Conversation with Eleanor Shearer: Filling the Archival Gaps in Caribbean Storytelling

In this episode of Go There with Tresha Lionel, I sit down with Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home. In it, a runaway slave moves across the Caribbean in search of her children taken from her. We dive into the challenges of writing about lives erased or reduced by history. What does it mean to rebuild stories from records that saw people as property or numbers? And what responsibility do writers have when imagining the undocumented? Instead of just “filling gaps,” we explore the risks and power in speaking for those silenced, and what it means to write with care after erasure.Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, we explore how this approach has evolved to consider the space of possibility within the gaps of historical narratives, where imagination does not distort truth but insists on the humanity that official records denied.We also talk about oral storytelling, not just as a supplement, but as an archive itself. In the Caribbean, memory thrives in spoken stories passed down through generations.This isn’t just a literary conversation. It’s a call to look closer, question what we accept as history, and face the cost of what’s been lost.