Review Short: Tusiata Avia’s The New Adventures of Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Dominique Hecq

The New Adventures of Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War
by Tusiata Avia
Recent Work Press, 2016


Samoan-New Zealand poet and performer Tusiata Avia explores the intricate fate history and myth have sent her way in The New Adventures of Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War. This slim volume is divided into two parts: the Nafanua poems, followed by lyrics gathered under the subtitle ‘How I Came into this World’.

Tusiata Avia’s imaginary is rooted in an ambivalent cultural matrix made of multilayered psychohistorical, sociocultural and mythical patterns. It is imbued with multiple connotations: it reflects New Zealand’s complex history and a woman’s passionate engagement with it; it also rejects Cartesian intellectualised thought in an effort to move into a different mode of feeling, seeing, knowing, and making. If New Zealand emerges as a magnetic locus for the imagination, the poetic topos is really a site without any actual locality; it appears at diverse geographical locations as the poet roams from one imaginative space to another. Here, the body is the point of destination and departure of quests. Here, poetry is analogous to swimming under water. It is diving, moving, taking, and giving. It is pulling toward and pulling back. It is pushing forward and pushing away. It is, briefly, coming up for air. Consider this excerpt from ‘Nafanua dreams of water’:

Under the water and it is submerge or drown.
Once or twice she cuts through the pool like a champion
there is no way of knowing what kind of performance she will give

or who is adding up the totals
the difference between the mantle of talent and the core of exhaustion.

The juxtaposition of moods in this poem suggests the destructive yet liberating force of the imagination. As elsewhere in this work, anxiety and fear often coexist with desire, suggesting the close relationship that exists between Eros and Thanatos, the intertwining of which is at the heart of experience and creativity.

The blurring of boundaries between the physical and mythical worlds is analogous to the border crossings between the conscious and unconscious forces that constitute the signifying processes in any production of meaning. The poetic voice gives articulation to this dynamic activity, where the speaking persona is constantly confronted by some unknown other. As a result, the protagonist appears to be in a constant state of becoming, indeed demands to be in a constant state of becoming. Perhaps this is because Tusiata Avia operates within the framework of a peripheral tradition. Perhaps this is because she uses an assertive stratagem in the form of a desiring body rather than a defensive one. Whatever the reason, what strikes me here is a refusal to ‘territorialise’ the body in its diverse manifestations – geopolitical, cultural, historical, colonial, amorous, and purely sexual and reproductive.

The first poem stages an encounter between Nafanua and Calamity Jane. It focuses on the painful history of their native societies and on their shared experience of exclusion, highlighting the dominant themes of the work. In particular, it dwells on the tension between exclusion and aggression while clearly advocating an ethos of compassion. It is a fragmentary text where the reader travels in all directions at once, realising that unspeakable truths lurk in the silences, the gaps between words, the blanks between stanzas. It is full of the whispers of ghosts. Yet it speaks of a refusal to succumb to repression and oppression.

As I suggest above, ‘Nafanua dreams of water’ works as an allegorical reflection on the plight of the performance poet. It breathes a corporeal contour into the craft that wavers between the materiality of the female body and the imaginary. It gestures towards the transformation resulting from a text’s being written, performed and visited upon an audience as though keeping in check jouissance.

The identification between Avia and her mythical avatar is more firmly asserted in the next three poems, ‘Nafanua talks about her friends in Philly’, ‘Nafanua talks about going to Washington DC’ and ‘Nafanua goes to Nashville’. In the latter:

Nafanua sits like the single white resident
in a tiny settlement called French Lick.
Zero point zero percent Hawa’ian and other Pacific Islanders
are stuffing the holes in their houses to the sounds of ghosts 
and their quiet piroguing down the Tennessee River.

Violence lurks under the surface of these poems and occasionally tears through the page as it does here in a carnival of images and echoes.

This proto-critique of postcolonialism is brought into relief in the next poem, a villanelle titled ‘Nafanua becomes creole’, where the colonial legacy is envisioned as dismembering. Here, the dispossessed are reduced to body parts, to racist taxonomies, to degradable materials and to both degraded and degrading metaphor: Nafanua is reduced to her belly with skin ‘as dark as an octoroon’ while her lover is ‘the colour of a brown paper bag’. In the end:

Nafanua with a body soft as pig
Nafanua with a belly like a salt trout
runs in shining streaks down the open mouth
of the brackish Pontchartrain.

‘Nafanua talks about going to Washington DC’, ‘Nafanua sleeps rough in Central Park’ and ‘Nafanua speaks to her beloved in Palestine’ are acerbic pieces that resonate with prophetic intimations of impending catastrophes, as does the poignant piece from part two, titled ‘The opposite of déjà vu’, with its ‘armageddonish’ sky, ‘a stage for the second coming’.

Of the more personal poems from part two, ‘We, the afflicted’ is unforgettable. It tackles the theme of maternal ambivalence with astonishing honesty and clarity, linking pain with glee in the event of a mother’s separation from her child. In this section, poems focus on other people’s bodies, including the failing body of the author’s father, and revisit the themes explored in part one from a more subjective standpoint. Here is an alternative expression of trauma on individuals who, while not directly affected by it are, as in part one, nonetheless haunted by it. Here, memory is about resonances and unprocessed experiences stored in the psyche and deposited in layers of flesh.

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Review Short: Michelle Cahill’s The Herring Lass

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Nathanael O'Reilly

The Herring Lass by Michelle Cahill
Arc Publications, 2016


Michelle Cahill is well-known to contemporary Australian readers as a poet, editor and fiction writer. She is the winner of the 2017 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (one of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), the Val Vallis Award, and the Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for other major prizes. The Herring Lass is Cahill’s fourth collection of poetry, and her first with a UK-based publisher. The transition from an Australian publisher (Cahill’s third, Vishvarupa, was published by Five Islands Press) to a British publisher (Arc) should bring Cahill’s work to greater prominence within the global Anglophone reading community. The front cover of The Herring Lass reproduces Winslow Homer’s The Fisher Girl (1894), introducing the themes of female strength, endurance and watchfulness, and creating unity with the collection’s title and title-poem. The back cover features praise quotes from Sarah Holland-Batt and John Kinsella, emphasising Cahill’s status as one of Australia’s leading poets. Indeed, Cahill is widely published and anthologised.

The poems in The Herring Lass are preceded by a quotation from a poem by Robin Robertson, which reads: ‘I hold you fast, until you are flesh again, / seal-herder, seer, sea-guardian: / you who can only tell the truth, / show me how to find a fresh wind / and a safe harbour’. The epigraph introduces some of the major tropes of the collection: the sea, transformation, truth-telling, discovery, safety and home. Cahill was born in Kenya; she has Goan Indian ancestry, has lived in the UK and Australia, and travelled widely. Unsurprisingly, her poetry is transnational and addresses issues such as diaspora, boundary crossings, belonging, and loss; the book is dedicated to fellow poet Lyn Hatherly, who passed away in 2016.

The Herring Lass contains fifty-three poems, of which just six are longer than thirty lines. Thirty of the poems have twenty lines or less; Cahill clearly favours condensed lyric poems. Eight of the fifty-three poems experiment with structure; however, Cahill usually employs traditional structures and forms, including a sonnet sequence, and often uses tercets and quatrains. Cahill does not use rhyme-schemes, and deploys rhyme subtly and sparingly. The poems often contain traditional poetic techniques, especially similes, alliteration, metaphors and enjambment. Cahill creates a variety of speakers and often inhabits the voices of others; the first person voice is used carefully and infrequently. The poems utilise an impressive range of locations on four continents: Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. A number of elements and themes appear repeatedly, including aspects of nature like trees, wind, oceans and rivers. The poems feature a variety of birds and animals, including a thylacine, dingo, bear, and wallaby. Pervasive themes include grief, loss, power, distance, home, language, identity, migrants and refugees. The thematic and geographical range of The Herring Lass is impressive and inspiring.

The poem ‘Her Dream’ is an excellent example of Cahill’s ability to inhabit the voices of others; it is written from the perspective of Sarah Milligan, who was the housekeeper for David Scott Mitchell, the founder of the Mitchell Library. The speaker declares:

In the dream, I become an illiterate moth or a wingless
louse, pulverizing monographs to velvet dust, chewing
the starch that fixes leaf by leaf to the bondage of light.

Here Cahill ventriloquises the voice of a woman from another time, who in turn dreams of taking on a non-human identity. Such irony, complexity and dexterity is typical of Cahill’s work.

In ‘Twofold Bay, 1930’, which describes the capture of a whale, Cahill includes both settler/invader and Indigenous history in a precise, visceral and sympathetic narrative. The speaker declares ‘museums are white man’s allegory but dreams of killer / and Koori whalers rewrite the past in undercurrents’, and a few lines later, ‘… I can taste the words whiten / into thin milk of settler culture, bloodlines turnstiled’. Thus Cahill combines history, culture, storytelling, hunting and nature, demonstrating her ability to powerfully blend the local and the global, the specific and the universal, the constructed and the natural. Cahill’s capacity for creating dense, specific and concise poems, while simultaneously addressing issues that transcend time and space, and thus attain universal relevance, is most impressive here.

Cahill’s adeptness at inhabiting other voices is demonstrated in the last stanza of ‘Pirogue’ when the speaker proclaims:

… I am one of Senghor’s thin-legged,
migrant sons, too proud to beg for breadfruit;
hungry for Spain. Listen, today we threw
a decomposing body overboard – and prayed.

The African migrant speaker insists on being heard, and thus the poet likewise demands that her readers pay attention and refuse to ignore the horrific realities of migrant and refugee experiences.

The Herring Lass also contains poems focusing on the personal and questions of belonging and memory, often using metaphors, similes and experiences drawn from travel. In ‘Hemisphere’, the speaker admits, ‘I might question my life in quatrains, the past ferries me back / to home in another hemisphere, to asphyxiating bushfires’. And, in ‘Postcard from Childhood’, Cahill reminds her readers that ‘Nothing shelters us from memory, its tender waves, / nocturnal voices like postcards from childhood’. Likewise, in ‘Mumbai by Night’, the speaker claims ‘… Time is a fixed currency without counterfeit, / so brief it leaves me cheating myself with words’. Close attention to the relationship between language, thought and communication also threads its way through these poems.

While this is an impressive collection, certainly one of the best produced by an Australian poet in recent years, it is not quite flawless. On a number of occasions, Cahill ends lines with weak words, particularly prepositions and articles. Placing specific nouns, verbs or adjectives at the end of such lines would have created stronger line breaks and more impact; however, this is a minor quibble and probably reveals more about my poetics than it does about Cahill’s poetry. The Herring Lass provides abundant evidence that Cahill is one of Australia’s leading contemporary poets; moreover, Cahill must now rank in the top-tier of Anglophone poets worldwide, and her reputation should continue to rise.

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Review Short: Susan Fealy’s Flute of Milk

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Anne-Marie Newton

Flute of Milk by Susan Fealy
UWAP Poetry, 2017


Award-winning Melbourne poet Susan Fealy’s first full-length collection is an engrossing and richly resonant volume, one that – like all good artworks – reveals greater connective complexity with each subsequent encounter. The work is divided into two parts, with section one’s epigraph drawing the first sixteen poems into a meaning formation that takes off from a Louise Glück work. In the selected Glück couplet, God addresses humans on the making of a life, referring to the ‘bed of earth’ and ‘blanket of blue air’ that are meant to sustain us. Fealy’s first section proceeds to explore this earth / sky schema, in poems that travel through such ‘earth’-associated ideas as materiality, body, and the present, as well as through notions relating to ephemerality, thought / imagination, and the past (‘sky’). The lengthier part two approaches similar territory from a different angle, using an excerpt from Robert Haas’ ‘A Story About the Body’ to foreshadow a heavier emphasis on events relating to the life cycle. Circulating thematically through both sections are questions regarding the relationship between mind and body, or, put another way, between intellect and creativity, an issue that comes to a head in the striking, quite personal concluding poem. ‘Writing with the Left Hand’ makes use of Hélène Cixous’ theory of writing through the body to suggest that perhaps the soma is the more trustworthy aspect of the human, and that it should somehow be liberated (‘cut off’) from cerebral limitations. But prior to this a wealth of figurative detail portrays life as far more fluid than binary, so that, on balance, this final piece offers no resolutory conclusion.

The continuity of life’s components seems, in fact, to be one of the collection’s driving concerns. The title poem, appearing early in the volume, depicts ‘the past, present and future’ as ‘a long flute of milk,’ and this image of liquid flowing is applicable to Flute of Milk as a whole. Throughout, a series of continuities are brought into view, one of the more overt being Fealy’s openness to other discursive forms. As the endnotes and individual poem’s epigraphs tell us, many pieces converse with and respond to external sources, these sources coming from a range of genres. Fiction, non-fiction, other poetry, visual and tactile arts all inform Fealy’s process, so that, overall, something of an intermingling of aesthetic forces is at work. Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid, for example, is a particularly vivid early resource that sets up ongoing reverberation, and writers such as Banville, Dickinson, Kafka and Baudelaire appear as important interlocutors. As might be anticipated in a work that can be read as exploring what makes up a life, motifs of love and loss figure strongly, but the role of the aesthetic itself is also a significant theme, often overlapping with other motifs. Specific references to aesthetic matters include the nature of poetry (‘It’s a place / to leave your fingers / and your lips’), a body preserved in Pompeii (‘the pain of stone clings to you’), a pinned moth in a museum (‘Do you remember / tapping at the window, frantic as a tiny bell?’), and a widower forging porcelain bowls (‘Their stillness is an argument / for eternity’).

Reading these poems and following their inter-threading elements, one becomes keenly aware that a great deal of material is being covered, both conceptually and sensorily. In such a situation one might rightfully consider how – and, indeed, if – the poet manages to create for the reader a reassurance that creative chaos is not a constant threat. For me, Flute of Milk is a profuse yet judicious collection for two main reasons. Firstly, and in relationship with Fealy’s intertextual method, a painterly approach is taken to the abundant, cycling imagery. From the first poem, a palette of visceral colours is established as the key aesthetic system organising this writing / reading experience. Reds (blood, roses), blues (sky, eyes), greens, pinks, gold, silver – such affective hues flow through almost every page and every image, with the repetition of colours having the effect of dispersing yet containing the multivariant meanings. This colour palette is variegated but also tethered, since limit colours are perceptible in the regular appearance of white (light) and black (shadow, darkness). These taut lines from ‘Film’ illustrate one impact of these boundaries:

Black slate is spilt
In filmic light:
The floor’s too deep,
The light too shallow.
Nothing lives
Outside its apparition.

The fluctuation of colour is an apparition, we might surmise, a continuum that is rich but also delimited by the powers of darkness and light. Despite its profusion of colour, then, a consciousness of containment infuses the volume.

The second technique that affords aesthetic assurance is Fealy’s handling of language. It is a measure of Fealy’s skill that the acute visual impact of her poetry is achieved by way of linguistic exactitude. The diction is finely crafted and feels (despite the occasional off note) precise, so that while tonality varies greatly across the poetry, there is, altogether, a sense that a singular voice underpins the work. This has the result of peeling back meaning to its most distilled, which is to say there is a force of quietness about Flute of Milk. The poem ‘In Lieu of a Statue,’ addressing the loss of a mother, exemplifies this exactitude:

The grass is blue with frost – 
sharp as the small bones of feet.
The lilacs rattle: 
…
How long since the moon-
lugged lake swallowed her?
Its water swims my bones.
The lilacs rattle like shrapnel.

This linguistic deftness continues across several poetic designs – free verse, sonnet, prose poem, villanelle. And in the deployment of each of these designs, Fealy’s adroit touch also seems to have let form evolve in correspondence with content, rather than impose it. In a poem responding to Brett Whiteley’s Still Life with Cornflowers, Fealy acknowledges her commitment to this kind of methodology: ‘The silence of the jar / must be the centre / which grows the painting.’

Although most of the poems in Flute of Milk have been published elsewhere, it has, from all accounts, taken Fealy quite some years to compile this collection. In an age when speed and instantaneity have become standard, we can only be thankful that she has persevered in her endeavor. Her sharply drawn and intensive poetic landscape offers a level of engagement with language and ideas that is highly gratifying.

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Review Short: Brook Emery’s Have Been and Are

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Martin Duwell

Have Been and Are by Brook Emery
Gloria SMH, 2016


Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does. One might look to a poet of the recent past like Bruce Beaver as a model (or rival) for these sophisticated but always humble meditations, and there are occasions when Emery sounds very like Beaver, but Beaver’s poetry has a suppressed and often irrational anger not far below the surface, something that I cannot detect at all in Emery’s poems. And then, moving back, there is John Blight, whose sea sonnets – though hardly poems of process – often bump up against similar questions. And Blight was an early admirer of Beaver, and one of his poems was called (quoting a critic) ‘His Best Poems Are About the Sea’ which reminds us that one of the poems in Have Been and Are says, ‘I’m always writing about the sea, about change, / about power …’, so perhaps there is a small local tradition here.

Though many of these poems address a subject, you feel that Emery is more comfortable with those that are based on some kind of progress through the world, where the movement of the body is reflected in the movement of the mind as it hunts themes along sidetracks. Indeed his poetry has the capacity to reanimate dead metaphors like ‘sidetracked’, ‘off the track’, ‘catching my drift’ and ‘lost in thought’. The fine first poem belongs to this category: an early morning walk immediately begins to wonder about poetry and language (‘that word “dappled”, that won’t do’), about what kind of poem it is (‘it wants to take you by the hand and say / “Come, come with me into this environment, // this moment and these meanderings”’) and about its connections to the world of poetry, referencing Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison and having a kind of admiring tussle with Hopkins. In fact Have Been and Are works this contextual approach consistently by using quotations from a range of writers as titles.

But the walk of this first poem takes place between the sea on one side and the trees and cottages of the coastal inhabitants on the other. And we are reminded that the sea is always there – ‘the endless, pulsing, / not to be assumed, reassuring sea’ – even when the poet’s mind is on other things. This sea stands for many things in Emery’s work and those poems in which he swims in the sea have a special resonance. It is, among other things, a huge body of ever-changing patterns whose determining and generative drives lie deep within it and far back in time:

This morning the rain-splashed, glass-grey dimpling
of the sea is unvaried, seems unvaried,
though gutters, sandbanks and channels, the ebbing tide
all leave hints of movement, change, unmeasured depth.
I see little more than surface …

All this manages to be both classical Greek and Buddhist at the same time – it’s a ‘changing world … which doesn’t change’ – but it defines what a poet must do: be aware of the processes of endless change, symbolised by the sea; know that such continual changes are products of profound forces; and focus on responding to the challenge of rendering the present verbally. Sometimes the poems do it as a self-confessed exercise so that ‘Only keep still …’ and ‘Echo, Repetition, Statement …’ each have plans:

            … To sit in one spot, perhaps on a balcony
looking through rainforest to the sea, from sunrise 
to sunset and record everything I see. All that is not me …

The ‘me’ – ‘the unconvincing fiction of myself’ – is also, of course, subject to change and this explains why there are a number of poems in the book (as there were in Emery’s earlier books) where the current self investigates a younger self: it’s the changes that register.

And just as inevitably as this poetry raises the issues of the surface and the depths, so it also has to deal with ethical issues as well as worry about where such issues fit into the broader philosophical scheme of things embodied in the symbol of the ever present sea. In Have Been and Are, ethical issues run the gamut from minor and intrusive niggles – nothing more than part of the experience of moving through the world thinking – to things that require full-intensity expression. At one extreme there is ‘World Without Hope’ detailing the experience of being asked to ‘save the wetland, tree frog, crocodile, / to cure cancer, heart disease, diabetes, liver failure, / free prisoners of conscience …’ by ‘peddlers / of worthiness’ at a local shopping mall. All are causes the poet is happy to endorse despite looking askance at the way the causes are framed, inevitably, in cliché: ‘Of their own accord / my eyes begin to roll and I hear an unintended / sniffing sound whenever someone says “affirmation” / “journey”, “empowerment”, “closure” or “community” …’

At the other extreme is ‘The Brown Current’, an attempt to deal with human cruelty at the macro level. Or perhaps it is an attempt to keep human cruelty (or stupidity: an earlier poem says ‘we must be stupid … the alternative / is too ghastly to acknowledge’) out of a poem which wants to be another poem about moving through the world and observing. Whatever the plan, it is a poem made up of segments of the kind of poem Emery writes brilliantly. Observations of the sea mingle with meditations about mind and random allusions to childhood, current events, etc. These are interspersed with small prose sections making up a kind of anthology of cruelty: beginning with the Athenian massacre at Melos, working through Genghis Khan up to the Rwandan massacre and the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a brave experiment and, while it isn’t as successful as other poems in the book, you can see the importance – in content and structure – of the issues this poem is dealing with.

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NEW CARIBBEAN Editorial

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Vladimir Lucien

New CaribbeanImage courtesy of ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival

When Kent MacCarter first asked me to edit this special issue of new Caribbean writing, I agreed before I had actually thought about the task. For, soon afterward, I was wondering who was actually ‘new’. Regarding literature, quite a few things have changed – both with the advent and permeation of social media as a way of meeting or getting to know artists, as well as with the literary festivals (such as Calabash in Jamaica, Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, Nature Isle Festival in Dominica and the Congres des Ecrivain de la Caraïbe in Guadeloupe) that bring writers together annually (or biennially) to read work, converse about issues surrounding their art, participate in workshops and to become familiar with newer voices. The ‘new’, in an environment devoid of these things, would emerge from the same criteria that confirmed for one the sense of him / her being a ‘writer’ – publication. And by that, I mean publication of a full volume of poems. Of course, there are writers whose names became popular before publication, who have written a few good things here and there enough for persons to label ‘a writer to watch’ or ‘up and coming’ and so on, but some writers remain in that phase, for various reasons, longer than others. Some take long hermetic hiatuses. Others publish books and nobody knows about it. And I have known some writers who just stopped.

The thing for me is, firstly, while I recognise the usefulness of full publication as a rubicon for determining real writers from aspiring ones, I do think there are many things that we can miss. For instance, over the last few years, some local anthologies have been published, representing the poetic output at national levels – Jubilation which celebrated 50 years of Jamaican independence, Ste. Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia, published in honour of one of St. Lucia’s elder statesmen of letters, McDonald Dixon; 100 Poems from Trinidad and Tobago and several anthologies coming out of St. Martin, under House of Nehesi publishing. The utility in these collections is not only that they present a much broader and variegated picture of what has been happening with poetry and language in those countries – and a much broader picture therefore of that society – but they also allow voices and concerns that would inevitably be more marginalised the higher up they go into the publishing world.

In the case of St. Lucia, the poetry produced in our nation language Kwéyòl, and the concerns surrounding this language and the culture it sounds out, may not really be of interest to publishers of big journals unless it can somehow be explained on the back cover or at least conceptually fitted into a grander narrative or movement that its readers would find accessible. One must be reminded here that the actual publication of Caribbean literature is still outside of the region for the most part. A truly Caribbean readership has remained underdeveloped – something that the rise in literacy and access to higher education has not significantly changed. In Trinidad there is – as there has been in other islands – the spoken word forms which, of late, have been doing – in their social commentary and their utter rootedness in the space and society – what Calypso has been doing for the last fifty years of the 20th century. Their national references, their puns, their metaphors are so utterly rooted in Trinidad and Tobago that a reader from outside would miss three quarters of what is happening in the poem, and Google – since we are talking about the Caribbean – would (still) not be of much help.

It has puzzled me, for instance, that the poetry coming out of Trinidad in the last fifteen years or so – reaching me more through publication – had been emerging from one, small corner of Trinidad’s language continuum, albeit with inflections hinting at the larger body. Trinidad is one of the most linguistically liberated spaces in the Caribbean. But, I was wrong. I had not, at that point, read the work of Desiree Seebaran or, even more so, Jannine Horsford, who were exploring the possibilities and magic of their local nation language (and I mean language in its broadest and best sense). Work like Andre Bagoo’s, though not of the same category or concern, was deeply engaged with Trinidad’s mythology and society and, as a journalist by day, he engaged with the ‘mundane’ society. Danielle Boodoo Fortuné’s work manages, with an admirable balance of subtlety and abandon, this language continuum, creating an intriguing relationship between the orality of Trinidad and the written work she would’ve encountered in reading poetry. The same can be said of Shivanee Ramlochan. They all have that unabashed and settled sense of the supreme importance of Trinidad over anywhere else; uniquely Trinidadian. The beauty of this is that it becomes established, and settles into the background. Rather than distract, it is something that could be taken for granted. Roots. This frees writers to interact (as equals) with literature from anywhere else in the world.

What I am trying to say is that what has made its way to us through publication has made that progress on the basis of certain ‘objective’ considerations of Craft with a capital C – including individual writers’ achievement in reproducing and innovating some of the principles that govern how we think about craft – as well as the ability to enter ‘grand’ discourses using the local as material. All this, as opposed to the tackling of local discourses in and of themselves, even for those that do not qualify or cannot be attached to ‘grand discourses’ – and we certainly have not looked at what is good on the basis of the produced work’s relationship to its society. Rather, we marvel more at the ‘scientific’ capability of art to ‘capture’, to accurately observe to the point where one’s distance – presumably allowing for more accurate observation – becomes a thing, a subject. We have strived for this rather than texture, which arrives through touch – to truly touch and be touched by the society, both gently and roughly. It is perhaps this conundrum that Mass Cyrus addresses at the beginning of Erna Brodber’s groundbreaking novel Myal, ‘but this kind of people, … spirit too sekkle pekkle. Best let them keep their distance after all.’

To be frank, and to admit my biases, I am less drawn to ‘accurate observation’ and ‘capturing’ (and containing, for there isn’t capture without containment) than I am in the writers habitation of space, of language and of cultural variety inherent in these. I am more interested in writing that contains the texture of the place, through being in touch with it, one that is also, and therefore, touched by the place – a writing that is not in full control, that is not acting unilaterally upon distanced material, but writing that acts and can be acted upon. Writing that can be vessel, rather than spirit tief or cyapturer … or, perhaps, somewhere in between (if the gods allow it). This may have been the reason why I was particularly interested – when thinking of what is truly new – in those un-smudged by too much publication or those still freshly into it. This seemed, to me, the way to go; before they get swept up in a certain idea of poetry, being a writer, ‘the writing life’ and so on, all their own regimes of truth, privileging certain realities, certain basic assumptions in the background of their praxis while sidelining others. Of course, this ‘untouchedness’ is not to be found equally in the writers gathered here. I am moving away from ‘accurate observation’ as the basis for metaphor and poetics, and I suppose I am less inclined toward the absolute precision and perfection that our science is after. Something in my interest in texture allows me to read differently, dealing with what would, under another gaze, be considered imperfect, imprecise.

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Deconstructing Decolonisation: Victor Questel’s Collected Poems

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Ben Etherington


A review essay

Ex-
it
mas’ man
push on
pan man,
a man
attuned, trapped

caught (like me)
making 
subtle inden-
tations
in his
spider web

(now)
limbo-
ing from flambeau-
pan-yard
to
flying Pan Am

a-
massing cultural
missions (17)1

For those unfamiliar with the Caribbean context, a pan man is a pan (‘steel drum’) player, and a mas’ man’ is a participant in the masquerade. They are key figures in the annual Trinidad Carnival: a festival which creolised the quasi-pagan, pre-Lenten festivities of the white plantation class in the slave era and Canboulay (French Trinidadian Creole for ‘cannes brulées’, or burnt cane), a celebration at least as old as emancipation (1834), in which those who had been enslaved re-enacted the rounding up of slaves that occurred when sugar cane illicitly had been burnt. Canboulay parodied and inverted this display of plantation power, celebrating freedom and continuities in African ritual expression.2 Once a hero of Carnival’s anarchic anticolonial spirit, in the post-independence era – Trinidad and Tobago decolonised in 1962, this poem appeared in 1972 – the pan man has become a jet-setting cultural ambassador for a nation finding its feet as a notional free-agent in the word-economy. (The same theme would be fleshed out in narrative form by Earl Lovelace in the tremendous The Dragon Can’t Dance a decade later.3) These opening lines signal that this is a poem concerned, at least in part, with the commercialisation of culture.

Each line of ‘Pan Drama’ is between one and five syllables long, and these are clustered into groups of six or seven. (As the poem continues, the groups contract to three or four lines.) From the third line there are four consecutive lines of two syllables. The enjambment of the poem’s first word into two mono-syllabic lines prepares the rhythmic and semantic logic of these bi-syllabic lines by asserting the dominance of line over word and the independence of the phoneme. It also works to distribute energy between syllables in a way that undermines the expectation that we should observe stress as per everyday speech (that is, if one’s inner ear presumes a certain kind of accentual delivery; something that would not necessarily occur to some of the poet’s compatriots). One might therefore read the opening as a series of two-beat utterances:

EX         IT
MAS      MAN
PUSH    ON
PAN      MAN
A           MAN
AT         TUNED

It could almost be delivered in the rhythm of the heart. This is not sustained, but the propulsion it creates persists for a few lines, affecting the way we negotiate the relationship between line and syntax throughout.

While it would be a stretch to claim that the rhythm is a direct mimesis of pan music, it seems likely that the augmentation of rhythmic effect through conspicuous segmentation connects form to content, much in the way that similar techniques do in the following passages: 

So come
quick cattle
train, lick
the long:
rails: choo-
choo chattanoo-
ga pick
the long 
trail to town. (33)
Rise rise
locks-
man, Solo-
man Wise
man, rise
rise rise
leh we
laugh 
dem, mock 
dem, stop
dem (43)4

Again phonemes hang semi-autonomously at the end of short lines, and there’s the suggestion of rhythmic mimesis; they do not directly imitate the rhythms of, respectively, the train blues and reggae, and yet the short line and conspicuous enjambment allows the poet quickly to establish a rhythmic propulsion that alludes to these musical genres. (An example of direct rhythmic mimesis is Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae Sounds’.)5

These latter excerpts come from a very famous collection: Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage, first published in 1968 by Oxford University Press. The first excerpt is from a poem in a collection known by very few: Victor Questel and Anson Gonzales’s Score, self-published by the authors in Port-of-Spain four years later. Brathwaite’s collection, the first instalment of his ‘New World’ trilogy The Arrivants, riffs on various musical forms produced by the African diaspora in the New World. As well as those mentioned already, there are work songs, delta blues, rock n’ roll, calypso, and various forms of jazz, which are arranged into a rough chronology that charts the dispersion and creolization of African culture in the Americas. One could probably slip Questel’s pan poem into Brathwaite’s collection and few first-time readers would spot the anomaly. The elements that might stand out are those parenthetical asides, which signal a clear divide between the poet and the musician. In Brathwaite’s collection there is no such separation of the poet’s voice and that of his personae.

If Questel’s asides suggest an individuated poetic voice whose language, and being, is separate from the folk, proletarian, and lumpenproletarian characters he, at turns, describes, ventriloquises and addresses, we are, perhaps, more in the milieu associated with Brathwaite’s poetic antithesis, Derek Walcott. Take the following from another early Questel poem, ‘Tom’:

I have no grief 
for words to
flounder upon

for the way lost
is the way
lost

and revolution 
is a scandal 
of poverty 
sandalled to the 
dust of processions. (32)

The segmentation again recalls Brathwaite’s early poetics, but the lofty note struck by personification, verbal metonym, and unblinking lyric fatalism is Walcott through and through. As Gordon Rohlehr notes frequently in his expansive commentary on Questel’s collected poems, this is a poetics that moves between, and at times attempts to synthesise, the two most celebrated poles of post-independence Caribbean poetics. This polarity was regularly observed at the time, and its impact on poets in the ’60s and ’70s would come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy.6

I start by emphasising Questel’s relation to Brathwaite vs. Walcott not to suggest that his corpus is epiphenomenal to or symptomatic of that headline aesthetic battle, but to point to the fact that he developed his poetic style at a time when an independent field of aesthetic position-taking had established itself in the region. It is probably the first moment in the history of the English-medium Caribbean poetry (at least in its written modes) at which an emerging poet could orient her or his aesthetic program primarily with reference to local authorships. This would not have been true even seven years earlier, when the late-colonial / early-post-colonial notion of ‘Commonwealth literature’ was still a dominant parameter for reception and interpretation.

The field of Caribbean poetry was a lot more varied and complex than Brathwaite vs. Walcott in 1972, but it is striking that their influence can so readily be observed on the surface of Questel’s work. This is not true for the generation just ahead of him – the likes of Wayne Brown, Mervyn Morris and Dennis Scott – who established their formal agendas before the polarisation had become so distinct, especially after the Brathwaite-edited anthology Savacou ¾7 – and it would not be true of the generation just after him, which included several ground-breaking female poets like Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior and Velma Pollard (all of whom, it should be said, were older than Questel, but who each published their first volumes later than him). It is both a testament to the times and the nature of Questel’s quest – it seems greatness was on his agenda – that the anxiety of influence is there for all to see. He editorialised in Brathwaite’s favour in the journal Tapia, and wrote one of the first doctorates dedicated to Walcott’s work at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at St Augustine.

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS, ESSAYS | Tagged ,

She’ll Chew You Up: Notes on Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal and Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Tiana Reid


Photo of the author by Josh Begley

Writing about the novel form in her 1971 essay, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,’ Jamaican novelist and theorist Sylvia Wynter said that ‘the novel form is in essence a question mark.’ It narrates, but also prods. If you’ve ever read Wynter’s only novel, The Hills of Hebron, which was published the same year as Jamaican independence, you’ll know that the novel form admittedly prompts more questions than answers. If the novel form is a question mark, then, and while reading Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal (2016), I thought the poetic form might as well be an em dash. Versatile, incidental, fragmented, paratactic, broken down and broken into.

Safiya Sinclair’s debut book of poems, Cannibal mines the break. The first break concerns the etymology of the English word ‘cannibal,’ which comes from caribal, as in the Carib people Christopher Columbus believed ate humans. ‘Belief’ might not seem like a strong enough word but this particular man’s beliefs, like so many, transformed the world. ‘Caribbean’ follows soon after caribal.

Sinclair’s Cannibal is also in conversation with Shakespeare, who was writing about 100 years after Columbus’s first 1492 voyage. In The Tempest, he anagrammed canibal (from the Spanish) to make Caliban: the native monster character to receive new life by the likes of Aimé Césaire and Oscar Wilde. Caliban has been somewhat of a stock figure to think through the colonial encounter and its afterlives.

At first glance, then, this pentalogy has all the requisite themes of what we call Caribbean literature: exile, the instability of the mother tongue, emigration, New World hauntologies, archipelagic thinking, involuntary servitude, cash crops, etc. And what happens when a ‘feminism’ is inserted here? When a canon is assumed to be neutral and unmarked? What telos is prescribed? What goals are inscribed? What scripts get written before we do our reading? If a Caliban gets gendered as woman, gets doubly marked, perhaps, Sinclair’s creeping text suggest that she swings back, gets turned around and becomes again cannibal: man-eater.

Cannibal holds its own, and breaks through literary scaffolding: the poems are divided into five parts and all begin with an epigraph from the Tempest (either Shakespeare’s or Césaire’s), punctuated by a play that has been taken up as a kind of ur-text of coloniality. The first line of Cannibal, from a poem called ‘Home,’ allows itself to hang over an em dash: ‘Have I forgotten it—.’ To forget and to betray carry a cruel intimacy. ‘Have I forgotten it— / wild conch-shell dialect, / black apostrophe curled / tight on my tongue?’ A mother tongue, if we can call it that, ought to remain tightly locked around the organ, but here it threatens to let loose and to unravel.

A cannibal must have a body, some flesh to devour. For Sinclair, the body, an established feminist philosophy, is the object of thick description: black-haired kelp, two hungry mouths, gravid belly, open ears, severed ankles and jelly cheeks. Still, in an era when every other Twitter bio claims ‘intersectional feminist :)’ as its foundational biography, it is not at all surprising to insist that ‘woman / women’ is not a monolithic or universal category. You know: women, in their production of difference, differ. This second-wave feminist truism does not attend to the many broken and fragmented selves, that is to say, a cannibalised self.

The self and the body both point to some narrative difference. The stories we tell about ourselves diverge from stories about our bodies (often told by others). Sinclair enacts the body’s various positions: one’s body, my body, your body, the body. ‘Wet mouth of my future body, we’ve come to understand / each word, and how sometimes the words / themselves will do.’ In ‘The Art of Unselfing,’ we have the image of ‘old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths.’ The prefix ‘un-’ tends to signal absence or lack but for Sinclair it is an art in the sense that it is a process. Like: ‘your youth / and it’s unweeding’ (99). Or: ‘How love is still unrooting you.’ The poem ends with an obligation to make a home of the unself. That is to cannibalise the self, the home, to undo it, to reverse it but also to take it in, to swallow the savage.

Who verbs the noun ‘cannibal’ here? Is it Father—sometimes only a lower case father? A dense one-page poem about possession in its various forms, ‘Pocomania,’ shares a restless irreverence with my favorite Sylvia Plath poem, ‘Daddy,’ but in its own context of revivalism and possession, ‘Pocomania’ further demonstrates how the play between Father and father adjudicates the entanglement of law, the patrilineal, and desire.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , ,

Selections from ‘The Face: a feeling’: 8 Portraits by Kwesi Abbensetts

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Kwesi Abbensetts


Kwesi Abbensetts | The Face: a feeling | Digital photograph

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

Delicious Pick

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Felicia Montoute

He sees them:
Smooth skin
Polished surface
Emitting light
Perfectly ripe Eyes intense
Lips apart
Saliva overload
Tongue wet
He gulps
He stops
They tease
Side by side
Imagine touch
Firm feel
Textured right
Must squeeze
Hands full
Sweet scent
Juicy inside
Impatient
He wants
Leans over
Grabs hard
Pulls back
Swings
Throws
Picks her
Julie mangoes

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

How to Exhale

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Chenée Daley

You drove restlessly to the edge
where moonwater washes the rock cliffs
to lay those underwhelming years down.
Waking up every morning to swim off the smoke
and lay on a hammock in the sun
with the rest of the people who came here
to turn themselves into vapour;
your mind rocking back and forth
between this moment.
Little girl, when you roll a life into a bundle,
seal it airtight and set yourself ablaze,
you have to release the vapour with the smoke and
loosen the chokehold; that black air
hindering your breath. Do it now
in this place of magical thinking,
where for the first time you will be able to feel air
between who you were
and who you have become.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Cracked

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Desiree Seebaran

I

To get to the usefulness in a calabash, you must pick the green fruit;
it may be above your reach
but stretch a little.
Hold it carefully, then slowly saw its guts
open. A brown calabash will shatter under the torture
but the green
holds its shape,
endures all violation. Let the rancid emotions spill.

Hollow the halves of the gourd, scrape until it feels
it has nothing left to give: then put it in the sun to dry.
When the sun has baked the shell
into a corpse
brown as Bagotville canals,
it is ready.

Dip it into water: drink. Bathe. This is what a calabash is good for.

Calabashes have been found
offering their zombie services in kitchens,
bedrooms and bathrooms
in holy rites.

Drafted in as wash basins,
holders for herbs and fruit, gourds to wash fellow dead;
vessels for sweat rice, tie foot and other obeahs.

And even in abandoned houses you may find a cracked calabash,
face down but still standing guard,
stone hardened
and filled with nothing more than memory.

II

I once saw a calabash
balance herself on the road,
ignoring cars that flashed past,
sauntering school children.

This calabash wasn’t a young one. Her unclean edges rounded out
like her speech
like her brown, stiff curves. She wasn’t young.

She was tipping to one side, showing
entirely too much
speckled leg and bumsee.
This calabash was coasting. Breezing out.
Indecent blank eyes sliding
down my embarrassment for her.

What happens when a calabash is no longer young?
No longer freshly green;
smelling her own ripe
stink wafting up from
between her legs. No longer tauntly naïve,
when she can no longer taste saltlessness
on her skin?

What happens when a calabash develops a little spice
on her tongue? When she balances herself at the roadside:
Speckled skin and hardened eyes.

III

My great-grandfather’s second wife
was not an obeah woman,
I think.

But when she could not
bend my great-grandfather –
the war hero, the knotty porkknocker, the village overseer –

When she could not bend
this purple-heart old man to her will,
when she could not divide him
from his daughters

(don’t mind that these were Daisy’s daughters,
born from bauxite blast)

When she could not convince him that
his favourite granddaughter – my mother –
was trying to poison him
with fish tea and mettem.

When she could not stop him from
from riding his own bicycle
in his own village
in his old gardening clothes

She took a long-suffering calabash
and used it to perfume rice
with her 70-odd year essence.

If Cousin Ronald hadn’t caught her at it,
Gershom might have boiled down
and become the house boy she wanted.

The sweat rice failed;
after a few tepid years
she packed up back to Barbados.
He never said a word.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Tony’s Taxi Service

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Colin Robinson

on the way back
i rode three hours on hurricaned roads
wheels in the early morning hands of
a brown-armed man with well healed scars
getting married tomorrow
who called my name over and over
bought me breakfast with all the change
his tidy fingernails found
in his shallow pockets
after the toll
driving me penniless in rain
i wanted to turn aground in the storm
be the best man to this foreigner
who asks from me nothing but business and conversation
from whom i withhold everything but questions and money
with a six year old son
and dreams of selling shoes
out of a converted container
of visiting america
and a future other than smiling
at men like me

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

After Olive Senior, ‘Flying’

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Andre Bagoo

light smoke how to dance
disco ball blocked by bodies
the sun eclipsed by moons
men growing like trees
in this club we leap
we do not look
yet look at me now Grandma
whatever I’m drinking it’s right
now I don’t care what Buju said
or the poet who called me buller
let our republic spread
above clouds—a dance-floor
of dreams
leap
like that time at your house Grandma
when walls disappeared
and he called me into the night
called me through the night
all through the gentle night
call, called to light—this sapwood
this heartwood no nails only bone
empty core mystery bark crackling
there is human flesh in me
in forest we
run deep
until trees no longer have meaning
Hurry up. Rain is coming. Let’s go.
there is a dance better than geography
he is a poem yet to be danced
Lay with me he says after the club
Grandma I’m not sick
I am love
no one tells you
there is no time without man
there is only bliss
we don’t need potions to fly
when we have this

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Messages to Bush Children – Building

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Alicia Valasse

Children …
If you must build your house
beyond La Maison’s Bridge
on Des Barras’ green ridge
use a carpenter with godly fear.
Pray for him.
Beseech
for Christ’s favour
as he builds
on Marquis’ old coconut grave.

Children …
If you must build your house
on bloody, unredeemed land
or spirit-filled wasteland,
use the pious Nails of the Cross.
Wound each board.
Seek the blood
to shield you
as you walk
this windswept graveyard.

Children …
Now you live on this ridge
where the dark never sleeps,
so close your ears when the lost coven calls.
Eschew their verses.
Refuse their charms
to protect your soul
as you live
amongst the charmed,
walking damned.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Stormy Night

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Damian Femi Rene

I think of you like a storm remembered—a marker in my life
Stalking my dreams and my memories like a phantom
Your neck a young brown sapling dancing in the wind
The wind-tossed fury of your hair
Your laughter, the swollen burst of flowing streams
Your smile, the silver lining of a dark day.
Still, my heart thunders with your name
Your face flashes in my mind, your body extended
like a branch of light in the bleakness of my life.
You for whom my heart yearns
Like a warm blanket under stormy skies,
You for whom I sigh myself to sleep
at night beneath the sheets
And when the storm clouds burst
You for whom I weep.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Beyond the River Road

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Linda M. Deane

(On observing artists Ras Akyem Ramsay and Ras Ishi Butcher in a van stand)

You had to look close, as close as yuh hand.
And you had to look way beyond to see them.

They not resembling any kind of Lord: Time, a-leaping or otherwise—yet they strode dimensions. You had to see them tekking on the River Road, shaving its edges; throwing all comers, all goers into shade—the homeward-bound, the outward and unbound, stragglers, strays; quieting the flippant pigeons and the flapping flightlessness of school-chil’run, mudda’s milk still dripping roun’ dey open, force-ripe mouths. They smoothed the blurred lines of tourists, smiles as taut as budget strings, and quelled the van men failing (yet again) to mind their own backsides, looking to scale a fuss up to a fight—mista policeman nowhere in sight—and the sun, badman at his own fete, stirring up the cuss and spite. Like he following a script.

One a dem carried a stick, carved—or maybe it was a length of cane. Yuh had to look good to see the heads angled in reasoning; reckoning. And they moved as one across that jukking stage, locs melding into torsos, melding into arms and legs: Two bred’ren dred with ways and means crammed into their backpacks; African Jedi, black Samurai striding straight out of their own secrets and dreams. And they looked like they were plotting. And it looked like the plotting of a tearing down of walls. But it looked like the urgent erection, first, of those fated walls; or before that, the planting of trees to meet beneath to wage campaigns to fire the bricks to build those self-same walls. And it looked like a bleeding. And it looked like a tidal wave of river-sea-ocean-stream. And it looked like flashes of forgotten forest and distant hill and vanishing field; and a mix-up, mix-up of earth and clay and coral limestone and sand and skin. And it looked like the crisp, Falernum light of dawn or the badman rant of a sun in a van stand gone midday; the thick mauby of afternoon. It looked like flaming sunsets and a sacrament of blood moons and blue moons and no moon and midnights—all of it, leeching into the streets to pigment the winds. And they looked like they were ready. And it looked like they were poised to lore themselves into the soil before our very eyes.

But you had to look good because they did not linger. They moved like apparitions of blood, of flesh, of sinew. They did not steal the foreground, just owned it for a moment, threw the rest of us some shade and placed the stand on mute. One of them carried a stick. Carved it was. Or maybe just a piece of cane, for wielding. Weaving spells. Or shaving edges. Hard to tell with that loose, unhurried stride, not looking, as they did, like lords of time or thievers of spotlight, or bringers of cool, coned silence to ice the sun. We won’t know …

’cause we ain’t seeing so good up close
and even less beyond the River Road.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Crystal Chandeliers

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Lesley-Ann Wanliss

The name of Country and Western song by Charlie Pride my father used to woo my mother.

This Sunday I came to his house that smells of death,
a spread of mannish water, fried sprat and curried goat,
just to say hello; the windows closed hold time

so no spirits may pass the round black wine holder holds
different rums. All that’s missing are glasses and an ice holder.

At my home my mother keeps her sterling
silver ice bucket and prongs hidden
to be laid out only on Ralph Lauren
table cloths with good plates. Crystal
glasses on Sundays are held with pinkies out

My father said I reminded him of her
I belong to her need for acquisition from his decay
there’re no similarities between he and I save for big toe and name.

I take a bottle of rum, and leave. Later I will call his name
and tilt a drop to him from mother’s crystal glass.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Anointing

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Jannine Horsford

Perhaps
when he came to the house
she said – Boy these two girls
up here growing wild
like grass.

And he would have answered
with some farming reference,
like Girl you don’t know
you have to pull out dem wild weed
in the bud.

Perhaps this was when
she invited him to be father.

In that head filled with frothing
water
left behind in the jar
from which wilting week-old
anthuriums have been lifted

“Father” was not a clean or singular thing.
Not the first time that word has been churned up
in a mind of mud—

How close female flesh to wet dirt, how
little muscle-heave
to cleave open the tender
core of them two yellow-heart
breadfruit.

What she didn’t realise was
What she had done was
reached up and placed a crown on
his head.

But she wanted to make him
comfortable
She wanted
him to know
there was a place for him.

And he would bring into that house
tilting like a fishingboat
a type of steadying.

What she didn’t realise was
before him
the world had been a soft green thing
asleep in a shell.

But you cannot keep a man apart
who silvers dry evenings
with the glistening skin
of enormous cavalli.

True, she couldn’t know
the thing she was dealing with
the bullion-weight
of that word she had just pronounced
not breathless
but with two d’s sitting down
in the middle of it.

She couldn’t know what
he would do to
those two girls how he would use
the slick machine of his imagination
and the dark breadth of his wit.

She didn’t know that she had suddenly
made him
irretrievably rich.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Exorcism / Freeport

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Richard Georges

when I was eight, a priest came and flicked holy water
into the four corners of this wooden house

that kept my parents, two sons, a daughter,
and a darkening forest in its mouth.

The priest muttered in Latin, crossed us all
with odorous oils, his thumb pausing on

on the bottom of each cross, on the small
space of our foreheads where Christ was hung from.

but the spirits came every night until
my father opened the fowl’s throat like a bible,

the glint of metal washed away in blood,
a beating of black, white and red feather

his hands, the knife, performed their own recital
to feed with one hand, with the other, kill.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Straight

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Mel Cooke

The tourist stops for uphill directions
Through British transplants
Strawberry Hill, Irish Town, Newcastle

Don’t turn off, keep straight straight
The woman tells him
One hand a lateral plumbline
Along a road of 300 corners legend
Bob Marley took upwards, fleeing bullets
Descended with song to become both
– legend and fugitive

They smile Jamaican
He aping comprehension
She in the local’s sheer satisfaction
Of setting foreigner on the narrow and winding

For straight only is not of sufficient rigidity
To channel these drivers from lands
Of broad tarmac with lanes enough
To be hell bent on destruction

They need a double
A repetition spell check would highlight for deletion
For Microsoft Word knows not our once
Much less twice spoken ways

cabba cabba
chaka chaka
dibby dibby
goody goody
back back
lay lay
meke meke
placka placka
panka panka
sawka sawka
jukky jukky
pyay pyay
fee fee
weddy weddy
passa passa
fool fool
dege dege
I an I
blabba blabba
puny puny
good up good up
one one
kreng kreng
wetty wetty
pum pum

For we are a plural society
Literally, reading a dancehall posters
Achieving ignition with a matches
Nursing the ache of a back teeth
Soothing a bees bite
Begging a smalls
Claiming a customers
Declaring singular possession
Dis is mines

We do not imitate English
In descriptive degrees
Of very and extremely
But pronounce doubles

slim slim
fat fat
white white
black black
reverse back
Loving bad bad
Even unto death

So straight straight means
There are more temptations than accustomed
To turn aside
The traveller must be steadfast
An Argonaut, deaf to siren song
Looking neither left nor right
As would be sojourners inside the US Embassy are
Unlike Lot’s wife and her sodium ways
A pillar of salt looking back at Sodom

High blood pressure has long been our affliction

We learnt under hot tents, on open lands
With calves brushing hard pews
Hemlines swaying
To be steadfast
See and blind, hear and deaf
For it is easier for the camel
To go through the eye of the needle
Than a rich man to enter Zion
Yeah, wanty wanty cyaa get e
An getty getty no want e

If the tourist goes just straight
He might yield to temptation at the first left
And get to a US state, Maryland
Beyond that return to Britain at Cambridge

For the road into the hills doubles back onto itself
Like our colonial masters
And our tongues, interrupting our song
To forward it back

All this she tells the tourist
With a smile, traffic barrier of an arm
Emphasis on two words
In the same exact way
Her sharp mind tells him to mind sharp
And blesses in parting
Have a good good day

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

College Degree in Tourism and Service

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Tiphanie Yanique

Sunshine is on the house. Rum and cola,
two for one. My mouth is sweet water.
I am faithful. I am your favorite.
I don’t spit in the food. I lick it good.
I will bring it to you on a platter
flecked with skin. Ice cubes in the water
encasing a strand of my curly hair.
I will play steel pan with my wrists if it’s
your birthday. But my hips are not polite.
Platitudes come free with the diploma.
Set the stick on fire. Move out the way.
I demonstrate the bending. Backward.
Good morning, sir. Have a nice stay,
mam. Welcome to my beautiful island.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Under the Tamarind

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Royston Emmanuel

I remember mornings when my father sat
under the tamarind tree trimming
feathers, as he whistled

Sunday tunes coming from inside.
On those mornings I would look
through frosted louvre panes

as he nursed those fowls
in ways only a doting parent
could. And I would think

my mother right.
That man love those animals
more than his own children.

I remember him feeding them
things I’d never seen and examining
every inch of their reddening bodies

making marks and bruises go away
with iodine and a gentle rub,
which he never did for us.

But for all the time he spent
with them and not with us,
for all the care he showed them,

I never blamed him.
I learnt somewhere
that each man had his love.

He loved those animals.
I loved books, and him.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

Norene’s Laugh

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Chadd Cumberbatch

Norene’s laugh
echoes through my window
on a Saturday morning
reaching every room
filling them with sunshine

At once
I am transported
to a congregation of aunts
Nennen’s toothless smile
Granny lifts her skirt high
before plunging them back between her thighs
and a laugh from deep within bellows joy
Another aunt tears streaming from her face
thumps a table and gasps for air
and a laugh escapes
peeling sorrow away from the wooden walls
of the house
in Salem

Today on that same street
Norene laughs and fills my heart with joy
and memories
of family
and brown women in madras head ties
and clicking sliver bracelets
Norene’s laugh is snow cone
ginger stick and sugar cake
And every time
it touches me it fills me up
it is Glory!
It is Hallelujah
it is a blessing
when Norene laughs.

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged

“We the Dirt”

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Adrian Green

We are the dirt

Divine earth

We are the trampled upon

Sampled and drawn from the direction of the dawn
To build empires on which the sun was never supposed to set
We were never supposed to get
Only begotten
Sons and daughters forgotten

by Heaven

We are the dirt

That covered the floors of hell
And protected the demon’s feet from the heat
Of their own sins
We are the dirt that they could not wash from their skins
We are the mud they rolled in
To wash and rinse

Left to dry

We are the dirt that still carries the blood stains they left behind

Benign brown earth

Our worth long under valued
Volcanic earth
From our core
Love and light like lava
Flow
We are the fertile soil where new life refuses to not grow
God refuses to not sow
Seeds in us
We are the dirt that will never turn to dust
We
Come to together
Coalesce
Convene in mounds
And rise
As mountains
Serene and stable
High tables prepared in the midst of enemies
Cups running over with energy
Plates cleared of enmity

Even though scorched by the slash and burn techniques
We are the dirt
The earth’s sweat
Sweet dew
And we will have our due
Long overdue
We the earth lay in waiting
Making preparations for the coming of the crop
We the dirt that form the blocks that build the citadel on hardest hill’s top

Posted in 81: NEW CARIBBEAN | Tagged