Earning his daily bread from a full-fledged writing career might not have been the plan at the time but Gladstone Taylor embarked on an adventure with his debut chapbook in 2015. He launched KingSun: The Testaments of Sunlight and Water on the summer solstice that year and has since become a shining, professional spinner of sentences for music and culture outlets worldwide, including his role as managing editor for premium Jamaican magazine, Backayard. His resume is impressive enough but his views on the writing process, myths and archetypes in music are even more stirring. These and more he expressed in conversation from his home in Kingston.
[GLOSSARY – pree/meds: to think about | say: that or said (context) | cyaa: can‘t | bad me up: encouraging tough love | dedeh: there | nuh: doesn’t or isn’t (context) | haffi: has/have to | fi: to or for (context) | nuff: a lot | weh: that or where (context) | wah: what | naa: not | gwaan: go | a gwaan: is happening | ‘memba: remember | uunu: you all]
How does it feel to be a published author 5 years on?
It mean a lot to me. Me a look pon me life now and me a see when me just start out. For one, me really did a pree fi just go school, finish school, get inna this job. The stuff in the book were just like springboards. I can see where my life veered off into different paths and things kinda manifested because of the book.
How did you make the decision to become an author?
Finding Tried & True was really pivotal for me in understanding that the space – in terms of literature and being able to publish and put out something and express yourself. A lot of the good literature that we have, the poetry and stuff that regular people are drawn to, a lot of that uses the regular language. They use the patwa and sometimes the broken English but when it comes to novels and nonfiction, they usually tend to be very wordy and not just wordy but a little more complex and sometimes academic, so it nuh really reach everyday people as swiftly. It nuh penetrate as easily as poetry and stuff like that, so that may be a part of the reason why it was so easy to feel like the publishing space wasn’t where I belonged or where any people like me or Dutty belong. When I got a hold of his book, that changed a whole heap of things fi me. It show me say the thing haffi read well but it nuh haffi prim and proper to the point where you forget who are the people you a talk to. There’s always that conversation in literature – who you a write for. Because if you a write for Jamaicans, it should be in our language but if you are writing for both Jamaicans and people abroad, then you find yourself in a different kind of situation where I guess you haffi be a little bit more careful and try fi translate.
Who were the intended audience of KingSun, being your debut publication?
Me never really meds say me have an audience at first but then me start fi collaborate with artists. As you can tell, one of the major themes of KingSun is collaboration. That’s how it was made. The visuals that supplement almost half of it was done by people who I was having similar conversations with. Peers. People who were either creative and in a similar mind frame at the time or just people who were around my age group. When I was writing, I realized I was talking to somebody because nuff a di tings me end up put inna the book stemmed outta those very same conversations. I realized that, Alright, well, I’m not the only youth thinking this way right now. If there was at least one other youth out there who a meds a similar way, then hopefully the book could be of some help to him too.
Fi tell the truth, when me look back on it now, me feel a little bit more concerned fi people who did inna spaces like where me live and where me come from, which is like inner cities. Just knowing it’s just the exposure weh nuh really dedeh. Being able to share certain things with a lot of the people who were a part of KingSun creatively, and knowing they were a part of that audience as well, my eyes opened to the fact that these people similarly have a lot of access to things. Their minds are more searching too. So you know say, with or without you, dem a go find wah dem a look for. Me did a talk to dem, in terms of having a conversation, but the ideal audience, like that one other person who it woulda be the most helpful to, would definitely be a person who come up in similar circumstances as me, where certain resources nuh so readily available.
LISTEN: ‘KingSun’ by Giark, released in 2016 and inspired by Gladstone Taylor’s book.
Would it be correct to say that you were drawing from enlightened conversations from within your creative community and projecting that in the direction of people who came up in circumstances like yours?
Yeah, that was really it for me because when me meet people like Travis Bailey and Matthew McCarthy – and thank God for them – that’s when me realize there were things out there that me can use fi fill me mind weh, one, not as Eurocentric and, two, enlightened. And just the fact that there’s a global space where that was happening as well. A lot of youths were experiencing a similar searching mentality. Getting my experience, there’s some privilege in it and some luck because a lot of the people that grow up in my situation wouldn’t be readily exposed to those kinda things. So it was almost like feeling like me cyaa just keep nuff a wah me a learn. There’s a strange kinda psychology in it as well ‘cause me grow up both inna the country and in Kingston, and a lot of the people wah me grow up with here in town, especially youths me used to run up and down pon street with and dem ting deh, dem man deh either deh jail or dem haffi fly out and flee the country because of some antics, or dem dead. So there is a feeling of survivor’s guilt, especially knowing that a lot of those people are just as curious as I am. It’s just that I was lucky enough to have a father who take me outta dem ting deh, so me never haffi live inna it. Me coulda actually pay attention to school and find other things interesting and get access to certain other things. So it was definitely from that space of feeling almost lucky to just find out and experience nuff a these things, and feeling like yow, me cyaa just keep it to miself, yuh nuh.
Have you had any memorable feedback from readers about KingSun?
It funny because is mostly women read. The majority of reading audience is women and that’s not just with reading. It’s just across the board when it comes to education and academia as well. Me always a get messages of appreciation from women who have read the book and find certain things appealing and comforting, or just interesting. One male interaction that stands out in my mind is a bredrin who link me and tell me say one a di ting dem make him actually cry. I can’t remember which piece exactly but is a bredrin who naa go get up and tell you something just because… know weh me mean? And him a one a dem man deh weh nuh talk as much either. And his personality is always very jovial, so fi find out say it reach him inna that kinda serious way, that did stand out inna me mind. It’s an encouragement too, just fi know say, as much as me love women and love the fact say dem a di majority of my readers, men my age are out there who maybe don’t consider themselves as artsy or creative as me, yet they can pree something like KingSun and have that experience with it.
[Writing] forces you to have a relationship with it, in a way, and that relationship reveals you to yourself a lot. It’s definitely not easy to continue doing it like that because you have to continue facing yourself every single time.
What is your view on writing in general?
Writing is just one of those very loving, kind of comforting things. I feel like most people have had some kinda experience with writing that’s emotional or close to the heart. Whether dem read a book when dem did young, like dem favorite story of all time. Maybe dem used to write poems when dem small or maybe dem used to write stories. A lot of the times that a di common thing. Even when I was just starting out, there were quite a few people who shared similar ambitions, feeling inspired to embrace that part of themselves and put more energy into it.
The flip side to the whole writing thing is that it’s a skill that is so difficult that most people give up after a while. It’s not difficult as in it’s hard to do or hard to be good at but it’s something that we all have to learn to do. It forces you to have a relationship with it, in a way, and that relationship reveals you to yourself a lot. It’s definitely not easy to continue doing it like that because you have to continue facing yourself every single time. And that mean everything: all of the ways in which you feel inadequate, all of the ways in which you feel insecure, all a dem ting deh. It’s really like a mirror more than anything. It depends on what you’re writing, of course, but if you’re talking about creative writing, you can’t properly create from a space where you don’t have some kind of spiritual harmony a gwaan inside of you. I think that’s why you hear a lot of writers talk about writer’s block. When you’re blocked up, there’s some kind of disharmony or something where you naa be truthful with yourself. Writing requires that kind of honesty.
So, not only is it difficult to get paid for writing, not only is it difficult to learn as a skill to do it properly, but it challenges you as a person. Most people who I started out with, let me not say dem give up but they turned their attention to other places. It’s one of the worst things to be, in a sense, so attached to the thing wah you a do fi make money but, then again, it’s also one of the best things because that’s how you know it’s a lifestyle thing. If it a help you through things, to figure out yourself, you will do it anyway without the money. I was watching a masterclass with Neil Gaiman. Him have this room, like a cabin separated from his house, and the only thing in the room is just a desk. And a chair. Him use da room deh fi write. And there’s windows all around and you a look out and see trees and greenery. That a di ultimate. That a my most comfortable thing in life.
Among the mix of genres in KingSun, you introduce your approach to fantasy fiction. What is your attraction to this genre?
Fantasy fiction is definitely one of my favorite things. Me’ll tell anybody this: if me have my way, ultimately that’s what I would be doing 24/7. I know that people get different things from fantasy but when I think about the things I fell in love with about fantasy… I loved it as a kid and then I fell in love with it again as a self aware person. Then I started to research and understand what it means to us as human beings, for our psychology. When you think about people like Carl Jung delving into the unconscious mind, that is ultimately what it is to me. Mythology. It represents the vast unconscious. The unconscious is not represented in reason. It’s not organized in the way that we would with a reasonable mind. In the unconscious, it is more about representation. It’s about symbolism and something representing another thing. That’s how meaning is conveyed in that world. If you even want to think about some of our stories like Anansi, and the Black Man, Chiney Man, White Man stories, they are meant to pass on a message to us but are also heavily steeped in fantasy.
Have people said anything about that section of the book in particular?
There were some people who were just curious. Most people who said anything about it were just interested or caught off guard. The thing I found out about people was that more people are actually interested in this thing than we know. It’s just that a lot of the fantasy work that has come down to us is exhausting. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are just really long but you find, when the movies came out, they got really popular in Jamaica. They had a really big boom in the country and that’s how me really draw the connection. I remember my cousin who is a Christian but was a big Harry Potter and Twilight fan. I would be reading the books but she watched the movies, and I would tell her what would happen in the movies. I guess some people would consider it nerdy but I don’t think she would have considered herself nerdy. But she mess with it so heavy and that’s when me realize…
…people like fantasy, horror movies – duppy show – and old kung fu movies as well. People like to escape from reality. Jamaican people are more curious than they’re given credit for. It’s just what’s accessible to them. Things were booming globally when they were booming here, so a man would just burn a DVD and watch it. KingSun increased that accessibility, even in the decision to make the book small, to make the stories short, to just give people different ways of reading that don’t try to demand so much of them. Because my stories were more brief, nuff a dem imagine it as something they could watch.
I favor the old myths where people are simpler and more connected to nature. You find that their mythologies are closely tied to the plant world and nature in general, whereas new myths kinda take on more present day archetypes.
What do you think about Black Leopard, Red Wolf as a contribution to the fantasy genre from a Caribbean writer of Marlon James’ notoriety?
I haven’t read it in detail. I’ve read excerpts, summaries and reviews, just to catch up because I’ve been excited about it. I think that we need somebody who is ambitious enough to step into that world. We have a lot of great poetry and a lot of great fiction as well, but when it comes on to high fantasy, we don’t really have a lot of great prominent examples of that. When I heard the descriptions of it and when I saw the cover, I was like, Yow, this is what we need. I’ve also discussed it with people who have read it. One of my close friends read it and I was getting bits from her about it. The majority of her reactions were good and I trust her taste in fantasy because we share a similar love for it. If she enjoys something then there must be something to it.
From what I can tell, James jokingly described it as an African Game of Thrones and people started to take it seriously. Some people say that isn’t accurate. I think maybe it’s actually accurate. I didn’t read the Game of Thrones books but I watched up to Season 3. After a while I just stopped watching it when another series came on that was a bit more my pace. Game of Thrones is definitely a great tale – high fantasy at its peak in the contemporary – but one of my issues with it is that the characters go on so much and a lot of it becomes about who says the most clever and hurtful thing. Maybe it’s written that way. Similarly, I probably wouldn’t be able to finish James’ book because it appears to be contemporary fantasy like Game of Thrones. The contemporary take on fantasy uses the adult mind in a way to try to organize stories through reason. When you think about the guys that I guess Marlon James looks up to, the Neil Gaimans look up to, the Tolkiens, all those people, that is what I fell in love with and it’s the way that I started to understand the real meaning in these things. How they organized the symbology, put these things into play and kinda just let the characters do what they do. Once you have an archetype for a character, you know what they’re going to be. A lot of the characters that are being built in these contemporary fantasies are very much new archetypes for new people, if you get what I’m saying. And I’m not just talking about sexuality or whatever, but a Game of Thrones is for people with different kinds of values. If you think about it, myth is separated into old myths and new myths. I favor the old myths where people are simpler and more connected to nature. You find that their mythologies are closely tied to the plant world and nature in general, whereas new myths kinda take on more present day archetypes. If you check even Gaiman’s American Gods, it’s a struggle between old gods and new gods, where the new gods personify the things that are in power nowadays like the internet or new media, or like capitalism, money, those kinds of things that form a new symbology. That’s kind of the energy that I’m picking up from James’ work. This means it’s new and interesting but my heart lies with the older myths. It’s not anything else. I just love to see a good myth that is focused more on the plot and the magic of that reality and the whole fantasy rather than the characters. Even though he has done a lot of research into older mythology and the older African world, and he was able to deliver that setting really well, the primary focus is on the characters and these characters very much feel like new people in an old world, based on what I’m sensing. I’m open to being wrong since I haven’t read the full thing.
What are you planning to put out next?
I don’t want to give too much away but it will definitely be fantasy and it will definitely be distinctly Jamaican. I want to use here and use us, and it might not find mass appeal because of that, but it also could. I think there really needs to be something about us that’s happening here and that’s pertinent in a lot of ways to our history. Me really get a wake up call recently. The place where this inspiration is coming from is a place of less concern about whether something will work or not.
Was that “wake up call” a sort of writer’s mid-life crisis?
It definitely feel like one a dem ting deh. The other day I was talking about different myths, talking about the hero’s journey. Isis Semaj-Hall was basically asking why I was initially hesitant to own up to being a writer, and my response was that sometimes the hero has to be called twice. In a lot of the myths you will find that. Sometimes you will get the call, and that call is the call to adventure or whatever, and sometimes the hero will decide not to do it today or didn’t get the right motivation or whatever. Writing is sometimes a difficult space to navigate logically but somebody definitely bad me up and say, Yow, you have a gift and you should be using it in this time. You should be using it to balance your energies, for one, and using it to create and do something that fulfills you and not just work all the time. That was my second call to adventure.
…for a lot of people, [music is] the thing that initiates them. That’s what myth does for cultures. That’s what it has done for us as African people ever since we’ve been around.
How do you feel when writing about music and music personalities?
The thing is, me love music! Me really see it as a mythology within itself too, because of what it means to people and what I know it means to me. You know how you know it’s real? When people start ‘memba ‘bout music. When you start ‘memba ‘bout music ‘round some people who know music too, and uunu start talk ‘bout the time when the music come out, is like everything start come back. The music start bring everything back. It’s like a fantasy world in a lot of ways. Also, for a lot of people, it’s the thing that initiates them. That’s what myth does for cultures. That’s what it has done for us as African people ever since we’ve been around. It initiates the child’s psyche into adulthood and that’s what a lot of music does, especially for the youths dem now. It’s a greater study because there are different ways to mature, depending on what archetype.
What are some archetypes that you observe?
One archetype in particular is the child archetype of the Hero. That’s the immature version, so the Hero has not matured as yet. It can mature into either the Warrior or the Sadist depending on what it chooses to do. The Sadist, sometimes called the Shadow Warrior, is the shadow version of the Warrior. The main difference between the Warrior and the Sadist is that the Warrior is willing to self-sacrifice because he or she has conquered the fear of death and is loyal to some greater good beyond personal gain. So, when you check that maths now, you realize say it’s really a defining thing. What is this music initiating these youths into? Is it the warrior lifestyle, heroism or sadism? It depends on the kind of figure that’s producing the music. If it’s a heroic figure, they’re initiating their young audience into heroism or starting them on their Hero’s journey, whereby they are able to face their dragon and mature into the Warrior sage. If it’s a sadistic figure, then they are initiating them into the sadism that comes with the shadow energy of the Warrior.
The Warrior, having conquered the fear of death, is usually someone who is willing to die for a cause or for people. I am willing to die for this because this is what my people need. This is what is needed for the cause. The self-sacrifice also can seem like self-sabotage sometimes, like they have already made up their mind to die, and this can happen if one is possessed by the Shadow Warrior. To me, there is a certain level of sadism to not just making up your mind to die for a cause or for other people, but also to the point where you’re unconsciously doing things that are slowly killing you, or just having a general disregard for yourself when it comes to safety, health, that kinda thing. The Sadist has more of a destructive attitude and that’s why it’s the shadow version of the Warrior, but it has conquered much of the same fears and lessons as the warrior. Sometimes it takes a deeper analysis to tell who is what.
But there’s also the Anti-hero, which further complicates the thing, because the Hero possesses a childish idealism that the Anti-hero discards and that’s what separates them. We’ve always had those people who feel that it has to be an ultimate decision. Maybe I would say Martin Luther King Jr. was a Hero based on his protest tactics. Then you have the Anti-hero being someone like Malcolm X who understands that this is another level of hate that’s not just going to go away because we’re asking them please, and that you have to be willing to do what’s necessary. That’s where the line of morality comes in because if you’re harming yourself that’s one thing, right? But it’s a different case when you’re influencing other people. There’s not much control that you have over that so it’s a debatable moral situation there but that’s the line really. When you start to harm other people, that’s where the question comes in: Is this still right? For me, it’s still right if that other person would have done the same thing to you had they gotten the chance first. That’s where the Anti-hero comes in. He’s not necessarily trying to get people to go with him down his path of death but he understands that death, violence or conflict may be the only way to shift things up. You need a more radical approach. It’s like Killmonger in Black Panther or Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. Harvey Dent is really the Anti-hero in that story, after he became Two Face, and The Joker would register as more of a Sadist but he’s also neutral in the sense that he doesn’t have an agenda. It’s more to him about making a point. Harvey Dent understands from experience that it’s a complicated system and cycle of violence. I mean the guy literally has half his face burnt off, so he knows that it takes a firm handed approach.
Do you find more Warriors or more Sadists in Jamaican music nowadays?
Now, the thing that makes Jamaican music interesting is that it could be easy for us to make that distinction and say that maybe we find the Warriors over the reggae side and the Sadists over the dancehall side but it’s definitely not that black and white. Some of our greatest Warriors or champions have come from dancehall and people who remain our Warriors to this day. People like Bounty Killer, who remains one of the few who champions the people’s cause. You can’t just draw the line. You have to go into the history and profile each person.
If you’re talking about the youths on the verge now, these are new beings. It’s difficult to tell sometimes. Some of them have the element of self-sacrifice and they are doing it for their families and communities. Once a lot of them start to see a certain amount of money, you will see the changes in the living conditions around them, whether through finances, resources or bringing in other people who can help people. You will see that happening.
There are definitely characters who are more serving themselves than serving the people. Maybe they are serving both simultaneously but there would be the question of how much one is taking advantage of the role. You’re supposed to be serving other people as a public figure. That’s part of your responsibility if you’re a public figure. Just like companies, you have to serve the communities that you’re kinda getting your power from. I’m not saying give out everything that you have but there should be a bare minimum.
Can the African Diaspora experience be likened to a fantasy world?
That’s the thing about myth. It’s deep. All the time I used to hear people talk about myth, me think is just something weh nuh go so. But it’s deeper. It’s like DNA deep. And nuff a di ting dem weh pass down to we as Africans come down through that same kinda channel, like a story. A lot of cautionary messages, life hacks and just miscellaneous knowledge are not just passed down but circulated in our communities through fantasy stories. We may not think of it as fantasy in the way a white writer would but, in truth, if we tried to write down and publish some of these old stories, we would have to file many of them underneath the speculative fiction or fantasy genre. Our culture itself is steeped in mysticism and spirituality in many ways, so the experience is certainly fantastic. Of course, there is the reality of having to confront the idea of returning home to Africa. The return is a mythological symbol as well and I think a large part of that is returning to the cosmic source, and the cosmic source representing the cradle of humankind here on Earth. Many of us are born perplexed, angry for no reason from birth because we are just cut off from the source. That’s a spiritual call to adventure, a call to know yourself because you have been stripped of identity. If that’s not fantastic then I don’t know what is.
