A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
cannot for less be told.
George Herbert’s lyrics seemed always to be concerned with some mysterious and healing source of goodness that I really wanted to get close to, but I had no idea how I’d be able to do this except through reading poems like his. Roaming freely through those bookshelves was the beginning of my lifelong identification with the figure of the scholar gypsy in Matthew Arnold’s long poem ‘Thyrsis’, and I am still, to this day, drawn to poems that contain what I call ‘medicine’ in them.
But when I found In a Green Night, an early collection of poems by Derek Walcott, who had been at university with my brother-in-law, was a good friend of my sister’s, and became a mentor and good friend to me, I stopped reading everything else and took to just reading his poems.
I read In a Green Night in the way I sometimes read the Hebrew Psalms (King James version), seeking something to hold on to: poem as source of hope and consolation; poem as lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.
One of the many things I liked about Walcott’s poems was that they alluded to people and landscapes with which I was familiar, and I badly needed to be on safe familiar ground right then as my father, the North Star of our family, the light of our lives, was gone.
One poem in particular, ‘A Careful Passion’, became one I kept returning to, not just because of the subject of the poem – doomed angst-ridden love (as a teenager I was of course deeply taken with anything that was angst-ridden) but because a number of things about it taught me how a poem could be written in a fresh and engaging way.
First, the epigraph in Jamaican vernacular made me see that patois could be used for something other than humour, and that in fact no other epigraph would have been as appropriate:
Hosanna I build me house, Lawd,
De rain come wash it ’way.
Then the opening lines employed language that could have been found in an advertisement for high-end real estate or in a tourism brochure:
The Cruise Inn, at the city’s edge,
Extends a breezy prospect of the sea…
It then went on to incorporate brilliant metaphors:
From tables fixed like islands near a hedge
Of foam-white flowers…
In that poem, an old Greek freighter is quitting port, no doubt making way for a Caribbean schooner helmed by Walcott. It is not his greatest poem, but it is still one of my favourites by him, because it has so many fine turns.
So cha cha cha, begin the long goodbyes…
The cha cha is a dance where one steps forwards and backwards and marks time on the spot; who has not said such a goodbye? Also, ‘cha cha cha’, if pronounced by someone with a Jamaican accent, can sound like ‘chu chu chu’, a cry of deep frustration sounded three times.
I liked that you could do that in a poem, but back then it never occurred to me that I would ever produce a book of poetry, nor that at some point I’d become deeply invested in trying for the kinds of skilful turns I have always instinctively admired in great writing. I suppose I was always, from the very beginning, just feeling my way forward.
About a year after I started reading In a Green Night I was given a prize for English Literature at St Hugh’s. It was The Oxford Book of Modern Verse edited by W. B. Yeats. I have read this anthology from cover to cover many times. One of the first things I did was to search through it for the works of women writers. I have to confess that only a few of them stayed with me – some pieces by Lady Gregory, from the Irish of Douglas Hyde. But there was a poet named Michael Field – I did not know then that it was the pen name of two women – who wrote some pretty angst-ridden verse that caused me to weep copious and cleansing tears.
Anyway, I got way more pleasure from reading poets like Oliver St John Gogarty, Ernest Dowson, Rabindranath Tagore, and Yeats himself, and I kept returning to one particular poem by Walter James Turner. I later found out he was a theatre critic. Turner’s ‘Hymn To Her Unknown’ was a revelation to me, and it taught me a great deal about the writing of poetry. It starts off as reportage, who, what, where, when, and then gradually becomes more and more freighted with rhythm, rhyme, repetition, allusion, rendering the language more and more patterned, more dense until the voice in the poem is almost talking in tongues before Venus rising from the waves is referenced, thus cooling things off. I taught that poem at the University of Michigan for many years and I recommend it highly.
But all these poems were written by men; and as I began to think more and more about my own place in the world I really, really needed to hear and read poems written by people who looked and thought like me. I searched through The Oxford Book of Modern Verse looking for poems to which I, as a Black woman, could relate, until I came across three poems that had Africa as their subject. One by Edith Sitwell – whose bold confident writing style was of some interest until I came to her truly appalling poem ‘Gold Coast Customs’. Dread! There was also one by Roy Campbell, titled ‘The Zulu Girl’ and one called ‘The Scorpion’ by William Plomer.
The unsettling way in which all these poets quickly turned to animal analogies to describe Black people made me feel queasy, Sitwell’s poem being the absolute worst and Roy Campbell’s being the least worst. After that experience I knew that I needed to find poems that did not disrespect people like me, poems that honoured the humanity of my people.
Maybe if I had known more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning when I was searching for women poets to read I’d have spent more time with her work back then – I’d been made to memorise ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ – because her family had strong ties to Jamaica. The Barretts have deep roots in my homeland, as they used to own several large sugar estates where they profited handsomely from the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans. It was years later that I read how the source of her family’s income was apparently deeply troubling to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who once wrote, ‘I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid.’ The concern for freedom and justice which drove many of her works stemmed from the fact that she felt guilty about profiting from the proceeds of such monumental cruelty and injustice.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were all about freedom and justice for me; it was also the time when I really began to accept the fact that I am a poet, and when I began to actively search out the works of Black women poets who might become role models for me. When I studied painting at the Art Students League of New York, I spent a good deal of time reading the fearless and incendiary writings of African American women poets like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and others, and I even tried for some of their righteously wrathful turns in a few of my early efforts, but I eventually came to the conclusion that, much as I love and admire these poets, I had to keep searching for my own unique way of expressing myself, which can accurately represent my own life experiences and my own culture.
In retrospect, I’d say that the African American woman poet whose work nourished me the most was Gwendolyn Brooks; her voice is truly elegant and timeless. And the great fiction writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison are all writers whose work I greatly respect and admire.
But all this time I kept searching for poetry written by Caribbean women, only coming across the odd poem here and there because they were hard to locate in print back then. I’d heard of Una Marson from my parents because she came from the same part of the island as my father – the parish of St Elizabeth – and occasionally I’d come across one of her poems in the local newspaper, my personal favourite being ‘Kinky Hair Blues’, but I was not taught the work of any Jamaican women writers at school. I was vaguely familiar with the names of a few other women writers
like Barbara Ferland, Constance Hollar and Vera Bell, who wrote one really powerful poem called ‘Ancestor on the Auction Block’, but at that time none of these women occupied a really central place in Caribbean literature. As proof of this, in 1971 when Bolivar Press in Kingston published a slim and handsome volume titled Seven Jamaican Poets, that publication did not include one work by a woman, although by then the great Louise Bennett had been writing and performing her poems for decades.
That the poems of Louise Bennett eventually managed to find their way into The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry was largely due to the efforts of the brilliant literary critic Jahan Ramazani, and was a case of justice being served, because, while I grew up familiar with Louise Bennett’s extraordinary satirical poems, Jamaicans were not encouraged to regard what she did as real poetry because she wrote in Jamaican English. All modern Jamaican and Caribbean writers owe Miss Lou a great debt because she took a great deal of abuse from the gatekeepers of society so that Jamaicans could one day be proud of the way we speak and write.
As far as poetry written by women was concerned, the 1960s and 70s were all about Sylvia Plath, and I learned one of the most important lessons of my life, my writing life, from reading Plath’s work. I learned that there are writers whose words are so powerful, whose ideas and images are so seductive, that a young writer can lose their own way by trying to follow them.
Sylvia Plath has written some of the most compelling poems in the English language. ‘Lady Lazarus’, with its multiple deaths and resurrections and reinventions, is the one I value most as I look back at my own, now long life, but I sensed early on that it was dangerous for me to spend too much time in Plath’s company because her world view is so inclined to be dark, and because for much of my young life I was so wounded, wayward and impressionable. I mercifully sensed that for my soul’s safety I needed to hold on to things that are life-affirming.
This need to hold on to what is life-giving also influenced my readings of Anne Sexton, and to some extent Virginia Woolf. I decided along the way to always approach the work of some writers with a measure of caution and respect, and to remind myself always that my admiration for their work did not mean that they would be ideal role models for me.
Edna St Vincent Millay was the exception to my rule. Some of the earliest poems by women I had found had been written by her, and I immediately took to her voice because I liked that she professed to being a sort of wild woman, and at the time I was getting ready to try on that persona for myself. Her influence on me was made manifest in the form of a longish mawkish rhyming poem I wrote which was heavily patterned on her long poem ‘Renascence’. Even at seventeen I realised how bad my effort was, so I tore it up. But looking back now, I’m sure that the writing of it helped me to process my grief at the loss of my father because it was a poem about resurrection, renewal and coming back to life.
I would say that the poem that has had the greatest impact on my adult life is the Divine Comedy. My engagement with it began when I was one of several poets invited by the Southbank Centre in London to rewrite one of the Cantos from Dante’s masterpiece. To date I have rewritten seven cantos, setting them all in Jamaica and employing Jamaican dialect in tribute to the great Italian poet who wrote in the local language of his people.
So, I really ended up writing the poems that I wanted to read, and writing them in a way that sounds more like the language I use when I quarrel with myself, or when I lament, praise, pray and console myself and hopefully others. A friend of mine once said that the poetry I have written can be grouped into two categories: poems about love, and poems about justice. That is probably true, and of this I am certain: I intend to keep praying for the open ear, in order to hear them if and when they come.
4
Nadine Gordimer Memorial Lecture
‘Guinea Woman’
My great grandmother was a Guinea woman.
Wide eyes turning the corners of her face
could see behind her.
Her cheeks dusted with a fine rash of jet-bead warts
that itched when the rain set up.
Great grandmother’s waistline the span of a headman’s
hand. Slender and tall like a cane stalk
with a Guinea woman’s antelope-quick walk.
And when she paused, her gaze would look to see
her profile fine like some obverse impression
on a Guinea coin from Royal memory.
It seems her fate was anchored in that unfathomable sea,
for great grandmother caught the eye of a sailor
whose ship sailed without him from Lucea Harbour.
Great grandmother’s royal scent of cinnamon and scallions
drew the sailor up the straits of Africa; the evidence
is my blue-eyed grandmother, the first mulatta
taken into backra’s household and covered with his name.
They forbade great grandmother’s Guinea woman presence,
they washed away her scent of cinnamon and scallions.
They controlled the child’s antelope walk, and they called her uprisings, rebellions.
But great grandmother, I see your features, blood dark appearing
in the children of each new breeding. And the high yellow-brown
is darkening down: Listen children, it’s your great grandmother’s turn.
IT MAY HAVE begun some time in 1965, with hearing Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte singing ‘The Train Song’. Or it could have begun with hearing Hugh Masekela’s rendition of ‘Coal Train’, and then finding out what the words meant. How these trains were taking migrant workers away from their homes and families in Southern Africa to those wicked and dreadful minefields, to excavate the great wealth from which they themselves could not profit, their humanity regarded then as less-than.
And something in you felt you had to keep track of that train and always follow the fortunes of those men and their women and children.
It may even have begun as far back as 1959 when you heard your parents saying how proud they were that our then premier Norman Manley had made Jamaica one of the first countries to join the embargo against trading with South Africa. You are not sure exactly when.
But one day you became convinced that your people, including your writers and scholars, artists and singers and players of instruments, had a burden placed upon them to speak and write and sing without cease of the fate of our Southern African brethren and sistren – yea, until Apartheid’s end.
Her name was Daphne Abrahams; and she was white; she was one of my first art teachers and she was the first South African I’d ever seen in real life. But most evenings I’d hear her husband’s voice over the radio. His name was Peter and he was Black and he was dearly loved and respected by the people of Jamaica. Peter and Daphne Abrahams were guilty of a love deemed criminal under Apartheid, but they found a place to thrive in Jamaica where they lived up in the hills and he wrote his great novels following Mine Boy and talked to us through the radio about things particular and universal, local and foreign, spiritual and secular, and always ended his broadcasts with life-giving words of encouragement.
And please know that the people of Jamaica truly loved Peter Abrahams and that we too are heartbroken and mortified by how his life ended. Peter Abrahams was the first writer from South Africa I really knew, but I’d read about the consequences of a marriage like his and Daphne’s in the novels of Alan Paton, in Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope.
Then in the summer of 1968 on my first trip to the USA, I caught Hugh Masekela at the Village Gate, ‘Grazing in the Grass’. The manager was Jamaican, and he allowed me and my two friends, Lorna Bennett and Joy Rogers, to stay over and watch the second show for free because we were so obviously young-girl delighted by Mr Masekela himself in his striped bell-bottom pants, and by his trumpet stylings, his exquisite artistry: exuberance and joy as fellow travellers accompanying profound sorrow songs of unfreedom.
Th
at condition of being at home with great contradiction – joy and sorrow, humour in the midst of grim realities, and stubborn, sometimes slenderest of hope in the midst of massive despair – is one of the great gifts that the artists, writers and thinkers of the continent of Africa and of the African diaspora have given to the world.
Something else they have given the world is a way of being entirely at home with the unempirical gifts of prophecy. That Nelson Mandela would say time and again, ‘South Africa Will Be Free – pause – In My Lifetime’ was always a source of wonder to many, myself included. How could he have said these words repeatedly, given what he was up against?
But he spoke them, and he wrote them, and he said them again and again, and Alleluia they came to pass, and everyone who trades in words should meditate a while upon that. Now more than ever we must believe that, as Rastafarians say, ‘word sounds have power’.
In 1983 I had the great good fortune to take part in the Iowa International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where writers from all over the world are brought together for a semester and given time and resources to write, give readings and lectures, and to be part of a community of writers and scholars learning from one another. I shared living space in the big adult dormitory of the Mayflower Hotel with a writer from South Africa by the name of Gladys Thomas. Here is my poem for her:
‘The Woman in Gladys’s Story’
Struck a match and smelled sulphur scorch the yellow
wallpaper rose. Like Dido she torches her own bed.
Introduced as my South African flatmate we are
Redemption Ground Page 3
