Ishion Hutchinson recalls a eureka moment in a library

The name of the town that I grew up in is Port Antonio, and it’s in the northeastern section of Jamaica. Very beautiful sort of ramshackled town that sort of began with pirates settling there, that was in the 16th century. And then when it became sort of a colonial hub two centuries later, you had Maroons living in the mountains, in free villages, and the planter class living on the coast. So, I grew up sort of in between those places, the coast and the mountains. So, my relationship to the sea and the mountain is very strong and shows up in my writing. When I was a student there attending a high school, a school called Titchfield, my daily routine after school would be to go to the library, which is behind an old market called Lady Musgrave Market. The library was attached to the old market at the very back where the harbor begins and sort of the water comes splashing on the walls of the library. So, I used to go there mostly for the scenery and the quiet of it after a long day at school. And then finally would enter into the library and browse at random, find a book and take it home. One day when I entered the library near closing time, I went to a shelf I had not noticed before, for some reason, even though this was a place I frequented and thought I knew in and out. And I went over to this shelf and on top of it there was the label, which to me now it’s a kind of a legend, West Indian Literature. Something, even though I’m a Caribbean person born in the West Indies in Jamaica, I’d never thought of West Indian literature and it wasn’t a subject that was brought up in school. Never this sort of dignified term, literature. And so, I was struck by just the label itself, and I ran my hand down the shelf of books, feeling their spines and landed on one book and pulled it out. And in my hand was a book with the name of an author, whom I’d never heard before, and his name was Derek Walcott, and it was a selected volume of his poetry. And I opened the book at random to a poem called “The Gulf.” And that was my introduction to the possibilities of seeing the landscape that I grew up in, and I knew very well, I knew it instinctively. And for the first time I encountered it on a page. And the lines of the poem, I’ll never forget, and the opening line goes, “The foothills of blue.. where the canes blow” There was such an emotional rush for me reading those words that I began to weep, right there, while standing in front of the shelf. And didn’t hear when the librarian was shouting, “closing time, closing time,” and when I finally got back to the world, sort of consciously realizing what was happening, felt already changed within myself, that destiny had put her hands on my shoulder and now I have a purpose. It was to make words with such immediacy as the ones that I just read.