Soy/Somos: Dr. Gretna Wilkinson
Teacher and Poet
This interview continues my Soy/Somos conversations with people in the U.S. rooted in more than one culture. As a naturalized American citizen, I want to understand pieces of the mosaic that make up this nation. In today’s climate, these conversations feel essential.
I've had the good fortune of getting to know Gretna Wilkinson via our common love of poetry. Gretna was born in Guyana. She has an infectious love of life and words and the promise of children. I caught up with her just as she returned from the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) and other venues in Newark.The 3-day festival is held every two years and features poets from all over the United States and the world.
What happens at the festival, Gretna?
Readings and conversations about the art and practice of poetry, great names, workshops, performance, music. Many young poets too. Teachers bring their high school students. You go in sober—and you leave drunk. As a Geraldine R. Dodge poet, I was invited to host poets, introduce and time them, manage questions. I’d visit other venues when I wasn't on staff.
I’m so happy to sit with you today. I see in your bio that you came to the United States in 1981, married with two sons.
Guyana was experiencing grave upheaval, political and social. There were political deaths. This impacted even our family; we had to leave. At the time we were thinking of England, Canada, the West Indian islands, and the U.S. My birth mother lived here in the U.S., and that made it easier.
Please tell us a little about Guyana, an English-speaking sovereign nation in the northeast coast of South America.
It’s called land of many waters—rivers, creeks, lakes—forests, and wildlife. It has fewer than 800,000 inhabitants. Can you imagine! So much land and so much beauty. Culturally it’s considered Caribbean.
Guyana was under British colonial rule from the early 1800s to 1966, when it became fully independent. There was a long history of slavery until emancipation in 1834. Indentured workers from India were brought in to work the sugar plantations after that. Their descendants are the majority population today.
You’ve told me that there is significant diversity in your ethnicity. Can were talk about that?
Among my ancestry there is African, Amerindian, Jewish, and Welsh. I don't think I have Indian ancestry, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Who was Gretna as a little girl growing up in Guyana?
When I look back at that little girl and the things that came out of her mouth…. She talked in poetry and rhymed every chance that she got. She planned to be a surgeon. She saw herself as operating on children and babies, and she would take a lot of things literally. My mother would say, what are we going to do with you!
Like the Sunday I came home from Sunday school really worried about Jesus. I thought maybe his father would send him to hell, because when he had a chance to raise people from the dead, he raised only his friend. I had never encountered as a little girl such a sense of discrimination. You can’t discriminate among the dead, I thought. I was so worried.
Did you go to high school in Guyana?
Yes, I wasn't quite 16 when I graduated and then had nowhere to go.
By the time you get out of high school you have the equivalent of an Associate degree. You learn so much in your 12 years of schooling. Looking back, I recognize and respect the intensity of it.
Did this come from a British-style school system?
Yes, and I think there was an unspoken awarenesses that we didn't have colleges and universities, so we got as much as we could. There was a college for teachers, for people in agriculture and technical fields like electricity. But, a medical school or regular universities, we didn't have that.
What did you do after high school?
I took mail-order courses, as many as I could in bookkeeping, accounting, commercial law, music…. At 16, I was too young for work. It would be a terrible shame to the family to have your 16-year-old working back then.
Those courses would have made you available for jobs in offices, no?
Yes, so I could make my way to what I called back then a surgeon's school. I had no idea about undergraduate degrees, pre-med. All of that would have been Greek to me.
Why surgery? Why do you think that image came to you?
When I was nine my grandmother bought me a book showing how babies come. There's a picture of the mother's belly, and I started to think, maybe when I grow up, if the mother's belly got too big and it hurt her too much, she could come to me and I would be the doctor and take the baby out so she doesn't have to wait for nine months. That was my 9-year-old mind thinking. I ended up being a missionary teacher starting at 16.
What does it mean to be a missionary teacher?
In Guyana, in the jungle, I visited at least three indigenous villages. It meant teaching the three R's—reading writing and arithmetic—social studies, and so on—and always integrating God's perspective, the religious approach. Then, being in charge of the "young people's society" that met once a week—these were pre-teens and teenagers—visiting sick people, taking worms out of injured sheep. Everything.
Then you met someone.
I did, when I was twenty. He was principal of the school, five years older than me. He went above my head, wrote to my father, visited my parents. They were so impressed with his willingness to say what kind of husband he would be. I ended up getting married to this man who turned out to be a heel and a liar.
At thirty you find yourself in the United States with a husband and two children. Where did you land?
At first, we stayed with friends in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. I stayed home with the children for a while. When I realized I could possibly go to college, I applied to Rutgers and to Upsala College. Both accepted me. I decided on Upsala because it was close to home. My car was totally unreliable. If I had to walk and push a stroller, I could make it to classes.
My advisor asked me what I wanted to do. I said I want to become a surgeon. He explained that every A is worth four points. With all A's your average GPA will be 4.0. Of course I set about to make all A's.
Another advisor said, I've heard you are very good with English. Why do you want to be a surgeon? You help others with their papers. Your professors read your papers to the rest of the faculty. (This is the first time I was hearing this.)
I go home and my husband says to me, if you go to medical school, I will leave you and take the boys. So that was over for me. By then I'd had our third boy. I realized I'd been teaching in Guyana. I know how to do that.
After the undergraduate degree in English, I discovered there was a way to work on your masters and doctorate in the same institution. I applied to Princeton, to Rutgers, and to Drew. All three accepted me. I ended up choosing Drew because they gave me graduate student housing. In all the years of our being here, we'd moved about once a year. So, my prayers and hopes for the boys was met by the offer from Drew. I completed there a Masters in Philosophy and Literature, and a Doctorate in Philosophy.
Who was paying for living and schooling?
I got a full ride. I also received a fellowship from the Southern Regional Educational Board. I worked in the library, also as instructor in SAT and GRE exams. I worked at a supermarket a few nights each week.
Tell us about your teaching work.
I taught at County College of Morris for 17 years--talk about fulfillment. I was Professor of English, taught English, literature, creative writing, and intercultural communication. After that, I ran the Creative Writing Academy at Red Bank's Visual and Performing Arts high school. The students are handpicked. They submit a portfolio, audition, and be interviewed. I had the same students for four years.
It was an unbelievable gift. It wasn't easy to leave the college. I loved what I did there, but I had a chance to try another pond while I could fish, so to speak.
The young people put on spectacular plays in school. They also had to perform their work in front of the school and community at large twice a year. There was room for performing or reciting your work, but a recitation must sound like a recitation. You are doing this in the service of the art. My students won top awards for writing at state, county, and country events.
You were named Monmouth County Arts Educator of the Year in 2016 and Red Bank Teacher of the Year also in 2016.
Yes. Humbly. Also Claus Nobel Educator of Distinction Award. I've since retired, but I am still involved, doing poetry workshops in New Jersey schools.
Gretna, what advice do you have for teachers and parents of high school age children?
This may sound trite, but here it is. Children need to know that they are loved. When they get that at the cellular level, these kids tend to perform for you, to behave for you because they don't want to lose that trust. They need understanding and grace.
Tell me what you mean by grace.
By grace, meaning a student comes to school and tears off at me. People might say, she's disrespecting me. No, she's not. She's disrespecting herself. Your job is to give her enough grace to want to know why.
Yes, she called me some terrible name. Well, I know I am not that. I'm going to haul her to the principal's office to do what? What is going on? Why are you angry? Understanding and grace.
If only we could remember what we were like as teenagers, we wouldn't be so harsh. We would help them talk through whatever is driving them at that moment.
My only rule is that there must be laughter in the classroom every day. For any reason, you have to laugh if you are in my class.
For the parents, keeping up with the youth culture, learning from them big time. I know we'll say they won't talk. Well, we have to speak their language.
How did you discover poetry?
It started at home in Guyana in church and at school. I blame my kindergarten teacher and my grandmother, who’d read us her favorite poem of the week. In school, every Friday was poetry day. By the time you were in kindergarten, you were expected to recite a poem every week.
When I was in kindergarten, I stole my sister's poem and recited it one Friday. It had the word delinquent. The teacher started crying. I realized then that poetry moved people, and I couldn't let it go after that.
When I was in graduate school, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to study for the summer with Abena Busia, an African poet and professor at Rutgers. Also with Dana Gioia. The program was sponsored by Rutgers and held at the County College.
I just kept writing. I was invited to become a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation poet. I continue to conduct workshops for them every year.
And you wrote the gorgeous book, Opening the Drawer: poems, published by Cool Women Press, in addition to several chapbooks.
Gretna, are you an American citizen?
Yes. By the mid-nineties I’d become a citizen.
Was this emotional? I ask because—also—I chose to become a citizen. I remember the moment as if it was yesterday.
Yes. I carried two emotions simultaneously. Am I walking away from my homeland? And, being a citizen allows me that sense of safety and home.
Guyana is my motherland, and the U.S. my home, though I still feel like an outsider in some ways.
Another thing I find inspiring here is that everyone has come from somewhere else. It sort of settles the spirit. Like a little ginger settling the stomach. It felt good to become a member of a global family called America.
What do you feel is special or problematic about this nation?
The opportunities that one can have—or make for oneself. It's kind of like heaven. If you go to heaven, you are stuck. They don't even come back to tell us what it's like, presuming there is a heaven.
You come to the United States and recognize that it's full of flaws, let's say, downright sins. But it's also full of amazing good and goodness. You weigh the two. For me, the good outweighs the bad. But the bad is so prominent, because good doesn't make the news. Young and old, of all races, who do good, for goodness sake! they don't make the news.
Gretna, thank you for speaking to us from the heart. It’s been a privilege to hear your story.
I wonder if you have a poem of yours we could end with.
I can think of a short one from the days when I lived in the jungle.
Down By the River
Week after week I come
to my best-friendly rock
at the edge of this water
pound dirt out of clothes
frustrations out of me
This rock holds up under
the weight of my worries
without judgment or echo
There's no sound
more beautiful
than the river rushing by
minding its own business
Dear readers, I hope you found this conversation with Gretna Wilkinson meaningful and illuminating. Please show the love by checking the heart or leaving a comment.
What here moves you?
If I were to ask you, who were you as a little kid, what would you say to me?
If you are new to these stories, please consider subscribing.
Gretna lives with passion. She's a worthy subject of Breathing in Spanish.
Would love to read your citizenship moment here too, Marlena
You are doing extraordinary work, Marlena! Great writing. How lovely to meet Dr. Gretna Wilkinson. She has an enchanting spirit.