By: Staff Writer
April 12, 2022
A labour of love helped turned tragedy into triumph for this educator/author in the past as she comes back with another offering to help reach young people to stop tragedy in its tracks.
Juanita Coleman-Merritt, programme director of the Caribbean Literary Conference (CARICON), told Caribbean Magazine Plus that while she is not presenting any finished work at this year’s CARICON, she will be giving attendees a preview of her upcoming book “Lessons from Starfish.”
The story is, you guessed it, about starfish, but also a lot more. It’s a “very famous story” she said and it goes way back to the 1970s. “So a lot of people in the field of education know the story and it has to do with this kid as he’s out on a beach, picking up starfish and he’s throwing the back into the sea.
“A lot of times, a lot of these starfish will wash up on the sea and they can’t get back into the water, so they die. So this boy is there on the beach and he’s doing his thing and a man walks by and says, ‘What are you doing?’ And the boy says, ‘I’m trying to help the starfish, I’m throwing them back into the sea.’ Then the man looks and he goes, ‘it’s thousands of starfish out here, it really isn’t going to help.’ And the boy goes and he picks up another starfish and throws it back in and says, ‘see, it helped that one.’ So that’s a little story,” Juanita said.
She also said the story that was relayed to her in Lessons of the Starfish helped her as a teacher and it “stuck with her” over the years. “Every year, I’m going to focus on certain kids that seem like they’re really struggling and I knew most of my kids were going to get the story’s meaning. I was a good teacher, and I knew that they would, but I said, I’m going to really see if I can help a kid who is really not going to make it if I don’t make an extra effort. So that’s the reason I wrote this, Lessons from Starfish, because I figured those are the kids that helps us to be better teachers. If you really dig into them then you learn more about being a teacher.” she added.
Wanting to inspire teachers to become better at their job is a lifelong passion for Juanita, because it is important to her that no child is left behind and that educators take the responsibility to reach every single student in their care.
In addition to being an author and an educator, Juanita is also a book editor and publisher, with her having edited and published her late brother’s, Damon Chandler, book of poetry that she presented at last year’s CARICON, “Drink from my cup: Musings from an East Harlem Poet.”
Juanita, who is part Jamaican and part Cuban, but grew up in New York along with her brother, said that the book of poetry is a compilation of poems written by him between 1967 and 2003 and from a perspective of an immigrant man who joined the U.S. Army to fight in the Vietnam War. “He saw a lot of action being a soldier for his country and at the same time seeing the kind of racism and discrimination and the life that a lot of people of colour experienced in this country,” she noted.
She also said: “I call him a folk poet because his poems are very down to earth. A lot of it rhymes, which a lot of poetry nowadays doesn’t rhyme, but it is written in rhyme and it has an every day man on the street and life situations kind of vibe to it.”
Damon, who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome due to the effects of the Vietnam War, upon his passing in 2003 left an entire manuscript of his poems where Juanita found them and decided to publish them as an edited work as a “labour of love” for him. “He was a mechanic in the marines and was shot down in the jungles of Vietnam and they could not find him for a while, but fortunately they did find him and his company,” she said.
She added: “When he was writing the poems down he decided to kind of put them together, compile them, and create an anthology out of them. He would come to my house and sit there, he didn’t type very well. So he’d be sitting there trying to type them up. When he finally did it after about a year and he finally got the whole thing together.”
Turning tragedy into triumph with Come Drink From My Cup, Juanita also told us about Damon overcoming alcoholism after entering into Alcoholics Anonymous and finding the courage to get back into stage work, which she says really was his calling more than writing poetry because “he really was a performer at heart.”