Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidad-born writer whose novels explored the pressures of family, the queasy legacy of colonialism and the immigrant’s longing for home — while often poking fun at American academia and New York City’s publishing world — died on Friday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 80.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said Jason Harrell, her son.
Dr. Nunez was raised in a prominent Trinidadian family of Portuguese and African descent, and educated in the British colonial system — heavy on the Western canon. (The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence the year she graduated from high school.) Growing up, she loved stories by the English children’s book author Enid Blyton, whose adventurous young characters she tried to emulate by wearing cardigans in the hot Caribbean sun and affecting a taste for cucumber sandwiches. She was known as Betty until she was 11, when she persuaded her parents to drop her childhood nickname after reading “Pride and Prejudice” and identifying with Jane Austen’s strong heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.
In 1963, she was sent to a tiny Roman Catholic college in Wisconsin, where she said she was, for all intents and purposes, “a Black English girl.” She knew her European history, but next to nothing about the Caribbean and the brutal story of colonialism. Her ideas about Africa were similarly Eurocentric: She thought it was a continent of savages, running around in grass skirts. Tarzan was involved.
When she began mapping out her first novel, “When Rocks Dance” (1986), she was planning to write about a contemporary woman, an academic and a feminist like herself, who was island born but living in America. Instead, she ended up writing mostly about the society she had left behind, the clash of modernism and mysticism there, and steeping herself, at last, in her homeland’s dark history.
“I had to understand myself, and where I came from,” she once said. “Then I was off to the races.”
The protagonist of her second novel, “Beyond the Limbo Silence” (1998), was very much like Dr. Nunez, a young Trinidadian sent to college in chilly Wisconsin — in a town that “had no Negroes,” she wrote, “so it had no Negro problem” — who becomes involved with a Black law student and civil rights activist.
“I wanted to explore the resentment, the justified — to me — resentment of an African American to a Caribbean person who’s in La-La Land,” she told Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, a literary journal, in 2002. “You know, like I was in La-La Land — and the practice of putting pressure on the Caribbean person to become committed and to become involved; to make her know that this fight was also her fight.”
The male protagonist of “Grace” (2003), who taught at a small public college in Brooklyn, also shared some of Dr. Nunez’s experiences. He often found himself at odds with his Black American colleagues, as Dr. Nunez did when she taught at Medgar Evers College, a small, predominantly Black public institution in Brooklyn.
In her memoir, “Not for Everyday Use” (2014), she recalled a colleague there snapping at her for her ambition. “You can’t come here on your banana boat and feel you can take what my people have suffered and died for,” she recalled the colleague saying. “Our blood was spilled to get this college. Know your place.”
That search for place, for belonging, is what marked all of Dr. Nunez’s work. The critically acclaimed “Prospero’s Daughter” (2006) recast Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” setting the story on a former leper colony off Trinidad, with the rumor of a rape and the efforts of a xenophobic and very British detective to get to the bottom of it.
Elizabeth Schmidt, reviewing the book for The New York Times, called Dr. Nunez “a master at pacing and plotting” and the book “an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him.”
Elizabeth Ann Nunez was born on Feb. 18, 1944, in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago, one of 11 children of Una Magdalena (Arneaud) Nunez and Waldo Everette Nunez. At the time, her father was a junior officer in the ministry of labor; he would later become the commissioner of labor and then an executive at Shell Oil. But money was tight when Elizabeth was young, and Una supplemented her husband’s salary by raising chickens.
The Nunez children were expected to excel, and to be stoic in their efforts. “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” her father told Elizabeth, quoting Shakespeare, when she complained about her less-than-perfect grades. Her proper Catholic mother kept her at arm’s length, and the tension of that relationship would inform many of the female characters in Dr. Nunez’s novels. Yet it was her mother who read all of her books, and who was a constant cheerleader. Her father never read a single title. To be fair, he eschewed all books, except those by P.G. Wodehouse, confining his reading to newspapers.
She attended Marian University, a private Catholic institution in Fond du Lac, Wis., on a scholarship. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1967, she moved to New York City, where she got a job as a caseworker with the Department of Social Services.
Riding the subway to work one day, she saw a sign advertising jobs for teachers at Medgar Evers College, which was then just a year old. She was hired to work in the English department; she eventually rose to become chair of the department, and then provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, before leaving in 2009. Along the way, she earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in literature from New York University. In 2010, she became a distinguished professor of English at Hunter College, where she remained until retiring this spring.
She married Clifton Daniel Harrell, a sociology professor at Medgar Evers, in 1974; they were divorced in 1994.
In addition to her son, Dr. Nunez is survived by her 10 siblings and two granddaughters.
Dr. Nunez was the author of 11 novels; the most recent, “Now Lila Knows,” was published in 2022. From 1986 to 2000, she was the director of the National Black Writers Conference, an annual event she founded with the novelist John Oliver Killens, which was connected to the Center for Black Literature.
“Elizabeth knew how important it was for young writers, and Black writers in particular, to be mentored,” said Lauren Francis-Sharma, a novelist who was scooped up by Dr. Nunez after a reading they did together. “If she cared for you, she wouldn’t hold back her critiques.”
Marlon James, the Jamaican-born novelist, credits Dr. Nunez with elevating his work. Years ago, he attended a workshop she led at the Calabash International Literary Festival, in Jamaica. “I read from what would become my first novel” — “John Crow’s Devil” (2005) — “and Elizabeth said, ‘You’re a really good writer, but you don’t have a clue about women,’” he recalled in an interview.
“She wanted to know how many women writers I had read. I’d read a lot, but they were dead authors,” he continued. “She wanted me to read my way into creating female characters.” And he did, embarking on a course of works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Iris Murdoch — and Dr. Nunez.
Mr. James felt a kinship with Dr. Nunez’s work, he said, because she wrote about the legacy of colonial violence, as he did, particularly in her 2000 novel, “Bruised Hibiscus,” a harrowing story about women trapped in grim, abusive marriages, among other things, which won an American Book Award.
“I like the way she interrogates that legacy,” he said. “It’s a very haunted book. To be a Caribbean writer is to write about haunted spaces.”
But as much Dr. Nunez mined her homeland in her work, she chafed at being pigeonholed. She was a writer who happened to be Caribbean, she liked to say.
“I don’t mind being classified as a Caribbean writer,” she told The Miami Herald in 2006, “as long as it’s a subcategory in literary fiction.”
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