Debut novel by award-winning Guyanese Poet attracts UK publisher

By Michael Jordan

It was not so long ago that award-winning Guyanese poet Berkley Wendell Semple was making light of his abilities as a novelist.
However, now the two-time Guyana Prize for Literature poet (Lamplight Teller, in 2004, and Flight and Other Poems in 2023) has not only written a novel but has seen his first book of fiction being snapped up by an enthusiastic United Kingdom publisher.
Semple’s novel, ‘Kipling Plass’, will be published soon by Peepal Tree Press, which has given voice to several award-winning writers from the Caribbean and elsewhere.
‘Kipling Plass’ is the name of the narrator in Semple’s riveting, haunting, brutal, lyrical debut novel, which is set in a rural Guyanese landscape that is similar to the Mahaicony community in which Semple, who now resides in Guyana, grew up.
With the publishing of his partly ‘historical novel,’ it is not a stretch to speculate that Berkley W. Semple may soon add the Guyana Prize Book of Fiction award to his already impressive resume.
In an exclusive interview with Guyana Times, Semple spoke about his novel, the challenges he faced in this new area of creative writing, and of the writers who shaped his literary career.
Guyana Times: Can you give us a brief summary of your novel?
Berkley W. Semple: It’s a politically astute coming-of-age novel set in Guyana in the turbulent, late 1970s, where Kipling Plass narrates his and his teenage friends’ struggles for both physical and emotional survival as they contend with the colonial past, racial animosity and Guyana’s economic hardships. It’s heartbreaking, shocking, and lyrical.
GT: Is it based on your experiences growing up in the country?
B.W.S: The novel is a work of the imagination, but there is always a jumping-off point in reality; the novel does not dispense with essential facts, but is not always an autobiography or essay; a novel elaborates on existing things or invented ones. This particular novel, Kipling Plass, is a historical novel in that it’s about the recent past in Guyana; its orientation is thus a sort of reality, often a kind of fantastic reality.
GT: What made you decide to write a novel? And this one in particular?
B.W. S: Ambition, I guess, why not. That is a kind of answer, but not an entirely honest one. I wanted to write a novel because I thought I could. I wanted to say more than I do in poetry. I thought a novel would help me with that. I wanted to say something about Guyana in the 1980s, about Guyanese, about Guyanese politics. I wanted to say many things about Guyana, because I love the place, it’s my home and the salient subject of all my writings.
GT: What was your initial feeling on learning that Peepul Tree Press had accepted your manuscript?
B.W.S: I am very pleased. You know, I have no sense of a critical response to my fiction. I have published short stories in the past. But I have no sense about what people think about them, outside the realm of my writer friends.
I sent it (my manuscript) to Harold Bascom, to whom I sent most things. He has a sharp, attentive eye and a no-nonsense way of saying what he likes and doesn’t like. He is very blunt but very honest. Also, he will respond with pages of suggestions. I sent it to my friend, Petamber Persaud; like Harold, he reads and comments.
GT: You have previously indicated an apparent lack of confidence in your ability to write a publishable novel. Now a reputable publisher has accepted your manuscript. What was the publisher’s response to your manuscript?
B.W.S: It feels good to get any of my work published. I like to feel that I have completed something I started. I don’t typically start many things I don’t finish. I have a certain level of discipline. I would venture to say that all my writing gets finished eventually. But I struggled with writing this novel because I am not a confident writer of fiction, especially something of this length, which encompasses so much. Kipling Plass is set in the early eighties, and so a certain kind of attention needed to be paid to the naked facts within the fiction. That requires deeper delving into the archive of the mind, as well as research when mere memory does not suffice. As for the “reputable publisher,” I love reading the stuff from their catalogue, especially their Caribbean Modern Classics series; I love those books. The publisher seems a natural fit for the kind of things I write and really, where I wanted to be. I thank Dr. David Dabydeen for helping me with this. He read my book Flight and sent me a nice note about it. I lamented to him that I was having a difficult time getting published and he put me in touch with Jeremy Poynting, the publisher of Peepal Tree Press. That was it. So, I thank Dr. Dabydeen for this nice thing he did for me. I am very grateful.
GT: How long have you been working on Kipling Plass, and what were your main challenges? Did you find yourself being immersed in the lives of your characters?
B.W.S: I have been working on it for about ten years, but off and on. I would write a few chapters and put them away while I worked on something else. This has gone on for years and many drafts are too numerous to count. But I like writing and continued to slug away at it. Ultimately, one gets to the end. The challenges are many.
Arriving at a particular voice for the narrator was particularly challenging; settling on a particular structure was hard as well. It was only when I read Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killing that I realized that the structure of a novel can be much more than I had in mind. It freed me from a sort of straight jacket and allowed me to be inventive.
Much more goes into writing a novel than poetry. Poetry is easier for me. In a novel you have to spell things out in a way you don’t have to in poetry, which can be allusive and metaphoric; a conceit of a kind is nascent to poetry, in the sense that a synecdoche can suggest an entire word, but with a novel you have to commit to providing much more detail, in a word, to spell things out. The language of this particular novel is lyrical, but that too must be reined in somewhat to make things plain and comprehensible. I found out a lot about writing while writing this novel. One has to be almost schizophrenic in a way, taking on the psychologies of so many characters, being them, having them be distinct from each other. Here is where the writer becomes the puppet master, the marionette or ventriloquist, pulling the strings of characters to animate them in a way that best suits your intent. I had a great deal of fun with this aspect of the writing. It’s full of surprise, especially when characters begin to speak for themselves in a way through you—getting out of hand, sometimes you let them and sometimes you must pull the reign and haul them in. I spent a lot of time hauling them in. It’s real work sometimes, but I am a writer.
I do other kinds of writing and literary work. I’m on the editorial board of The Caribbean Writer at the University of the Virgin Islands and must do a lot of editorial work on submissions for them. I contribute little essays and book reviews to Caribbean Voice, edited by Annan Boodram, the hardest-working editor in the whole world. I also must work on my PhD dissertation, which is not as exciting as poetry or fiction.
GT: How are you able to write so vividly about the countryside, particularly the seaside, (beautifully and lyrically portrayed in your novel) after living overseas for so long?
B.W. S: I come to Guyana once or twice a year, and I am not a city person. My mother has a house in Mahaicony and I stay there and explore the community.
I love the sea there; it is not a ‘tourist’ sort of sea; it’s more natural. I like the fishermen and go down and speak to them and ‘lime’ with them and buy their rum sometimes. I know the place and can recall it well; I make a study of my environment. As I said, Guyana is the salient subject of my writing, it does no good not to know about the place you write about.
GT: What started you on the path to writing (poetry). Did you one day consciously say, ‘I want to be a poet?’
B.W.S: I started writing poetry because I was a reader of poetry. I like to read, and reading is often magical. It leads to self-examination and for some of us, ambition. Reading suggests to readers that, “you can do this too,” you can write about this also. Writing is a tributary of reading well. Reading is ultimately a better teacher than the one in the classroom, I think. But you have to read things that are meaningful, life-changing, surprising, well-written, wonderful, and inexhaustible. I have read Moby Dick about twenty times; it a great teacher; I read Leaves of Grass, The Star-apple Kingdom, Blood Meridian, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and The Palace of the Peacock, over and over again. I am taught something new every time.
GT: Would you say that Guyana has a still virtually untapped resource in its myths, and stories? Why is it that so many of our stories remain untold?
B.W.S: The Guyanese mythology, especially the Amerindian mythology is vibrant and ideal for literary exploration. The proper medium to write about Guyanese myths is literary, the novel. Some of this has been done by Wilson Harris and Pauline Melville, but not enough. We need an epic novel to tell the story well. We need a certain kind of dedication as well as an invested personality.
GT: You are an amazingly well-read individual, across various genres. Tell me how long you have been a reader, and what in particular influenced you to be a writer.
B.W.S: I have always read. I do not know when I did not. Reading made me want to be a writer. Derek Walcott, when I came to understand him, made me want to write poetry. You can see his influence on my earlier work. I was in my late teens and the military when I found him. I was stationed in California at the time. He was the first Caribbean poet whose work I learned to recite. I had read Martin Carter in school, of course, but as I came to the US relatively young, I forgot about him. Walcott was a door to all the other poets I would read later. It was a tremendous discovery.
Some earlier generations of Caribbean writers had to look to Europe for their poetic influencers. My generation did not, I think. We had our own avatars in Naipaul, Walcott, Harris, Carew, Lamming, Lovelace, Selvon, Wynter, Reid Anthony, Carter and others. We looked homeward in a way. I read widely, authors from all over the world and across genres, but my writing is most influenced by Caribbean writers. These days there are so many. I admire the world of Kei Miller, Nicole Dennis Benn, Marlon James, Oonya Kempadoo. I think Ruel Johnson is a very thoughtful, beautiful writer of short fiction, but he doesn’t publish enough of it. I love his work. I like the poetry of Sasenarine Persaud. I think highly of the innovative and strange output of Scott Ting-A-Kee. I love Harold Bascom’s plays and your own work. I thought Kamarang was a wonderfully new approach to contemporary Guyanese fiction.
GT: Can we expect more novels from Berkley W Semple?
B.W.S: Maybe, but it is hard on me! I hope I get better at it; I hope it becomes easier to do. I am of a certain age and I don’t imagine I have many novels in me. I would like to do what Jim Harrison did well, write intense novellas, and publish them together in a book; he always did three together. I love Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog. I would like to do that kind of fiction writing.
(Berkley Wendell Semple has published four collections of poetry, Lamplight Teller, awarded a 2004 Guyana Prize for Poetry, The Solo Flyer, The Central Station, and Flight and Other Poems, awarded the 2023 Guyana Prize for Literature, and has edited a book of student poems. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Callaloo, The Hampden-Sydney Review, The Caribbean Writer, for which he was awarded a Daily News Prize for poetry, and many other publications. He is a veteran of the US armed forces and a graduate of the Naval School of Health Sciences. He holds an MA and MLS degrees from Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and an MPhil from Long Island University (LIU) where he is a current Ph.D. candidate. From 2010 to 2022 he wrote audiobook reviews for Sound Commentary Journal. He is on the Editorial Board of The Caribbean Writer, and an editor and book reviewer for Caribbean Voice. He is also a librarian and currently works for the Queens Public Library system in New York City.)