But that Saturday afternoon in the Regal Theatre (I’m going with the Regal Theatre, especially as it, like most of Kingston’s movie theatres, no longer exists) I was glad that I’d gone to see A Taste of Honey by myself because I remember being so moved that I could not stop crying. I identified fully with the character of the teenage girl who was a gifted artist racked by self-doubt, anxious about the level of her own intelligence and about her place in life.
I was both fascinated and appalled by the mother who goes off and marries a fancy man leaving the girl to fend for herself. The girl becomes pregnant by a handsome Black sailor who goes off to sea, presumably never to be heard from again, and the girl is then befriended by a young homosexual man who tells her ‘You need somebody to love you, while you are looking for someone to love.’ They move in together and he begins to look after her and to prepare for the arrival of the baby. The movie ends on a heart-wrenching note as the bad mother, who has been abandoned by her new husband, comes back into her daughter’s life and forces out the young man who had been tenderly making arrangements for the birth of the baby. The girl is played by one of the brightest stars of 60s British stage and screen, Rita Tushingham, who also played the daughter of Dr Zhivago and Lara in David Lean’s gorgeous epic Doctor Zhivago.
Another reason this movie is transformative was recently revealed to me by the writer Caz Phillips. When the girl asks him where he was born, the Black sailor replies that he’s from Cardiff. This is the first time that a Black character in a film ever identified themselves as British.
It took me a long time to understand why I was so moved by A Taste of Honey, but I finally figured out that it was probably the first film I saw where I felt sympathy for the humanity of every single one of the characters, even for the careless living mother who was the exact antithesis of my own. My heart ached for the young gay man, who demonstrates more maternal concern for the arrival of the baby than the pregnant girl does, and the scene near the end, where the awful mother hands him back the bassinet he’d bought for the baby, was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.
There was not a lot of happiness on offer in that film; still it proved to be one of the most important experiences I would ever have in a cinema, because I decided to myself as I sat there in the dark that no matter what I was going to do with my life I would somehow try to honour the humanity of everyone, no matter how strange, how different, how not-usual. Jamaican society is notoriously homophobic, and I credit that movie with helping me to honour the humanity of gay people and of people who do not fit in.
Shelagh Delaney was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everybody else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.
3
Some poems that made me
FROM THE TIME I was maybe seven or eight years old, I began to be seized by a strong desire to put down my feelings in writing. Before that, I’d mostly expressed my feelings orally, sometimes in rhyme. One of my first rhyming efforts took the form of what I considered to be a praise song to my mother’s distant cousin, Mimi Blackie. The rhyme had something to do with cousin Mimi’s fondness for the Jamaican national fruit, the ackee:
Miss Mimi Blackie
She love to eat ackee
For this, my mother cautioned me that I was being disrespectful to one of her beloved relatives from Harvey River. After that I decided that it was best to write things down. But setting my thoughts down in writing also managed to get me into trouble, especially after I took it upon myself to write, on the newly painted walls of the family toilet, something that I had read in the obituary section of The Gleaner. To this day I still cannot comprehend why I was so affected by the headline: ‘Mrs Hilda Shoucair is dead’. I had never met the lady, and I am certain that nobody in my family had ever had anything to do with her. Why then was I so moved by the news of her death that I felt compelled to write of it on that wall?
‘Mrs Hilda Shoucair is dead’.
I got punished for that. Many years later I would learn from my husband, Ted Chamberlin, how some of the earliest poems recorded were words written on tombstones in remembrance of the dead. Wherever Mrs H. Shoucair is, I hope she knows that in keeping with this tradition, I tried to make sure that she was not forgotten and that I suffered for my art. And yet whenever I am asked, ‘When did you know that you were a poet?’ or ‘When did you write your first poem?’ I never think back to this incident, I usually say that the first poem I ever wrote was ‘After A Shower of Rain’. I wrote it in the aftermath of one of those sudden downpours that come to quench the Jamaican landscape in the month of August. It is the kind of rain that cleans the air and the trees and which leaves behind the most pleasing of all scents, ‘eau de rain on dry earth’. This kind of shower is usually followed by swarms of ‘rainflies’ who dance around electric lights until you hold a bowl of water up close to the light bulb so they can dive to their death by drowning.
I was not the kind of child who saved my school books, so I’ll never be able to revisit my earliest poetic efforts, but looking back now I realise that apart from early babbling and doodling (like my couplets for Mimi Blackie and Mrs H. Shoucair) maybe I first came to poetry through the hymns that I sang at my Convent infant school, where I learned to sing praises to the Virgin Mary, and All Saints Primary School, and St Hugh’s High School for Girls where every school day started with the singing of a good Anglican hymn. Poetry also presented itself early in the nursery rhymes, riddles, songs and poems my mother would sing or recite to us, like the numinous, riddling ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’ by Christina Rossetti.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
the wind is passing by.
Poetry wafted in off the streets in the cries of the mango sellers who would go about the city of Kingston calling out:
Call: Buy yu number eleven
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu Hairy, hairy
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu Blackie
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu sweetie-come brush me
Response: Mango
Poetry provided the imagery for the ring games I played as a small girl:
‘There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la’ (Boney M later turned this traditional Jamaican children’s song into a big hit). And it provided the rhythm when we jumped rope:
Massquitta one, massquitta two
Massquitta jump inna hot callaloo.
My mother had been a teacher of small children before she married my father and had nine children of her own and she would tell me and my siblings stories at night before we went to sleep. The story of the little Hebrew boy Samuel who was the only one that Yahweh cared to address his precious words to at a time when Yahweh was withholding his speech from his chosen people, was one of our family favourites. She would accompany the story by singing the hymn:
Hushed was the evening hymn,
The temple courts were dark,
The lamp was burning dim,
Before the sacred ark:
When suddenly a voice divine
Rang through the silence of the shrine.
Oh, give me Samuel’s ear,
The open ear, O Lord,
Alive and quick to hear
Each whisper of Thy word!
Like all children, I thought literally, so I was deeply puzzled at first by the idea of asking to be given someone’s ear. Wouldn’t that mean that I would have three ears and the poor little boy just one? Also, ‘Alive and quick’? ‘Alive’ yes, but what was a ‘quick ear’? Still, I liked the sound of these words, and soon I just decided to go along with that and not worry too much about the business of the ears.
If I imagined that Samuel was a little boy who lived at All Saints Church, where my family then worshipped, I could quite clearly see the picture that was being painted.
I count this as one of the poems that made me, because I am always hoping to be given the open ear that is alive and quick to hear each whisper of the word, the good word, the singing mysterious word that is Poetry.
Another poem that helped to shape me was William Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’. Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.
What I will say here is that that poem caused me to wonder why, as a Jamaican child of eight or nine, I was being made to memorise and recite a poem about a flower I had never seen, a flower that does not grow on the island. And perhaps because as a small child I had asked for an open ear, I thought I heard a voice saying, ‘Well maybe you should write a poem about the plants and flowers that grow in Jamaica,’ and I have tried to obey that voice.
The next poem that helped to shape my poetic voice was Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abou Ben Adhem’. This was another poem I’d been made to memorise at primary school by our headmaster Ralston Wilmot, who was a gentleman, a humanist, and a great lover of literature and music.
I was told a few years ago by someone who is a speaker of Arabic that the title of this poem is problematic – ‘Abou’ means ‘son of’ and ‘Ben’ also means ‘son of’ – but this has not changed my feelings towards it. I liked ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ so much that I took to reciting it sometimes when I accompanied my mother to weddings where she had designed and sewn the bride’s and bridesmaids’ dresses. As a kind of two-for-one deal, the assembled guests would be able to admire my mother’s peerless dressmaking even as they were treated to my rendition of ‘Abou Ben Adhem’. I guess these recitations can be counted as my first poetry readings.
And then there is Rupert Brooke’s poem about the little dog who went on a tear and, of course, paid for it with his life. I learned that poem at St Hugh’s High School for Girls, set up in Kingston, Jamaica over 115 years ago by the Church of England. Our patron saint was St Hugh of Lincoln, we wore two-piece shirt-waist uniforms of Lincoln green and under our pleated skirts we were required to wear knee-length bloomers. No other footwear was permitted except dark brown lace-up Oxfords, and dark brown socks, and on our heads we wore green berets. Because our patron saint was alleged to have had a pet swan who always followed him around, our school badge was a small cobalt-blue enamelled shield, upon which a swan floated on the waves of the word Fidelitas. The schoolboys of Kingston called us ‘green lizards’. We referred to ourselves as swans.
At age twelve, I sat in a classroom with a high ceiling and listened as our English teacher, who was from England, read us, with no warning or preparation, two poems: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Little Dog’s Day’. The look of pure delight on her face as she read them aloud was enough to show us how poems can give pleasure. That same teacher, her name was Mrs Junor, also read us sections of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and I remember being completely captivated by her performance. But she did not explain those poems, and she never gave us one piece of biographical information about the poets; we were allowed to let the words do whatever they wished to us, and I believe they worked some kind of magic on my twelve-year-old self. I cannot, to this day, read those poems without being overtaken by a great sense of delight, although in actual fact the subject of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is really deeply depressing. But I thoroughly enjoyed them, and I am still charmed by ‘The Little Dog’s Day’ by Rupert Brooke, particularly by the opening stanza, with its gentle description of people asleep and the sun rising; a deceptive start to what would prove to be a day of riotous canine infamy. I liked it that the dog began his twenty-four-hour spree of doggy wickedness with a dance; and maybe because of this I have always liked the idea of writing about dancing in poems.
Nine years later, when I was a student at the Art Students League of New York I bought, from Brentano’s bookstore in Greenwich Village, a copy of Rupert Brooke’s poems and I read them as I rode the subway. I particularly liked the poems from the section on the South Seas; one I kept revisiting was ‘The Great Lover’:
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men [and women] use, to cheat despair.
In a beautiful and strange come around, a few years ago I was given a copy of that same collection by George Kiddell, a wonderful Canadian who played a big part in acquiring my papers for the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. My husband, Ted, and I spent several evenings in his company at his apartment in Toronto, and towards the end of those evenings the three of us would inevitably end up reciting poems aloud. George Cadell also liked Rupert Brooke, and just before he died he sent me a leather-bound early edition of 1914 & Other Poems as a gift to replace my dog-eared copy, which I had long since left behind on the seat of a New York subway.
Looking back, I see that I was taught a very wide range of poems, almost all written by European men. Poems like Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’, Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I learned to take delight in poems like Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ and the mad funny verses of Ogden Nash and Hilaire Belloc. To this day if I find myself in the company of old school friends like Cecile Clayton and Annie Rose Kitchin, we are liable to end up reciting the long cautionary tale in verse of Belloc’s ‘Jim’, who was eaten by a lion for the crime of running away from his nursemaid.
I was also taught several of the poems of John Masefield – who used local language – and these are so hard-wired into me that occasionally, for no apparent reason, I will find myself crooning ‘The Port of Many Ships’.
It’s a sunny pleasant anchorage, is Kingdom Come,
Where crews is always layin’ aft with double-tots o’ rum,
’N’ there’s dancin’ ’n’ fiddlin’ of ev’ry kind o’ sort,
It’s a fine place for sailormen is that there port
’N’ I wish—
I wish as I was there.
The winds is never nothin’ more than jest light airs,
’N’ no one gets belayin’ pinned, ’n’ no one never swears.
To be fair to our teacher, in this case she did explain to us that to be ‘belayin’ pinned’ is essentially to get whacked over the head with a heavy blunt instrument shaped like a rolling pin.
When my father died in December 1963, I felt as if I had been belayin’ pinned. Like all my siblings I had to struggle to make sense of this terrible loss and of the dramatic changes that my father’s death brought about in our family. One of these changes was that I was sent to live with my elder sister Barbara and her husband, Ancile Gloudon, in their beautiful home in Gordon Town in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. My sister, who is one of the brightest and best-known women in the Caribbean and who has had an outstanding career as a journalist and radio talk show host, has always been a great reader, and the library in that house was well stocked with a wide range of books, including a signed first edition copy of The Dream Keeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes. I was overjoyed to discover these poems by this revered and iconic figure of African American poetry, and I got no end of pleasure from reading lyrics like ‘Weary Blues’, ‘Dream Variations’ and ‘Quiet Girl’.
On the shelves that ran floor to ceiling in that long narrow library, there were many signed first editions of books written by early authors of West Indian literature, several of whom were personal friends of my sister and her husband. Outstanding books from the New York Times bestseller list had also made it on to the sh
elves as well as a complete set of textbooks acquired from a close friend of my brother-in-law’s who had read English at the University of the West Indies.
In between studying the texts I was meant to be doing for my O-level English exams, I read widely from that library, sometimes drawn by the illustrations on the book jackets. For example, I was attracted to Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great family saga The Leopard because the book jacket featured a rampant leopard on a coat of arms, set against a scarlet background. But Vic Reid’s novel The Leopard actually resonated more with me because he is such an important Jamaican writer whom I was lucky enough to meet in person on a few occasions. James Baldwin’s Another Country, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man were all important works of fiction I first encountered there; but I always returned to the lower shelves where the collections of poetry were kept. I developed a fondness for one particular collection featuring the metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert. I found John Donne hard going, and most of the time I just could not puzzle out his extravagant conceits, but I am certain that I benefited from the trying. George Herbert was way more accessible, and that is because I was used to singing some of his poems that had been set to hymn tunes in church and at school. At least once a month, we’d sing ‘The Elixir’ in school assembly, and when we did I’d always find myself puzzling over these two stanzas:
Redemption Ground Page 2
