Kei Miller Meet the Author

and surprised a lot of people, including myself. We will be back

with you at eight o'clock. Now, this week on Meet

the Author, Jim Naughtie talks to the Jamaican poet

and author Kei Miller. Augustown, in Kei Miller's

novel of that name, is an imaginary place in Jamaica,

but it is very real. The sounds, the smells,

the voices ring true, It is appropriate for somewhere

where the past and the present seem to overlap, and where legend

and superstition are as real as the fiery politics or the smell

of ganja in the streets. It is a town where they still tell

stories of the preacher who could fly, and where they think

it might be happening again, as they wait

for the autoclapse - the apocalypse. This is a world in Jamaica

where the imagined and the real seem Is that your memory

of what it is like, rather I moved to the UK in 2008,

but since then, I have been back to Jamaica probably twice,

sometimes three times a year, so it feels like something

that is very present. There is never this

idea of looking back. It still feels very much a world

that I'm part of and participate in. But I think that is the same

everywhere, how we make sense of what is happening

is through what we see through the stories

that we hear, through mythology. I don't think that is

unique to Jamaica. In everywhere, reality is a part

of the visual and the Except in Augustown,

it is stronger. We begin with the story

of the preacher in the 19th century, who could fly and could look

down, and as a reader, These stories are repeated

down the generations, and there is a feeling by people,

although they know that is not true, that they wanted to be true,

they want to believe it, and they want to see it happening

again, and they feel And that, for them, is as real

as what is happening Yeah, but in my mind,

the story that is true, I hear people whose truths have

always been challenged, people I have always been trying to write

about that reality, where a woman can wake up at three

o'clock in the morning, and she knows that her son died,

and you cannot make sense of that, and you cannot make sense

of that truth easily. Except that she knows

that it is true, and it is. It is, and that is the kind of world

that I am trying to write about, a world that is not exactly

superstition, but the only way that we can make sense

of it is by using those words, It is a kind of magic and a kind

of superstition that is grounded, it is gritty, and it is not a magic

that makes things It is a magic that lives

alongside guns, and violence, And what you say at one point

is that there are stories that smell of their own breath,

that is the phrase you used, that these stories aren't bits

of folklore taken out of a box and laid out for

everyone to look at. They are real and potent,

and they are about the past, And certainly, the end

of the story that lies at the centre of this book,

the flying preacher, I have always been interested

in the way that he has been routinely dismissed,

despite the profundity Without Bedward, this

preacher man who said he was going to flight 1920,

Rastafari would have Rastafari singers singing,

"If I had the wings of a dove, There is a memory of Bedward,

but we dismiss him at the same time, so I really wanted to write a book

about it, almost The consequence of the world

you create is that you create in a mystery, a fair bit

of violence, and all of the things that makes life

difficult for people. There is a richness and colour

that is intoxicating. That is what Jamaica

feels like to me. It is a country that is beautiful

and it is a country that is troubled, and in some ways,

it is a country that is beautifully troubled, and you kind

of want to use literature to begin It is also true that you do it

by writing a very poetic style. It is a very free-flowing

imaginative style, and of course, My career as a poet took

off much more quickly, but as a kid, what I wanted

to do was write stories, I began writing poetry when I was at

the University of Jamaica. The only available creative writing

course was poetry. In the beginning, I thought

that I would write poems because if you could write a half

decent poem, you could write So poetry was only

way to feed fiction. It is hard to describe the story

to people who will come to this book But it does lead, we're told,

at the very beginning, to a cataclysm, and I won't say

what it is. And you use this

wonderful word. And you say, well, if there

were a dictionary with this in it, I mentioned at the beginning that

you could call it an apocalypse. What of the word say

to you in your head, autoclapse? In the Caribbean, this

would be very word. It is always something terrible

that is about to happen, Sometimes, it is used in small ways,

but also, large ways. If there is a terrible violent act

that happened to a community, Sometimes, simply, your mother comes

to your house and find that The great and the small,

but some disaster. I won't say what happens

towards the end of the book, but there is an act of violence

that is very real, and very pretty, It is not a superstitious ending,

a real ending. We feel at the end of the book

where this world, whether imagined and superstitious and real coexist,

is going to continue. In other words, the autoclapse

that we have here, does not Yeah, and I think that is one

of the things that I wanted The story of Edward,

which is at the heart of it, and I wanted to explore how

that keeps on happening, One of the most poorest

communities in Jamaica, how they always have the ambition

to fly, to rise, to get out of this situation,

to do something incredible. And what are the things that

keep getting in the way? What are the things that

keep pulling them down? It is a story that keeps repeating

itself again and again. It is just a story of

someone trying to rise, You have a sense that this

is an ongoing story,