Dr. Yabome Gilpin-Jackson is a Sierra Leonean-Canadian scholar, organizational development consultant and writer. She has published several stories on identity and immigration including Identities: A Short Story Collection and Ancestries. In this interview with Poda-Poda Stories, she talks about the power of words in crafting new narratives.
Poda-Poda Stories: Thank you for joining the Poda-Poda. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work as a writer and scholar.
Yabome Gilpin-Jackson: Professionally, I identify as a scholar-practitioner in the broad applied social science field of human/organization development. That means generally that I am concerned with how humans organize themselves to achieve positive experiences and outcomes. When I am practicing on the Human Development end of the spectrum, I am working with groups and communities working on social change challenges such as for example working with immigrant service professionals supporting new immigrants and refugees in their resettlement journey and overcoming systemic barriers as well as processing past traumatic experiences. When working on the Organization Development end of the spectrum, I am supporting leaders and groups in organizations with their complex organization/systems and people development challenges, helping them through organizational changes and transformations and generally supporting them to shift from where they may be feeling stuck to where they aspire to be. This background 100% translates into my writing. I want to provoke and inspire people through my writing in ways that are transformative. That means writing to evoke emotions that inspire different insights and challenging assumptions in ways that open readers up to new/different possibilities.
Poda-Poda Stories: You have a rich collection of short stories. Tell us how you started out as a writer.
Gilpin-Jackson: I started writing to respond to a deep desire to write for a broader audience than academic higher education audiences and specifically for Black and African audiences on the continent and in the diaspora. I started writing way back in elementary and secondary school and recall teachers telling me I was a good writer. I won essay competitions in my schools or was often the recipient of the best creative writing paper. One standout for me was that an essay I wrote via British Council for a Martin Luther King Day writing competition won one of the top 3 prizes in Sierra Leone at the time.
Over the years after that, I stopped writing creatively for a long time as I focused on my academic and professional growth. At some point though as I became increasingly frustrated with lack of visibility and representation of my own experiences and the many diversities of Black/African experiences I was exposed to, I started writing as a way to process these experiences of visible-invisibility---being part of a global society yet finding oneself missing from available narratives altogether or included in token representations that felt anemic to me. I wanted to write in ways that were more accessible than my scholar-practitioner papers and chapters, easy to read and open to all.
I also found it most rewarding to capture and study these social moments that may have happened in everyday interactions, like the kind of identity questions I am often asked (where are you from? where are you really from?) and turn them into stories. That is how my short story collections Identities and Ancestries and the flash fiction, Destinies happened.
Poda-Poda Stories: What is your writing process like?
Gilpin-Jackson: My process is both planned and spontaneous. Since I was a child, I would often find myself daydreaming…grabbing a moment I think is interesting, inspiring or challenging and making up stories and scripts in my head with characters that emerged from that moment and would make up multiple alternate endings. Now, I intentionally reflect on what I want to write about, but I also carry a physical notepad or take electronic notes on my phone whenever I’m out and about and find myself with characters jumping into my head from random everyday interactions.
Yabome Gilpin-Jackson receiving the prize for the Martin Luther King Day essay competition at the American Embassy in Sierra Leone, circa 1993.
Poda-Poda Stories: You’ve written about immigration, identity and trauma? Why are those themes important to you? What inspires you to write these stories?
Gilpin-Jackson: All these themes are present in my writing because they are part of my own lived experiences as well as some of the underlying themes of Black/African experiences whether on the continent or the diaspora. I was born in Germany, grew up in Sierra Leone where I completed elementary and secondary schooling as well as started university at Fourah Bay College. I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees in Canada and the United States. I am a naturalized immigrant to Canada and arrived there as a refugee because of the Sierra Leone blood diamond war. All these experiences have shaped me and inspire my work in the world. In my doctoral work I researched the post-traumatic growth experiences of war survivors and examined how peoples of African descent experience the process of being transformational leaders despite and often because of experiences with global systems of oppression.
My writings include these themes to make visible different dimensions of these kinds of experiences through the characters I create that embody and transcend these experiences. All writing, after all, is somewhat autobiographical, as no matter how broadly we research and extend our gaze to create characters and stories beyond ourselves, the stories we write are formed first from within the writers’ consciousness and lenses of the world.
It is also important to note that my writings extend beyond these themes that have often been written in stereotypical and trauma-laden ways, to intentionally create Black/African characters also create their own belonging and exercise agency in all circumstances. I am always thinking about what it means to claim one’s place in the world and live out fully open to sharing the gifts of oneself. To live and not hide, no matter the cards one is dealt.
Poda-Poda Stories: How does your career as a consultant inform your work as a writer?
Gilpin-Jackson: So much of consulting is relationship-building and relationships are the soil for inspiring connection, belonging and the power of human love, used in its broadest sense.Relationships are also where we learn what lies in the shadows of our human consciousness and emotional reactivity. It is in relationships that we touch on people’s deepest fears and where the darker, harder side of humanity can show up. Relationships, professional or otherwise, can both nourish and hurt us, but even in the hurt, we can learn to productively engage humanity past our pains in ways that grow us. I have learnt as much about myself and human relationships as a consultant, leader and colleague as I have in other contexts. Often, the seeds for my characters are sown in everything from casual professional conversations to the boardroom dilemmas I may be privy to. In the short story collection Identities for example, the story The Conference is based on an amalgamation of dilemmas I wrestled with at a conference and across professional interactions I’d had or been privy to.
Poda-Poda Stories: What advice would you give to young creative writers living in Sierra Leone?
Gilpin-Jackson: Write your lives, tell your stories, imagine new narratives to the social struggles you see, experience or are aware of and write them into life. Your perspectives matter to the world. Some of the greatest writers of Black and African literature have written from the perspective of centering Africa and Afrocentrism that continue to inspire generations—Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and so many more. We need more present-day Sierra Leonean writers like Yema Lucinda Hunter, Adelaide Casely-Hayford who tell stories set in Sierra Leone/highlighting our histories as well as writers who uplift Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism now.
We can choose to create worlds. So if you believe you have stories to share, share them and keep sharing them until words form beliefs and beliefs become reality through actions. Words are life-giving, magical, powerful. Our humanity has always grown from words that turned to action so act on your writing dreams and share your writing until people start noticing.
Poda-Poda Stories: How has writing saved your life?
Gilpin-Jackson: As a former refugee, I struggle with the human suffering all around us that has escalated with the wars and geopolitics of this era. I am deeply troubled by the hunger crises in our world and by the planetary challenges of these times. As a mentor, coach, leader and just a human in the world, I am regularly witnessing how the mental strains of these times are manifesting in people’s lives and in the organizations and institutions around us. Back when I had my creative writing resurgence to process my inner conflicts and social dilemmas, I found an outlet to make sense of the world.
Strangers have reached out to tell me how my writing has saved them are saving me. They remind me I can still write about my inner troubles and the circumstances around me and imagine better futures for all. They are pulling me in from the high tides and taking me back to why I write, motivating me to return to my writing pages (screens!) which have needed a lifeline. I thank them for throwing me the line and I am reminded to keep writing so that I might throw it back out.