Ameena Gafoor Institute (AGI): Red Hibiscus was published when you were only 24. When did you start writing?

Scott Ting-A-Kee (STAK): I didn’t particularly like literature at first. In secondary school, I only wrote when I was forced to write. At that age, I did not like reading novels, which I found to be superfluous and a waste of time. I was a science student, so I used to spend all my time reading science textbooks, and the only novels I read were the novels on the curriculum for the English literature exam. But in Guyana, you’re taught to write short stories every year to build up for the CSEC exams you take when you’re sixteen. As I started writing more short stories for exam practice, I started writing for fun too. That is how it started.

The first time I enjoyed reading a book that I chose myself was after I finished CSEC exams. That summer, I really started getting into writing. By that time, I was writing poetry as well, but I didn’t really know where to go with it. I had a friend who was reading Victorian Literature. She was my age, and she was like ‘these books are classics’. So I went to the National Library, and I read the entire classics section. Wuthering Heights was my favourite. At the time, I didn’t know what the gothic was, but I think that since I was a child the gothic has always appealed to me. I was fascinated.

That summer, I bought my first Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I bought it after I had enjoyed Shakespeare at school, and I just fell in love with it. I used to treat Shakespeare as a comfort read. Every night before bed, I read a little bit from a play and a couple of sonnets – that was bedtime stories for me. I read most of the Complete Works during that summer.

AGI: How did you get from reading Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare to writing Red Hibiscus?

STAK: It started during my third year of university, when we were all forced to do West Indian literature. The summer before, I had decided to become a pure English Literature major, instead of pursuing a Literature and Linguistics degree. At the time, I only considered British literature to be real literature. When we had to do West Indian literature, I hated it. I told the lecturer that I only liked British literature, and she was like “White people literature? You like the coloniser’s literature more than the Caribbean novel?” I said, “Well, West Indian literature ain about people like me.” I’m Guyanese, but I’m not Guyanese enough to be seen as being Guyanese, because I’m not Black, I’m not Indian, I’m not Amerindian. The Chinese don’t really feature in anything of importance within Guyanese culture or history. That was my mentality at the time.

It was only when I was reading Wide Sargasso Sea [by Jean Rhys] for the West Indian literature course that I realised I had an identity crisis. I told the lecturer, “I hate West Indian literature, but I’m liking this Wide Sargasso Sea”. In response, she gave me a book to borrow, and two chapters to read from it. One of the chapters gave a short biography of Jean Rhys. There was this one particular paragraph I still remember. It said that Jean Rhys was a child who would pray to god that she would be Black, so that she could fit in with her peers in Dominica. I was shocked, because I thought I was the only person would have ever done that. At nursery school, I used to feel so out of place, because I was the only person that looked like me. And whenever Guyana would have elections, the racial tensions would be so much. My mother is Portuguese, so she’s fair skinned, but my other siblings are part Afro-Guyanese, not part Chinese. And I can remember, I think I was in primary school at the time, when we had elections and it was my brother and my sister who had to go out to buy certain things, because my mother didn’t think it was completely safe for us to be moving around. So I used to do that exact same prayer.

This lecturer – her name is Ramona Bennett – noticed I was enthused by Wide Sargasso Sea. She lent me the Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and I would sit in her office and read the chapters on white creole literature between classes. That was part of where the fascination started for me, because I could see that the experiences of a minority can be a part of the vast sea of Caribbean literature.

AGI: Where did the historical element of Red Hibiscus come into all of this?

STAK: The same year at university, I was introduced to postcolonial studies for the first time. We studied Monkey Hunting, by Cristina García, which is a Cuban Chinese text. It was Mark Tumbridge taking the course, and his speciality is indentureship. When he introduced us to that historical context, I started doing my own research, and stumbled on A Documented History of the Chinese in the West Indies by Dr Walton Look Lai. That’s when I was like, “oh my god, Chinese Guyanese history is a thing”. Then I stumbled on Cecil Clementi’s text, A Report on the Chinese in British Guiana. I read that too, and then I just kept going. 

Another source of inspiration was anime and manga. I was obsessed with anime and manga in my university years. That was my coping mechanism. Every morning I would get up really early and watch one episode of anime, and that would be my dose to keep me going for the rest of the day. I would always go for isekai or fantasy, and from there I got really interested in Chinese mythology. In one book I came across, it spoke about the Shang dynasty as the earliest period of Chinese literature. It said that the first pieces of Chinese literature date back to the turtle shells and bones where they transcribed the predictions of the Oracle. That was something I found really interesting, and it found its way into Red Hibiscus. 

So I was doing all this historical research. But at the same time, I had reached a point where I stopped reading for pleasure, because there were no books that were really dealing with the things that I wanted to deal with. So I said to myself, I’ll just write something to read, for me. I had this idea of a story with three characters, based on a prophecy and seeing the future. It was going to be called ‘Composition of Six Eyes’. And that became Red Hibiscus.

AGI: In the Author’s Note to Red Hibiscus, you describe your work as a “literary experimentation with myth creation”. The main narrative action of the novel takes place in 1420 A.D., featuring mythical characters and events, but narrated with a strict stylistic realism. You then interrupt this with fragmented images of sugar plantations and indentured labour from nineteenth-century colonial history, narrated in an imagistic, almost mythical manner. How did you come to straddle these two approaches to the past?

STAK: I think myth has always been part of me. The whole thing with creatures and gods and monsters is something I’ve always been fascinated by. Sometimes when I’m bored, I just dive into a different myth, like Indian mythology or Portuguese mythology or Brazilian mythology. But history was something different. My fascination with history was only really planted when I read Derek Walcott’s essay, ‘The Muse of History’. Reading that essay made me completely rethink Caribbean literature, and why people from the former empire write back. By the time I was writing Red Hibiscus, I knew I wanted to explore Chinese indentureship, because I was doing so much research on it already as a way of rediscovering myself. But I did not want to be like other writers, who go a little bit too academic in their stories, where the facts take over and the imaginative element of the text suffers. The stories I like are the ones where the creative imagination is evident. I didn’t want to be in a place where the facts and the academia and the research dim the creative language within the story. At the end of the day, it all goes back to Wilson Harris. Because in Palace of the Peacock, Harris engaged with history, but he did not reflect history – he revisioned it. I was working with this same idea: I am revisioning history, not writing an imaginative retelling of it.

AGI: What are you working on now?

STAK: Recently, I was doing research for a play by GEMS Theatre Productions, From Whence We Came, about the history of the Chinese in British Guiana. The producer wanted someone to do the historical research and approached me for the work, together with one of the workers at the National Archives. It’s something I’ve been interested in for a very long time, and it has seeped into my poetry. But with the play, they needed a full, comprehensive history. I got to look into the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, Guangdong and Fujian, and the tribal tensions between the Hakka and the Puntis, as well as all three phases of Chinese indentureship in British Guiana. Some of it I didn’t know before. I didn’t know we used to have a Chinatown in Georgetown. That really shook me. The whole thing burned down, and the interesting thing is that they had no concern about rebuilding the community. Instead, they saw an opportunity to disseminate to other parts of Georgetown and the country. I also came across the Chinese Sports Club. The Chinese were not allowed to join the other sports clubs in British Guiana, so they made their own sports club called Cosmos. They only opened it to non-Chinese members in the 1950s or 1960s, when their membership started dwindling because of emigration. Now it’s a motor racing club. After this work, I’m thinking about venturing into history, and trying to publish a historical book. I hope I can follow through with it.