re all part of the culture, the more that happens, the more likely those kinds of difficulties that I found myself in 10,15 years ago, the BBC will be things of the past, they weren’t the things that recur, I hope, but also in the future, I think you’ll find that the people who get on will be the people who recognize that we are all part of one big culture, and that there are no people who are either perpetrators or victims. My sternum is grass, my skin is black. My parents are black Jamaicans, but what’s good is fully black. If you look at my skin color, you’ll see that somewhere down the line, there has been some whites input into the gene pool. So somewhere down the line, I’m the descendant birth of some slave owner, or overseer who raped one of my four mothers, that person descendant, descendant of the perpetrator and the victim, and I can’t claim ownership of one exclusively and I think it’s important to recognize that, because until we do, we will continue down this path of living inside of a separation and in a way, I hope that kind of writing that I do, which I hope is nuanced, and funny and interesting and complicated. We’ll complicate the story and will encourage people to see that there is commonality of purpose in all cultures, no matter where people came from. I mean, sometimes we hear about this phrase, you are the citizen of somewhere, or nowhere and I would say that we are all both because most of the people on this planet have had some forebear that came from somewhere else. So we’re all immigrants in a way and I think the problems that I’ve had to BBC and problems that some people like me have had in our culture have been through people who haven’t recognized that, within the day of the margins, people who are part of a culture that has always been there. A very famous book by a man called Peter Fryer, called Staying Power and it’s the history of black people in Britain. I will say the only problem, the funny problem about that book is that the most important book on Black British history in the UK, is written by white men and I salute him. Peter Fryer was a white Marxist historian and he wrote a fantastic book, which shows that actually, black people were here in the UK at the time of the Roman Empire and he has a funny line which says though, there were Africans in Britain before they were English people. So I think I would love to continue in that vein to remind people that we are all if we dig down into our gene pool, we’re all connected.
Norman 19:47
Nice. That is an interesting line though. There were black people in Britain before there were English people.
Colin 19:55
Yeah. Africans in Britain before there were English people.
Norman 20:03
Let’s talk about it because you touched on it. You wrote a book called Homecoming and it’s a collection of short stories about the Windrush generation and I wanted you to go down that path a little bit. Can we talk about that?
Colin 20:16
Yeah, sure. I’m not writing that book, because it was an oral history of parody migration to Britain, from 1945, or thereabouts to 1960, which is the kind of key period and with that book, I personally interviewed over 60 people and I had archived from other collections of people who’ve done the road or histories in the past, and people who have been interviewed by the BBC, the British Library. So there are over 128 voices in that book and I was determined to cast the net widely, because this period of talking about this Windrush period, and this idea of black people, black Caribbean people in Britain, too often is focused on the Jamaicans. Jamaicans take up too much room, they make too much noise. They have too large space in the culture, they have too great regard for themselves. I say this as a child of Jamaican parents. So I was determined to spread the love to show that there are other Caribbean people who arrived from Antigua, St. Kitts, St. Vincent’s, Trinidad, Tobago, Barbuda, Bermuda, everywhere. So there are people from all of the islands and what I’ve done is I’ve tried to show the degree to which when these people arrived, there rather the sense that they were British. So when my mother was growing up in Jamaica in the 1940s, when you went to the cinema in Jamaica, at the beginning of the screen, and you stand up to sing the British National Anthem, this was in Jamaica. At the end of the screening, we stand up to sing the British National Anthem. When I was growing up in Luton in the 60s, when my mom was cleaning the house on Saturday morning, she read reciting keeps shedding words were Kipling going with him was a favorite, she could recite these things verbatim, all of the education was through the prism of being British. She knew more about Britain than she knew about Jamaica and I wanted to show that that was a kind of innocence that these people had when they arrived, because when they arrived, there were lots of wonderful intersections with people. There are lots of great welcomes, but there’s lots of hostility as well. I wanted to show the degree to which the Caribbean people have this great chutzpah, have this great spirit, they take things on the chin and they move on. When people do the roll, they pull a car up on the curb, and they walk on and time and time I found this. But what I was determined to share was there was a lot of humor as well. So when people arrived in the 50s, and 60s from the Caribbean, they were coming to Britain, coming to London, especially which had a glamour attached to it, even the name London and glamour attached, but also streets like Oxford Circus or Piccadilly Circus as a man called Wallace Collins, who came to Britain in the 1950s and in the book, and he talks about the fact that when people arrived, that often get photographs of themselves taken and send these snaps back home to say, look how well I’m doing and he went to the barber square and he was depressed when and he says a pigeon came and dropped something on his head, shall we say and he wrote back with a photograph to his family and said, I am making history and I love that idea. They have this kind of innocence about them. But also, they have a lot of wit and humor and again, I was renewed in my enthusiasm for the human race by listening to these elderly people. They’re all in their 80s and 90s now, and one of the things I was struck by was they were these people, and we’re all very nervous about being interviewed because there’s a phrase you might hear maybe here in Toronto, if you were to go into a house, or house or cabin household, you might hear the phrase, They don’t like people chat my business, which means that they don’t like people to talk about them. They don’t have to share their stories, because we never quite know what can be done with this stories and so whenever I went to interview these people that I had to disabuse them of the notion that I was a runner, I wasn’t going to do them harm and my approach was often to actually fool to be a kind of idiots pretend I knew nothing, and that they would feel sorry for me, and they would volunteer their stories. The time again, or what was clear was that all the interviews I did, I did over 60 interviews. They all went for three or four hours, all of the interviews were policed by the adults’ children of this Windrush generation and they were more savvy and wary and cynical about someone like me who they consider the journalists. I’m not really a journalist, but they thought of us as a journalist, as anybody accusing them of showing them I was gonna, in a way disgrace their parents that they allowed me in. But in the course of interviewing people, I began to feel almost as if I was like a producer. On a television show, we have here called the Antiques Roadshow, which is a television show where a team of specialists go out into the country and they encourage people to bring almost as if to affair antiques have been up in the attics, artifacts, special pots and pans or miniature statues, medals and often the people bring in this antiques to the Antiques Roadshow, kind of delighted by the backstory and learn that the thing that’s been lurking in their attic for 30 years has great value and when I would interview these Caribbean people, I recognize that I was like a producer on the Antiques Roadshow. But the antiques were their stories that hadn’t been readily told, or if they had been told they’ve been told to put children or bored grandchildren have stopped listening, or haven’t paid attention to the detail of the story and I was going to rush down these stories and polish them up and reveal them for the jewels that there really weren’t at all through the interviews. It was a tension that I was trying to articulate. That was often felt from the very beginning, between couples sometimes, there were those in the couple who wanted to stick and stay when they arrived in 50s and 60s, and remain, and those that my mother, the romances in the dreamers who wanted to go back to the Caribbean and when I was growing up in Luton, there was a newspaper that was imported from Jamaica called The Cleaner, the Jamaican Cleaner and on the back of the Cleaner, there were the adverts for plots of lands that can be bought in Jamaica and architectural drawings for buildings can be built on those plots of land. Every Friday afternoon, when the paper why my mother would take a pen and she’d bring the advert that she spied is the best part of land, she was going back and she’d say to us, Oh, don’t get too comfortable. Don’t get too comfortable. We’re only passing through. This world is not a resting place. But never went back. Until when I worked at the BBC, about 15 years ago now to persuade the BBC to allow me to take my mother back to Jamaica, my mother’s in the book, essence in the book, because one of the chapters is about this idea of return. So my mother had never been back to Jamaica for 40 years and she suffered from that whole notion, JP Hartley notion The past is a foreign country. I think she didn’t go back because I knew, I think she knew that it had changed that she was going to be very different from the place that she left and she wanted to hold on to the old idea that she had. So we went with a little bit of fear and trepidation on my mother’s part to the airport when we flew to Jamaica. I’d been with her the first time that she hadn’t been back for 40 years and knew when that plane touched down, when she stepped down onto the tarmac at the airport, I’ve never seen such a transformation. She was singing. She was laughing, she was loose. She was being cheeky with all the local people. She was singing songs about the local penitentiary with my grandfather and would take prisoners on remand to the penitentiary. It was probably like an artist she was drawing on all of the colors of the palettes. When I was growing up with her in England, she sent her rather reduced life officials and it’s wrong on a small number of the colors and I suddenly thought Wow, wow. What if she had stayed as a young woman and lived and grew up and have children in Jamaica? Which you have been as vibrant and as colorful, as full a person that you seem to be then
Colin 29:41
Wouldn’t that have been better? So I felt a bit sadness on her part, but she felt no sadness and I again admire people like my mother and all of her peers, all of the peers of the Windrush generation because they made this kind of sacrifice that they were going to see that they could make a better life for themselves and the children by migrating because things are rough in Jamaica. So I admire and honor them for that and finally, one of the things that characterize that, for me most fully, was the story of The Barrel Children. I’m sure you have them in Canada, North America as well. The Barrel Children is a phrase that refers to the fact that when my kids from the Caribbean left to go either to America, Canada or Britain, sometimes they might have been married to a young couple, and they could afford to take themselves to Canada, America, Britain by they couldn’t afford to take the children. So they would leave the children in the care of the grandparents and then they would soon for you. But sometimes it took years and in the interim, the children began to perceive the grandparents, as their parents and now, years later, when the parents, the real parents have set up enough money to bring the children over, they might have started another family in the UK or Canada or America and so there was a great trauma of the children in Jamaica say, having to leave their grandparents within they formed an attachment. There’s a great trauma and feeling of being bereft on the part of the grandparents and when the children arrive now to meet the biological parents in the UK, there was difficulty in bonding. They didn’t know how to be with each other and I interviewed several people, I didn’t realize how prevalent it was, I’d say a third of the people that I interviewed had either been feral children, or being parents of feral children and I interviewed a woman called Rena Cubao, from British Ghana, who’s in her late 70s, early 80s now, and she left Ghana and left three young children behind. The youngest was nine months and the oldest was five years and her husband took five years to stand for the soon to come for you, to stand for the children and equally when those children arrived, they didn’t have to brace their parents and their parents, we know how to embrace them with those great difficulties. I mean, eventually they did, obviously, and they lived full and rich and loving lives. But when I interviewed Rena Kobelt, she told me that still today, she misses, she mourns those five years when she had to be absent from her children. So it’s one of those there being great humor and liveliness, there was great sorrow in the book, as well. But I did finish on a positive note, because I think they’re very proud of their achievements. People who I interviewed, and they don’t see themselves as victims, the most important word in the Caribbean lexicon is respect. It comes out of the disrespect of shadow people during the time of slavery and the first thing you showed each other off the stone with respect to this idea of respect, is very, very important to them and so I felt really aggrieved on their part, then some of these people who would respect for Caribbean people who 50 years after were then deported. Again, it was an egregious act on the part of the British government, but they have maintained their dignity and thankfully, through the great work of journalists, like Amelia Gentlemen of Guardian newspaper in the UK, their their plight has come to light, and they are late in the day, but hopefully, and fully, I think will be shown the respect that they fully deserve.
Norman 34:04
We talked about trauma earlier. I know that in the States people have seen something similar illegal, the illegal immigrants being shipped back to the state and there’s all sorts of incredible documentaries showing the trauma associated with it. First of all, I never thought about it in England when I was doing the research for this podcast. It was the first time I heard of this and I couldn’t imagine being on the other end, living in a country that you grow up to find out that now you’re going back because you’re not part of this society.
Colin 34:45
It’s terrible. It’s tough, but also dangerous as well, because the idea is that you leave a pole and you return wealthy. So the greatest insult to these people is that they’re having to return with the tail between their legs, sometimes even in cuffs and they’re now deposited in a country, which they don’t know very well, they may not even have any relatives there anymore. But they’re pursued by some local people by some gangsters to be wealthy and they will be preyed upon and sadly, some of those people have been killed. So it’s a great, great tragedy, and a great, shameful act on the part of the British government and other governments that are doing similar kinds of things. But thank God, the people who are countervailing and countering such attitudes and remembering and reminding people of migrants who are from the Caribbean, in this country. As they say, we are here because you were there. I think that’s important point to amplify and to keep on reminding people that there’s a shared story that Caribbean people, African people who are enslaved and brought to Caribbean wouldn’t come to England, if the English hadn’t been to Africa and into the Caribbean, and plundered both people and countries for their own prosperity.
Norman 36:26
How many people were deported?
Colin 36:30
The problem is that the British government has not given a full account and they said that in I think only 60, or 70, people have been remunerated or brought back or given back their passports. But lots and lots of undocumented people who have come back to this parents into the countryside and don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I’ve interviewed people who are not part of the so-called Windrush scandal, who would have gone back, for instance, for a funeral. I mean, I interviewed a guy who went back for a funeral. He has been brought to Britain as a boy of nine years old, and never had a passport because he didn’t need a passport. When I was growing up in the UK, no one never had to carry any documents and there are many people and this is hard to believe, but there are many people who’ve never left the country and so you don’t need to get a passport if you’re not going to leave the country, some of these people, sadly, they’d have left the country just to go to a funeral and they wouldn’t have the right documents to show on the way back as it is now but he even had the country for 30 odd years, more than 20 years in prison, it’s a part of the statistics show that lots of lots of people like him. But equally, he said to me that there has been some noise made by the government that they will allow them to do this thing. It’s not permanent citizenship, but it’s the right to a bird for a certain period of time, indefinitely to remain that’s the phrase and this man said I don’t want indefinite leave to remain. I want my passport and if they don’t want to give me back my passport, they can keep it and I like that kind of spirit amongst all the people I spoke to that they’re not going to allow the insult into their soul, they’re not going to be affected, that’s going to affect the way that they think of themselves. They’re going to expel it and they’re going to turn it back towards the people who are trying to do them wrong and I found that again, and again and again throughout the book. There’s was one funny story, I interviewed this guy who was talking about fact that a lot of people from the Caribbean found it difficult to get work when they arrived, because there’s a lot of prejudice on the part of the employers and Eric Johnson told me that he’d see an advert and it arrived at a job interview, only to be told, Oh, Mr. Johnson, I’m so sorry. That job is gone. If any of you arrived just an hour earlier, it would have been certain but I’m afraid that’s gone and this happens from time to time again, and he said to me, Boy, Englishman is the nicest man in the world when he’s telling you no. So what they did was they used humor as a shoe.
Norman 39:25
I hear about it coming from the States, Canada less. I grew up in a town. It’s now a pretty big city, where it was basically all white and we became a university town, which was mid 60s. I think was the first time I ever saw anybody come into the town of color and the interesting part though, I did see some racism. I did see some, but the town was actually very welcoming. In Canada, I’m sure there’s still all sorts of prejudice or racism with undertones of racism, for sure. However, nothing like some of the things that I’ve seen more in the south. What was it like for your parents that they talk about coming over and facing a ton of racism or prejudice?
Colin 40:17
Well, it’s interesting you say that because I think I remember my parents saying they prefer the Americans, North Americans, because if the Americans didn’t like you, they will tell you to your face that they didn’t like you whereas the British had this kind of foe politeness. My father used to say the polite to the point of being rude. So it was kind of sarcastic politeness. But my father was a very amusing, amused man and he had a very amusing and amused approach to any kind of insensitive disrespect, because also he was doing things that you don’t want to do, I suppose. I mean, the things in my father’s car when he did eventually get a car that all not to be there, but just the marijuana, but he was getting knockoff beer from the local American army base, and selling it to his friends. So in a very, it’s very instructive to me to pay attention to how my father dealt with white policemen. But we were stopped quite a lot by the police. We stopped by a lowly beat policeman like a police constable and my father would promote the police constable immediately. So police constable blocks became text inspector blocks, Chief Constable blocks before amused by my father’s fear that he would wave a song. I remember thinking about that attitude and that strategy as well being quite a useful one to adopt through life. So I learned from the author, I love my fist, pull forward now. Come to your third years of the story I just told you about my father promoting the policeman. Now, I’m a BBC producer in the newsroom, and I’m producing a program that kind of verge of what the papers say the next morning, where you rifle through the first editions at 10pm in Iraq and the count of one of the key stories, and they all shift would finish at three or four o’clock in the morning and other time I lived not very far from the center of town kids could walk in, and I’ll get into my car, and I would drive down to the Thames River, turn left to go home. But every time one lecture, once a month, I would get in my car, drive down to the Thames at three o’clock in the morning and stopped by the police and it got so bad that I would drive the other way. I drive up all the way from the Thames to the pedicle, hoping over to Copperweld I go round will have a very long way to get to my home and maybe add another 30,40 minutes to the journey but at least it saves me the hassle. See with the aggravation and so one day I had this feeling you know what? I’m just gonna get the quickest way ahead. I’m going to risk it. So I got into my car, I drove down to the river Thames and turned left and back, stopped by the police. The two policemen one of them’s black and they will get the black guy to do the bad stuff. So I’m having a discussion with this police constable black police constable, What is it now Officer? I’m getting a bit of a shirty expression, I’m getting a bit irritated and he says the cop was on your bumper and I said, you’re stopping me because the cop puts on your bumper and suddenly I hear this voice in my head and the voice is well, they are bad guys. I said, Well, Detective Inspector, and the police constable says, Who are you calling Detective Inspector mate? Who are you calling mate, mate and what I haven’t recognized is that my father is a working class Caribbean man who sounds deferential. When I say it, it’s like a snobbish, middle class idiot who’s patronizing the working class policeman and the lessons that I’ve learned from my father aren’t always that useful. But I think humility is a good lesson to learn and although my parents did meet prejudice, I think on a daily basis, really, and they recognized that they had to get through life and that they couldn’t find all the battles though, just sort of shrug and let some things go and then recognize that they would have said this constantly, but I think they recognize that the problem was more the problem with the person who’s the perpetrator to have such behavior that is the person whom they want to be the recipient of such behavior. So, again, I said that my parents would be people who, for whom the prejudice was transmitted, but they didn’t receive us.
Norman 45:17
That’s interesting. Sounds like there’s a parallel here to what’s going on right now.
Colin 45:25
Yeah. But the way in denial, I don’t mean, like Yonko, president of America is being transmitted, not the notion that he should leave the house. But it’s not saving the lesson. Like that. But more that the idea that pity the poor perpetrators or prejudice, they know the same, they don’t know what they do, but they’re diminished by it more than they diminish the person who they’re trying to hurt. I think that’s what my parents would say.
Norman 46:01
Right. Okay, I want to just talk to you about something this is while you were talking a little while back about Jamaica, this is just something interesting. Years ago, when I went this might have been my first time there, this might have been my second time there. I was by myself, I was on a bus ride and the tour ended up on this beach. So we got off on the beach, and we laid down and we got in our sand for an hour or two, or sun for a couple hours and the beach was Negril, the Negril beach. It did not have a single hotel and when I think of it now, it actually makes me kind of sick kind of sad. Just seeing that maybe like for everybody who’s prospering and for the tourist industry, that’s great. But to be on that beach, when it was basically virgin ground and then to see what it turned into, it’s actually kind of sad.
Colin 47:00
Yeah, it is and you see that up and down the country. It’s the that those private beaches now, where the local people are not permitted to land, the sand and there are all these chains of hotels, where the people don’t leave the hotel, and they don’t interact with the local people, which is a great shame, a great tragedy, but I think, maybe wrongly, my wife was too much of an optimist. But I’d like to think that this is a blip. Okay, very long blip but a blip and people will change and people get fed up with that kind of seclusion or exclusion and want to reach out and to meet and to know they’re strangers. But the thing I think, I think things will change. Things will happen in the future, which we are unaware of. I mean, who could foretold maybe people would foretold that we would be having this kind of conversation via this platform a year or two ago, the critical tell that we wouldn’t get to the cinema and I’ve lived a life where through my parents, I’ve seen that you can live with uncertainty, because what is certain today will not be so tomorrow. It was not certain at all to my parents that there would be any possibility for someone like me to be a producer in the Premier Broadcasting Corporation in Britain, but it’s every day now. When that shifts, one of those shifts happens when the people become the managers of these exclusive hotels that don’t share the outlook of the people who present Brandon, then things will change. I think. So rest assured, I’m telling an old guy, teaching young No. There will come a time when we turn away for instance from digital back to analog. There’ll come a time when we open the gates of these exclusive gated communities and welcome strangers into our hearts. I’m sure of it.
Norman 49:09
It would be nice if that happened. All right. Okay, so when we talked to you originally, we asked you if you had a quote that you could provide. Something either by yourself or by somebody that you would like to provide to us. What is that quote?
Colin 49:30
Well, thank you for this wonderful interview, Norman. I’m very pleased to bring it to an end with this wonderful quote by George Lamming, a great writer from the Caribbean. He wrote a book called In The Castle Of My Skin, and the quote is this, “It was my mother who fathered me.” He goes on to say that his father only father the idea of him but it was his mother who fathered him because his father wasn’t around and that resonates with me because it was my mother who fathered me and every time I pick up a pen or sit at a computer, and I tap out the story, I honor my mother. Because my mother who fathered me gave me my voice, gave me my writer’s voice. I could not have written anything without my mother’s voice and so every book that I write every piece of journalism that I pen is a tribute to my mother, who fathered me.
Norman 50:39
I love it. Thank you for sharing that.
Colin 50:41
Thank you.
Norman 50:43
Now, this is the big question. So many successful people, to become successful, have had struggles, hurdles, failures, whatever you like to call them. Can you let us know, one of these failures or hurdles that you’ve had to overcome? What did you learn from it and how did you go on from it?
Colin 51:05
That’s a good question Norm. I’m not maybe the right person to answer the question. Because I remember when I wrote my first book, I wrote a book about Marcus Garvey and you have to write a biography, or suggest the biography for the publisher and I wrote something like I spent five years failing to be a doctor, I spent four years failing to be a West and playwright. I spent most of my life failing, but in a way, I don’t see failing as failing. I see failing as a process and I really love the quote by Samuel Beckett, great Irish writer who he counseled his students or anybody who wants to write he’d say to them, fail, fail again, fail better. That’s what I’ve done through life. I’ve had a string of failures, but they’re getting slightly better as I go. Okay, as I get along, but also I’m not too keen on the word success, I’d rather think about whether anything has integrity, or whether anything can be said to be an achievement and I’d much rather think that I’ve achieved things, rather than I’ve been a success. I have an attitude. Occasionally, I’ll be put up for book prizes. But I said to my publisher recently, that I would not want them to submit me for any prize, other than the best book written by Colin Grant prize. So I think my advice about success and failure is to recognize that the obviously two sides of the same coin, but equally the interchangeable, and that they don’t have to be lasting. But I think whenever I read somebody, or wherever I see something, I think, not necessarily about whether the book is a success, or the person is a success, I just think about whether they’re my kind of person, and whether they have integrity, whether they have kind of an honesty and a value that transcends their own limits, shall we say? That’s something that I recognize in my own writing, do I have some value? Do I have something that transcends my own limits? If so, let me find a platform for that. I brought up a Catholic and pity the poor Catholics right Norm? Pity the poor Catholics. One of the great things about being a Catholic is this, you fail, you sit all through the week and then on Saturday, you go to confession and you’re given absolution and pieces go and sin no more, but what he’s really saying is go and sin again until the next time for confession. Because you’re going to fail as a human being. As far as I’m concerned, you’re going to fail, but you’re going to try to do better and if you don’t manage it, we will hear your confession, and you will be absolved. So I’m a great believer in that and the idea that I am still a work in progress. I haven’t really succeeded.
Norman 54:24
I like the way that you were talking about going out there and failing and coming back and confessing. The Hawaiians have something I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it called Ho’oponopono which is a system of making things right and so it’s a similar, you can not so much sin but you can do something in your life, but it’s actually around a circle of friends but you make it right. You approach the person, you tell them what you’ve done and anyways, I guess it’s a system of confession. But it’s just making it right.
Colin 55:04
I think that’s an important point to make and whenever I think about these kinds of notions about success and failure, making amends, I think my brother wrote a book about my brother Christopher, who had epilepsy and he died from this condition called sudep, Sudden, unexpected death in epilepsy and he was about I really loved and I would get to see films with him. We share great love films, matter of life and death. Power press better film is one of our favorites. But the absolute favorite film of my brother Christopher was Corners Gutsy, Corners gutsy and it’s a wonderful film. It’s a film, mostly sound chanting and sort of passage of time, over the decades and centuries, done filmmaking is speeded up. But there’s this phrase, which is a Hopi char, Korea, gutsy Korea on katzie and roughly translates his life out of balance and the idea is to get life back into balance and I think that can be achieved with humility, and the recognition that you’re mostly going to fail. But yeah, to rebalance, to recalibrate, to achieve fullness, a harmony is something that I yearn for and keep me awake at night, but it keeps me hopeful and allows me into the ground.
Norman 56:51
I hope I’m doing the same. Okay, so on that note, we’re at the end of this podcast and I really want to thank you for coming on. I just looked up and I just noticed that we’ve been going a couple hours here and I could have easily talked to you for another couple of hours. So thank you for coming on today.
Colin 57:13
Well, Norman, and Hayden, your son, thank you for inviting me. It’s been a real pleasure. I’ve felt I’ve made a connection. I would like to reflect on what my mother says through life, which is find your people and I think through I Know This Guy, I found my people today. Thank you very much.
Norman 57:34
Well. thank you for that and right back at you. How’s that?
Norman 57:41
Okay, one thing though, before you go, we always have one question we like to ask our guests and do they know a guy?
Colin 57:49
Yes and I have told Hayden that the guy I would recommend to is a friend of mine and a great writer, called Nicholas Rankin, Nick Rankin, who’s also an author. I used to sit beside Nick Rankin in the BBC. he is the chief producer of the BBC. He’s a connoisseur, rapper. He is the man I always wanted to be. I admire him enormously and other than his wife magazine, my mother and my wife, the few people who I owe a debt of gratitude to through enabling me to practice as a writer through their encouragement. So Nick Rankin is the guy that I would recommend to you.
Norman 58:32
Fantastic. Well, I can’t wait to reach out to Nick and talk to him. Thank you again.
Colin 58:37
I’ll connect you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Hayden. Bye for now.
Hayden 58:41
Thanks for listening, everyone. That concludes our interview with Colin Grant. Stepping up to plate next week is Jeff Bosley. Jeff is an American actor, known primarily for his roles and action films. You might have seen him recently in the movie Sniper. We end up digging into Jeff’s unorthodox path to becoming an actor and a bit about his time in the military actually. Anyway, you don’t want to miss it. So make sure to check it out. See you next time.
