Out of the Caribbean

WATERTOWN -- "All my books begin with the personal," Patricia Powell says as she sits in the light-filled kitchen of her condo.

More accurately, it's the personal with a twist. She sprinkles her novels with aspects of her life as a Jamaican immigrant: a gay friend abandoned by his family after he contracted AIDS, being raised by her great-aunt from the tender age of 3 months, the discovery in her teenage years that she was a lesbian.

Then she distances herself by turning female characters into male ones, young protagonists into old ones, and lesbian heroes into gay men. The intimate yet distant results can be seen in her first two Jamaica-based novels reissued last month: "Me Dying Trial," about a family whose mother abandons it, and "A Small Gathering of Bones," which explores how AIDS affects a community of gay men. Her last work of fiction, 1998's "The Pagoda," tells the story of Mr. Lowe, a female Chinese immigrant to Jamaica who spends most of the novel pretending to be a man.

"Even though all of those characters have a part of me," says Powell, 37, a creative writing teacher at MIT, as she protectively wraps her arms around herself, "I still haven't been able to write a female character. Not an adult one. It's too close. It also feels so exposing. Maybe I'm fooling myself by thinking when I'm writing these characters that I'm safely hiding out."

In many ways Powell is in the spotlight in her novels. She's part of a burgeoning wave of Caribbean writers who are tackling the subject of gay and lesbian life in their home countries. Her contemporary literary peers include Dionne Brand, Thomas Glave, Makeda Silvera, and Shani Mootoo. Their numbers have grown so large that Glave is pitching an anthology of gay and lesbian Caribbean writing that will include Stacyann Chin, Reinaldo Arenas, and Maryse Conde.

These writers consider themselves the literary descendants of Audre Lord, Michelle Cliff, H. Nigel Thomas, Andrew Salkey, Lawrence Scott, and even Jamaica Kincaid, whose female characters often delve into homoeroticism as they discover their sexual selves.

"[They're] writers from the region who may not themselves be lesbian and gay," explains Faith Smith, an associate professor at Brandeis University who often teaches courses on Caribbean literature, "but who have been forcing us for quite a while to not pretend that Caribbean identity and homosexual identity are two separate boxes."

These authors often pick their battles far from their birthplaces -- in Boston, Toronto, London, or Santa Cruz, Calif. They do, after all, come from a region where homophobia rears its heads in many aspects of society. You can hear rumbles of it, Smith says, in dancehall reggae songs that casually chant "chi chi man for dead " -- slang for "all gay men should die." It's also evident, she says, in the words of the upper middle class, who are appalled that V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, is a bishop.

"If I had to make my life in Jamaica," says Glave, author of the short-story collection "Whose Song? and Other Stories," published in 2000, "I don't think I would feel as free to write about these issues unless I wrote under a pseudonym."

Islands of intolerance

In a soft Jamaican accent thinned by 21 years of living in this country, Powell explains why she feels free to write about gays in her novels. She's thoughtful and quite talkative but not particularly eager to divulge personal details.

She is asked: Would you like to give the name of your partner?

She looks out the window, processing the question, then answers, "No." Later, she sends an e-mail with her partner's full name: Prudence Carter, a sociology professor at Harvard.

"One of the beautiful things about living here is you're kind of cushioned, you know," Powell says. "I don't know if I could have written about this stuff when I was there even though I knew about it. I don't think I would have felt safe, and I don't know how much of an audience I would have had."

Powell came out in Jamaica at the age of 15. Her younger brother was seeing a psychiatrist. So she promptly made an appointment with the doctor to discuss her own sexuality.

"I was well aware of the kind of fervor around gayness," she says, laughing. "The psychiatrist was so wonderful! She said, `You know there isn't anything wrong with being gay.' I remember her saying, `Just go and find a girlfriend.' That's the best advice you could get in that place. She didn't tell me what I already knew: Just how hostile people can be toward that kind of lifestyle."

Powell got to experience gay life in Jamaica firsthand in the late 1970s and early '80s, since her older brother was an active member of the community. It consisted of the gay newspaper the Jamaica Gaily News, Sunday dinners that provided opportunities to gather and talk, and clubs, usually based in the capital, Kingston. Powell brings that period back to life in "A Small Gathering of Bones."

The novel also depicts the church as a safe harbor for gays. One main character, Dale Singleton, actively participates in the church even as he hides his sexuality. Early in the novel, Dale recalls telling a priest at his Pentecostal church about his sexual orientation when he was a young man. The priest's response: "Son . . . it is not for us to question the doings of the Almighty."

But Powell also blames the church's conservatism for creating an intolerance of gays and a lot of other problems. "We have a lot of teenage pregnancies," Powell says, twiddling her fingers thoughtfully around a mug of hot tea, "and I think it's because . . . your parents won't talk to you about sex. You have a very sort of distant relationship with your body."

Smith, who's also from Jamaica, believes the Caribbean's homophobia is caused not only by its religious beliefs but by its colonial origins as well: "Unfortunately sexuality now becomes the way we in the Caribbean have the right to say who and what we are."

There's a perception among some Caribbean people, says Smith, that homosexuality is foreign to the islands. "[It] comes from the outside," she says, "whether it is from evil white people or diasporic Caribbean people who have migrated and have become infected by this evil thing."

It's a direct reaction, says Smith, to the Caribbean's European conquerors who categorized black and brown bodies as impure and overtly sexual. Upon gaining their freedom, Caribbean people yearned to prove that wasn't so. "It became imperative to say `Look, we are clean,' `Look, we are normal,' " she says, "because for such a long time the mythology of savagery was attached to us."

Powell had to deal with this issue along with many other things when she arrived in Boston to live with her mother at the age of 16. It was the first time she'd ever lived with her mom. Like many of the children who populate "Me Dying Trial," Powell was raised by a relative.

"A lot of it is economics," Powell says. "You don't have child care. It was a way to go off and work to be able to take care of this child. So, yeah, many of us are raised by our grandparents."

Following her art

Soon after Powell arrived here, her mother left for Florida. That doesn't exactly promote confidence, but Powell can put a positive face on it these days.

"I've gotten used to it," Powell says, laughing. "I was in school. I just stayed."

Powell also had to contend with the death of the great-aunt she considered her mother, a year after moving to Boston. No wonder Powell describes herself as numb during her first years here and unable to process all the things that were happening to her. But the teachers who surrounded her at Jeremiah Burke High School in Dorchester made sure that Powell succeeded.

Margaret Spencer, her English teacher at the high school, remembers being immediately impressed with Powell: "She made it clear she was here to get an education and work as hard as she could." Powell took to Spencer as well: "She was white and Irish, but she was my great-aunt all over again. She totally took me under her wing, and she got me enrolled in all the right programs."

Two years later, Powell was at Wellesley College, with her eye on an economics degree. But even then, Spencer could see the writer in Powell. For her high school graduation present, Spencer gave Powell an anthology of black writers with an inscription. "Something like, `I hope one day to see your name in an anthology like this,' " Powell remembers. Now newspaper and magazine clippings following Powell's literary career hang on the wall of Spencer's classroom.

"It was not until I started writing `Me Dying Trial,' I think, that I felt that I began to thaw," Powell says.

She began the novel while taking a writing class at Wellesley that convinced her to follow her artistic muse rather than monetary security. She switched to an English major, then went on to get her master's degree in creative writing at Brown University. She taught at UMass-Boston and Harvard before landing a gig as a visiting scholar at MIT last year.

Powell is now doing rewrites on her fourth novel, "A Good Life." This time it isn't personal: It revolves around a straight man living in Boston who returns to Jamaica to visit his estranged, dying father. He comes back to Boston with a child of his own to raise. Powell thinks this story of fatherhood will be her last Caribbean novel.

She doesn't gloss over the fact that she's had a hard time writing "A Good Life," which is six years in the making.

"You know, I have a nonexistent relationship with my own father," she says. "It's trying to think through what is it like for those men having children and not being parented themselves and now having to parent. What resources are they falling back on?"

Perhaps it's not so far from the personal after all.

Vanessa E. Jones can be reached at v--jones@globe.com

Patricia Powell will read at Wordsworth Books in Cambridge on Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. and Jamaicaway Books & Gifts in Jamaica Plain on Feb. 28 at 3 p.m.