Prospero's Daughter (33 page)
MORE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sister Marie Thérèse Rétout, O.P. spent a morning with me at my parents’ home in Trinidad, sharing her handwritten notes about the experiences of the Dominican nuns in Chacachacare. Her book
Called to
Serve: A History of the Dominican Sisters in Trinidad and Tobago
(Trinidad: Paria Publishing Company, 1998) was indispensable for many of the details about Chacachacare in this novel, and so, too, the book
Western
Isles of Trinidad
(Trinidad: Litho Press, 2000) written by Father Anthony de Verteuil, C.S. Sp. I am also indebted to David Tindall, who gave me my first guided tour of Chacachacare, and to Raymond Habib, who took me on his magnificent launch, along with his beautiful daughter Natalie and handsome young son Matthew, to see the lighthouse on Chacachacare. My thanks to Superintendent Mark Fisher for permitting navigational officers Otis Tippin and Christopher George to open the lighthouse for me. I am grateful for the invaluable information they gave me. Thanks, too, to Rawle Birmingham, who drove us up that winding road to the lighthouse.
Kevin Browne, one of my past students at Medgar Evers College, is the true author of the two poems in the novel. I owe the spelling of folklore characters and the fruits, flora, and fauna of Trinidad to John Mendes’s remarkable compilation in
Cote ci Cote la
(Trinidad: Mendes, 1986). I am grateful for the support and leadership of Edison O. Jack-son, the president of my college, Medgar Evers College, who generously gave me invaluable time to write. My gratitude in particular to my friends Pat Ramdeen-Anderson and Anne-Marie Stewart for their critical eye; to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my first editor, who asked the right questions; to Melody Guy, who guided me to the final draft; to my sister Mary Nunez for her loyalty and friendship; and to my agent, Ivy Fischer Stone of the Fifi Oscard Agency, for her continued support. This acknowledgment comes late, but I am forever grateful to the master poet Walter James Miller, who was my first mentor.
As always, my life would be bleak without my son, Jason Harrell.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I had finished this novel when I finally read Stephen Greenblatt’s absorbing book
Will in the World
(Norton, 2004), which links Shakespeare’s life to his work. Naturally, I was anxious to read his comments about
The Tempest.
As other critics have done, Greenblatt sees Prospero as a stand-in for the playwright. Thus, confounded by Prospero’s appeal for forgiveness (to Greenblatt, Prospero’s “guilt does not make entire sense”), Greenblatt asks, “Why, if he [Shakespeare] is implicated in the figure of his magician hero, might he feel compelled to plead for indulgence, as if he were asking to be pardoned for a crime he had committed? The whiff of criminality is just a fantasy, of course, but is a peculiar fantasy, of a piece with the hint of necromancy” (376–377). At the end of the book, Greenblatt makes the alarming observation: “The woman who most intensely appealed to Shakespeare in his life was twenty years younger than he: his daughter Susanna. It cannot be an accident that three of his last plays—
Pericles, The Winter’s Tale,
and
The Tempest
—are centered on the father-daughter relationship and are so deeply anxious about incestuous desires” (389–390).
What difference it would have made had I read Greenblatt’s book while I was writing this novel, I cannot tell.
ELIZABETH NUNEZ is the author of Grace, Discretion (short-listed for the 2003 Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Fiction),
Beyond the
Limbo Silence, Bruised Hibiscus
(winner of an American Book Award), and
When Rocks Dance.
She was born in Trinidad and immigrated to the United States after secondary school. Nunez is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Medgar Evers College. She co-founded the National Black Writers Conference, is executive producer of the acclaimed television series
Black Writers in America
(nominated for a 2004 New York Emmy), and now chairs the PEN American Center Open Book committee. Named Author of the Year by the Go On Girl! Book Club for 2002, Nunez is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including fellowships at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies and the Paden Institute, the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, and the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Black Business. She lives in Amityville, New York. Visit the author’s website at
www.elizabethnunez.com
.
ALSO BY ELIZABETH NUNEZ
Grace
Beyond the Limbo Silence
Bruised Hibiscus
Discretion
When Rocks Dance
Prospero’s Daughter
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2006 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Nunez
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nunez, Elizabeth.
Prospero’s daughter : a novel / by Elizabeth Nunez.
p. cm.
1. Human experimentation in medicine—
Fiction. 2. Conflict of generations— Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Caribbean Area—Fiction.
5. Scientists—Fiction. 6. Islands—Fiction. 7. Exiles—Fiction I. Title.
PS3564.U48P76 2006
813’.54—dc22 2005051260
eISBN: 978-0-307-41644-5
v3.0
