By Nelcia Charlemagne
For three years, the name Amanie Mathurin was synonymous with nightly news at Choice Television, as she provided Saint Lucians and the diaspora with comprehensive updates on current events.
Now, the Belle Vue-raised media professional is making her mark as a writer, documentarian, storyteller, and most recently, a 2024 Chevening Scholar.
Amanie says her love for storytelling began as a child. “I remember being about seven years old and stapling pages together, drawing a little cover and saying I wrote my first book. I think growing up, I was a bit of a lonely child, so I spent a lot of time reading. I was in love with books.”
She recalls teachers encouraging her writing as a student at the Vieux Fort Comprehensive School, but she admitted she “[didn’t] think it was something [that] could be a career for me.” That sentiment has since changed.
While attending university as an Island Scholar in the United Kingdom, Amanie realised that she had a “real passion and talent for storytelling and bringing people’s stories to life.”
As a child, she accompanied her mother – a Guyanese immigrant – to various odd jobs including as a cleaner and later as a teller and in passenger services at the Hewanorra International Airport. These varied experiences honed Amanie’s ability to pull remarkable stories out of ordinary Saint Lucians.
“I’d see my mom having a lot of conversations with people, and realised that there was a joy in that,” she recounted. While attending A Level, Amanie worked as a part-time cleaner and made time to chat with her employers. “They’d tell me their life stories. They’d tell me the things they think about, the things they were afraid of.”
Reminiscing on her time at the Laborie Cooperative Credit Union, she shared that “I loved getting to know customers, especially at the credit union… I was a special services teller, so I’d get some of the same members repeatedly over time. I found that they just wanted to talk to me… they would tell me their life stories, tell me about their families, their home situations.”
It’s a skill that transcended her work as a news reporter. In turn, she says that experience made her a stronger writer. “The awareness of issues that I got from news is trickling into my actual writing. I don’t want to just tell stories. I want to tell very Caribbean stories; very Saint Lucian stories.”
Amanie has been doing just that. Her most recent work, “In the Hurricane’s Wake”, was published in Callaloo. It tells a story all too familiar to Caribbean people, one that recounts a hurricane’s passage, accompanying losses, and familiar family dynamics.
During the 2024 Carnival season, she worked with Piton Beer to spotlight integral aspects of Saint Lucian culture: calypso, soca, costume building, and panorama. “It’s important to me to tell stories that are distinctly Caribbean. We don’t realise the value of sharing our lived experiences. We don’t realise that in many ways, we’re living through really traumatic events. We’re living through history in the making,” Amanie observed.
This perspective continues to shape her work. “As a storyteller, it’s my role to bring a voice to these stories and help people realise that our problems are very valid.”
Amanie is currently preparing to pursue another degree in the United Kingdom. This time, it’s a Masters in Media, Communications and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For the young documentarian, media is often overlooked or underestimated in its contribution toward development. Her experience in news reporting, public relations, and documentary production allowed her to “see how the media that people engage with shapes their thinking, how it shapes how they look at social issues, how they look at political issues, whether they feel represented.”
She’s hopeful that her time in the UK will “add a richness to not just my written work, but the documentaries that I intend to produce, and any type of work that I do in writing or media…As a writer, you have to live and have experiences. You have to travel. You have to meet people, and learn the way they look at the world, so it can open your writing and open your thinking.”
When she returns to Saint Lucia, Amanie is looking forward to putting her new knowledge into practice immediately, while creating opportunities for young creatives like herself. She’s interested in “getting to the heart of issues in a way that people relate to in a very personal way,” and laying a foundation to “be known as somebody who lifted Caribbean voices and Caribbean stories.”
