Zee Edgell, Belize's foremost author of fiction, has passed. She died on Sunday at home in Saint Louis Missouri after a battle with cancer. She was 80 years old.
Edgell started her life as just another Belize City girl in pre colonial Belize - but, by the time of her passing, she was a celebrated international author who had penned four novels including Time and the River, The Festival of San Joaquin, In Times like these, and Beka Lamb.
The first of course was Beka Lamb, a seminal work still considered a Caribbean classic coming of age story.
Tonight, in part one of our story celebrating Edgell's life and legacy, we look at how she arrived on the literary scene in 1982 - a self taught novelist, fully formed and ready to give the world a story for all time. Cherisse Halsall reports.
If you went to high school in Belize you were made to read a few titles among them Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, and Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb.
It's a work that's become iconic - published a year after Independence. It's as much a coming of age book for the titular character as it is for the country of Belize. A story that came from the mind of a woman who had lived a thousand lives before she wrote its first page.
Holly Edgell, Zee's Daughter
"She loved to read and actually her favorite and first loved book was Tom Sawyer, the adventures of Tom Sawyer so I think that she loved to read and she always I mean, up until she passed she was reading and so that was a big driver and then it's fictionalized, it's depicted in Beka Lamb where freshman Beka wins a writing contest an essay contest and this was a shock to my mother as well as her family because she didn't think she was that great of a writer."
But despite her initial self-doubt, Edgell would continue writing, eventually becoming the very first editor at the Reporter. Her Daughter Holly, also a Journalist says it was the skills she mastered in Journalism that later allowed her to craft her stories.
Holly Edgell, Zee's Daughter
"Her dedication to learning and teaching herself a lot of different things she would also attribute it to training as a journalist she did train additionally as a journalist, and as a journalist you learn to organize your thoughts you develop your eye for detail and your ear for dialogue and your sense this comes first then this, this, then, this in order to tell a story in a way that is compelling and satisfying so a combination of her training as a journalist her natural talent and her drive to do something and capture Belize on the page a Belize that she knew that thank goodness we do have it because that Belize is no longer real with all its problems and challenges and issues, but also a kind of magic and special time in her life."
A special time that was permeated by her native languages so much so that when Edgell began to write she crafted her prose out of both English and Creole.
Ivory Kelly, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing
"Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb serves as a great example of what Belizean and Caribbean, Anglophone literature is and that is the usage of Belize creole is greatly managed in Beka Lamb and so for me both as a writer and a writer of teacher I have turned to Beka Lamb as exemplar. Now a days it's wonderful that our students take for granted that the usage of our indigenous language is our local languages within the Caribbean is the norm in the Caribbean writing these days. In this weekend's publication of the Amandala I just published an article in which I am survey a 100 year's of creole usage in Belizean literature and Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb is highlighted among the examples of great use, so it stands as one of the great models of language uses and embracing of our Belizean language and culture identity in our literature."
We'll have part two of the story for you tomorrow night where we dive into how Beka Lamb fits into finds its place in the Central American Literary canon and how Edgell used storytelling to breathe life into history.
Zee Edgell's children Holly and Randall Edgell have arranged for her to be buried here in her native Belize. We'll let you know when a date is set for her funeral.
