“LET MY THOUGHTS COME TO YOU
WHEN I AM GONE,
LIKE THE GLOW OF SUNSET
AT THE MARGIN OF STARRY SILENCE”
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
How do you sum up a life entire in only a few minutes? How can you capture eighty years of an amazing, rich, beautiful existence in anything less than a novel? And how could anyone do so when the subject is Belize’s most prolific and celebrated writer and a beloved teacher? Impossible.
Zelma Inez Tucker was born on Cleghorn Street, in Belize City, British Honduras, on October 21, 1940, to Veronica and Clive Tucker – a notable Creole Family; one of a bevy of siblings, some of whom I always refer to as the Fabulous Tucker Girls : Martha, Zee, Laura, Monica and Ava. Her brothers were Barry, Clive Jr., Alexander and Lenton. Her family was large and loving.
Zee, like many of us, attended Holy Redeemer School, and St. Catherine Academy, and it can fairly be said that she lived much of the time and places featured in perhaps her most celebrated novel, Beka Lamb. Zee Edgell’s compelling novel of a span of time in the life of 14-year-old Beka Lamb is a redolent capsule of a bygone Belize City through the observant eye and knowing pen of a girl who was once herself 14.
This is how it begins: “On a warm November day, Beka Lamb won an essay contest at St. Cecilia’s Academy, situated not far from the front gate of his Majesty’s Prison on Milpa Lane.”
And just then you have no doubt that this was here, in Belize, and it was about an SCA girl. It is so tempting—and I confess that I truly could not resist the temptation—to read Zee’s debut novel, published a year after our Independence in 1981, to see if I could data-mine her work of fiction for clues about the young life of a writer who so obviously knew what she was writing about; a girl who, like Beka, was no “flat-rate Belize Creole, but a person with a ‘high mind’”. Like Beka, Zee was destined to make the shift from “the washing bowl underneath the house bottom to books in a classroom overlooking the Caribbean Sea” — and we are all the richer for it.
Lest there be any doubt that Zee was destined to be a writer, you should know that at the tender age of 18, she worked as a trainee reporter at The Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica, in the late 1950s. These were heady, turbulent times in our Caribbean, and Zee was obviously alive to the struggle of Black Caribbean leaders for independence and self-determination.
In 1965, Zee earned a Diploma in journalism from Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in England, and the following year, 1966, Zee began her first stint of teaching at St. Cecilia’s Academy, I mean, SCA which was situated not far from the front gate of his Majesty’s Prison on Gaol Lane.
While still teaching, Zee also became one of the founders of The Reporter newspaper in 1967, and in 1968, she met the wonderful Alvin George Edgell, who had come to Belize with the development agency, CARE. Al and Zee were married in Belize in 1968.
And in short order came the twin loves of their lives – Holly, a year later in 1969, and Randall in 1975. Al’s work took Zee and the children to Nigeria, the United Kingdom, to Afghanistan, to Bangladesh and to Somalia — where he wound up his development career working for Save the Children.
Zee, Al and their young family settled in Belize City in the early 1980s and Al began to do consulting work and served as a lecturer at the emerging University College of Belize (now the University of Belize). Zee, in true triple threat Superwoman fashion, came home to teach again at SCA (where I had the honor to be in her class) and also served as the Director of the Belize Women’s Bureau (also known as the Women’s Dept.), 1981-82.
And if that were not enough, her debut novel, Beka Lamb, which was also the very first Belizean novel published after Belize gained its independence, in that same year earned the 1982 Fawcett Society Book Prize.
There should be no doubt that Zee cared deeply about women, development and our place in the new Belize. From 1986 to 1988, Zee served again as Director of the Women’s Department under a different political administration.
No wonder, then, that all her novels feature women, living, loving, struggling and striving in Belize:
• In Times Like These, her 1991 novel, who most readers in the know regard as her most autobiographical sketch, featuring Pavana Leslie, who returns with her children to Belize after many years abroad, and who fights to come to terms with her past;
• 1997’s The Festival of San Joaquin, in which Marina is released from prison on a three-year probation for the murder of her husband and returns to her home in a Mestizo community in Belize, and which explores the dark territory of domestic violence and a machista culture;
• And in 2007, Time and the River, about Leah Lawson, daughter of a slave owner and a slave woman in Belize, dreaming of a better future and forced to make difficult choices.
Writers like Zee are gifted beings who hold up a mirror to our faces so that we are obliged to see who we are. There is no gift more precious, or more rare, and Zee had that by the bucket-full. And she clearly loved to teach. I can attest to the fact that she was a wonderful mentor, guide and teacher. In 1988-89, Zee served as a lecturer at the University College of Belize (now the University of Belize).
In the early 1990s, Zee was offered an assistant professor position at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, and Al and Zee moved to Kent, where Zee became a professor of English with tenure from 1992 to 2009. She retired from Kent State University in 2009, as a full professor of English. Talk about a “high-minded person”!
In 2007, our Zee was made a Member of the British Empire for her services to literature and the community; and in 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature, from the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, 2009. I believe she is the sole Belizean writer so far to be so distinguished by my alma mater.
After retirement, Al and Zee moved to St. Louis, to be closer to Holly, Randy and Randy’s growing family.
But Zee left her family (and us) too soon in 2020, but those of us who believe, know that she is with her soulmate of 52 years, the incomparable Alvin Edgell. Al and Zee are survived by their son Randall and his wife Emily Shavers Edgell, and their daughter Holly; as well as by three grandchildren: Isaac Edgell, Sophia Edgell and Simon Edgell.
This is but the skimming of the life of Zelma Inez Tucker Edgell. You will each no doubt have many stories, poignant, funny, memorable, to tell each other about her life, her times and her many deeds and accomplishments. Tell the stories; this is how you who are nearest and dearest to her, keep her memory alive.
The rest of us will have her words, always – her four novels and her short stories – and they will teach us again and again, who we were, where we came from and who we are.
Ave Atque Vale, Zee.
I started with Tagore. Let me end with his beautiful words:
DEATH IS NOT EXTINGUISHING THE LIGHT;
IT IS ONLY PUTTING OUT THE LAMP
BECAUSE THE DAWN HAS COME.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE