Laura Fish

What sparked Strange Music?
STRANGE MUSIC was sparked by my first trip to Jamaica and my visit to Greenwood Great House, a former home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's family near Montego Bay, Jamaica, where my father now lives. The three main characters were inspired by two poems: 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself, and Easton Lee's 'Strategy'. Elizabeth wrote 'The Runaway Slave' for American abolitionists during her honeymoon with Robert Browning. The Barretts were the largest plantation owners in Jamaica and the poem expresses Elizabeth's hatred of slavery and the plantation system from
which her family wealth was derived. The book's title, Strange Music, is taken from the first letter Robert Browning sent to Elizabeth, dated January 10, 1845.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
Confined to her bed in Torquay, Elizabeth Barrett is at the climax of her illness and obsessed with the sea and night and death. It is November, 1838. Fierce off-shore winds blow themselves into a fury and Elizabeth is caught in a triangular conflict from the forces of her father, invalidity, and opium addiction.

Cinnamon Hill Great House on Jamaica's north coast overlooks a bay of warm golden sand. Crimson flowers climb the white stone walls. The Caribbean Sea sparkles turquoise-blue with silver stars in the sunshine. Kaydia, a domestic maid, has conceived a child from Elizabeth's brother Sam in an attempt to obtain power and security from him, and attract him away from
Mary Ann, Kaydia's young daughter with whom Sam has had a sexual relationship since Mary Ann was nine years old.

Sheba who works in the sugar fields is struggling to escape a violent history. Her narrative expresses the intensity of the particular atmosphere of deep uncertainty in which many Jamaican women lived after emancipation in 1833, and tackles the complex problem of how a tragic past can be accommodated in memory.

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
I have a particular attachment to Sheba, the indentured labourer on one of the Barrett estates. Despite the wealth of material that exists on the Barrett family, the story of relations between the Barretts and black women and men, which dates back to 1655 when one of Elizabeth's ancestors sailed into Port Royal, Jamaica, has remained largely unheard and ignored. My research into the Barrett's history led to scholarly work, but I found, as I tried to put together the puzzle of their past, that some pieces were missing. I could feel an absent history. My attention became drawn to the many hundreds of men, women and children who had been forced into slavery on the Barrett estates. The fragments of information I uncovered about
black women on the plantations, when pieced together, revealed a picture that mirrored that of the white plantocracy: it was the history of those who enslaved, reflected back – crude, grotesque. Although research about Elizabeth underpins Strange Music, I wanted the reader to hear from these
other, unheard and enslaved Barrett women who were as much a part of the family and the family tragedy as the famous poet. Sheba's narrative shares the trauma of infanticide presented in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point', and incorporates a contrasting African tribal belief that because her child was not nine days old at the
time of death it may be considered as a wandering spirit returning to the spirit world.

I also have a particular attachment to the Great Houses of Greenwood and Cinnamon Hill. Greenwood Great House was built in 1790 by Richard Barrett (Elizabeth's father's illegitimate cousin), primarily for entertainment, it is now my Jamaican family home. The singer Johnny Cash bought Cinnamon Hill, the 17th century Jamaican great house in which Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett, was born. Cash adored Elizabeth's writing, copied many poems onto parchment and hung them around the walls. I met Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash shortly before they died (as with Elizabeth Barrett and
Robert Browning, another romantic story lies behind their relationship). They expressed great interest in Strange Music and arranged a tour of Cinnamon Hill as part of my research.

What are you reading at the moment?
I am reading Nuruddin Farah's, From A Crooked RIb and Dudley Barker's Swaziland

What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a contemporary novel set in Southern Africa.