Caryn Rae Adams
Camille U. Adams’s testimony in How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir, offers a counterpoint to a growing number of contemporary Caribbean women’s narratives which privilege reconciliation and repair in their reimagining of mother-daughter relationships. This vivacious, accomplished, Trinidadian poet and writer refuses sentimental closure, confronting maternal abandonment, abuse and agency through the trope of unmothering, insisting on rupture and self-reclamation as forms of healing.
I first encountered Camille’s work in an interview published in April 2024 in The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, where she fiercely declared: “… I am a storm. I do not comply with the norm of Caribbean writers, sometimes complicit, hiding behind fiction and not apprising the world.” It was clear that her voice would become part of my current project on Caribbean literary maternity, as it refuses to ‘tiptoe,’ around the lived experiences of women from the region. Our conversation in July 2025 — an Adams in conversation with another Adams; no relation but bound by scholarship and sisterhood — unfolded with warmth and vulnerability; a testament to the power of truth-telling in breaking generational silences.
Caryn Rae Adams: The title of your book, How to be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir is immediately evocative and defiant. What does this phrase mean to you at this stage in your life?
Camille U. Adams: Oh, that’s such a beautiful question! Initially, I thought of the book as a manual – that I’d be explaining the psychology and sociology of the ways a mother or maternal figure can unmother a daughter. Presently, that title holds the breadth and depth of what it means to be unmothered: genealogically, epigenetically, intergenerationally, racially, culturally, and personally. Yet, unmothering extends beyond me personally, as, at this point, there’s simply too much at stake for silence. Too often, we don’t talk about how harms are visited upon children by mothers.
CRA: Evelyn O’Callaghan says that with autobiography, some things may be shaded, concealed and hidden. But I get the feeling that you’re not going to do that. Am I right?
CUA: Girl! There is no time to conceal! I’m writing for a couple of reasons: for the book that I needed at 12 years old, which is when I read Annie John. Annie John was so life changing for me as a child; so many other books, were painting this happy family situation. Later, I’d also read so much nonfiction, and there’d still be this veiling. This person was abused and then there’s a reconciliation, and I’m like, ‘who is this happily-ever-after for?’ It’s irresponsible to the reader and dangerous for the narrator.
CRA: What called you to write this story now?
CUA: When I went home for Carnival in 2018, I nearly drowned at Maracas Beach. Nearly dying was a very transformative experience. That was 14 February 2018, and when I returned to New York, I applied to one PhD programme. I was accepted on 14 February 2019, exactly one year later. In that programme, I was literally writing for my life. I could not leave this Earth without telling the truth and that’s why there has been no shading and no concealing. That’s why I wrote it, for me personally. In terms of the cultural zeitgeist, I also wrote it because I consider myself a layman sociologist.
CRA: Like Erna Brodber!
CUA: Yes. It’s scary to note the rise of narcissism; in microaggressions within the greater society and in familial relationships. The idea of people not being able to discern what an abuser looks like is troubling to me. And for so many of us, our mothers are our first and greatest saboteurs and abusers. In the book, I show my mother being a victim of domestic violence. I show her being mistreated in the worst ways by my father. Given that domestic violence, many people would say rubbish like, ‘well, she did her best’ or ‘be more empathetic’. I wanted to show the knife edge of someone who is abused and is a worse abuser. If you have been or are the victim of abuse and you turn around and abuse your own children, you are a monster.
CRA: They often say that those who are abused turn out to become abusers and you’re absolutely right: just because she was abused does not negate what she did to you.
CUA: We pedestalise motherhood. I want to be the one that says ‘no’, let’s crumble all of these platforms. There is no body nor institution that shouldn’t be interrogated. And motherhood is one of them.
CRA: Would you say that silence plays a role in this story?
CUA: I like the word ‘complicity’. We are complicit. And when I say ‘we’ not ‘me’, because I am not.
CRA: I know! Not you!
CUA: In the Caribbean, we will hear someone getting beaten and you know what we do? We open our curtain, we say, ‘eh eh’; we shhshh, we maco, we gossip and then we pull the curtain back.
CRA: Yes, we do nothing.
CUA: We don’t do anything because that is part of our social makeup; we consider that part of our culture. We laugh at it in calypsos, we make fun, and we keep it moving. That is a form of silence. My sisters also presently maintain relationships with my parents and that is a silencing.
CRA: The Caribbean often treats the mother as sacred and almost untouchable. Did you encounter any internal resistance to telling your truth?
CUA: No, absolutely not! This is a lifetime of processing. I couldn’t have written this in my 20s. In my early 20s I would have gone to therapists and been like, ‘help me to figure out what I need to do; help me to figure out how I can be better, make this [abusive] relationship better’. Not now. In the book there are no changed names, you know?
CRA: Really?
CUA: No. I am innovating the memoir form, and I say that without ego. There is no changing of names, there is no changing of years or locations or events. You could literally take my book and go to Trinidad and find my family. It’s a living text.
CRA: And no fear?
CUA: No fear. The greatest fear I had was that I could die and not have told my truth. When you get to the point of literally looking death in the face, you are not afraid thereafter. I already have no contact with these people.
CRA: Do you think they will try anything legal?
CUA: They could try! It’s only going to be further evincing and substantiating. If you try to silence me, it is because you are wrong. My mother saw the article in the Guardian, and she called me. She was like, ‘Camille, I just want to ask you about this book you’re writing … you’re ruining people’s lives’. The unmitigated gall that allows an abuser to tell you that you’re ruining their life by saying what they’ve done, tells you everything. My mother targeted me very personally, from a child to an adult. To turn around and to try to silence my voice — I can’t tell you all the ways in which my mother tried to stop me from being a writer. People recognise power and now it’s here to tell the world.
CRA: Are you the eldest child?
CUA: I thought I was the eldest of three. Then, at a certain point, I found out that my mother had another daughter in Grenada, whom she left there without telling any of us about [her]. I was like, wow, you have the capacity for multiple abandonments. You desert your children habitually. I grew up as the eldest, and I don’t have to tell you what happens to these girls — the way they can be parentified.
CRA: Yes, they become mums. Little mums to the younger children.
CUA: That is why I have no sentimentality about motherhood, because mothers know what they’re doing.
CRA: Do you want to be a mother?
CUA: No, I don’t because I was made a mother so young. But I don’t want to say that is the [only] cause. When I think about all of the ways in which I want to nurture myself; to write; to see the world, I have no time. I’ve never had cravings for children, and I think that’s the only way that you should become a mother; if you feel that you are going to provide for your child, not just financially, but in terms of time, love and in really wanting them.
CRA: The term unmothered suggests absence, but also autonomy. Is your story about estrangement or is it about claiming space for yourself outside of that relationship?
CUA: It is about both. Estrangement is not just about miserably going no contact in reaction to abuse. I want you to think about that very nuanced place where you accept estrangement. In the acceptance of it, you are accepting that belonging to these people would require so much compromise of yourself.
CRA: I know and that’s not healthy.
CUA: That is not healthy to say the very least. If you belonged, you would have to cut off your true self. You would have to compromise all of your values to belong to people who could never give you love or make you feel whole. Once you have unbelonged, you are quick to note when something is abusive and unhealthy.
CRA: Do you see this type of letting go as a form of healing?
CUA: Yes. Yearning is an open wound, and if unchecked, you could devote your energy trying to fix what cannot be fixed. The process that is the acceptance of estrangement allows you to let go of the desire that things could have been different. You are in control of yourself. There’s nothing you can do to change an abuser from being abusive. So, letting go is healing, because it allows you to say ‘no’ [to others] but say ‘yes’ to yourself, your truth and your talents.
CRA: Were there particular writers or texts that gave you the courage to tell this story without apology?
CUA: I wouldn’t say gave me the courage but that kept me company. Literature has done that for me. Kincaid gave me my people as a young reader. Not just Annie John, but Lucy and Autobiography of My Mother. And, while writing as an adult, specific memoirs like Jaquira Diaz’s and Mariah Carey’s.
CRA: What made you choose memoir as the form for this story? Did you ever consider telling it as fiction?
CUA: Nope! I never considered telling it as fiction. It’s memoir plus. I refuse to change one thing.
CRA: Memoir plus. I like that!
CUA: The title is How to be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir. At first, my editors wanted to publish it as How to be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Story, and I said ‘no’, we are not using any word ‘story’ because it’s not a story. Memoir was the only genre. And I had to exceed memoir because too many people still stay within neat lines in memoir. I needed mine to hold people to account. I am a slap in the face.
CRA: A much-needed slap in the face.
CUA: Exactly. I’m calling everybody out. Let us recognise what sort of system we’ve created and what we are existing in.
CRA: Do you think your family are going to read it?
CUA: Probably. My publisher asked me: ‘Camille, are you prepared for what will come with this? Are you prepared for there being no way back?’ There is nothing worse than not fulfilling your life’s purpose. That is the only thing that I am afraid of.
CRA: It is your truth, and once you feel good within yourself for putting it out there, that’s all that matters!
CUA: I feel good! The book is good! The writing is good! I am a talented writer!
CRA: You are. I saw the excerpts online, and that’s how I knew immediately that you were a poet. It’s very lyrical.
CUA: Thank you. I am a scholar as well as a writer. It is meant to be an academic, creative, cultural and spiritual work.
CRA: If readers take one thing from your book, especially Caribbean daughters who have struggled with unmothering, what would it be?
CUA: I’ve wanted someone to ask me that. I like how you said Caribbean daughters.
CRA: Yeah, because I feel that this is a work that will really resonate with them.
CUA: I would want three things. One, unmothering is not your fault, period. Two, you are love, not loved. Three, there is a future ahead of you.
CRA: Girl, there is a future ahead of you, too. This book is going to be so helpful for many who feel the same way but can’t articulate it. I am lucky that I have a good mother. Through her, I have had a lot of othermothers in my life — teachers, godmothers, aunties — women who have shaped me and inspired me in so many ways. I’m very lucky.
CUA: Three things to say to that: one, that is the greatest resource, the greatest blessing, the greatest joy, having that love. Two, this interview is such a credit to you because so many people who have beautiful mother-daughter relationships do not want to hear [from] or engage with other people [who are estranged from their family]. So, the fact that you take that on is a wonderful thing. Three, I was unmothered, and from that spurs further unmothering. I want to show you the inverse being true, where your mother is so beautifully mothering that you gained many othermothers.
CRA: Final question: how has writing this story changed you?
CUA: It has freed me. I have no yearnings for a mother, the mother, that mother.
CRA: I’m elated for you. Life is too short to be unhappy.
CUA: I got to tell the truth and that is how the book has changed me. It’s given the child Camille complete respect — I had it before, but it’s widened it. The child survived these people. And I am unafraid.
CRA: Unafraid and free.
CUA: I’m unafraid and free. Most importantly, it [the book] has freed me from longing for my sisters. That was still a sore point that would hurt my heart.
CRA: Thank you so much for talking to me! I’m excited for you and I cannot wait to read the book!
CUA: Let me just say — you were exactly the right person to have this conversation with. I’ve spoken to others, but no one Caribbean, no one who got it without needing translation. You came in with your own understanding, your own respect for what unmothering really means, and that made all the difference. So, thank you!
