W

riter and storyteller Brenda Flanagan said she was blessed to be able to travel the world and nurture long-lasting friendships wherever she went.

Flanagan has served as a cultural ambassador for the US Department of State since 2003. In late October, she made her first visit to Indonesia.

'€œI hope I'€™ll be able to come back here again. I really enjoyed my time here in Indonesia,'€ she told The Jakarta Post.

One of the most exciting times she had in the archipelago was when she visited literary art students of Padjadjaran University in Bandung, West Java.

At the opening of the event, one of her famous stories, The Girl from Bahia, was read and performed by a wayang golek troupe featuring the jester and servant character of Cepot.

'€œIt was so fantastic and really, really special. The puppet master had a different interpretation of the story; he made it funny. When I read the story people cry, but when he read it people laughed,'€ Flanagan recalled.

'€œI was supposed to read my story after, but I refused. I got upstaged by a puppet,'€ she said with a big laugh, joking that she took the Cepot puppet home as a husband.

Flanagan is a senior English professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. She teaches, among others, creative writing, African American literature, Caribbean literature, world literature, colonial-postcolonial literature and expository writing.

'€œEver since I was a child I always wanted to be a writer. I love books, I love reading.

'€œI thought that writing books would allow people faraway to be able to have some sense of my culture. I love books for that reason,'€ she said.

Flanagan was born in Trinidad in 1949, the 12th of 14 children in an impoverished family whose father was a barman and mother a laundress.

She started writing poetry when she was 10 and by the time she was 13 she had been singing as part of a calypso style of music and had earnt money from it. But when she was 14, she had to leave school to help support her family, which was only taken care of by her mother.

'€œI also thought that if I became a journalist, maybe I would get an opportunity to travel around the world. While I loved writing poems, short stories and all of that, I wanted to become a journalist,'€ she said.

She worked for a time in a factory before she became a trainee reporter of The Nation, the newspaper of the then ruling People'€™s National Movement Party.

In 1967, she left Trinidad for the US. There, she took various jobs, including a family assistant to jazz artist and activist Nina Simone, a routing clerk at a telephone company, a sales consultant and an accounts clerk.

 In 1975, then a single mother, she began undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan.

'€œI went to college to study journalism because I wanted to write feature stories about what was happening around the world,'€ she said.

At the university, she won the prestigious Hopwood Award for her short stories, a novel and drama. She went on to pursue a career as an academic and a writer.

'€œI particularly like to write stories of women. I'€™m fascinated by the lives of women, so I write a lot of stories about them. I like to write about the problems that women experience, but also how they manage to survive and how they manage to achieve the light,'€ she said.

As US cultural ambassador, she has served in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Kuwait, Tajikistan, Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Panama, India and the Czech Republic.

Besides giving lectures on African American, Caribbean, and world literature, she performs her work and engages in dialogue with citizens, students, professors, creative artists and journalists on subjects such as public policy, diversity, politics and race.

'€œThe American [government] can'€™t tell me what to say and it can'€™t keep me from saying anything. I'€™m very free to speak about the things I want to say. That'€™s why I agreed to do it. I don'€™t have to be diplomatic at all,'€ she said.

Flanagan said she considered being able to travel the globe as the biggest piece of fortune in her life.

'€œMy wealth is being able to travel all over the world to meet wonderful people and to make lasting friendships. To create a good impression of myself is to know that I'€™ve been of use. To be of use is really important. For me, I have been of use,'€ she said.