With Frances-Anne Solomon
There’s a point in every artist’s journey where instinct begins to outrun intention. Where you stop trying to prove that what you’re doing makes sense and start trusting that it will find meaning on its own.
For Frances-Anne Solomon, that moment has repeated itself across decades, from early theatre productions and BBC radio dramas to the founding of CaribbeanTales and now Garvey’s Ghost, the irreverent, award-winning web and TV series heading into its second season.
When we spoke, she told me simply:
“I think the key thing has always been joy.”
That word — joy — sits like a refrain in her creative language. Joy not as an escape, but as resistance. Joy as the engine behind work that is unflinching, mischievous, and often controversial.
THE LAUGHTER THAT STARTED IT ALL
“We laughed all the time,” she said, recalling the earliest days of Garvey’s Ghost. “We laughed without knowing why, without knowing if what we were doing was any good or even allowed.”
That laughter would eventually turn into the heartbeat of a series that took one of Pan- Africanism’s most revered figures — Marcus Garvey — and reimagined him as an impish, giggling ghost haunting a West Indian matriarch in 1950s Toronto.
The premise sounds outrageous until you hear the story behind it. While artist-in- residence at Toronto Metropolitan University, Frances-Anne met a Scottish student who wanted to shoot something with her. “I’d just optioned Denham Jolly’s memoir,” she explained, “and I thought of this story — a young Jamaican immigrant arriving in Toronto in 1955 to stay at a boarding house run by Miss Violet Williams, the Lady President of the UNIA.”
It began as a half-hour drama. But during a workshop, an actor said he wanted to play Marcus Garvey. “Everyone laughed — Garvey was dead in the story! But he said, I’ll play him as a ghost. And that one suggestion changed everything.”
THE AUDACITY OF JOY
What followed was a creative leap that would have frightened most filmmakers. Turning Garvey into a comic figure — a cross between Garvey and Anansi, as actor Owen “Blakka” Ellis later put it — was both risky and radical.
Letters from Garvey associations soon followed, asking how she could make fun of such a monumental figure. Her answer was clear:
“Part of our culture is to deal with trauma through humor. That’s what we do.”
For Frances-Anne, humor is not deflection; it’s reclamation.
“We didn’t have the right to tell our stories for so long,” she said. “We don’t remember. We were brainwashed into British traditions. So I’ve always felt it’s my responsibility to make it up — because we didn’t inherit enough. I can do whatever I want. I’m a child of this soil.”
In her world, laughter is not light — it’s liberation. It’s how we make meaning from what was once meant to silence us.
The Stories That Posses You
When she speaks of storytelling, Frances-Anne uses the language of embodiment, not career.
“Some stories just possess me,” she said. “Not in a bad way, they just take hold. I can’t keep them inside.”
That room has always been full. Her creative process is deeply collaborative, shaped by improvisation, feedback, and a kind of joyful surrender.
“It’s never isolation,” she said. “I work with too many other people. I borrow their ideas. I use them. It’s a rich process — and yes, I make the final decisions, but it’s never just me.”
The Diaspora As One Story
Frances-Anne’s work has always spanned borders because her life has. Born in England to Trinidadian parents, she grew up in Switzerland, Guyana, Trinidad, Denmark, Venezuela, the U.S., and Canada before eventually returning to the Caribbean.
“I’ve always been a child of the diaspora. Everywhere I go, I find Caribbean people. It always made perfect sense to tell stories of that reality.”
That philosophy gave birth to CaribbeanTales and the Cross-Continental Forum, both dedicated to connecting storytellers across the African and Caribbean diasporas.
“Cross-continental was about bringing together the communities I knew in England with those I knew in South Africa, Ghana, Canada. It was self-evident to me — the same story was being told everywhere. Garvey’s Ghost,” she explained, “sits squarely in that continuum. It’s not a departure — it’s an evolution.”
“It’s a Pan-African story,” she said, “about a Caribbean community in 1950s Canada. And I know it’s going to resonate because that experience — of migration, of holding humor and hardship together — is universal across our diaspora.”
SERIOUS FOOLISHNESS
Frances-Anne calls Garvey’s Ghost “serious foolishness” — a phrase that captures her dual gift for depth and irreverence. She’s proud that the series honors “the generation who went before us,” the ones who survived the cold, the racism, the absurdity — and still found reasons to laugh.
“We think our lives are tough,” she said. “But it’s nothing compared to what those people went through. And yet they laughed, and they gave us so much to stand on.”
Not everyone understood her approach. At one screening, a viewer asked why she made it a comedy. “Because it is serious,” she laughed. “But also because that’s how we’ve survived.”
LEGACY, REVISITED
When asked about her legacy, Frances-Anne surprised me with her answer.
“I don’t think the next generation needs my advice,” she said. “They’re brilliant. The future is bright. What I’d say instead is — be kind to us. To yourselves. To those who came before.”
After forty-five years of telling stories — from What My Mother Told Me to A Winter Tale, Hero, and now Garvey’s Ghost — she’s come to see creativity not as a possession, but as Grace.
“Creativity is a gift,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t belong to us. The opportunity to live a creative life — that’s the gift.”
There’s something deeply freeing about that statement. It’s not humility disguised as wisdom; it’s the hard-won truth of someone who has built worlds out of laughter, risk, and faith.
And perhaps that’s the real ghost haunting Garvey’s Ghost — not Marcus Garvey himself, but the spirit of invention that refuses to rest.
| LATEST NEWS: GARVEY’S GHOST |
| Garvey’s Ghost was screened at Skylark Film Festivalto an enthusiastic audience.Star of Garvey’s Ghost, Owen “Blakka” Ellis, appeared on CVM Sunrise to discuss the film and its cultural impact.Garvey’s Ghost was also featured in The Gleaner, in an interview with director Frances-Anne Solomon and actor Owen “Blakka” Ellis.The 2025 Rex Nettleford Arts Conference featured a special screening of Garvey’s Ghost for a packed international audience of Caribbean artists and academics. |
About the Hudson Spotlight™ Series
Hudson Spotlight™ is a long-form narrative series created and written by Giselle Hudson. Each feature is an immersive, story-driven portrait that listens deeply and writes widely, capturing not just what someone does but how their life, work and inner world come together in real time.
Built on Giselle’s practice as a Strategic Alignment Facilitator™, the series goes beyond traditional profiles. Every piece is crafted like a living composition: researched in depth, shaped through intimate conversation, and written to reveal the deeper architecture of a creative life—the motivations, turning points, and hard-won clarity that make enduring work possible.
The result is slow, layered storytelling that honours complexity and leaves readers with more than admiration; it leaves them with insight, resonance and the quiet charge of possibility.
About Cross Continental Conversations
CaribbeanTales Media Group (CTMG) and Hudson Spotlight™ are collaborating to share the stories of exceptional Caribbean creatives in richly told, long-form narratives. In the newest feature, writer and Strategic Alignment Facilitator™ Giselle Hudson sits with acclaimed composer Dominique Le Gendre to trace a life where music becomes both memory and map.
This partnership celebrates the depth and range of Caribbean artistry while giving readers a powerful experience of narrative journalism rooted in clarity, creativity and alignment.
