Erna Brodber


Erna Brodber is a Jamaican writer, sociologist and social activist. She is the sister of writer Velma Pollard.

Biography

Born in the farming village of Woodside, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica, she gained a B.A. from the University College of [the West Indies], followed by an MSc and PhD, and has received a predoctoral fellowship in psychiatric anthropology. She subsequently worked as a civil servant, teacher, sociology lecturer, and researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research in the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. During Brodber's time working at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies, she collected several oral histories of elderly people's lives in rural Jamaica, which inspired her novel, Louisiana.
After working at the university, she left to work full-time in her home community of Woodside.
She is the author of five novels: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Myal, Louisiana, The Rainmaker's Mistake, and Nothing's Mat. She also writes non-fiction. Brodber works as a freelance writer, researcher, and lecturer in Jamaica. She was Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies, Mona for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Work

Brodber—trained as a sociologist with a Ph.D. and several publications on Jamaican society—emphasizes non-western forms of understanding in her fiction, deconstructing the historical methodologies of colonialist knowledge. She works to challenge western ways of ordering the world, and to resurrect myth and tradition as a form of historical rehabilitation from the psychic damage of slavery and colonialism. She weaves fantastical, non-realist elements with traditional modes of story-telling—emphasizing both as crucial to the psychic make-up of her characters and the world around them. As seen in her novel Louisiana, Brodber also plays with western notions of time. Time is ambiguous among the characters and not exactly viewed in a straight line. The shared experiences of those in the past mingle with those in the present.

Awards and honours

Brodber won the Caribbean and Canadian regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989 for Myal. In 1999, she was awarded the Musgrave Gold Award for Literature and Orature from the Institute of Jamaica, and she was awarded the Order of Distinction from the government of Jamaica in 2004. She received a Prince Claus Award in 2006 and a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2017.