Flair | Home is where the heart is for Anna Perkins

Being part of a female collective marking a history-making turn at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, is not lost on Anna Kasafi Perkins.

Appointed last year as a professor of Caribbean theology and ethics in the Faculty of Humanities and Education, a delighted and forthcoming Perkins doesn’t shirk away from the elephant in the room.

“To recognise we have made an increasing space for women and the work they have done, where ordinarily in the past, when professorships were being handed out, it mostly would have been men, is progressive,” she told Flair in a sit-down in the conference room in the faculty’s main office.

“UWI is certainly moving in a direction where they are valuing and validating the work of women academics and women researchers.”

Perkins, who is also the senior programme officer in the Quality Assurance Unit at UWI’s Regional Headquarters, is one of four colleagues in the faculty who have recently been elevated to professorship.

The other three women are Zoyah Kinkead-Clark, deputy dean of graduate studies; Carmel Roofe, director of the School of Education and professor of curriculum studies; and Sonjah Stanley Niaah, professor of cultural studies in the faculty and director of the Centre for Reparation Research at UWI’s Regional Headquarters.

As she took stock of her educational roadmap — from a first degree at St Michael’s Theological College here, to a Master of Philosophy in Christian theology in the modern world at the University of Cambridge in England, to Boston College for a Doctorate of Philosophy in theological ethics — Perkins noted that nationalism and paying it forward were twinned priorities that always beckoned a return to home.

“That was always part of the calling, to come back to Jamaica. Get what I needed to have done away, but I felt there was always something I had to do here,” said the now 56-year-old.

While initially accepted at UWI in 1987 to read for an undergraduate degree in geography, the Immaculate Conception High alumna had a sustained interest in theology, which led her to detour to attend St Michael’s.

Though she had long worked across the road at the university’s affiliated multidimensional ecumenical seminary, Perkins’ journey at UWI officially began in 2007.

Work was threefold, straddling administrative duties, teaching quality assurance and ethics, and conducting research. Other strands of the academic’s work examine gender minorities and poverty. “Justice links all of that together, and how do you give regard to our culture and what popular culture means, which is not high culture, so you want to look down your nose at folk culture. You find that I am highly interested in dancehall because it rubs up against a lot of these issues that I am concerned about,” said Perkins, a major fan of the music catalogue of Jamaican deejay and singer Tanya Stephens.

She lauds the creative as hard-hitting, humorous and absolutely talented “in how she draws on her No 2 pencil to write and give expression.”

A testament of her adoration saw the theologian co-editing the 2020-published Rough Riding: Tanya Stephens and The Power of Music to Transform Society — a collection of articles examining different facets of Stephens, alongside Adwoa Ntozake Onuora and Ajamu Nangwaya.

While she does extensive research to pen books or chapters in them herself (there have been more than 50 at last count), in her downtime, Perkins is an avid bibliophile with her interests spanning Canadian journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell to Trinidadian poet and fiction writer Jennifer Rahim.

“I love to watch movies, I love drama,” she divulged, pointing out that much of her leisure time, which includes restaurant crawls to new spots across the capital city, is shared with her partner of 14 years, engineer Patrick Dallas.

“That’s part of what makes our friendship stronger,” she reasoned. “Patrick is not religious, and people give him a hard time about that.”

So, how do their opposing takes on religion impact their union?

“It works beautifully because Patrick has a lot of respect for religion, and we have lots of discussions about it. He recognises that I have a critical perspective on the subject,” she explained.

Having grown up in Hope Tavern, the middle child of five for her mason father Herman Perkins and officer custodian wife Sarah, the professor has made deliberate life actions to opt out of motherhood and not tie the knot. She is perfectly fine with her choices.

“I think I will be honest that it is a pushback. I don’t need to validate myself with a ‘Mrs’, I don’t need to. That solidifies nothing. What Patrick and I have is really strong, so I am not there yet. It is totally inconsequential to me and to him.”

There is fulfilment in being an aunt to her eight-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece.

“We share a dual home; they live on one side with my brother and his wife, and I am on the next. They are the joy of my life. The joy comes from watching them grow and recognising [that] I am shaping them.”

Forging ahead with her professorial appointment, she said, “I want to continue to mentor students and do that by supervising master’s and PhD students. I want to contribute to growing a cadre of really good academics at that level. I got here by a process, and that process doesn’t end because a title has been awarded,” shared the woman adoringly nicknamed ‘Our Professor Perkins’ (OPP) by colleagues in her unit.

lifestyle@gleanerjm.com