KWEE Liberian Literary Magazine Jan. Iss. Vol. 0115 Mar Vol. 0315 | страница 27

Liberian Literary Magazine Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture

CATANA TULLY

LLM: First, we would like to thank you for granting this interview. Let us kick off this interview with you telling us a little about yourself ….

I was born in a remote village in Guatemala and was adopted early on by a German family that lived there. When they had to move to Guatemala City, they took me with them and raised me as a German child. There were no Blacks in the city, so I grew up distanced from my race and culture, speaking German, Spanish and English fluently. I received the best education a child could access. When the family became aware that my perception of people like me was problematic, I was sent to a boarding school in Jamaica to receive a positive image of dark people. At the time Jamaica was still British, so my A-level HS diploma came courtesy of Cambridge University. After that I studied in Munich, Germany, at a language academy with the intention of becoming a translator and interpreter. However, because of my appearance and fluency in German, I was enticed to follow an acting career in film, television and theatre, and also as a fashion model. I met and married my white American husband in Munich, and after the birth of our son, moved to California to keep the family together. I was 35. In the US my sense of self began to unravel, as I had to identify as a Black. It would take years of therapy to understand that despite all the love and concern my German parents had for me, I had lost all that was me, and my strong European identity had become detrimental to my emotional wellbeing. I gave up acting and pursued a master’ s degree and then a doctoral degree in Humanistic studies. Therapy guided me to research who my birthparents were and why I had ended up in the German family. I met my birth father and then my birthmother’ s children. Their version regarding my story was quite different to what I had been told and had come to believe.

2) Why writing?

The reason I sat down to write my story was because it was becoming a fad for middle-class White families to adopt internationally and interracially. My story, I felt, would show them significant pitfalls( for them and their children) as they navigated the tricky waters of not talking about, or exposing their children in a significant and positive way to the child’ s race and culture.

3) What books have most influenced your life / career most? My influence came from many different sources: at first German fairy tales and German literature; in Jamaica it was British writers and poets, later in the US international literature, primarily Black writers. I needed to learn about Black Thought, philosophy and culture. African classic writers like Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, lately Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Caribbean writers: Frantz Fanon, Nicolas Guillen, Aimee Cesaire and Derek Walcott. The Americans: Langston Hughes, Zorah Neal Hurston, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright … I hope you get the picture: primarily 20th century Black literature classics. Everything I read in some form or another inspires me. I’ m currently reading works by Turkish author Orham Pamuk. However, my preferred genre is memoir.

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