By: Staff writer
January 26, 2021
A renowned Jamaican author and orator dishes the details on his latest work and what inspired him to produce it.
Kwame MA McPherson, spoke to Caribbean Magazine Plus about his latest book and what has kept him inspired over the years. He said: “My latest book is called My Date with Depression and it is around my experience of being in that space, or being at a time when I was focused on my journey. It’s a story that I’ve shared with a lot of people and a lot of men in particular, as we are challenged with talking about how we feel and our emotions and our stresses.”
Kwame said he had to delve deep into his psyche, going back to his upbringing in a Caribbean home between the United Kingdom and Jamaica and having to come to grips with the trauma he experienced as a child. “What I found out about myself was one of the things that I used to do, which was not being open, and I have traced it back to a number of sources or origins,” said Kwame.
He added: “One of the origins I realized was in my past, when I was a child and from childhood trauma, which I didn’t realize, until I was going through my adulthood, and interactions with the opposite sex.”
Kwame said that it was only then that he realised that he had been shutting down when his emotions got too high for him and started to turn people away, instead of confronting people or “challenging them” when something he didn’t like was done to him.
He also spoke about the dramatic effect his late father had on his manhood where he said, “Another aspect of my journey back to when my father and my mother, had a violent episode in terms of the trauma around that come I thought it was pretty funny to my mother. So she then split apart and ended up in Jamaica and that trauma I had carried for a while and I didn’t realize. It was only through my interactions with the opposite sex that I was able to reflect back to understand what had happened when I was younger, and why I did the things I did when I was in my relationships with significant others.”
All of these childhood misfortunes have only fuelled Kwame to produce a brilliantly written and well received piece of work on depression in black men, something he described as being “well received” in many quarters in Jamaica, from various men’s groups to the defence forces in Jamaica.
Kwame has also written several other books that have been featured on the University of the West Indies. He is also won the bursary award for the Kit de Waal Bursary for Flash Fiction with The Bridport Prize: International Creative Writing Competition, which is one of the largest and most prestigious prizes in the English speaking world with prizes up to $10,000 for short poems or essays.
Kwame is not stopping there at all. In fact, even though he currently resides in London, England he is planning a return to Jamaica as he said the entire Caribbean is now experiencing a “renaissance,” and wants to be a part of that development.
He said the same renaissance is happening in Africa right now as he told us about his trip to Ghana several years ago and how it awakened his spirit.
He said his trip to Africa was something that one just can’t just tell anybody about, as they have to “experience it for themselves.” He added: “It was a real awakening for me, like when people talk about being baptised and having a rebirth. That is exactly what happened to me when I went back to the Motherland for the first time.”
Kwame’s interesting life ride is certainly inspiring and one can only wait with baited breath on his next inspired work will be.