:00:00. > :00:00.and surprised a lot of people, including myself. We will be back
:00:00. > :00:00.with you at eight o'clock. Now, this week on Meet
:00:07. > :00:08.the Author, Jim Naughtie talks to the Jamaican poet
:00:09. > :00:12.and author Kei Miller. Augustown, in Kei Miller's
:00:13. > :00:13.novel of that name, is an imaginary place in Jamaica,
:00:14. > :00:16.but it is very real. The sounds, the smells,
:00:17. > :00:18.the voices ring true, It is appropriate for somewhere
:00:19. > :00:23.where the past and the present seem to overlap, and where legend
:00:24. > :00:25.and superstition are as real as the fiery politics or the smell
:00:26. > :00:28.of ganja in the streets. It is a town where they still tell
:00:29. > :00:31.stories of the preacher who could fly, and where they think
:00:32. > :00:37.it might be happening again, as they wait
:00:38. > :00:40.for the autoclapse - the apocalypse. This is a world in Jamaica
:00:41. > :00:59.where the imagined and the real seem Is that your memory
:01:00. > :01:06.of what it is like, rather I moved to the UK in 2008,
:01:07. > :01:13.but since then, I have been back to Jamaica probably twice,
:01:14. > :01:15.sometimes three times a year, so it feels like something
:01:16. > :01:19.that is very present. There is never this
:01:20. > :01:22.idea of looking back. It still feels very much a world
:01:23. > :01:28.that I'm part of and participate in. But I think that is the same
:01:29. > :01:30.everywhere, how we make sense of what is happening
:01:31. > :01:32.is through what we see through the stories
:01:33. > :01:41.that we hear, through mythology. I don't think that is
:01:42. > :01:43.unique to Jamaica. In everywhere, reality is a part
:01:44. > :01:46.of the visual and the Except in Augustown,
:01:47. > :01:52.it is stronger. We begin with the story
:01:53. > :01:58.of the preacher in the 19th century, who could fly and could look
:01:59. > :02:00.down, and as a reader, These stories are repeated
:02:01. > :02:07.down the generations, and there is a feeling by people,
:02:08. > :02:11.although they know that is not true, that they wanted to be true,
:02:12. > :02:13.they want to believe it, and they want to see it happening
:02:14. > :02:16.again, and they feel And that, for them, is as real
:02:17. > :02:25.as what is happening Yeah, but in my mind,
:02:26. > :02:29.the story that is true, I hear people whose truths have
:02:30. > :02:32.always been challenged, people I have always been trying to write
:02:33. > :02:39.about that reality, where a woman can wake up at three
:02:40. > :02:51.o'clock in the morning, and she knows that her son died,
:02:52. > :02:54.and you cannot make sense of that, and you cannot make sense
:02:55. > :02:56.of that truth easily. Except that she knows
:02:57. > :02:59.that it is true, and it is. It is, and that is the kind of world
:03:00. > :03:02.that I am trying to write about, a world that is not exactly
:03:03. > :03:05.superstition, but the only way that we can make sense
:03:06. > :03:08.of it is by using those words, It is a kind of magic and a kind
:03:09. > :03:14.of superstition that is grounded, it is gritty, and it is not a magic
:03:15. > :03:17.that makes things It is a magic that lives
:03:18. > :03:25.alongside guns, and violence, And what you say at one point
:03:26. > :03:33.is that there are stories that smell of their own breath,
:03:34. > :03:43.that is the phrase you used, that these stories aren't bits
:03:44. > :03:46.of folklore taken out of a box and laid out for
:03:47. > :03:47.everyone to look at. They are real and potent,
:03:48. > :03:50.and they are about the past, And certainly, the end
:03:51. > :03:54.of the story that lies at the centre of this book,
:03:55. > :03:56.the flying preacher, I have always been interested
:03:57. > :04:02.in the way that he has been routinely dismissed,
:04:03. > :04:03.despite the profundity Without Bedward, this
:04:04. > :04:17.preacher man who said he was going to flight 1920,
:04:18. > :04:19.Rastafari would have Rastafari singers singing,
:04:20. > :04:27."If I had the wings of a dove, There is a memory of Bedward,
:04:28. > :04:32.but we dismiss him at the same time, so I really wanted to write a book
:04:33. > :04:34.about it, almost The consequence of the world
:04:35. > :04:39.you create is that you create in a mystery, a fair bit
:04:40. > :04:41.of violence, and all of the things that makes life
:04:42. > :04:44.difficult for people. There is a richness and colour
:04:45. > :04:55.that is intoxicating. That is what Jamaica
:04:56. > :05:05.feels like to me. It is a country that is beautiful
:05:06. > :05:08.and it is a country that is troubled, and in some ways,
:05:09. > :05:12.it is a country that is beautifully troubled, and you kind
:05:13. > :05:14.of want to use literature to begin It is also true that you do it
:05:15. > :05:20.by writing a very poetic style. It is a very free-flowing
:05:21. > :05:22.imaginative style, and of course, My career as a poet took
:05:23. > :05:30.off much more quickly, but as a kid, what I wanted
:05:31. > :05:33.to do was write stories, I began writing poetry when I was at
:05:34. > :05:40.the University of Jamaica. The only available creative writing
:05:41. > :05:43.course was poetry. In the beginning, I thought
:05:44. > :05:45.that I would write poems because if you could write a half
:05:46. > :05:48.decent poem, you could write So poetry was only
:05:49. > :05:55.way to feed fiction. It is hard to describe the story
:05:56. > :06:03.to people who will come to this book But it does lead, we're told,
:06:04. > :06:09.at the very beginning, to a cataclysm, and I won't say
:06:10. > :06:16.what it is. And you use this
:06:17. > :06:18.wonderful word. And you say, well, if there
:06:19. > :06:25.were a dictionary with this in it, I mentioned at the beginning that
:06:26. > :06:30.you could call it an apocalypse. What of the word say
:06:31. > :06:36.to you in your head, autoclapse? In the Caribbean, this
:06:37. > :06:41.would be very word. It is always something terrible
:06:42. > :06:52.that is about to happen, Sometimes, it is used in small ways,
:06:53. > :06:56.but also, large ways. If there is a terrible violent act
:06:57. > :07:00.that happened to a community, Sometimes, simply, your mother comes
:07:01. > :07:05.to your house and find that The great and the small,
:07:06. > :07:10.but some disaster. I won't say what happens
:07:11. > :07:13.towards the end of the book, but there is an act of violence
:07:14. > :07:19.that is very real, and very pretty, It is not a superstitious ending,
:07:20. > :07:28.a real ending. We feel at the end of the book
:07:29. > :07:31.where this world, whether imagined and superstitious and real coexist,
:07:32. > :07:33.is going to continue. In other words, the autoclapse
:07:34. > :07:36.that we have here, does not Yeah, and I think that is one
:07:37. > :07:42.of the things that I wanted The story of Edward,
:07:43. > :07:53.which is at the heart of it, and I wanted to explore how
:07:54. > :07:55.that keeps on happening, One of the most poorest
:07:56. > :07:59.communities in Jamaica, how they always have the ambition
:08:00. > :08:02.to fly, to rise, to get out of this situation,
:08:03. > :08:04.to do something incredible. And what are the things that
:08:05. > :08:06.keep getting in the way? What are the things that
:08:07. > :08:08.keep pulling them down? It is a story that keeps repeating
:08:09. > :08:11.itself again and again. It is just a story of
:08:12. > :08:14.someone trying to rise, You have a sense that this
:08:15. > :08:18.is an ongoing story,