My demons could never be exorcized through playing characters, I was stuck with trying to understand myself and what I perceived as the uncomprehending world around me through other means. Pretense was anathema to me, and yet, acting fascinated both my father and Ferruccio; my father through utilizing videotape in therapy and Ferruccio through staging psychodramas, encouraging patients to perform in spontaneous scenarios.
“Who’s ready for dessert?” she calls as she barges through the saloon doors with five glasses on a tray, oblivious to the scarlet flush that tips her daughter’s ears.
Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, before coming to the United States to attend college. She is the author of two poetry collections, Snapshots From Istanbul and Fauna, as well as a novel, The River's Song. Bishop is also the author of the non-fiction books, My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories From Jamaican Women in New York, and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists.
I’ve always had trouble accepting the intricacies of the so-called grown up world, finding the behavior of most adults completely bewildering. This started in childhood with the way I viewed my father. I thought he was strange, whereas he was revered by his peers in …
When we finish, I see he has the gun, so I can’t do anything, like get away, which was what I was hoping for, and he ties me up again. Afterwards, because it’s drier down there, he slides back underneath the platform.
“I’m going back out to look for her,” Elena said. He looked up from his desk and saw her backlit in the doorway of his office. “You want to come with me?”
My mother had said we should be careful how we moved about in Ama, because the bad men were on rampage. Every mother sang it like a song to their children.