Margaret Cezair-Thompson is a Jamaican writer, author of novels The True History of Paradise and The Pirate's Daughter, short stories, articles, and a screenplay about a female Jamaican athlete, Photo Finish, purchased by Oprah Winfrey (Harpo-Disney). Cezair-Thompson is a professor of literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Early life and education
Margaret Cezair-Thompson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where she attended Saint Andrew's High School for Girls. As the daughter of Dudley J. Thompson, noted Jamaican QC, who served as Jamaican Justice Minister and then as a diplomat, Cezair-Thompson recognizes her father's influence in her work: "My father's life has spanned almost a century of Caribbean and African history and being a lover both of history and storytelling and having a father who had so many first-hand stories of great events and people influenced me enormously." He met her mother in Manchester, England, where Cezair-Thompson's maternal grandfather, Dr. Hubert Cezair, was a West Indian doctor.
Cezair-Thompson left Jamaica to study English literature at Barnard College (where she was mentored by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin) and Columbia University. She then went on to complete her PhD at Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she wrote her dissertation on V. S. Naipaul with the help of legendary critic Alfred Kazin. Although she has lived outside Jamaica for many years, Cezair-Thompson retains strong ties to her native country. Like many characters in her novels, she was a child when Jamaica became an independent nation in 1962, and she has witnessed the country's changes. She currently lives in Massachusetts where she continues to work and write.
Literary style
Her work has been compared to that of William Faulkner, George Lamming and Jamaica Kincaid. Among the themes in her work is the individual quest for place and identity within the tumult of history. She is not only interested in Jamaica's history but how Jamaica's history connects to history at large: "Growing up as a child in Jamaica, it never seemed as though my history was in any way connected to the great moments in European history except when it came to talking about slavery, but now I'm seeing all the ways in which [formerly marginalized] areas were very much players in world events and bigger history." She feels part of a growing tradition of post-colonial writers "very much claiming back their part in a bigger history." Many critics also praise Cezair-Thompson's ability to evoke the "genuine essence of Jamaica" in her descriptions of the Jamaican landscape, flora and culture.
The writers (and books) of special interest to Cezair-Thompson include Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, Paule Marshall, Ben Okri, Jean Rhys, William Shakespeare, James Joyce (Dubliners), William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair), Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), William Butler Yeats, Derek Walcott, and Wallace Stevens.
Publications and awards
The True History of Paradise, Cezair-Thompson's first novel, follows Jean Landing on a drive across the mountains as she attempts to flee Jamaica for the United States. During the ride, she recalls memories of her own fractured past as she notes the increasingly violent confrontations between political factions of her island nation: "Ghosts stand on the foothills of this journey. She smells their woody ancestral breath in the land's familiar crests and undulations. She has heard them all her life, these obstinate spirits, desperate to speak, to revise the broken grammar of their exits. They speak to her, Jean Landing, born in that audient hour before daylight broke on the nation, born into the knowledge of nation and prenation, the old noises of barracks, slave quarters, and steerage mingling in her ears with the newest sounds of self-rule. On verandas, in kitchens, in the old talk, in her waking reveries and anxious dreams, she has heard their stories." The True History of Paradise was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2000.