The Jamaican Writer Who “Grew Up As a Boy”
Lady Colin Campbell, known as Georgie Campbell (17 August 1949), is a Jamaican-born British writer. Campbell was born in Jamaica, one of four children of Michael and Gloria Ziadie.
The Ziadie family are descendants of six Maronite Catholic brothers who emigrated from Lebanon in the early 20th century. The family were Lebanese Eastern Orthodox Christians.
“I grew up in a wealthy upper-class household in Jamaica, which was run along militaristic lines by my mother, Gloria,” Campbell said. “We always knew that there was something wrong with Mummy, but I didn’t realise she suffered from any kind of psychological disorder until I was talking with my therapist years later. ‘You’re describing a classic narcissist,’ he told me.”
Born with a fused labia, Campbell was registered as a boy and brought up as male, though she is genetically female. She was bullied by classmates and her parents. She sought help at age 13 by secretly contacting her mother’s gynecologist, who was sympathetic.
When her parents discovered what she had done, they had her hospitalised, and injected with male hormones for three weeks. Campbell refused to live as a boy; and her father told her the only solution was for her to commit suicide by taking rat poison.
She was not able to have corrective surgery until she was 21, when her grandmother discovered what had occurred and gave her the $5,000 she needed. Campbell legally changed her name to Georgia Arianna and received a new birth certificate.
Campbell is most well-known for her books on royals, including biographies on Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Her 1992 book, Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, detailed information about the Diana’s struggle with bulimia and affair with James Hewitt.
Campbell was “dismissed as a fantasist” but later vindicated when the information was corroborated. Diana in Private appeared on the The New York Times Best Seller list in 1992.
“ I am grateful to my mother for some things. Her malevolent neglect meant that we learned how to be independent, and we all learned how to be very in tune with reality. We had to be – it was our only way of surviving. The other good thing was that, through her, I learned how to fight. People muck you around in life, and Gloria taught me to never give up,” she said. WOW!
See an interview with Lady Colin here
By Neo Makeba
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