My sixth-form English literature teacher, Mr. Maxwell Coore, had a profound love for Shakespeare. His favourite play was the pastoral comedy As You Like It, which I read a year before entering his class. After seven weeks of Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, our professor was not pleased with the students' apathetic treatment of his favourite writer, but found my engagement with the text, he later revealed, unconventional yet intriguing.

We bonded over Shakespeare, meeting most Friday evenings at the back of Titchfield High, a former British fort, seated on forgotten colonial cannons where we lauded the genius of Shakespeare. As time went on, Mr. Coore began to tell me about his life, his family, and how he fell in love with literature. I discovered in him an intellect that I had never before encountered. He deconstructed literature and life with such ease - the ease, I thought, of the black waves of the Caribbean Sea rippling inward and outward over oblivion.

Our meetings later became extended sessions in his dilapidated teacher's flat, in an 18th century great house, its drawing room rumoured to have been a famous meeting place for English privateers. The sessions at the great house turned frantically to books: great books by great authors, books I believed only existed in dreams, were right there on his shelves!

I read all that he suggested: Tolstoy, Achebe, Garvey, Hardy, Donne. Indirectly, Mr. Coore, whom I now call Dada, and I developed a sort of Plato-to-Socrates relationship, one in which he gave me weekly assignments. I felt magnified and inspired, and began to pay more serious attention not only to my critical but also my creative writing.

The first poem I thought worthy of showing Dada, a rickety sonnet called 'Greek Letter', written in the spirit of and for my favourite poet, Derek Walcott, was met with a long pause. The house and street ricocheted in my head, the sea flooded the Blue Mountains, and Titchfield went under with cannon blasts, leaving puffs of blank papers in the world. He said nothing at first, only took the soft lead pencil with which he liked to write, underlined some lines, placed in the margins a few exclamation and question marks, and wrote something at the bottom of the page.

After Dada left the room I picked through his pencil marks, wincing at some of the more obvious mistakes. I took the question marks to mean that the lines were oblique and exclamation points indicated some promise. For days I carried around in my head the comment he wrote at the bottom of the page: Magnanimous, kindle this fire and join the masters, son.

In that line was all my vision, as writer, poet, and human being.

My meetings, and later friendship, with Mr. Coore was a school away from school. What I valued at Titchfield High, from rudimentary learning to extra-curricular activities, I cherished in Dada. The books read in English class only to complete assignments were reread in his teacher's flat for their creative and intellectual enjoyment. Through poems, plays, and prose I encountered a myriad of characters and experiences, proving to me that no tale was too small to tell, no person without interest. Indeed, every human story was important, eternal, sacred.

END

- Ishion Hutchinson