IT’S A QUESTION of balancing a passion for writing with a commitment to a search for knowledge.
Even so, with his long list of well-written books that provide valuable insights into life in a multicultural society, it’s difficult to imagine Dr Cecil Foster carving out so much time from his academic responsibilities to write, not one, but two books.
But he has done it. Between October and January, the Barbadian who has written a dozen books and hundreds of articles for some of Canada’s leading national newspapers, magazines and academic journals will add to his outstanding literary collection, first with the publication of “Genuine Multiculturalism”, an academic work that examines the ability of people of different cultures to live together in relative harmony.
Published by McGill University Press, the book is scheduled to be released in October. It’s already being offered on Amazon.
Next is “Independence”, a novel that captures the travails of two youths in Barbados during the first two years of the island-nation’s attainment of sovereignty.
The books are coming out at a time when Foster is assuming a key position at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the academic and research hub of the network of tertiary schools of SUNY. Foster is the new Director of Graduate Studies and the Associate Director of Canadian studies at the SUNY campus that’s a short driving distance of Ontario, where for the past several years he has been a professor, a member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph.
“It has been a busy period, but I am enjoying it,” said the man who grew up in Christ Church and after a stint as a newspaper reporter in Barbados emigrated to Canada in 1979 to pursue a journalistic career and to boost his academic credentials. “You just have to set your mind to the task and get it done.”
Foster, who can switch back and forth with ease from using his creative imagination on thought-provoking novels to preparing solid academic published material that conforms to the demands of the halls of academe, has earned a reputation in Canada as a master craftsman of the Queen’s English, and a writer with an eye for detail. Just as important, he displays an ability to describe the paradox of life in a rich country and the challenges people of color face in a eurocentric environment and affluent society.
Take the case of “Independence”. Tracing 18 months in the lives of two teenagers in the end of the 1960s, shortly after Barbados became independent from Britain, the book brings to the fore the impact of a colonial country cutting the umbilical cord that had tied it to an imperial power. At the same time though, it uses the characters to show that, as the words of the national anthem stated, the new nation and its people had “expectations great”.
“It was an interesting period for Barbados and Barbadians and the real adjustment they had to make,” said Foster. “Like the rest of the country, the characters, the boy and the girl, who lived side by side, grew up like brother and sister but were not related, had hopes for the future. They each had a grandmother who was left to raise them because their respective mothers had emigrated and we see grandmothers who used their own skill and business enterprise to provide for their grandchildren.
“To achieve that goal, the grandmothers sold fish cakes, pudding and souse, bread and other foods we enjoyed back then on Saturday nights,” Foster explained.
While the book is set in Barbados, the author hopes people in the rest of the Caribbean and in the Diaspora in North America, England and elsewhere would find it relevant to their existence as Caribbean people. A proud son of the soil, Foster has dedicated the book “to the people of Bim”, especially to the youth as the 50th anniversary of nationhood beckons in 2016.
In a real sense “Independence” builds on the themes from Foster’s first novel, “No Man In The House” which draws on the experience of children and a grandmother in a Barbadian village as they sought to make ends meet after their parents went off to England in search of a better life.
“Independence” also extends the substance of “Island Wings: A Memoir”, a non-fiction work, written by Foster in 1998.
The writer, who holds bachelor’s degrees in business administration and economics from Toronto’s York University, a Master’s and a doctorate in social and political thought also from York, has been a professor at Guelph University since 2002. He has also taught at York, the University of Halifax and the Rochester Institute of Technology.