Putting pain to paper

Children and adults who endured childhood trauma and abuse have a reading space to learn how a Canadian-Jamaican chronicled her truth and are encouraged to pen their own stories to overcome.

Kamelah Blair, an award-winning Canadian author, rekindled her Jamaican roots and with the release of her latest book The Storm Within, A Story of Childhood Trauma, she is encouraging Caribbean people to become authors and improve literacy.

“I named the character Catherine. It’s based on Caribbean upbringing with childhood trauma. The basic storyline is that she suffers from childhood trauma and the community doesn’t think that it’s important, they put her down until they know she can do beautiful art. It took someone from abroad to say ‘no, what she is doing is excellent and speak positivity in her’,” she said.

According to Blair, whose parents are Jamaicans, the novel is resourceful for anyone going through, or underwent childhood trauma.

Blair said outside of the story it gives tools for persons going through trauma ways to overcome.

“I believe everybody has a story inside of them. I just know that as a culture, in the Caribbean we are hushed. If we spoke our stories and lived our truth, then we would be better. In the meantime, while doing that is to encourage literacy and to get back to writing,” Blair said.

She believes in today’s world people are too caught up in the phone and are unaware that with ideas, like a vision board, you must see it to manifest it.

“Let’s take it back to basics where writing is an essential tool. We are moving into a digital world yes, but in your personal life, life goals, you need to write things down,” said Blair.

She is on the borderline as it relates to physical copies and eBooks.

“Yes and no … No for business because the world has become so lazy. So, my biggest sales come from audio books, people will listen at the gym, in the car. But for me I love the smell, feel and cracking open a book. It has more value,” she reasoned.

Blair, a 2022 recipient of Canada’s top 100 Black Women to Watch Award, has 17 published books with notable placements in retailers such as Walmart, Target, Barnes and Noble and Chapters.

‘I target people who have been targeted’

Blair told The Gleaner that her target audience fluctuates, but her interest lies in teens and pre-teens.

“My thing is I’ve been through trauma, so the last book is based on the Caribbean for childhood trauma. That was my reason to come to Jamaica and do research and put into that book,” Blair said.

She said one cannot mould a child when they are 16 or 17 years old and so ages nine, 10 or 11 is ideal.

“They must want it that badly and a lot of people don’t want it because the way of the world looks more fabulous than our ways of teaching. I have adults too that have had traumatic, whether verbal, sexual abuse, or childhood trauma. I target people who have been targeted,” Blair said.

She told The Gleaner that she has seen here in Jamaica where children are going through trauma.

Blair said she too had traumatic experiences growing up in Jamaica and put pain to paper and that was when she found her true purpose.

“All through life I was told by teachers, professors all the way up to college ‘you should write a book’. I always journalled and once my mom found my journal and I get a piece of whopping and I had no one to talk to,” Blair said.

It was during the COVID pandemic that she got time to slow down and wrote things from her journal into her first book.

During the period 2020-2022, the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPSFA) received 35,958 reports of alleged cases of children being at the risk of abuse, neglect or otherwise in need of care and protection.

During the period January to April 2023, the number of cases reported were 5,204.

UNICEF reports that approximately 80 per cent of our children in Jamaica experience some form of psychological or physical violence in the name of discipline and that approximately 79 per cent of our children will witness violence in their communities and homes.

andre.williams@gleanerjm.com