About The Author
I was born in Tanzania in 1951, where I lived until two seismic events upended my life. The first was the deportation of my father in 1968, after which the family moved to Rome; the second the tragically early death of my mother the following year. These two experiences were a turning point that set me on a road of exploration and self-discovery. I have spent the rest of my life writing and teaching about Africa, first as a freelance journalist and editor, then as lecturer/Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill in Barbados. My childhood and my parents’ experiences are the subject of the memoir, Zamani: a Haunted Memoir of Tanzania.
Between 1981 and 1991, alongside teaching and studying I wrote reviews and cultural features, specialising in African and Caribbean arts related subjects, for London-based journals and newspapers. In 1983 I went to Nigeria as a Commonwealth Scholar to study for a PhD in Nigerian Women’s Writing at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. While there I joined the Nigerian journalistic community, writing cultural features for Lagos-and London-based publications.
In 1992 I began a new life in the Caribbean, where my daughter Tumi was born. I continued to be active as a journalist, writing for the fortnightly newspaper, Caribbean Week, the quarterly journal Caribbean Beat and Caribbean Review of Books. From 2003-2005 I contributed a fortnightly column, ‘Letter from a Small Place’ to the Lagos paper, New Age.
As a lecturer at Cave Hill I taught creative writing, and was a founding editor of Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, a nexus for creative writing activities at Cave Hill, including live readings, workshops and writers’ master-classes. I was proud to host well-known Caribbean writers like Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Lawrence Scott, Thomas Glave, Caryl Phillips, Kendal Hippolyte, Merle Collins, Grace Nichols, Karen Lord and Colin Channer, as well as African writers like Niyi Osundare, Yewande Omotoso and Gabriel Gbadamosi. I continue to be active as a reviewer and judge for local and regional literary competitions.
As well as literary and cultural criticism, I’ve published short stories and creative non-fiction in a range of international journals and edited collections. I edited the anthology Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream (Macmillan UK: 2006), and am the author of Chameleon and other stories (Peepal Tree Press, 2007) and Zamani – a Haunted Memoir of Tanzania (Cinnamon Press, 2023). I’m working on a YA novel, How To Find Your Way In The Air.
I live in Barbados with my husband, the Vincentian poet, Philip Nanton, with whom I host a writing group that meets on our verandah. We share ideas and critique each other’s work - fuelled by banana bread and Banks beer or rum.
Zamani
A Haunted Memoir of Tanzania
Haunted by memories of a Tanzanian childhood abruptly ended when my parents were deported, I return in search of the past only to be ambushed by the present. As I retrace my own and my parents’ footsteps, I’m surprised by unexpected connections, reaching back into the colonial past, and further, to a time of myth and legend. The key to understanding what holds these together comes to me in the form of zamani – the Swahili sea of time where spirits inhabit places and landscape, memory animates the everyday and voices from the past speak to the present.
Collectively these voices paint a picture of social and political change in Tanzania over the last 50 years, and invite me to take my place in it.
Published by Leaf by Leaf, an imprint of Cinnamon Press.
'There are different kinds of belonging. There's the kind that comes with a passport, and there's a kind of helpless, spiritual attachment.' Jane Bryce, revisiting the places where she spent her Tanzanian childhood, finds them haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past. In this painfully honest and insightful memoir she explores the themes of identity and belonging and how these can survive a lifetime apart.'
- Sally Keeble, British political activist, author of She, You, I.
'Spare and rather remarkable. Unsentimental and stern and filled with honoured things.'
- Peter Merrington.
Zamani Gallery
Other Writings
Caribbean Dispatches
Caribbean Dispatches takes a highly original approach to one of the world’s most diverse cultures, covering a wide cross-section from Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago in the south to the Bahamas in the north. It offers an entertaining and idiosyncratic collection of personal perspectives on the Caribbean, by 28 writers of different backgrounds, for readers who want to get beneath the exotic surface of the tourist experience. Contributions from poets, novelists, scholars, journalists, artists and broadcasters knit together in a lively dialogue about the region. Organized under headings - Landscapes, Encounters, Personalities, Performances and Retrospectives – these dispatches pay tribute to one of the most diverse regions in the world.
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Chameleon and Other Stories
When a young, white child discovers why her family’s African gardener so dislikes the chameleon she spots in a tree, she is plunged into a puzzled awareness of the complexities of race, colour and difference. As the ‘I’ of the stories grows into adulthood in Nigeria, she too becomes a chameleon of sorts, caught in the tension between a sense of separateness and the desire for belonging. In crossing from West Africa to the Caribbean, she discovers it is not only people who are chameleons – the Yoruba orisa Osun has also made the journey, emerging in Trinidad and Cuba, changed but recognizable. What stands out in Bryce’s careful, elegant writing is a very concrete sense of the reality and autonomy of other voices, other views.
Reviews of Chameleon
This is distinguished, elegant, reticent writing dealing with difficult, puzzling things: religion, old age, colour differences, music, jubilation. Bryce writes constantly as the outsider: the views of the child,trying to understand her parents and their Moslem servant's feelings about holiness, the reporter's response to Chief Priest, musician and wiseman ‘a mixture of madness and mastery’. Bryce's father's job, we learn, was ‘to map the forest, 32,000 acres of it’. Her job is similar. She maps human experience in Africa and the West Indies, a strange, dark, bright world.
The settings move from Lagos to Mombasa to Yorubaland, from Sallah to Barbados. What is always there, wherever the place, is the innocent eye that doesn't understand, but that sees all the better for not understanding (rather like James's Maisie). The un-named narrator of the first six stories is always learning, ‘her world was full of incomprehensible prohibitions’. Ahmed the servant opens to her a world of strange things: the wild beauty of chameleon and frangipani. Adolescence later presents a fresh sort of consciousness, the difficult perspective of being obscured by younger sisters, ‘the breast problem’, seeing parents differently, the awful moment when she says the unsayable ‘you have to do what I say because ‘I’m white and you're black’. Set against this is the delightful relationship with Mariamu the comforter, who gives of her own delicious food ‘and I suck the gravy off my wrist’.
At boarding school she moves into another world of strangeness, of dares, of letters home, of secret societies. ‘The Silent Three do solemnly swear never to reveal each other's names’. This anonymity has stayed with Bryce. In adult life an Embassy party is seen as a tribal gathering, and again she is an outsider: ‘I am a fake and I want to leave.’ But sometimes in a conspiracy of music and feeling, it is possible to join in, as ‘I’ does in the ‘Carnival’ where ‘playing mas... becomes a collective statement, is the possibility of transcendence...The feeling is so intense I don't know what to do with it, or even how to name it.' This is the Bryce territory, full of skewed perspectives (child/adult, black/white, master/servant). Full too of strong, simple sensations, the tastes, smells, textures, mud, silence, music of Africa. She is particularly good at describing the upheavals of music, writes with the loving attention to detail of an exile, an outsider, a reporter. Hers is uncanny territory. Chameleon is like The Heart of Darkness crossed with Alice in Wonderland. But not very like anything, really. There is an original writer here.
- UA Fanthorpe, poet, author of Safe as Houses and Side Effects.
Essentially a writer with a keen eye for depth and detail, Jane Bryce has a knack for
making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. For example, her
short story, 'Lady', appropriates the title of a hit record by Fela
Anikulapo-Kuti, one of Africa's most prodigiously controversial
musicians; but she weaves so many people, incidents and events into the
story, against the draconian background of Nigeria's military
dictatorship, that the reader begins to wonder if s/he is still in
Bryce's Nigeria or Garcia Marquez's Colombia. Most significant: the hero
of this story is NOT Fela the world-acclaimed star, but one of his
singers/dancers, a somewhat anonymous figure at the beginning of Bryce's
story who transforms into a mysteriously powerful character at its end.
This deep sympathy for the ostensibly insignificant and underprivileged,
this almost conspiratorial understanding of their lot rules the ethos of
'The Prayer Rug', another story set in Africa, where Ahmed the
African 'house boy' and the mysteries of his religion loom so large in
the consciousness of his expatriate/settler employers. These and other
stories are told in a language that is crisp and compelling; Jane Bryce's
sense of dialogue and language variation is sensitive, her overall sense
of style is professional but never fastidious.
- Niyi Osundare, poet, Professor of English, University of New Orleans; and University of Ibadan, Nigeria, author of Songs from the Marketplace, Waiting Laughters and City Without People – the Katrina Poems.