Both as a prominent educator until her retirement in 2016, and as a published author, Dr. Angela Barry has long been a passionate supporter and promoter of the arts in Bermuda. During her 21 years at the Bermuda College as Senior Lecturer, she designed an upper level course in Bermudian Literature and taught a wide range of writing and literature courses, kindling in her students the desire to discover their own potential and, as she says, to understand “that the well-chosen word is a powerful tool of information and persuasion.” In addition, she founded and oversaw the Bermuda College Literature Series which ran between 2006 and 2011. Thanks to the Series, every year an eminent writer from overseas, such as Olive Senior and Kwame Dawes, would come to Bermuda to host a literary event.
One of the projects most important to her was forming and chairing a committee from 2012 to 2016, which created the Brian Burland Centre for Research in the Bermuda College Library. “Brian Burland was the first Bermudian to make a name as a published writer,” she explains, “but apart from what he achieved, he gave permission for others in Bermuda to follow.”
She herself has certainly followed in Burland’s footsteps. In addition to promoting the Arts in Bermuda through her roles as educator and arts administrator, she has also added to the body of Bermudian literature through her writing of fiction, admired by eminent writers such as George Lamming. In 1990 and 1993 her short stories “Song for Man” and “Where the Remote Bermudas Ride” were included in anthologies published by the Bermuda Writers Collective. In 1994 her “Where the Remote Bermudas Ride” gained international recognition when it was published in the Massachusetts Review. In 2002 her anthology Endangered Species and Other Stories was published by Peepal Tree Press. And in 2010 her first full length novel, Gorée: Point of Departure was also published by Peepal Tree Press. Gorée was nominated for the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award, 2012. At home the Department of Cultural Affairs twice awarded her the Brian Burland Award for Adult Fiction in 2008 and 2013. Next year her short story “Beached” will be included in the Commonwealth Society’s anthology, “So Many Islands.”
Often her fiction focusses on the immense power and the difficulty of love. Like Burland, Angela does not flinch from writing about both inner and outer conflicts resulting from racial tensions and economic disparities. But, as she says firmly, “I’m not one for quick and easy answers.” She explores the idea that life is often about negotiating different identities, with children of mixed parentage often having to choose or having the choice forced upon them. Those identities are to do with religion, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and more recently, sexual orientation. Her fiction is not only focused on the young: The older figures, the grandparents, have just as an important place in her fictional world as do their children and grandchildren, thus stressing the theme of cultural change or, in many cases, fracture versus continuity across the generations. Neither is her work placed in just one setting. Some works are placed in Bermuda but others move to different settings – London, U.K., for example, Senegal, Gambia and the Cote D’Ivoire,
How is she able to create so convincingly such a range of characters and settings?
The answer at least partially lies in her childhood. She was born in 1951 in Bermuda , to Madree and Edward T. Richards, a lawyer and well-known M.P. who would subsequently become Premier of Bermuda and a knight. From the start she was exposed to politics and to diverse culture since her father was from what was then British Guiana and a stream of overseas visitors from the Caribbean would constantly come to stay.
However, it is also significant she was diagnosed at an early age with asthma, forcing her to spend many days ill in bed. Instead of reading for pleasure, an activity she enjoyed later in her teenage years, she spent the hours imagining different worlds and characters.
Educated at the Central School and at the Berkeley Institute, she completed her ‘A’ Levels at Holland Park, a socially diverse and progressive school in Notting Hill Gate, London, where she stayed with her sister and her South African brother-in-law. As she says, the cultural doors kept opening. She then took her B.A. (Hons) in English and Comparative Literature) at the University of York. But it wasn’t until she met her first husband, Abdoulaye Barry from Senegal, that she became immersed in African culture and society. They never lived in Senegal together – staying instead in Paris, where she studied French at the Sorbonne, London and the Seychelles, where she respectively taught in high schools and a polytechnic. However, Angela did frequently visit rural areas in Senegal. There, she discovered that African relationships and mores were very different from western ones and required work on her part. She has never regretted this, understanding that openness to different cultures and mindsets is a gift for which she will always be grateful.
Having gained an MA in the 1985, she decided to pursue a Ph.D. from the University of Lancaster in creative writing. Her successful doctoral presentation in 2015 was The Drowned Forest, a novel shortlisted for the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize. She is now completing it for publication and as always she looks to her husband, Michael Gilkes, for critical advice. “He is my first and best reader.”
