I lost all the books I collected for over thirty years, most of the paintings I’d done, and many photographs and cherished objects, to Hurricane Gilbert. I have had to learn to re-imagine my relationship with lost things.
And other forces come into play. The primary school that I attended, the very good school where I was made to memorise dozens of poems, mostly by the British Romantic poets, a school that helped to nourish my earliest interest in poetry, was one day bulldozed to the ground. I have never been able to figure out why.
I periodically reimagine my lost paintings. I reimagine my old school. My father died when I was fifteen, I often imagine what life for my family would have been like had he lived.
My memoir From Harvey River was born out of a need to preserve a time and a place that is all but gone, because the small village founded by my paternal great grandfather looks nothing like it did in my mother’s time, the family home no longer exists, and climate change has altered the flow of the river. I had to imagine it in all its original bucolic charm in order to write that memoir.
And I do this because as a Caribbean writer it is my job to imagine and keep reimagining the past and the future into being, so that the best of what was lost might exist again in the future.
13
A meditation on friendships past
I ONCE HEARD a story about a man – I heard it from a friend of his who was no longer a friend – who got up in the middle of a dinner party where there was much good food and wine and witty conversation and said something to the effect that he was not going to spend his time like that any more. I imagined that he just put down his knife and fork and declared that he was going to find something better to do with his life than being a charming guest at dinner parties, and he did. He went on to research and write a powerful and well-received book about homeless children, but he lost quite a few friends after that dinner party.
Let me tell you about another dinner party, one where I was the hostess. It was in the mid-1970s in Kingston, Jamaica. I was then newly married to a man who was a popular radio announcer. Our mutual interest in a wide range of music had brought us together; sadly, it was not enough to keep us together. One of the benefits of that relationship was that I went with him to many music concerts in Jamaica and the USA; and I sometimes found myself in the company of singers and musicians and major players in the music industry including Miriam Makeba, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Les McCann, the Four Tops, Roberta Flack, and the Staple Singers. Mavis Staples I especially remember, because she solved the problem of remembering people’s names by calling everybody – man, woman and child – ‘Montana’. I met the Staple Singers when they appeared as the other half of the bill with Les McCann, who had just produced the amazing First Take album with Roberta Flack.
The night the show opened, the entire band, along with the promoter of the show, a famous New York DJ named Ed Williams, came to dinner at our house. The food was plentiful – good Jamaican food: escoveitched fish, fricassee chicken, curried goat, rice and peas, and fried plantain. Good wine and every other kind of liquor flowed. I was a charming hostess, laughing merrily, making witty remarks to beat the band as I saw that everyone was fed and watered. Les McCann is a big man, who enjoys his food (I know that because at the end of the evening he told me so). He also said something else, he said: ‘It must be very difficult for you to keep pretending that you are not as bright as you are.’
In those days I worked as an advertising copywriter, and for that reason I can identify fully with Peggy Olson, that character on the TV show Mad Men, for I too was often the only female member of the creative team and I too (at the risk of sounding self-aggrandising) was very good at my job. I wrote radio and television commercials, one of which won a Clio prize (advertising’s Oscars). After I sat my A-levels and finished school, I worked for a year as a junior bookmobile librarian, then as a trainee copywriter in an advertising agency. I left that job to go and study art at the Jamaica School of Art and then at The Art Students League of New York. I’d come back to Jamaica and taught art and some creative writing at Jamaica College, then I’d gone back to working as an advertising copywriter; mostly because the pay was better and because I got to work in a fancy office with exciting, interesting people. I had no life plan, nor any clear idea of who or what I wanted to be in those days, so as the fabulous writer Grace Paley, whom I met at the University of Michigan, once said, I just kept doing ‘the next thing’.
No matter what I was doing, I was also writing poems, but I never imagined that I was doing anything of great significance.
Most people would have considered me extremely lucky, at the age of twenty-five, to be married, living in a fine townhouse, and doing well at my job where I got to write and produce press, radio and TV commercials, and travel abroad to Miami, London and Toronto. I imagined that I was keeping my interest in the arts alive when I wrote and produced commercials with Olive Lewin and the Jamaica Folk Singers for Horlicks and worked with Tony Gambrill to produce radio and TV ads for Dragon Stout featuring the daddy of all deejays and rappers, U-Roy. I was sure that I was doing my civic duty when I wrote and produced radio and television ads for the Jamaica Family Planning Association. I had a fine life. Why was I so deep to the marrow unhappy?
A year after Les McCann said what he said to me at that dinner party, I started to make changes in my life. While my decision to – as the man at the dinner party at the beginning of this essay said – not spend my time like that any more did not happen as suddenly, or so dramatically, I did have a clear moment of decision which occurred, of all places, in the ladies’ room at the Bottom Line jazz club in New York.
I was in the company of my then husband and some other interesting people including a few writers, and we had come to hear Les McCann perform; but first we had to sit through an opening act by a woman whose claim to fame was that she had been one of Miles Davis’s several wives.
At some point during her on-stage carryings on, I got up and went to the ladies’ room to get away from what was making my head hurt.
I looked at myself in the mirror of the ladies’ room in the Bottom Line club in New York City on that August night in 1974 and I said to myself, ‘You have got to change your life,’ and then I started to cry. At least four or five women came and went as I stood there off to the side of the sink weeping, but I do not recall any of them asking me what the matter was or if they could help in any way. Maybe the sight of a woman crying in a bathroom in a nightclub in New York City was not all that unusual.
I stood there alone with tears running down my face, dressed from head to toe in sleek black as if somebody had just died. After a while I managed to pull myself together enough to wash my face, put on some lipstick and go back inside.
‘Good timing, she finished her set while you were in there.’
‘Thank God for that. I need a cigarette, I’m going outside.’
Standing outside in the late summer evening I smoked a shocking-pink Balkan Sobranie. I had been introduced to these strong, brightly coloured cigarettes on my first visit to London, and I’d been glad to find them in a tobacconist in Manhattan earlier that evening. I believed that they looked cool against the all-black outfits I had taken to wearing.
As trite as this sounds, I love New York, especially in the autumn, and this was a late August night, just a little cool, and I could smell and feel the season about to shift.
‘You have got to change your life,’ I’d said to myself in the mirror back there in the ladies’ room, although I doubt that I had then read Rilke’s great poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, which concludes with that same line. The poet had been moved by the power and beauty of an ancient statue. I had been moved from my comfortable seat by a woman whose performance was making me conscious of the fact that my own artistic talents were urgently crying out to be expressed. When I said goodbye to the people I was with at the end of that evening, I knew that I’d never see any of them again. A year later I left that marriage under less tha
n ideal circumstances and began to do more of my own writing and painting.
‘WHAT MORE could you want?’ someone once asked me. What more could I want? At the time, I was trying to make a living as a writer and teacher of poetry and I was a single mother raising my beloved son Miles. There was a lot more for me to want.
I have become convinced over time that I have every right to want to do more of the work I believe I have been given to do. At this stage of my life, I do not now regret one day that I have spent working at any job, because somehow every job that I have ever had has always fed and nourished my writing. A good example of the way in which things have worked together for the good is something that happened when I worked at McCann Erickson (where the late Edgar Stewart gave me the opportunity to go for training in the London office). It was while I was working at their office in Kingston that one of the most important breaks in my life as a poet came to me.
Everybody there knew that I wrote poetry. Sometimes, when I was tired of coming up with new concepts and catchy slogans for anything from motor cars to tinned beef and fine jewellery, I’d announce to the creative director, an extremely talented African American man named Joe Grey who would sometimes close his office door and play his trumpet when he needed inspiration, that I was shutting my door because I needed to clear my head. He understood that that meant I was working on my poems.
One day Ralph Shearer, who was then the head of the production department, came to me and said, ‘I’m designing the Jamaica Journal, why don’t you give me some of your poems to show to the editor?’ I did, and he came back after a few weeks and said, ‘They liked the poems and the head of the institute says he wants to see you.’ So, one day during my lunch hour, I went down to the Institute of Jamaica where I was shown into the office of Neville Dawes, the then director, and he looked at me gravely and said, ‘Do you know that you’re a poet?’
I believe that you cannot just decide that you’re a poet.
When I was fifteen years old, my English teacher, Lena Robinson Aub, had told me that I was a writer. Lena Robinson Aub was a very confident English woman who had read English at Oxford, and she helped to cultivate my love of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare’s history plays to the social realism or kitchen sink school of writers like Lynne Reid Banks, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe.
It was Lena Robinson Aub who had told me, in her straightforward way, after I’d complained to her that I wanted to read a book with a character who looked and sounded more like me, that I was a writer, and that I should write what I wanted to read.
When I’d first started to write poems I never told anyone what I was doing. It was my secret and my way of coping with the tidal waves of feelings that had often pulled me down into sink holes of adolescent sadness. But I had no idea what to do with these poetic offerings once they’d arrived, so I once made a funeral pyre of all my writings in the back yard and burnt them, every one. But they still insisted on coming. One day I decided to just accept the fact that I was and am, by some great grace, a poet, but that poetry was something I would do in private without any expectation of reward or recognition.
And here I return to where I started. I have noticed that some people who were happy to be my friend when I was an advertising copywriter who was also a sometime painter and art teacher, were not so happy once I openly began to lay claim to being a poet.
But as my dear friend the brilliant historian, poet and nation-builder Sir Philip Sherlock – who is my absolute favourite Jamaican poet – would say: ‘Some of us come in by the tradespersons’ entrance, nothing wrong with that.’
In any case, from all I’ve read and heard, some of the most unlikely people have been given the gift of poetry. Poetry seems to like to go its own way, keeping its own ‘leggo beast’ company with whomever it pleases. Hence all sorts of upstarts and ‘unsuitable’ people – Shakespeare being chief amongst them – are poets.
I also realised that a big part of my initial reluctance to fully embrace my gifts was that I always feared that it would bring great upheaval and uncertainty to my life. Boy, was I ever right.
I had to leave my first marriage, become estranged from my family for a time, and to make what in retrospect now seems like a series of quite reckless, unwise, inexplicably lonely and alienating life choices; but somehow, from where I now stand, it all seems to have worked together for good.
I remember once speaking aloud, presumably to poetry, and saying something like ‘Okay, I’ll go along with this business of being a poet on one condition. I want to grow, to develop to be the best that I can be at this. Now do what you want to do with me.’
14
Hurricanes
June too soon,
July stand by,
August look out you must,
September remember,
October all over.
I WAS ONLY four years old, but I remember that my mother put my one-week-old baby brother Nigel in the bottom drawer of the bureau. She said it was to protect him in case we lost our roof.
I remember my whole family – my mother and father and my eight siblings Barbara, Howard, Carmen, Bunny, Kingsley and Karl the twins, Keith, Nigel and me all huddled together in our house, which under normal circumstances would have been described as ‘cramped’, but with a hurricane raging outside felt safe, warm and cosy.
It was August 1951 and Hurricane Charlie was about to prove what we all believed at the time to be true: that a man hurricane – that is, a hurricane named after a man – was badder than one named for a woman.
Charlie proceeded to rain hard and heavy blows on the island of Jamaica. It had made landfall during the night of August 17th and quickly moved across the island, beating down everything in its path as it went. Some time during the morning of August 18th, the wicked winds and torrential rain suddenly stopped. ‘This is just the eye of the hurricane,’ my father explained, as the curious stillness descended, ‘Charlie will be coming back.’ Then he opened the front door and allowed my older siblings out into the yard to splash about in the deep rainwater pool that had collected outside.
Just as suddenly as it had stopped, the wind started up again, announcing its return through weird whistling noises and a frantic stirring of the waters of what had become a big wading pool in which tree branches and fallen fruit bobbed about. Soaked to the skin and deliriously happy, my siblings dashed inside and changed out of their wet clothes while my father bolted the front door shut with a wide heavy plank of wood dropped into two iron hooks set on either of the doorframe. During the calm of the eye, my mother had managed to brew up a big pot of Fry’s cocoa, which we drank as we ate big thick slices of hard dough bread with butter and bully beef. We settled in again, bellies full, just in time. Charlie, it seemed, had rested enough and was returning with more brute force and power than before. By the time he left, there were 152 people dead and 2,000 homeless.
‘June too soon, July stand by, August look out you must, September remember, October all over’ is what they taught us in primary school about hurricane season. We believed this, and come September we expected to look back and remember, and when October came around, the people of the Caribbean would all breathe a sigh of relief, expecting to feel safe for another year because hurricane season was all over. And then came Gilbert. ‘Wild Gilbert’, as one of our finest lyricists, Lloyd Lovindeer, christened the hurricane that battered down Jamaica in September 1988.
In between Charlie and Gilbert, Jamaica had experienced a number of storms, including Hurricane Hazel. Hazel did not do as much damage to Jamaica as Charlie, but she did manage to travel further, becoming more un-ladylike and virago-ish as she went. She did serious damage in upstate New York and killed several people in Ontario, Canada. Up until Gilbert, the island of Jamaica had been miraculously spared from a full-impact hurricane. Sure, we’d had storms, ‘breeze-blow’ and torrential rains that caused loss of life, washed away houses and livestock and reconfigured parts of the island’s landscape, but we’d not
seen anything like Gilbert – well, not since Charlie.
The ‘razor blade winds’, my son Miles, who was then eight years old, called them. A perfect description for the winds of Gilbert which, when they started up on the morning of September 12th, immediately set about decapitating trees and mincing the leaves into green confetti which they then sprayed with brute force onto any standing surface. The effect was very artistic, a form of pointillism: walls densely stippled with green vegetable matter. The only problem was, this verdant patina was being created on the walls both outside and inside our house.
Gilbert came in the whirlwind, accompanied by torrential waterfalls of rain – hard rain sheeting down. We were huddled safe and dry inside, marvelling at the ferocity of the wind and rain, the lightning and the thunder, when with a terrible groaning sound the roof of our house just lifted off and took flight. Suddenly there was no difference between being inside and being outside.
Gilbert rained down over my beds and chairs and tables, all over my books, all over my paintings and photographs and clothes and shoes, all over my son Miles’s books and toys; almost everything we owned and treasured was soaked right through.
When the eye of the storm came we headed out and found refuge with my sister and her husband, whose roof was mercifully still intact, and we waited out the rest of Gilbert there. ‘They should have called it “Roofus”, not Gilbert,’ said Jamaicans, who can always manage to make a joke under the worst circumstances. In the days after Gilbert, the days without electricity and running water, the island struggled to right itself again. With more than forty-five people killed, thousands left homeless and many, many thousands left roofless, I began to think more and more about how small and powerless we human beings are in the face of the Charlies and Hazels and Gilberts that are visited upon us as part of regular life in the Caribbean.
Redemption Ground Page 7
