EP 12 Erna Brodber - She Rewrote Jamaica's Soul | Women and Resistance

In this episode, Erna Brodber shares her journey from Jamaica to becoming a renowned writer and historian, emphasising the importance of community memory, cultural roots, and the creation of spaces for black liberation. She discusses her work in oral history, her novels, and the significance of reclaiming African and Caribbean histories.

Brodber turned oral histories into tools that challenge Western frameworks of time, history, and psychology, including her Commonwealth Prize–winning novel Myal (1988) and Louisiana (1994).

We trace her journey, culminating in her decision to leave the university and return home to serve her community.

This is a conversation about resistance through orature.

 Takeaways

*Erna Brodber's background and early life in Jamaica
*The influence of community memory and oral traditions
*Her approach to writing and blending sociology with fiction
*The significance of cultural roots and African heritage
*The concept of black spaces and ancestral gardens
*The impact of colonialism and the metaphor of zombification
*Her work in oral history and community projects
*The importance of reclaiming and preserving history

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Erna Brodber's Work and Impact
02:01 Her Background and Connection to Jamaica
03:20 How Erna Brodber Started Writing
07:36 The Dual Education: Formal and Community Learning
14:33 Her Experience in the US and Return to Jamaica
18:05 Oral History and Community Memory Projects
22:42 From Oral Interviews to Fiction: Louisiana
28:08 The Significance of African Roots and Spiritual Traditions
32:58 Colonial Trauma and the Metaphor of Zombification
40:17 Building Black Spaces and Community Resilience
45:48 The Land as Memory: The Ancestral Gardens
52:21 Reflections on Her Life and Legacy

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Transcript

Adesoji Iginla (00:01.634)
Yes, greetings, greetings, and welcome to another episode of Women in Resistance. I am your host, Addis for G. Egler, and with me as usual is Aya Fobera and Ellie Esquire. Before she goes into character. This we on Women in Resistance, what we do here is showcase women who have helped further the case for black liberation. With

This is about our 75th episode, if I'm not mistaken. So there's a whole body of women who we've touched on. But every other day we come up with another person. And this person is no different from the previous. But who she is, what she's about, we shall find out in the course of today's program. So welcome, welcome, welcome. So today we go to

The hills side of Jamaica, particularly Woodside St. Mary Parish, where the kind of history books sort of just glosses over, but in there there is an Erudite germ. There is a woman who has decided, you know what, she was not going to play small. Because we might be born small, we might grow, but then what we grow into.

We can determine by our own very little actions. And this woman is no little, but I would allow her to tell her own story. So today we're going to sit with Aya Febra, who is going to Faberia Nelly, who is going to embody Anna Brother. Welcome.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:50.382)
Thank you. just to let your people know, your audience know, I'm not dead, I'm alive. And so just to let them know, yes. I know you talk to, and I believe in this. I believe that the spirits of our ancestors.

Adesoji Iginla (02:02.229)
Very much so.

Aya as Erna Brodber (02:19.895)
will in each generation find those receptive to receive and will transfer information that they are now supposed to act on and and every generation will have that spirit transfer as you are open to receive. So I I appreciate the work that you all have been doing, but I am very much alive. Yes.

Adesoji Iginla (02:46.763)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And alive you are. So for those who are just coming in contact with the name Anna Broadbur, because let's be honest, sometimes you hear the name and the name doesn't match the face. How is it that Anna Brobba came out of Jamaica? Could you start there, please?

Aya as Erna Brodber (03:06.765)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (03:17.483)
Well, it it is not really my thing to talk about myself. I've actually

Aya as Erna Brodber (03:33.047)
kept my my life fairly private in that sense. So that, you know, I'm used to talking up talking about the work, the work that we're doing.

So the name Erna itself in different languages means something different, but it is the name that I was given and we will just leave it at that.

Adesoji Iginla (04:02.943)
Okay. Okay. Let's see. Okay, so how did you come into writing? Maybe let's start from there.

Aya as Erna Brodber (04:14.157)
so yes, I've been described as a novelist, a sociologist, a historian by way of my first degree and my PhD, my doctorate.

Adesoji Iginla (04:14.967)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (04:37.783)
But I think even the Academy doesn't know quite what to do with me because my work will not fit neatly into these categories that they've carved out that doesn't make any sense, as though all aspects of our lives don't intertwine. And

Adesoji Iginla (04:53.613)
Yeah, yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (04:58.231)
How I came about writing was actually very honest, you know? And I I say that because I my father was a farmer.

And we lived, I was born in April of 1940 in Woodside. It's a farming village. It's about 10-15 minutes outside of Highgate in the St. Mary Parish. and you know, all of our names show the markings of colonialism. We are on the north side of Jamaica.

Adesoji Iginla (05:35.565)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (05:40.106)
And if you're looking for in the past, it's starting to change a little bit, but if you're looking for woodside on a tourist map or the island, you will not find us. It has no beach, no resort, no attraction that they at the time recognize. But I will tell you about something that we have recently done that I believe is a place where people can come and learn and grow.

And connect. But anyway, Woodside, this is a place where my family has lived for generations. Now, when you think of the name Erna, my father's name was Ernest. And my mother was Lucy. And my father farmed, and my mother taught school. Now, between the two of them, I inherited.

Aya as Erna Brodber (06:40.523)
You put it. It's something that I can't quite put a name properly to, but what I would say is it's a respect for the land and labor, and a respect for learning and language. And I did not grow up believing that those two things are in competition with each other at all.

Adesoji Iginla (07:06.645)
Different.

Aya as Erna Brodber (07:09.513)
In my house, they were the same inheritance. And so one of the greatest influences in my life is my sister Velma. She was a poet and novelist, Velma Pollard, three years older than me. And we grew up in the same house under the same roof, and most likely exchanged books back and forth.

Adesoji Iginla (07:15.117)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (07:37.683)
And given the influence of our mother, but how closely we're also tied to our land, it it it is no accident that we both became people who worked with language.

Adesoji Iginla (07:51.893)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (07:53.686)
Now my sister passed in February of twenty twenty five and I miss her dearly.

Aya as Erna Brodber (08:03.127)
But so much of what I have built, what I have done, was done alongside her, was done in conversation with her for the better part of 80 years, you see. So that is that love of language, that love of learning is something that

Adesoji Iginla (08:12.951)
Okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (08:29.077)
Was part of the foundation in my home. Now, when I went to school as a young girl in in Jamaica, actually, by the time I got to high school, I to go into Kingston. But as soon as my classes were done, I came right back to our village, to our rural area, as they will call it.

Aya as Erna Brodber (08:54.669)
Growing up in Woodside gave me two educations at the same time.

Aya as Erna Brodber (09:02.741)
Of course as a child I did not have that language. There was the formal one school books the colonial curriculum that every Jamaican child of my generation absorbed, and I think that we can probably say all children of African descent, wherever they were, imbibed the

education, the history, the cultural outlook of the ruling class. Mm-hmm.

Adesoji Iginla (09:38.689)
Yeah. Spoke the language of colonialism.

Aya as Erna Brodber (09:41.985)
But what was clear to me even as a child was that that curriculum had almost nothing to say about my kind.

Adesoji Iginla (09:51.989)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (09:52.972)
So I also had this other education. And this is the one that happened on the porch, in kitchens, at wakes, at community cultural events, where the elders talked, where the community's actual memory lived. And that actual memory, and this is this is an assignment for those of you who might want to take it on.

That actual memory is uncatalogued, it is mostly unwritten, and it is passed by mouth for those who are still inclined to hear.

Adesoji Iginla (10:36.983)
Yeah, yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (10:41.421)
So I was getting these two education side by side, and it took me many decades to understand that the second education was the more valuable one, and that most of my life's work would end up being an attempt.

Adesoji Iginla (11:00.045)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (11:09.749)
To translate

That informal education into a form that the first education cannot erase. And so, with my background, I wanted, you know, everybody is not going to read a book. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what your lens is. Some people will start a book, they won't finish it.

But the knowledge still has to be passed on. So on the one hand, yes, I have written many books, because those books will outlive me, and that information is something that the curious can always still access.

But so that informed my writing. And I came into writing as in, you know, publishing books at a a more advanced age. I was forty.

Aya as Erna Brodber (12:17.815)
But the other thing that was impressed upon me is for those who are not going to read the books, who may not have the ability or the interest to

Community memory must still be passed down. So, how do we do that? And so, whether it's my novels, my short stories, and even a play that I've written, the idea is to find ways to pass on that memory, pass on that knowledge.

So when I first went to

Excelsior High School in J in Kingston. I believe it was there that at first, maybe, maybe I maybe earlier, but it was there that I began to understand that there was a a a seed that had been planted that I would now look back and call resistance. Back then, I simply saw it as paying attention.

Noticing even as a girl that this history we were taught in the classroom and the history that lived in Woodside's oral memory.

Adesoji Iginla (13:46.859)
Difference.

Aya as Erna Brodber (13:49.366)
Not the same history. One had footnotes, a curriculum board behind it, the sanction and stamp of the state. The other only had the people who had lived it, and then their children, and then their children's children holding on, we hope.

Aya as Erna Brodber (14:17.459)
Let me pause there because I don't know if you have another question for me.

Adesoji Iginla (14:21.483)
No, so the question would be you got to school and

Adesoji Iginla (14:31.125)
What was the what was the reception to the knowledge you had in you? Because you obviously as a child, you're coming into a formal setting and you're going to be interacting with the curriculum as you put it. Were you curious to put certain things straight to explain what you've heard? Or did you just absorb it like a sponge?

And just kept it moving. What was or what does hm. Hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (15:02.449)
You understand, you must understand the times. I told you I was born in 1940. So you went and you got the education and you passed your exams and you were mindful of how you presented.

Adesoji Iginla (15:16.801)
And you kept.

Aya as Erna Brodber (15:27.723)
Which is one of the reasons I appreciate what you're doing here, because perhaps there are people who would now understand that they don't have to wait for permission to fight back. But from Kingston, I went to the University College at that that the high school at Xcelsior. I went on to the University College of the West Indies.

Adesoji Iginla (15:40.845)
Sure.

Aya as Erna Brodber (15:57.486)
It is now known as the University of the West Indies Mona Campus, which is just outside Kingston. And there I earned my Bachelor of Arts in History in 1963.

Adesoji Iginla (16:12.525)
Okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (16:14.423)
And I want to be precise about this because sometimes people say I'm a sociologist first before history, but my first degree was actually in history. and that that matters to me to make that distinction because that grounding in history shaped how I would eventually write fiction.

Adesoji Iginla (16:28.812)
Why history don't?

Aya as Erna Brodber (16:44.137)
A fiction that some people have filed under magical or spiritual. When what I was actually doing was writing history, just a type of history that refused to leave out the parts that a positivist discipline had trained itself not to see.

Aya as Erna Brodber (17:16.001)
So I encourage your audience to actually pick up one or two of my books and read the books and interact with the stories and the spirit behind the stories.

So after my BA, I went on for postgraduate studies, and I eventually earned a Masters of Science in Sociology in 1968. And then in 1985, you know, a few years later, I earned a PhD in history conferred by the University of the West Indies.

In between those two milestones of my master's and my PhD.

Something happened that I would consider one of the true hinge points of of my life. And it happened actually not in Jamaica, but in the United States. So you see, I received a Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship in nineteen sixty-seven.

in psychiatric anthropology and I went to study in the United States.

Aya as Erna Brodber (18:48.481)
So picture this Jamaican woman arriving in America in the late 1960s. This was the height of the Black Power Movement. It was also the height of the women's liberation movement. Now I had grown up in a village that had its own deep sense of black community and self-reliance and determination.

Adesoji Iginla (19:05.421)
We should move on to the

Aya as Erna Brodber (19:19.351)
But it was coming to the United States where I saw those instincts actually organized and theorized and then shouted from a podium.

Adesoji Iginla (19:33.527)
To do what?

Aya as Erna Brodber (19:38.957)
So I returned to Jamaica wearing an afro.

Adesoji Iginla (19:47.137)
Okay, now we understand.

Aya as Erna Brodber (19:51.337)
And that version of Jamaica simply could not deal with my Afro.

Adesoji Iginla (19:59.95)
Yes.

Aya as Erna Brodber (20:03.517)
It was not funny at all the reception, and I was shocked.

What shocked me wasn't the hairstyle itself. It was what the hairstyle revealed that I had left Jamaica as one kind of Jamaican and come back as another. And that the Jamaica I returned to was not exactly where my thinking, my

Black political consciousness had gone. So some would say I came back radicalized.

But what they will call radicalization, I think is better described as rooted. Rooted again, but rooted differently.

Aya as Erna Brodber (21:08.529)
With this clarity, I understood that the folk culture I had grown up in that I'd grown up with inside of Woodside, those chants, the stories, the healing practices, even the ways we organized grief and celebration.

I was rooted in a newfound understanding that those cultural acts were not backwardness.

Aya as Erna Brodber (21:55.338)
If you really think about it, it was theory, lived theory, it was politics. It just had never been given any respect from the outside world and had not been written down as such.

So some people can come and say, what where is your culture? Where's your philosophy? Where is we have them, they guide us. We just never give it the names that they gave them. You know? So when I came home to Jamaica, I went to work first as a civil servant, then as a teacher.

Adesoji Iginla (22:35.319)
Did yeah, yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (22:48.181)
And then eventually, as a sociology lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies Mona, everybody just called it ICER. And this was the mid-1970s. And this, this is where the two halves of my education, the American radicalization, as they would call it, and the Jamaican rootedness.

Found a shared project. Because at ISER I was invited to begin to do a kind of field work that has defined the rest of my working life, and that is oral history.

Aya as Erna Brodber (23:35.104)
I set out in the mid-1970s to interview elderly Jamaicans, people who could remember in their own words what life had actually been like at the turn of the twentieth century. Yes, several decades removed from emancipation, but still living inside its aftershocks.

Adesoji Iginla (23:54.197)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (24:05.441)
I interviewed 90 elders, and the archives have been a treasure trove for so many.

I asked them about their childhoods, their families, their schooling under the colonial free education system, and how that opened doors to teaching or the ministry, professions that had some prestige, but of course very little pay. I asked them about disconnection.

How many of them or their siblings had been raised not by their own parents, but by other kin, scattered across a family structure that seriously no colonial anthropologist tidy chart could ever quite capture. And you know, one of the things I talk about, I write about, in fact, I have a new book out on this, this issue of

Men and women relationship. It's a it's a some might even say a vexing one in Jamaica.

Aya as Erna Brodber (25:25.349)
One of the elders I interviewed, she was telling me how she ran from away from home to Kingston. But the reason she ran from home is this this thing where

Aya as Erna Brodber (25:44.066)
The Jamaicans take that section of the Bible that says, be fruitful and multiply very seriously. A woman is supposed to bear children, supposed to bear multiple children. You're supposed to have sex. But at the same time, you have to stay pure and not be seen as a someone just out there. And so her mother heard that.

Adesoji Iginla (26:07.054)
yeah, promise cubes.

Aya as Erna Brodber (26:13.063)
She had taken off her hat and was showing her hair and flirting with some boys, and her mother was going to beat her because she thought she's out there having sex. And so she ran from home to Kingston. Got to Kingston, she's learning how to become a laundress, and she then gets pregnant.

Adesoji Iginla (26:41.494)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (26:44.809)
And understand this. They say the one who you carry belly for, the one who cut who baby in your womb. It's it's a very different kind of construct. So that man, the one who get the belly, now wrote to her mother and said, and I'm gonna say it in a way hopefully you all understand.

Adesoji Iginla (27:02.444)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (27:13.931)
She didn't come for to get the belly, I give it to her.

Aya as Erna Brodber (27:26.539)
The idea being

Maybe to absolve t she wasn't promiscuous, but then but then there's also the issue when I talk about this man woman issue where

Adesoji Iginla (27:33.853)
Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (27:44.791)
Mothers and fathers expended a great deal of energy trying to keep their daughters away from men.

Aya as Erna Brodber (27:58.702)
So there's still a conversation that has to be ongoing about this woman man situation. And if you listen to some of the music and the folklore, you hear, the woman just wanna use the man and things, and we have to ask is that as a result of the colonial trauma?

Adesoji Iginla (28:24.909)
Or yeah, or socialization.

Aya as Erna Brodber (28:30.695)
Or are there things we still have to examine and say, is the woman using the man or is the man

Mistreating women, using women as things, we must have these tough conversations. Anyway, let me go back. So she was one of ninety elders that I interviewed.

Aya as Erna Brodber (28:57.901)
Those 90 conversations became the raw material for a report I called Life in Jamaica in the Early Twentieth Century. A presentation of 90 oral accounts.

But they also became a well from which I could draw much more, and so many others have too. Because more than a decade later, I wrote my novel Louisiana. And if you want to trace the pattern of my working life.

You understand that I never treated sociology and fiction as two different jobs. I've treated them as two different instruments for telling the same truth. Sometimes the truth may need a bar chat and some statistics and a methodology section. Sometimes

It needs a woman possessed by another woman's spirit speaking across a re a radio signal from the other side.

Adesoji Iginla (30:24.205)
Well.

Aya as Erna Brodber (30:26.625)
So I've used both instruments often for the very same material because I don't believe that the discipline of sociology or history on its own, or any discipline, as a matter of fact, on its own is equipped to hold everything that the black Jamaican life actually contains.

So just really quickly, some of my books, I published my first novel in nineteen eighty at age forty, called Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home.

Aya as Erna Brodber (31:07.883)
The title comes from a Jamaican ring-game, a children's song that generations of us sang without ever asking, what does it mean? You just sing it. And that was a very deliberate choice on my part. The whole novel works.

With the way memory works for a colonized people. And how does memory work for a colonized people? Through fragments, through nursery rhymes, through half-forgotten games.

Aya as Erna Brodber (31:52.92)
When you examine it, if you're paying attention, you realize that it carries more freight than anyone playing them might realize at the time.

Adesoji Iginla (32:04.333)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (32:06.965)
At the center of that particular book was the kumbla. The kumbla, a kumbla in Jamaican folk tradition is something like a shell or a pot. Like something that is harder and protects you, right?

Adesoji Iginla (32:26.082)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (32:28.045)
So an animal might have a, you know, like a snail or tortoise might have a harder square. But for human beings, and in the metaphor, the way I was using it, that shell might be something you build to protect yourself, to keep you safe in a hostile world.

Adesoji Iginla (32:33.279)
sure. Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (32:52.971)
And that may work and should work for a particular time under certain circumstances. But the kumbla, that shell is not meant to be a permanent home.

Aya as Erna Brodber (33:07.177)
See what I address in the book, in the novel, is that if the shell becomes a permanent home for you, then what at one time protected you now becomes the very thing that imprisons you and prevents you from living.

Adesoji Iginla (33:24.14)
Does okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (33:32.469)
So in that book my my protagonist Nelly had to learn to break out of her own kumbla.

And this trauma, the colonialism, the issues, the racism, that the gender issues, the class issues that still exist can cause someone in survival mode to build a kumbla, but you cannot live there forever without dire consequences.

I also wrote the novel using a fragmented polyvocal structure. So, like voices layering over voices, timelines folding back and forth. Have you ever?

Aya as Erna Brodber (34:29.938)
constructed a mat out of natural fiber.

Adesoji Iginla (34:35.521)
Rafael.

Aya as Erna Brodber (34:36.053)
You see, yes, you see the patterns repeat, and as you're weaving that mat, you go forward and then you fold back on yourself, and then you go forward, and that.

Adesoji Iginla (34:41.035)
Interlock in.

Adesoji Iginla (34:47.692)
Is it?

Aya as Erna Brodber (34:54.061)
kind of going back and forward is what for me feels it feels like to grow up Jamaican and female.

Aya as Erna Brodber (35:07.213)
Cut between the world your grandmother knew and the world you're being told you should want instead. Even while maintaining.

Adesoji Iginla (35:19.561)
A traditional

Aya as Erna Brodber (35:21.911)
Back and forth, patterns repeating themselves. Anyway, the book did not make me famous, but it did get me some respect. And people began to really recognize me as somebody doing something new in the field of Caribbean fiction. A woman who was writing from inside sociology's discipline.

But ensuring that I was not doing that flattening of our instincts, I was willing to let our folk metaphors, our culture, our traditions to carry as much of the analytical weight as any academic turn.

Then I wrote to Mayel. You have to go back and look at that one because there's so much I want to cover you, can't cover with you. But one of the things with Mayel was it's it's the earliest documented Mayalism is the earliest documented Jamaican religion with African roots. You may not have heard of it.

It is actually a spiritual tradition. It's a spiritual and a healing tradition because we did not separate the two. You know, that predates the plantation's official religions and the colonial establishment did everything to stamp it out. Because

Adesoji Iginla (36:53.335)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (37:08.809)
It was a source of black spiritual authority that the plantation could not control.

Adesoji Iginla (37:15.936)
Okay so

Aya as Erna Brodber (37:18.829)
And so in this book, Mayal, there's a community that invokes Mayal. It invokes this specific African-rooted healing tradition to address the psychological harm, the damage that had been done to a young woman named Ella. You must read the book.

I would not go into more detail, but even now what I would say is

Aya as Erna Brodber (37:53.804)
My El Ellie was betrayed. She was a very light-skinned woman. She could have passed for white. And she married a white American husband. And during the course of marriage and engagement and intimacy, she shared some very private stories of her village and her childhood.

Story shared in trust.

Adesoji Iginla (38:24.843)
Hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (38:26.625)
But what he chose to do in the novel was to turn those stories into a blackface minstrel show for public entertainment and for him to make money.

Aya as Erna Brodber (38:43.169)
This betrayal is not incidental to the plot. It is the plot. Because what you see happen there is the theft of culture. Think about it. The theft of the interior life of a people that you don't even know or respect. Dressed up the theft of spirit.

dressed up as artistic interpretation.

Aya as Erna Brodber (39:20.331)
What it is really is spirit theedry.

Aya as Erna Brodber (39:30.709)
And how does one recover from that? And so what I describe using a term that I think is more useful than any clinical label available. Any clinical label that is available, yes, is the term zombie. When you steal a spirit from a person,

But they are still a living, walking human being.

Aya as Erna Brodber (40:09.257)
Is not is that not zombification?

Adesoji Iginla (40:12.757)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (40:15.063)
But what I have repeatedly said in interviews about that book is that for me, the past is never truly dead. Never really dead.

Aya as Erna Brodber (40:31.403)
The zombie in my hands is not the horror. It's not the monster in the Western world.

The zombie in my hands is a powerful trope for the psychological and political afterlife of colonial exploitation.

Aya as Erna Brodber (41:04.235)
Your labor stolen, your story stolen, your name, your culture, your religious practices, your spiritual practices, your very selfhood has been extracted. You have even been bred.

And then repurposed by someone else.

Leaving the shell of a person walking around while the actual self has been taken.

Adesoji Iginla (41:41.527)
Wow.

Aya as Erna Brodber (41:41.613)
You take jazz, you take the you take the dances, you take the yes.

Adesoji Iginla (41:45.792)
Rock and roll.

Aya as Erna Brodber (41:51.734)
I think that that is one of the most honest metaphors I have ever found for what colonialism and its aftermath actually does to people. It's not the chains, not the whips, those are the visible instruments. The deeper injury is the zombification, having your own story stolen from you and sold back to you.

or sold past you to someone else's audience.

Mael won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Caribbean and Canada region in 1989. And it's taught very widely, especially when in courses that deal with Caribbean literature. And I'm glad for that. Because it was never supposed to be a private reckoning, it was meant to be a diagnosis.

And hopefully the beginning of a cure.

Aya as Erna Brodber (43:06.401)
But back to Louisiana, which was published in 1994, could not have done it without those 90 oral interviews that I collected back in the 70s. Because that book follows a black American anthropologist sent to Louisiana in the 1930s to record the oral history of an elderly woman named Louisiana. And what happens instead is

Adesoji Iginla (43:15.421)
Mm-hmm.

Adesoji Iginla (43:28.352)
Okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (43:32.16)
Is that the anthropologist begins receiving transmissions, communications from the dead, from the grave, because nothing is truly dead, connecting her to a Jamaican woman, Mrs. Sue Ann, and then to a wider web of ancestral connection stretching out across the geography, the the whole.

What we call the transatlantic slave trade. Not a single homeland, but a scattered, interconnected diaspora that spans, of course, the American South, the Caribbean, and Africa itself. And we must see these connections.

I have never accepted the framing that treats the African diaspora as a set of separate and disconnected communities. All of us, whether we're Jamaicans, African Americans, Black Britons, West Africans, we are all participants in one continuous, even though scattered, conversation.

Adesoji Iginla (44:34.013)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (44:52.939)
And with Louisiana, I try to give that conversation voice.

Aya as Erna Brodber (45:06.935)
So I was in conversation one time and they said, So you see yourself as a Creole? I said, No. No.

Aya as Erna Brodber (45:18.999)
I see myself as an Africanist. I'm not comfortable with that Caribbean Creole the way it's usually. No, I'm an Africanist. We cannot start our story, our history from the plantation. We can't. You came from somewhere.

Aya as Erna Brodber (45:45.41)
There's a much older story than the one that started at the plantation. And you must go back and reclaim that story. Crossing the waters.

To get that older, longer story together.

Aya as Erna Brodber (46:11.917)
So I would later on publish about thirteen years after Louisiana, I published another book. that was the The Rainmaker's Mistake. This was set in an unnamed plantation following enslaved characters who were grappling with the question of freedom, spiritual power.

And the risks of assuming that liberation, once it comes, comes complete.

Adesoji Iginla (46:48.749)
Okay.

Aya as Erna Brodber (46:52.181)
That book was shortlisted for a major regional literary prize. This might not be the right place to say this, but it's what is coming to mind now. As we continue the work of gathering our stories, what I believe in is.

Whatever work I'm doing, I must give back to my community.

It is not work to just, now I have a position in a in a university or have tenure or those kind of things. And then there's a wall between you and your work and the people that you go to to get information to come and do your writing to get your promotions. No. Whatever work we're doing, just like with these interviews that I did, must be returned to the people.

How do you share that information back with the people?

Aya as Erna Brodber (47:59.638)
In 2012, I published The World is a High Heel. And in 2014, Nothing's Matt, which is a story of a black British teenager who is assigned to write about a West Indian family for a school exam, but then finds out that her family won't quite fit into

these straight lines because we have all kinds of things going on sometimes in our community. Somebody got pregnant, think she got sent somewhere. When she came back, she didn't come with a child, but now your mother, your grandmother is really your mother and your sister was your mother, but you don't know that. Yes.

Adesoji Iginla (48:46.602)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (48:49.812)
Again you have to read it.

Aya as Erna Brodber (48:58.775)
But there's some other work that I want to spend just a few minutes on. My earliest published research from my ICER years includes abandonment of children in Jamaica from 1974, a study of yards in the city of Kingston. And it was close empirical work on family structure and augur poverty.

that gave me material that I would later turn into fiction. But again, it's putting things in a way that maybe more people can receive because they're not going to go and read that published research many people.

And then in 1982, I published Perceptions of Caribbean Women towards a documentation of stereotypes. And this is something we must talk about because if you are a Jamaican man today and you think you are going to your your idea is that every Jamaican woman just wants to marry, get a small house, and have all the children you want, that may or may not work for you.

Because now not every woman has that dream or that desire.

So how are we going to work this issue between men and women?

Aya as Erna Brodber (50:30.797)
So, what I tried to do with that work was to catalog the images the region had constructed of its own women so that we could see clearly the stereotypes, and then hopefully begin the work of dismantling them. And a year later, I wrote Oral Sources and the Creation of a Social History of the Caribbean. And

I use that to make a case that I have spent my life defending, and that is that oral testimony deserves to be treated as legitimate historical evidence, not merely as some color or anecdote, you know, lay it on top of the real archive.

Adesoji Iginla (51:09.718)
Mm-hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (51:24.725)
What I have lived and experienced and speak to should carry the same weight, you see.

And then in 2003, I published The Continent of Black Consciousness on the history of the African diaspora from slavery to the present day. And this was an intellectual history tracing how black political consciousness formed and traveled across the diaspora. And then in 2004.

The second generation of freemen in Jamaica, nineteen seven to nineteen forty-four, and then Woodside Pier Tree Grove P.O., which was a full-length social history of my own home village, written not with an outsider's view, you know, an outside ethnographer's view, but from an insider's act of preservation. I wanted to record.

Adesoji Iginla (52:26.988)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (52:31.787)
The oral memory of my community, because that had shaped everything else I had written.

Aya as Erna Brodber (52:42.547)
So, one of the most instrumental things I have done as I wrap up with you and take any questions you have is actually the creation of two spaces I want to share with you. One is called Black Space.

You see, at a certain point after the university career, after the writer and residence appointments, after so many decades of splitting my time between the demands of academic life and the pools of home, I made the decision.

That has defined the last chapter of my working life. And that is that I will leave full-time university academic work and I will come and work in my home community of Woodside.

And so in the early 2000s, I founded something I call black space. Some of you may not be comfortable with that. You don't know how to be in a black space. A black space is a refuge built, it's a refuge that I built around my own family home for descendants of enslaved Africans.

Adesoji Iginla (53:51.554)
Yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (54:07.745)
Let me say it again. A refuge built around my own family home for descendants of enslaved Africans who are engaged in intellectual, political, and cultural work.

Adesoji Iginla (54:25.301)
Hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (54:26.433)
See the spaces that we live in as a colonized and a formerly colonized people, and those of you in America listening to this as formerly enslaved people, these spaces are fundamentally white spaces. Inherited institutions, inherited assumptions, inherited ways of knowing that were never constructed with us in mind.

Aya as Erna Brodber (55:00.501)
Am I lying? Or is that what you've experienced?

Adesoji Iginla (55:01.825)
No, no, no, no. Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's white centered.

Aya as Erna Brodber (55:09.837)
So, if we want to move outside of that, we have to build something of our own.

And that is black space. Not a metaphor, an actual place on actual land, and it's in the village where I was born.

Black space hosts what I call reasonings. You remember brother Walter.

Aya as Erna Brodber (55:49.003)
The groundings with the brothers.

Adesoji Iginla (55:49.813)
Only in swim up. Yeah. Yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (55:54.978)
These are group discussions in the Jamaican and Pan-Caribbean tradition of communal talk as a method of working through hard history together. And you know, some of the hard history we have to work through.

There's a part of history where we extol the Maroons.

Adesoji Iginla (56:17.037)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (56:19.383)
But there's also another part of that maroonage history where we have to understand and grapple with the fact that to keep their

Freedom.

Some point they agreed to, at least that is what is written in some of the latter treaties, to return any of the other enslaved Africans who had attempted to run away. So you have to look at as a whole, not even just specific to Maroons, the complicity.

Adesoji Iginla (56:35.743)
Yeah to return.

Adesoji Iginla (56:43.767)
Yeah. Runaways.

Adesoji Iginla (56:49.717)
All right, well. Mm. Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (57:03.537)
Our complicity in our own degradation, in our own oppression, these are hard conversations to have.

But we must create black spaces where we can have those conversations, where you are not sharing your intimacies with someone who will now take it and make it into a blackface minstrel show for their own aggrandizement. These have to be safe black spaces.

Aya as Erna Brodber (57:45.492)
So, in our black space, we run a two-week emancipation school each summer for the children between ages of three and fifteen. And we reenact pre-1838 life. And we have open discussions on the African spiritual systems.

That the colonial and post-colonial schooling alike have tried to either erase or make exotic two weeks emancipation school for our children. And local woodside residents participate alongside visiting American students and African collaborators and

Adesoji Iginla (58:15.637)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (58:34.229)
I will tell you, sustaining that partnership has not always been easy, but because even amongst black people who say we want to be liberated, there is a hesitancy to fully commit to a vision that they deem ambitious.

So we wait.

For what? For who to come?

Adesoji Iginla (59:05.463)
Permission.

Aya as Erna Brodber (59:10.835)
As I put it once when asked how I imagine black spaces' future, I said I want somebody to come over and take over this because I am getting older. Take over the concept. In fact, reproduce the concept in reproduce multiple black spaces across the world. But I still want to see young people from across the black world sitting down together.

Adesoji Iginla (59:30.549)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (59:40.352)
Learning about their past and their present so that they can figure out more intelligently, guided by spirit, how to move into the future. The final space is the ancestral gardens. I spent more than fifteen years conceiving and building.

Adesoji Iginla (01:00:00.406)
Hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:00:05.313)
The ancestral gardens. It's a project that was finally opened in

Right before the pandemic, as a matter of fact, March twenty twenty. And it's on the same family land. Where black space is largely about gathering and conversation, the ancestral gardens about the land itself as a form of memory. It's a physical growing space dedicated to honoring.

our enslaved ancestors whose labor made Woodside and every village like it's possible. So every Emancipation Day, the first of August, Woodside gathers to remember.

Adesoji Iginla (01:00:53.399)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:00:59.393)
And then we have we take a visit to the to Daddy Rock. It's a historic meeting place for enslaved Africans. And the night before Emancipation Day, we have a vigil there. And we open with a chant. And then anybody who feels led by the Spirit speaks. So some of you may have seen a documentary called Bury Me Foot Chain. And it was made about these Emancipation Day celebrations, capturing on film.

What I had spent decades trying to capture on the page, a community's determination not to let its own liberation be forgotten, not to let its own liberation be misfiled, be miscategorized, be told by others, or given as the accomplishment of a totally different group of people.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:02:06.709)
Now, people are always curious about my personal life. All that you need to know, I have a loving, extended family, and I have a son named Timothy.

And at 86 years old, I am still living, still working, still very much rooted in the village where my story, at least this physical birth story, began. And whenever this life eventually comes to an end, it will be here in this ground among this family.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:02:50.017)
That my physical remains will lay. Thank you, and I will take any questions that you have.

Adesoji Iginla (01:02:58.583)
Thank you. Thank you. so one question, just one question. you mentioned the idea of people taking up the black spaces. so would you be open to the concept of people take creating virtual black spaces, or does it have to be physical?

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:03:08.277)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:03:20.813)
I think we do whatever we can do as we move we use all of our tools as we move forward in our liberation. So clearly I'm speaking to you, not in person, not physically, and that has allowed many more of us to gather.

Adesoji Iginla (01:03:33.899)
Yeah. Hmm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:03:40.769)
And there's a place for that. But there's also a place for a physical gathering, for a touching, for for not letting a clock determine.

Adesoji Iginla (01:03:59.618)
Yeah, proximity.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:04:01.483)
the and and the conversation and when it has to be cut off and and and even financially who can join in these spaces so if we create enough physical spaces now will some travel yes but then those in though that physical commune can also be part and parcel of this work that involves all of us and that must be done.

We are not having enough conversations. Even within families.

Grandparents don't even talk.

And impart their wisdom because we again have put this agreed with a hierarchy of knowledge. Remember, I talked about how I was now rooted in understanding that my traditions were not backward, but there are still many who are caught up in that kind of thinking.

Adesoji Iginla (01:04:50.037)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:05:09.837)
are the plantings they so some of what we did with the plantings is to honor the Taino, the Arawak people who were there first and to have plants that reflect that time there, that culture.

Then we also have plants that now exist in the Caribbean and Jamaica because the Africans brought them over. And then we also have plants that reflect what the Europeans also brought over. And we

Sent out, you know, a request for some funds for some assistance, and a cement company decided to partner with us, and so we have a concrete, big concrete wall that has all the known names of the enslaved people on the wall.

We also have some benches, you know, concrete benches where so you you don't only have to sit on daddy rock anymore. We now have some benches. But yes, you can come and commune. Maybe it is not a specific nanny tree, but you can commune with the ancestors in the in these ancestral gardens. Yes.

Adesoji Iginla (01:06:28.621)
Yeah.

Adesoji Iginla (01:06:41.111)
Yes. we we thank you, thank you, for the work you continue to do, for the grace and knowledge you continue to pass on. Hopefully this becomes the seedlings of for the black spaces, like you said, because again, I was party to a conversation this week and I was told

Sometimes we have to make our oppressors comfortable or around us, which beggars belief. But then again, once you've been colonized to the point where their presence alone doesn't need to happen, but you would actually police yourself. That is what happens when you have those kinds of interactions. That said,

I'm mind to say we've come to the end of this week's episode of Women in Resistance. Next week, and I'll.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:07:45.294)
Some someone is asking about the documentary. Yeah, this documentary should be available. There's another one from 2023. It's called A View from the Field, The Visions of Erna Broadburn. And it was actually produced by a Nigerian Iforma Wangwa.

And directed by someone from a totally different, we must still, you know, engage and and get the work out. But what it does is it explores my life's work and the political error and you know different things that that I've done. but again, what is important to me is it's not the honors, it's not the accolades, it is how do we

Collect our memories and then remind ourselves of who we are.

Adesoji Iginla (01:08:41.133)
Mm.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:08:49.793)
How do we do that work of going back to understand the richness of our traditions?

and then bring that back to the people so that they better understand and see and can embrace who we are.

and there if on on on on these you you are on YouTube. On YouTube there are many, many interviews, many conversations that I have had with many others. In fact, you can invite me and I will come maybe and speak with you in a different way. Yes.

Adesoji Iginla (01:09:31.863)
Yeah.

Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you for coming through, Miss Robert. And yes to audience, thank you for engaging in the chats. And again, next week it will be because we've just finished another season, so we're going to before the start of the next season, we do what it's a recap of the current season. So that's what we'll be doing next week.

And then after we'll give you another list of people to where we intend to speak to. So that said, next week will be a recap of the previous 12 episodes we've done. And so join us for that. It promises to be engaging because it gives us an opportunity to look back on not just the individuals but also their contributions.

To act as a reminder. Because yes, we spoke about them, but the further we move away from them, the more people tend to or

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:10:42.509)
So so many people will tell you when they meet me, in fact there are books that have come out as a result of this thing that I do, is I'm going to challenge people. So my challenge to your audience is, How many how many women have you done? You said there's seasons?

Adesoji Iginla (01:11:01.131)
The yeah, the seasons and so far we've done seventy f seventy one. And this would be the seventy second.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:11:09.855)
Okay, so here is a conversation that I would like to have with your audience, or you have with your audience. If you've interacted with heard the life stories of 72 women who I suppose you chose because you felt that they made some significant contribution.

Adesoji Iginla (01:11:25.997)
Mm-hmm.

Adesoji Iginla (01:11:34.849)
Contributions, yeah.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:11:37.397)
Besides hearing about their stories,

How has your life changed? What do you do differently?

Have we inspired you or are you really just

Evoking spirits from the other side to come here and you waste their time.

This is a serious question.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:12:13.351)
What? Seventy-two? What how does that impact your life? What is happening differently in how you think or what you do after hearing from seventy-two different black women, African women?

Adesoji Iginla (01:12:15.873)
Yeah. Seventy two women.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:12:42.829)
who have been working in various capacities for our liberation. I hope to hear what the answers to those questions are.

Adesoji Iginla (01:12:57.791)
Okay. So that said, you've got in your homework. So next week, bring your answers. And so any final thoughts? I mean you've just given us a homework, but you might want to add up to that.

Aya as Erna Brodber (01:13:16.565)
I am all talked out. I am an eighty-six-year-old woman.

Adesoji Iginla (01:13:21.587)
Okay, so from me it's good night and God bless and see you next week.