THE POEM ‘Guinea Woman’ (p.30) was born out of a strong need to honour my maternal great grandmother who would have been a small child when slavery was abolished in 1838.

All I knew of her when I wrote the poem was that she was very dark-skinned, and that people called her a Guinea woman because of the small warts across the top of her cheeks. I also knew that she had had my mother’s mother with an Irish man, and that later in her life she married a man of African descent. That was almost all I knew about her then. Most of the poem is therefore my imagining.

There were no family photographs of her. There were no archives to visit, no ancestry dot.com that kept records of the lives of people like my great grandmother, and so I learnt early in my life as a writer that if I wanted to write about my people I had to learn to listen carefully to family stories then imagine, and constantly reimagine those stories. And that is because, in the Caribbean, the centre will not, does not, and looks like it might not ever, hold. A Caribbean writer therefore has to take what is available even if much has been lost, and give it a presence, a reality through their imagination.

All writers do this, but Caribbean writers face formidable or particular challenges because of the ways in which slavery, and then colonialism, erased or distorted so much of our lives that we have had to learn to write ourselves into the story in any way we can.

The feeling of being lost is still very much part of all our experience and I never thought I’d live to say this, but it’s not all bad, and it has a history that goes back well before our modern times.

The word ‘disoriented’, which we often use to describe how we feel when we’re not sure where we are, was first coined centuries ago to describe the experience of venturing far from a centre of certainties.

For medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic sailors who went out from the Mediterranean onto the Atlantic Ocean, that centre was in the east, the Orient, where they all identified their spiritual and their secular home. If they ventured too far into the western sea – which they often did – it was said that they would become ‘dis-oriented’, alienated from their home.

Being disoriented has negative connotations for many of us, and especially for those in the Caribbean who feel far from their ancestral home in Africa or India; but on the positive side it is nothing more – or less – than not being sure about things and being surprised by new things, and that is what Caribbean literature has often taken as its mandate, making a virtue out of necessity.

I lost all the books I collected for over thirty years, most of the paintings I’d done, and many photographs and cherished objects, to Hurricane Gilbert. I have had to learn to re-imagine my relationship with lost things.

And other forces come into play. The primary school that I attended, the very good school where I was made to memorise dozens of poems, mostly by the British Romantic poets, a school that helped to nourish my earliest interest in poetry, was one day bulldozed to the ground. I have never been able to figure out why.

I periodically reimagine my lost paintings. I reimagine my old school. My father died when I was fifteen, I often imagine what life for my family would have been like had he lived.

My memoir From Harvey River was born out of a need to preserve a time and a place that is all but gone, because the small village founded by my paternal great grandfather looks nothing like it did in my mother’s time, the family home no longer exists, and climate change has altered the flow of the river. I had to imagine it in all its original bucolic charm in order to write that memoir.

And I do this because as a Caribbean writer it is my job to imagine and keep reimagining the past and the future into being, so that the best of what was lost might exist again in the future.