When I arrived at Joan Riley's house in West Norwood, in southeast Lon-
don, on a sunny July afternoon in 1991, she greeted me warmly. "I've
been away, so I'm afraid the house is a bit of a mess," she said, although
it looked comfortably lived-in to me. "I do hope you like fish because I've
made you a Caribbean lunch." For the next few hours, over baked mack-
erel ("I wasn't sure if you would be ready for parrot fish"), callaloo,
mastic bread, and guava jelly, I discovered how and why she writes such
powerful fiction about the difficult, often painful lives of ordinary people.
And I came to like and respect her.

Family and community--the Caribbean community in Britain or her na-
tive Jamaican community--have inspired Joan Riley's fiction from the
publication of her first novel, The Unbelonging ( The Women's Press [ Lon-
don], 1985). About an eleven-year-old's psychic dislocation at having to
leave her native Kingston, Jamaica, for Britain to rejoin a father she has
never really known, the book was based partly on the life of a woman
Riley met when she was working as a residential counselor and partly on
her own experiences.

Born in 1959 in Saint Mary, Jamaica, the youngest of eight children in a
family of laborers, Riley came to Britain for college, receiving a B.A. and
M.A. from the Universities of Sussex and London, respectively. She was
shocked by Britain--the hardness of the life, the coldness of climate and
people, the racism--but she was older than her fictional Hyacinth

Photo: Copyright © Raisa Page

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