A writer's life: a country's transition.

• Author: McClaurin, Irma
• Position: Belize novelist Zee Edgell

I discovered that by writing I could overcome some of the obstacles that faced me as a woman, a Belizean, and later on as someone who was living away from Belize. It helps me to be. If I don't write--I feel unconnected.

The soft voice of Zee Edgell belies the passion, conviction, and determination that fuel her writing and create the people and events of her novels. All her works are set in her native Belize, and in the thirteen intervening years since that country became independent, Edgell has single-handedly become its most widely recognized international literary voice.

Born Zelma Inez Tucker on October 21, 1940, to Veronica and Clive Tucker, both Creole, Edgell documents in her novels the changing history of Belize and the development of a national identity based upon the country's rich ethnic and diverse cultural traditions. In addition to Creoles (African, African-British mixture, and West Indian), mestizos, Mopan- and Ketchi-speaking Maya, Garifuna (African and Amerindian), and East Indians, as well as Mennonites and a small group of expatriate Canadians and Americans live side by side in the country today and contribute to the rich mixture that is Belizean culture.

The act of placing place pen to paper is often described by writers as a compulsion--a need. For Edgell, it is no different. Writing for her is cathartic, a means of turning pain and difficulties into creative empowerment. Her desire to write grew out of a childhood in Belize that was connected to a supportive family and informed by a strong sense of community.

I think both my mother and father had very hard lives. Neither was formally educated, but they set about educating themselves through night school and whatnot. And then my extended family, they were very much rooted in the community and they were always concerned about Belize. Belize was everything to them and I grew up with the sense that the Belize I used to know would always be there. . . . I grew up feeling that it was one of my jobs to help other Belizeans in whatever ways I could, and I saw examples of that on both sides of my family.

The longing to do something for her country became even more intense after Edgell returned home to Belize from Jamaica, where she worked as a newspaper reporter, and from London, where she studied journalism. Each return since has been intensified by a recognition that the Belize of her childhood was disappearing. Later, Edgell left Belize again for long stretches to work with her American husband, Al Edgell, in such agencies as CARE, Save the Children USA, and the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Somalia. She also has lived off and on in the United States and continues research on her dissertation, "Images of the Caribbean in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing," through the Department of English at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. All of this movement gave Edgell a sense of "disconnectedness" from Belize. She says: "My novels are an attempt to reconstruct the fragmented images and myriad memories of Belize."

While living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and the United States, Edgell, inspired by her desire to preserve the Belize of the past, wrote Beka Lamb, which was published by Heinemann in 1982. Set in 1951, the novel chronicles the birth of the nationalist movement in then British Honduras. Edgell says she wanted to capture the optimism and solidarity of that period, when the citizens of British Honduras rejected their colonial status.

The novel evolved in response to Edgell's memories of the general mood of the country during the late sixties and seventies when many...