BOOKS: THE PAST, ANOTHER COUNTRY

Fred D'Aguiar, poet and novelist, pulls no punches in his writing about the horrors of slavery and its dark legacy

"ONE, TWO, three, four," says Fred D'Aguiar into the microphone. "Had breakfast. Am happy. Life is sweet."

Such buoyancy seems justified: having just returned from the States after a spell as creative writing fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts and at Bates College in Maine, he is in England to promote his prize- winning novel The Longest Memory, now published in paperback. He has just finished a stint as Writer in Residence for the Greenwich Festival, and is currently working on a community writing project on the Terrier Estate in South East London before returning to the States to take up a teaching post in Miami.

Does he find it difficult to balance the demands of teaching creative writing with those of his own work? His reply summarises the different attitudes of England and America towards the profession of writing. Here, one has little choice but to treat it as a sideline; there, it is regarded as a branch of academic life. "When I lived in the UK I was hustling as a poet for years, doing residencies and so on. In the States, I have teaching time, two or three days a week. The rest of the time I spend playing with ideas. It's thinking time. Writing time. Economically, I can't do that here."

D'Aguiar established his reputation with two collections of poetry, Mama Dot (1985) and Airy Hall (1989), both of which are set in Guyana where he grew up, and combine fragments of childhood memory, Caribbean folklore and vernacular speech with a sharp awareness of political realities. "I suppose what I was trying to do in those first two books was describe what it was like to be a post-colonial child. So even though it was me looking back, it wasn't nostalgia - or if it was nostalgia, it was nostalgia with teeth. If it was sentimental, it was because it was trying to get someone to feel, rather than forget their experience."

"Feeling" rather than "forgetting" is also central to D'Aguiar's novel, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Award last year. Set in Virginia in 1810, it opens with the spare and moving first- person narrative of an elderly slave called Whitechapel, which concludes with the heart-stopping words, "I forget as hard as I can." Whitechapel's reasons for wanting to forget the past, and the impossibility of his ever doing so, make up the texture of the novel, which offers a series of different perspectives on slavery.

Whitechapel the slave's is one point of view; another comes from the owner whose name he bears - no unfeeling monster, but a liberal with a conscience. Far from weakening the horror of the book, this has the effect of intensifying it. "To present him as a stereotype would have been too easy," D'Aguiar observes. "I wanted to show how people who thought of themselves as decent, who were churchgoers and parents, and who did charitable work, could still be capable of these things..."

It is a short book - fewer than 150 pages - but it conveys a powerful sense of what living in a slave-owning society was like, and of the moral compromises which allowed such a system to flourish. What first prompted him to write about slavery? "My very first poem, 'Solomon Grundy' which was published in 1985, dealt with the theme. When I started thinking about this book I went back and thought, 'I've had a long interest in an experience - a post-colonial experience - which goes back to slavery and has its roots in that original journey. I knew I had to do something with it."

Several different things determined what form the book would take. The first was seeing a photograph of an old man, a former slave, who was 103 when the picture was taken in 1963 - "the year of Kennedy's assassination ... Martin Luther King hadn't died yet; it fascinated me, to think about what that old man must have seen. I began by asking him a few questions." Added to this was D'Aguiar's own arrival in the United States in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. "America was licking its wounds, trying to come to terms with what had happened. It occurred to me that the book might be a way of talking about contemporary issues in terms of a past event. Faulkner says 'the past is never past'; he's absolutely right."

His reading of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer prize-winning novel about slavery, Beloved, was a further inspiration: "that book opened a whole lot of doors for me... it showed me the kind of things that were possible..." Other writers whose work he has found enriching include the poet Derek Walcott and the novelist Wilson Harris - "a wonderful writer" - whose work, like his own early poetry, has a Guyanese setting. "And of course Robert Browning," he adds. "I love Browning. The way he uses the dramatic monologue form to convey the character's inner life. I suppose you could say it's what I'm trying to do in the novel..."

D'Aguiar is not one of those who believes that the novel has outlived its usefulness. "I don't feel that, in writing fiction, I'm taking part in something which is dying or dead ... although it might occasionally be in need of rejuvenation. Ways of telling can become formulas." He warms to this theme. "I think perhaps the novel needs to open up a bit more. Writers need to be less complacent, because readers are more knowing. We've got a situation where there's an intelligent readership striking back, saying 'what else can you show us?' "

So what does he see as the alternative to the linear narrative, for our society? "My own preference is for a story which is kaleidoscopic, with a number of different voices rather than one character speaking for the entire novel. I suppose it may be a post-colonial viewpoint, because it seems to me that an experience like slavery resulted in a tremendous upheaval for the society as well as an actual, physical upheaval for the people caught up in it, and that leads to a broken narrative - because the past itself is broken. A writer like Rushdie gives us this kind of deracinated narrative, to reflect a past that isn't continuous, and which is full of contradictions. A novel has to have this quality of breakage about it. And yet, at the same time, it has to offer the possibility of repair..."

The next book will be a sequence of poems about the Jonestown massacre - a subject which, because of its Guyanese context, has intrigued him for years. There's also a novel in the pipeline - more than that he's reluctant to say. Writers - even those as outgoing as D'Aguiar - are wary when it comes to discussing work in progress. We chat for a few more minutes, and then Debbie, D'Aguiar's American girlfriend, puts her head around the door. They're going flat-hunting, to find somewhere to stay for the next two months of D'Aguiar's residency at Greenwich. He shakes my hand and gives me a warm smile. "It was great to meet you," he says. It makes me feel quite envious of his creative writing students.

8 'The Longest Memory' is published by Vintage at pounds 5.99. His latest collection of poetry, 'British Subjects', appeared in 1993.