Making History Happen : Caribbean Poetry in America [1 ed.] 9781443884143, 9781443874427

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Making History Happen

Making History Happen Caribbean Poetry in America By

Derrilyn E. Morrison

Making History Happen: Caribbean Poetry in America By Derrilyn E. Morrison This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Derrilyn E. Morrison All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7442-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7442-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface....................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Migration, Relation, Location: Mobilizing History through the Poetic Imagination Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 Re-membering the Journey: History and Memory in Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39 Home, Memory, and Identity: Shara McCallum’s The Water between Us Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59 Re-mapping Poetic Identity: Claudia Rankine’s Plot Epilogue..................................................................................................... 79 Making History Happen Endnotes .................................................................................................... 87 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 95 Index .......................................................................................................... 99

PREFACE THE WOMB OF LANGUAGE

Derrilyn Morrison’s Making History Happen: Caribbean Poetry in America,” takes us on a fascinating journey through the poetry of three Jamaican transnational women based in the United States. In their poetry written at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century Lorna Goodison (1947- ), Claudia Rankine (1963- ), and Shara McCallum (1972-) expand the borders of a Caribbean literature not limited to the confines of the West Indies (supposing the West Indies could ever be confined), but located in multiple U.S. and transnational sites. Morrison identifies their poetic power strongly inscribed in the expectant woman’s body in what could be called a womb of language. More than a critic, Morrison is a poet in her own right, whose arguments embrace, in elegant and creative writing, the poems with which she engages, instead of simply projecting an interpretation onto them. Along with Goodison, McCallum, and Rankine, she is a language coiner, a creator, who provides an intimate and language-based understanding of tropes and experiences such as exile, motherhood, cannibalism, which are created anew by the women poets. In Making History Happen, the commonly used term “black diaspora” becomes a fluid notion based on “‘Africa’ and ‘slavery’” as mobile tropes of Home and Exile,” as Morrison astutely demonstrates. This fluidity is based on the poets’ use of orality as a unifying structure that allows for a “continuous flow of socio-cultural exchange and interchange” (2). Morrison’s “shifting poetics” has a lot to do with Edouard Glissant’s philosophy of Relation and with Kamau Brathwaite’s poetics in movement. However, the critic reframes and reshapes the respectively Martinican and Barbadian philosophers and poets’ theory by infusing it with the womblike process of creativity. Relation is not simply a theoretical notion (Glissant), nor solely expressed in the landscape or the rhythmic body (Brathwaite), but is deeply rooted in the materiality of women’s body, and particularly in their simultaneous gestational, healing, and poetic properties. The language of care and soothing inhabits Morrison’s book in, for instance, her evocation of Lorna Goodison’s

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“rehabilitative poetry” (13), of her practice of an African-derived “tradition of African praise poetry” or of her poems as “source of nourishment” in which the mango tree and its fruit “become a metaphor of Caribbean poetry spreading far and wide.” The writers’ “shifting poetics” also provides, if not a solution, at least a balm to the fragmented and wounded experience of the black diaspora. The poets under analysis share St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s notion that the love poured into the re-assemblage of broken fragments of the Antilles contain more historical and sacred significance than the intact original object. “This gathering of broken pieces,” Walcott claims, “is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture...” (Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragment of Epic Memory”). Like Walcott, Goodison, McCallum, and Rankine reorganize these bits and pieces into new shapes. However, to Walcott’s act of reconstruction situated in the universal Caribbean poet’s agency, the transnational Jamaican poets re-organize the broken body through gestures radically grounded in a feminized and motherly body. Through cannibalistic acts of poetry, whereby the mother devours the “odd body of her child” misshaped by slavery, exploitation, violence, and animalistic representations, they regurgitate their poetic children in a new shape that bears the signature of motherly agency. In what is perhaps the most striking claim of the book, Morrison argues for a maternal cannibalistic and creative agency that is not destructive but creative. Her discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Plot reveals that the poetpersona’s rearranging of body parts “construct a conventional countertype that offers an extension of the larger prevailing discourse of poetic identity.” Instead of the proverbial cannibalistic cruel mother of fairytales and folktales, the mother devouring of her own children does not amount to self-nourishing or destruction of the devoured object, but rather, to a nurturing rearrangement of the child’s mismatched, suffering, and tortured body, which Rankine calls a “freakish anatomy” (66). This creative act of cannibalism has nothing to do with the offensive figure of the “New World” cannibal portrayed in Western representations, whether Tupinamba or African. It also differs from New World literary and artistic cannibalism as practiced by Oswald de Andrade (Brazil), Suzanne Césaire (Martinique) and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) and theorized by Kristen Guest, Eugenio Matibag, Zita Nunes, or myself, among others, in that it recreates a “discursive morphology” towards which the pregnant womb, the devouring mouth, the mind, and the poetic matrix of language all work.

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Morrison’s book could be seen as a study of the “re-.” It is a story of re-gurgitation, re-creation, re-gathering, re-folding, re-telling, or rememory, in Toni Morrison’s sense. While the abundant repetition of the prefix may seem superfluous in another study, Derrilyn Morrison convincingly shows how these Caribbean women poets occupy that space of repetition, reoccurrence, renewal, not only as a secondary space but as vital. Like the migrant hermit crab, they invest the old shells of dead animals anew with life, survival, and meaning in a shape-shifting exile. Like the proverbial hermit crab, Shara McCallum in The Water Between Us, not only rehashes African folktales and the Brothers Grimm’s tales as an accessory, but rather, as vital homes. Re-memory, in a complex reinvention of time, becomes pre-memory, a “feminine memory time,” which, Morrison argues, “is often displaced,” with a past becoming also the future since, as Rankine says, ‘expecting was also remembering’” (61). The site of this complex temporality and new landscape is the pregnant womb operating with or even as the mind. Morrison’s own upbringing in Jamaica provides us with an intimate access to the authors’ biography, digging deep into politics of identity shaped not only by nationality and race, but also class, rural status, land ownership, family name, and stories of the poets’ ancestor such as Goodison’s paternal grandfather who was “one of the few Englishmen in his time to legally marry a black Jamaican woman” (19). Morrison also subtly identifies the passages of “Jamaican Creole as it is spoken there” (21) in the multilayered fabric of the poetpersona’s English. Morrison’s ear also illuminates the written text through her perception of the Jamaican pronunciation inhabiting it. Morrison’s book, while relying mostly upon three poets, provides a new critical language and matrix of interpretation that could illuminate the transnational world of Caribbean poets (and non-Caribbean poets as well) for whom the house of poetry is strongly inscribed in the female body. Making History Happen, provides appropriate technique-poetic tools to enhance our frequenting of, among others, Dionne Brand, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Grace Nichols, M. NourbeSe Philip, Patricia Smith, Alison Townsend, or Donna Weir-Soley. —Valérie Loichot, Emory University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has grown out of the dedication and persistence of numerous well-wishers who inspired its production. I thank Lorna Goodison for the many discussions we had on Caribbean poetry during the Writers Workshop at the U of Miami, summer 1996, and the years beyond of fruitful sharing. She is one of a special group of poets and writers whose generosity of spirit has marked my own writing: Claudia Rankine, Shara McCallum, Afua Cooper, Emily Allen-Williams, Horace Goddard, Mervyn Morris, and Eddie Baugh. I owe a debt of gratitude, also, to Valerie Loichot for her careful guidance over the years, her unfailing encouragement, and her endorsement of my own act of writing.

INTRODUCTION MIGRATION, RELATION, LOCATION: MOBILIZING HISTORY THROUGH THE POETIC IMAGINATION

Caribbean literature produced by writers on the external frontiers, that is to say, those living in host societies, increasingly reflects resistance to the traditional notion of exile as a trope of identity. This concept of exile which has dominated Caribbean writing for decades is now largely recognized as ambiguous, whether apprehended as a cultural or linguistic definition. Shifts in the meaning and usage of “exile” are created by the passing of time and the expansion of space allowed by migration and its attendant questioning of identity. For instance, in an interview with Kwame Dawes a little over a decade ago, Edward “Kamau” Brathwaite, while acknowledging the difference that being “immigrants” creates, uses the term “second exiles” to define their identity.1 However, his contemporary, Colin Channer, expresses the view that some present-day Caribbeanists, himself included, are “not in exile” because their experience of distance is different, “in kind and in degree,” from those “early exiles” of the forties and fifties.2 This ideological difference in conceptualizing Caribbean identity has recognizably contributed to the variety of poetic works which has been transforming the American literary landscape. Mary Chamberlain’s Caribbean Migration: Globalized Identities uses the term “transnationals” to describe those who “traffic freely in and through the culture of the Caribbean.”3 Describing the process that occurs in this transnational space, her analysis effectively creates a conceptual shifting of grounds that speaks to Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation in Poetics of Relation,4 a theory that is engaged in the postcolonial project of questioning traditional concepts of cultural authority and identity. In his reading of Caribbean poetry, Glissant privileges the differences that are created in the crossing of cultures, and the nodes of resistance to establishment. Reading contemporary Caribbean poetry emerging from these communities as Relational, in the sense that Glissant would use it,

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suggests the need to look at internal differences and changes. It also leads the way to expressing the “open totality”5 of the dynamics of black cultural experience. This approach would allow for an assembling of the “cluster of narratives”6 found within the black diaspora, without seeking to erase that difference. Of course, it is important to bear in mind the caution that Francois Lionnet gives in this regard, that “difference,” can become the “reason for exoticizing, “othering,”7 an approach that would amount to mirroring the early master discourses of Western poetics. The discourse created by Glissant and Chamberlain call attention to the cultural communities of the black diaspora and their social counterparts in host societies, pointing to a process of change and exchange among them that is infinite in its capacity to generate new ideas, new cultural concepts. Much described and defined by contemporary cultural critics, such as David Scott, the black diaspora is generally recognized as a “discursive community/tradition” that is constituted in and through its relation to “Africa” and “Slavery.”8 My own use of the term “black diaspora” in this book is shifting grounds a bit, as it reconfigures the concepts of Africa and Slavery as mobile tropes of Home and Exile. The effects of trans/migration has created a shift in the discourse on Africa and Exile in poetic works produced by writers on the Caribbean external frontiers, reflecting their sense of being at ease, or not, within the larger communal body. The term “black diaspora” is useful in this discussion of Caribbean identity, since the experience of journey through migration shifts the national perspective onto the transnational, an important aspect of this discourse focusing on the Relation between subjectivity and location. Using Brathwaite’s “Rights of Passage” as touchstone, the book seeks to shift the Caribbean discourse of identity by examining the continuous flow of socio-cultural exchange and interchange released in a careful reading of poetry collections by contemporary poets. An examination of poems in an early collection by Brathwaite reveals that the poet had been leading the way in re-thinking Caribbean praxis. Interested in the effect of slavery and exile on the human psyche, Brathwaite explored the idea in his “Rights of Passage”9 collection (The Arrivants 1973), wherein he shows the fragmented sense of self that is created by geographical and cultural dislocation. Drawing on the early experiences of dislocation caused by slavery and later postwar migration, the poet’s autobiographical persona in “Rights of Passage” traverses and reclaims Western geographical spaces. The poems perform a rereading of conventional historical accounts of black migration through the poetic device of re-memory, privileging communal memory of these events as it recounts the journey. Brathwaite’s work is used as touchstone to introduce a younger generation of

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contemporary poets whose works shift the discourse of Caribbean identity from the male domain into an exploration of female subjectivity.

Rights of Passage: Language Relations and History Brathwaite’s The Arrivants (1973) forms a trilogy of poems written between 1964 and 1969. As a collection, the book reflects the poet’s enthusiasm for jazz which he began to cultivate as early as high school. His later journey to Africa also influenced the shape of his poems. Brathwaite had spent time in Africa, working as an Education Officer for the Ministry of Education in Ghana over a period of seven years. Gordon Rohlehr’s Pathfinder, a seminal text outlining the ethos of The Arrivants collection, points to the poet’s time in Africa as a period that marks his “initial encounter with the details of Caribbean history.”10 The Arrivants creates a sense of the growing feeling of “placelessness” that writers abroad were experiencing and marked the need to move from place to place as a search for identity. At this time, Caribbean poets and writers such as Walcott and Lamming had already begun exploring the possibility of creating a sense of the black tradition in their works, as a way of redefining cultural value systems and re-shaping black identity. In Rights of Passage (1967), which forms the first part of The Arrivants, Brathwaite foregrounds the question of language and history as cultural markers of black identity, reflecting the afro-centric positioning that the discourse of black diaspora poetics had begun to assume, the twin idea of Africa and exile dominating the creative imagination of Caribbean writers back then. Rohlehr‘s reading of Brathwaite’s poetry within the context of the poet’s own historical journey to Africa places importance on the interrelationship between personal experience and the collective or communal history, a theme that forms the basis for Rights of Passage. More recently, in Come Back to me My Language, J. Edward Chamberlin also speaks to the importance of Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage as a frame of reference for examining ways in which Caribbean poetry transforms history through its conscious deliberation on language.11 Divided into four chapters, Rights of Passage opens chapter 1, “Work Song and Blues,” as well as chapter 2, “The Spades,” with a section entitled “Prelude” as if to indicate the jazz quality of the poem which depends on a sense of repetition, the doubling that marks the history and consciousness of the people. Furthermore, the use of repetition and ambivalence becomes a structural strategy of the “Prelude” as it does the rest of the poem. The poem opens with the people travelling through the African desert, a journey marked by decay and desolation. There is no

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Introduction

fixed originary point of departure; the poet begins in medias res, although he is at the beginning of the narrative. One journey ends and another begins and the rituals of existence call for a rebuilding of the nation people again and again: “Build now / the new villages / ... / so build build / again the new / villages” (p. 4-6). Chapter 3, “Islands and Exiles,” and Chapter 4, “The Return,” examine the meaning and effects of colonial “discovery” and migration, evoking the sadness of loss. Chapter 1, “Work Song and Blues,” is divided into four sections that work together to create a picture of the African diaspora. It shows the slaves, forcibly transported to the New World, and locked in the dialectics of time and place, history and identity. The loss of homeland is captured in the tone of resignation carried by the narrator: It will be a long time before we see this land again, these trees again, drifting inland… (p. 10)

The loss of self-identity is presented in the contrast between the African people and the white invaders and the narrator projects his mind into the future when a mix of the two groups will take place and: “create new soils, new souls, new / ancestors…” in the “new worlds, new waters, new / harbours” (p. 10). In sections 3-5 of “Work Song and Blues” the communal voice of the narrator changes and becomes the plaintive voice of Uncle Tom, the dispossessed African whose children, first generation born in the islands, reject and despise all that he stands for. Mourning the colossal loss he is experiencing Tom tries to retrieve the past only to feel the futility of it: “Yes, I remember…/ but what good / is recollection now” (p. 17). “The Spades” – chapter 2 of Rights of Passage – opens with another “Prelude,” but the voice and tone are completely different from the earlier one. Tom’s descendants are strident in their assessment of their situation and in their rejection of whatever sense of history he tried to give them. With one voice they chant: “To hell / with Af- / rica / to hell / with Eu- / rope too… (p. 28). Rejecting history and identity, the people are presented as being rootless, fated to journey from one place to another without possession or home. Tom laments the fact that they are “poor / land- / less, harbor / less” black souls travelling always in search of home (p. 33). The fragmentation of words, so typical of this poem, images the fragmentation of self that the people experience, even as it marks their poverty, so that to say they are “less harbour” speaks of the lack of a homeland and “less spade” their poverty, not the least of which is a lack of self- possession.

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Through the collection of poems in Rights of Passage, the poet negotiates a new identity for the African diaspora, creating a voice for them that can be described as “double-tongued,” a device that allows the speaker to say one thing but always with a sense of meaning something more or something else, similar perhaps to speaking tongue-in-cheek. The ever present musical trope in the poem, foregrounds the “principle of repetition and difference” that operates the poetic drama and reflects the “practice of intertextuality,” a practice Henry Louis Gates Jr. relates to the “black vernacular forms of Signifyin(g).”12 In harmony with this, Rohlehr’s discussion of Brathwaite’s use of jazz and the blues in Rights of Passage mentions the “tribal masks, flutes and drums…the complex improvisations of jazz saxophones and trumpets” and of the “tonality of the Blues” constituent in the collection. According to Rohlehr, these “widely scattered but generically inter-related art forms”13 become a heuristic blue print for the poems. In Brathwaite’s collection of poetry, there is always a sense of doubling, which creates a collage effect that can be likened to the effect of “jazz satura”14 as defined by Michael Jarrett. Jarrett’s use of the term satura seeks to describe the mix of musical generic forms that constitute the origins of jazz, a combining of what has come before to create an art form that is new and exciting. According to him, satura is “the figure of mixing” which is “the founding image of jazz.”15 Interestingly, the word satura holds echoes of the word “saturation,” used by Stephen Henderson in his discussion of African American poetry. Here, “saturation”16 is describing the insistence with which the work communicates a quality of blackness, through its use of black cultural forms - music, speech, dance, and art. For example, in Rohlehr’s extensive discussion of Brathwaite’s work he points out that in Rights of Passage, the subtitle of Chapter 1, “Work Song and Blues” openly invokes two basic forms of African American music, so that an examination of the poems reveals a mix of various musical forms: “jazz tunes, forms or dances which have evolved from the sacred/secular continuum of spirituals, Blues and jazz.”17 Section II of this chapter, “New World A-Comin’,” (9) is “the name of a 1943 composition by Duke Ellington,”18 reflecting on the historical collision between black Africa and white Europe even as it celebrates the cultural achievements of the black diaspora. This musical reading can be sustained throughout the collection, showing that the poems imagine language as a mixture of music and speech, the one dependent on the other in the process of producing the particular poem. In Rights of Passage, the black musical form has a definite structural effect on the verbal language of the poem and the language exerts its own

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pressure on the musical form. It is important, therefore, to notice that the poem’s language is a composite of English and vernacular lexical items, and the structural rhythm is strongly Afro-centric. In addition, the poems are seen to operate on the principles of allusion, repetition, and improvisation, principles which govern the technique of the jazz musician Discussing these very contexts in Come Back to me my Language, Chamberlin speaks of the development of an “extraordinary rich tradition of imaginative expression drawing deeply on African inheritances, especially in such conditions of relative discontinuity and incoherence”19 which marks the experiences of the black diaspora. He points out that the historical Colombian journey, in Western imagination, became the process through which black identity was assaulted by “images of disdain and difference, images that for five hundred years have conditioned [black peoples’] need to determine for themselves who they are and where they belong” (28). He states also that the history of loss and dispossession that haunts the individual is “transformed into migration and exile to Europe and North America for many West Indians, as they reverse Columbus’s voyages of discovery and invention, in a quest for a place called home” (28). In Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage, the revised journey becomes a process of reclaiming collective identity, as Tom makes the epic move from Africa, through the Middle Passage of slavery to the New World of America and the islands of the Caribbean and later, through his descendants, to Europe. Rights of Passage is empowered by a psychological representation of the communal journey toward self-identity. In Chapter 2, Section III, Part 1, “The Journeys” (35-40), the poet gives a summary of all the journeys African peoples have undertaken from Africa to the New World. Moving from Africa the presentation of the black diaspora highlights sections of America, Europe, and the Caribbean, that become historically significant. The poetic eye moves from “Little Rock, Dallas, New Orleans, Santiago De Cuba, the miles of unfortunate islands” to “Detroit, Chicago, and Denver” and then lingers on “New York … Brooklyn and Harlem” before going on to “Cape Town and Rio…Paris” (35-36). Each city signals a history that is significant: Detroit, where large numbers of Blacks were able to find employment (1914) for the first time since the outbreak of the War had stopped the flow of migrants to Europe; Chicago, a reminder of the bloody race riots of 1919; Brooklyn and Harlem, the cities of the Black renaissance, and receptors of the largest waves of migrants in the twentieth century. The poem presents Brathwaite’s reassessment of the journeys undertaken by the black diaspora, represented by Tom and his descendants, the names of the cities becoming a litany, reconstructing

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through the physical landscape the presence of the individual. In this way personal and collective history become relational, as the poem examines various constructions of identity; identity that is imposed and self-made, and worn as masks by the individual as he moves from one region to another. Part 2 of “The Journeys” (37) is a good example of Brathwaite’s exploration of identity during the postwar era. The poem creates a vignette of the African in Paris, a city where the cultural energy of its people was influenced by the “discovery of Africa” in the West, during the surge of Modernism. Cultural historical records show that black musicians took Paris by storm from WWI through to WWII, a period when the influence of African music and art was reflected on modern art in France. The picture in the poem is that of a black man making his way through society, his dignified presence emphasized by the poet’s crafty use of language, and in the spaces between the visual and the verbal, we hear the selfmocking voice of the persona. Always there is a sense of doubling, for as the poem describes the poetpersona standing at a distance describing the black man, it creates, equally, a kind of out-of-body experience in which the black man also stands aloof critically assessing himself. At the same time, the slow movement of the lines becomes a caricature of the man’s walk along the city’s boulevard and ultimately of his progress, (or as an ironic reading shows, his lack of progress) within Parisian society. Brathwaite’s poem operates here as a jazz and blues musical composition, each statement of which can be read as a musical movement. The line breaks in the poem are guided by the jazz principles of syncopation and variation which create the poem’s tempo, while the spirit of the blues guides its tone. This “spirit of the blues” is created by Brathwaite’s use of folk art forms of the Negro Blues to create the poem’s impulse, propelling it towards an exploration of black experientialism. In the spirit of the blues, the poetpersona describes the black man’s attempt to maneuver into a subject position within a society that regards him as object. His use of the French “exterieur” in describing the man emphasizes the fact that he is a “foreigner” in both the sense that he can never truly be a part of this crowd, and that his behavior is unnatural, placing the man in an “exterior” position in relation to himself. The tension between the musical tempo and the speech rhythm employed in this poem can be read as a poetic device that emphasizes the ironic distance between appearance and reality and marks the man’s selfdeception (subconscious or otherwise). Both narrative voice and musical tone suggest that the black man’s effort to make an entry into Parisian bourgeois society is unsuccessful. The blues quality of the poem serves to

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highlight the man’s painful awareness of the difficulty he encounters as he struggles to create his own identity and is also the poet’s attempt to dignify the struggle. This is underscored by the French root of “nonchalance” (from chaloir – to be concerned); this immediately suspects the man’s studied “indifference,” or “nonchalance,” as he walks the boulevard, showing it as a mask of his inner, or subconscious, state of anxiety.20 In essence, the black man’s studied indifference which complements his slow walk is an attempt to create a sense of “dignity,” or dignified manhood, in the face of social rejection. The poet’s use of language and music in this poem is directly related to the making of the man’s identity, the poetic eye serving as a “correcting mirror” for what Frantz Fanon describes as the “myth of the Negro,” a mythology shared by white society, that sets him apart as being inferior to them (Fanon 202-204). In the face of this historical positioning of the black man, the poem speaks of his refusal to remain a “prisoner of history” and of the experience of “endlessly creating [himself]” (229). This selfpositioning is and can be used to explain the behavior of the black man in Brathwaite’s poem. The man’s “clowning” and “boot / black smile” belongs to the minstrel tradition wherein the “gigolo” finds pleasure in gratifying the sexual desires of the white world and the “black baboon” is the mirror white society hands him (37). All form a complex picture that is part of a larger animal imagery at work in this poem, and serve as a replay of the white society’s construction of a black mythology. The persona’s use of “the rich-lipped generous ewe,” fourteen lines later, alludes to the “black ram,” of Shakespeare’s Othello and serves to evoke the traditional European and American perception of the Negro as a sexual abnormality. Yet, it also reminds us of Shakespeare’s projection of the diseased mind of the two principal actors (Iago the white, and Othello the black soldier) to depict the neurotic imagination of society as a whole. The main thrust of Brathwaite’s poem is to describe the way the black man’s identity is created by and through the impulse of the white society’s mythology. The society is consistently implicated throughout as a significant agent of desire and impulse in the black man’s construction of his identity. The poem presents him in parts as deceiving himself, but reading the man’s behavior within Fanon’s historico-racial schema presents white constructions of black identity as a force exerting its own pressure in the development of the man’s self-identity. Furthermore, the poetic construction of the relation between battle and play in the poem, as well as speech and music, highlights the irony of the situation and suggests that the black man needs to maintain a strong sense of his cultural heritage

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in order to survive the struggle on the cross cultural battlefield in which self-identity is inscribed. In the fifth movement of the poem, the poetpersona is at pains to emphasize that the black man’s position remains hopeless as long as his self-deception continues. In playing the game of deception the man is “losing himself,” and his “man- / oeuvres” are nothing short of a betrayal of true manhood (38). The French word “manoeuvres” here is a reminder that there is a history, as it speaks to the “oeuvre of a man,” perhaps the work of a lifetime. We note that Brathwaite’s use of the word is split, and “oeuvres” is carried over to a new line, a poetic device that creates historical and psychological leap. This split in the French word allows the poet to invoke collective history, as it links the man’s individual experience, by a leap of the imagination, to the collective and historical experience of the black man’s search for identity. Bearing in mind that the black man as descendant of Tom is a representative figure, the word “oeuvres,” conveys the idea that the man’s present behavior forms part of a personal (and communal) history of movement or action. The poet’s use of French in this poem, borders on mimicry. Homi Bhabha’s discussion in The Location of Culture, speaks of mimicry as “a camouflage…a form of resemblance that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.”21 If mimicry is camouflage, the presence of French-looking words in the poem does not indicate the black man’s assimilation into French culture in its entirety. Rather, the poet’s use of the French language becomes a sort of camouflage that, in the black tradition of Signifyin(g), signifies on black manhood in the making. This is highlighted in the way the Negro’s use of the French language in speech makes it part of his personal armory. The poet’s use of italics in the poem serves more than as a formal recognition of a different language lexicon in writing; it is mimetic of the man’s speech as he pulls out his knowledge of French, using it as arsenal in the battle for acceptance and recognition. The poem suggests that language is his weapon and he uses it to create room for maneuver in his negotiation of self-identity. Through the poetic eye, the reader sees this linguistic maneuver as ironically bordering on imitation, the kind of imitation that, to use Glissant’s words, wreaks a “kind of insidious violence.”22 Fanon’s engagement with this issue of imitation in “The Fact of Blackness,” where he deliberates on the ambivalence attached to black identity in the French Caribbean islands, helps the reader to see how self-violence works its way subtly into the very essence of black manhood. Having described the black man as one who perceives himself, and who is perceived as “an object in the midst of other objects,” Fanon articulates the dilemma further by

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Introduction

explaining that, “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”23 That means negotiation of black identity takes place within the limits/ limitations prescribed by white society since, as Bhabha points out, “mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its ‘otherness’.”24 Brathwaite’s poem shows that, in the grip of a society that helps to degrade him, the black man’s psychological condition is a desperate struggle; he being as constrained to conform to society as he is to reject its projection of his image. Despite the dark undertones, “The Journeys”: Part 2, ends in song, with the sound of the blues, for Tom sings the blues as he mourns the pain of living through his epic revision of black identity. In The World of Jazz, Rodney Dale describes the early blues form as an eight-bar form, and he also explains that “the blues has to be sung to take on its poetry and beauty of feeling and rhythm and rhyme.”25 The final verse of the poem under discussion recognizes the traditional eight-bar blues line verse of early blues into a poetic verse form containing four-bar lines, each line of which performs a musical time lag as the final two bars of the line are completed by its musical counterpart. This poetic device of breaking up the blues line is further complicated by an unnatural break in the words making up each line, which serves to exaggerate the syncopated sound of the blues rhythm. Note the effect in the doubling of the phrasal “less” in the use of “path / less harbour- / less spade” which closes the poem (40). In a sing/speak reading of the poem, we hear the verbal rhythm stretching and sliding from one line to the next, but also pacing itself behind the musical notes, so that the poem becomes an authentic blues rendition. The music rises to the surface and, in effect, it becomes an extension of the human voice lamenting the history of poverty and negativity that plagues the black diaspora.

Overview of Chapters In the context of the foregoing analysis, we may read Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage as a movement in itself, the poetic maneuver to reclaim and transform black identity. Brathwaite’s critical analysis of the social and behavioral contexts that shape the evolution of the black man’s identity, as performed by the poem, is a poetic strategy. It is the poet’s call for responsible action, for the conscious reshaping of black identity by transforming history. His poetry set the pattern for other Caribbean poets of the black diaspora in its deliberate use of nation language to challenge mainstream discourses of identity. His work can be used to lay the groundwork for a discussion on poetry produced by writers who, like

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Brathwaite, traverse the transnational spaces of the Caribbean and North America. The 1970s was a watershed decade for Caribbean writers and poets. In both North American and Caribbean regions, the literary camp became divided into colonialists/traditionalists and postcolonialists/modernists, the former arguing the need to stick to European literary forms, the latter arguing the case for establishing and maintaining a new poetics to reflect the voices and lived experiences of black people. Another exciting exchange that marked the latter part of the 1970s on into the 1980s is reflected in the opening up of the predominantly male literary world to women writers whose works up to this time had been overlooked. Creative changes were revolutionary during this decade; the emphasis was on black and Rastafarian thinking and musical rhythms, and on people speech. Yet, even as the poetry of the times reflected the prevailing ideologies, it was contributing simultaneously to the disintegration of these very ideologies, shaping and being shaped by them. The poetic discourse of identity emerging from works written by Caribbean women of the black diaspora in the United States calls for a renewed exploration of how we hear as much as of how we see, reflecting on the creative rupture that allows the escape of meaning. The readings of their poetry collections offered in the following chapters aim to demonstrate ways in which the particular experiences of the individual are brought into crisis with the subjective experiences of the society in which they live. Poetry written by transnationals, those living at once inside and outside of the geographical spaces of America and the Caribbean, reflect a deliberate shifting of emphasis in the discourse on Caribbean identity. In the normal flow of exchange between these spaces Caribbean women poets began using tropes of mobility to create cultural and ethnic identity and re-form their awareness of self as individuals belonging to a communal network. Contemporary criticism of their work has drawn attention to the importance of not overlooking differences even as these works are read together as “Caribbean” collections. In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, American critic Cheryl Wall makes the case for Relational reading of diaspora literature, written by women, reflecting on the significance of the connection between “what Gayatri Spivak calls the verbal text and the social text.”26 She emphasizes the need to read the verbal text carefully as part of and, at the same time, apart from its social context. Recognizing the significance of the verbal technique at work is especially useful as we read poetry from the diaspora, since such written work usually carries strong oral under/overtones. The importance of

12

Introduction

seeing language as a strategy in the poetic construction of identity within these works cannot be more emphasized. The language of identity is constructed upon the basis of cultural and historical associations shared by the individual and community; and the black diaspora is shown to create an escape from traditional Western metaphysics, problematizing, to use Gilroy’s words, the “cultural and historical mechanics of belonging” to which the term identity appeals. In his work, Gilroy points out the way diaspora study usefully “contributes to the analysis of intercultural and transcultural processes and forms” and “identifies a relational network, characteristically produced by forced dispersal and reluctant scattering.”27 Engaging with this discourse, this book nevertheless looks beyond the “forced dispersal and reluctant scattering” to address the concerns of a diaspora that is created even by choice or will. The offerings in this book focus on a reading of poetry collections written by three women poets of the Caribbean: Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks (1999), McCallum’s The Water between Us (1999), Claudia Rankine’s Plot (2001), as well as Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004). These works are presented as part of the enterprise to examine the complex processes by which personal identity gets constructed, and issues of language become foregrounded as the marker of self-identity in contemporary poetic works arising out of the transnational space of North America and the Caribbean. Their poetry collections are used to demonstrate that the project of re-writing individual self-identity in light of the individual’s expanding consciousness or awareness of the “other” is urgent, and more demandingly realistic, than ever before. The readings reflect on ways that transnational women poets of the black diaspora are using tropes of mobility to create a renewed sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a communal network. The book appeals to the needs of the reading public in general, as well as college students who must grapple with the mechanics of reading and analyzing contemporary American poetry written by Caribbean nationals. Highlighting the ways cultural concepts are constructed within poetry collections produced by such transnational poets, it takes a cultural studies approach, performing literary analysis alongside some close reading of individual poems that become exemplary of the diversity within black diaspora writing. As the following chapters will show, Lorna Goodison, Shara McCallum, and Claudia Rankine, despite the attendant diversity of their poetic offerings, are among those of a later generation of transnational/transmigrant poets whose works are recognizably Caribbean and, when read together, they signal the development of a body of poetry that becomes a transformative force in the American literary landscape.

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Each Chapter of this book examines the way contemporary transnational poets of the black diaspora have been transforming the Caribbean discourse of identity by extending it to include the experiences of black women poets who inhabit transnational spaces. They emphasize that Caribbean women writers, as part of the larger black diaspora, are entering the poetic discourse of identity by positioning themselves as transnationals whose boundary crossings are reflected in the rhetorical and structural strategies they undertake in creating their poetic works. Their poems stand in contrast to earlier collections of poetry written by male Caribbean writers in that the creative reinterpretation of self-identity in which these women poets are engaged is worked out on the level of the personal and the individual, rather than the national. If Brathwaite’s work examines the collective fragmented sense of self that is created by geographical and cultural dislocation, the poetic collections of contemporary Caribbean women writers show another side to the picture. These poets become active participants, writing as well as consciously performing in their own works as they reposition the discourse within the geocultural framework. Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks (1999), is a collection of lyrical poetry that creates a panorama of Caribbean heritage folding, and refolding, through cycles of generations brought together in a collapse of time. The poet examines her family history and gives thanks for this heritage. The poetpersona rejects the traditional presentation of Caribbean identity generated by decades old male centered, western ideology, as one forged through disinheritance and loss, reclaiming as its rightful possession all the parts that constitute one’s identity. Goodison’s is rehabilitative poetry that transforms images of dispossession making them over into tropes of wealthy heritage. Her Turn Thanks collection of poems serves to gather together the fragments of identity hidden in family history that is as public as it is private. The little every day details of living are used in the poems to create a counter discourse that transforms the Caribbean landscape. Woven within this larger Caribbean tapestry are poems that reflect directly on the poetpersona’s experiences of dislocation and alienation within the wider American social spaces. Altogether the poems facilitate an examination of the way the network of Relations, created through accepting and adapting to multiple social and geographical dimensions, speaks to the urgency of negotiating identity as an act of personal empowerment. The Caribbean landscape also haunts the autobiographical speaker in Shara McCallum’s The Water Between Us (1999), one whose identity has been transplanted in the American soil. As in Goodison’s case, this

14

Introduction

transnational identity becomes a manifestation of relations that occur in and through the cross cultural processes of being. Using her family history, McCallum weaves a network of personal and communal experiences that insist on being heard. Within this personal framework, the poetpersona weaves a mythological assemblage of Western and Caribbean fairytales and folktales, giving a new spin, to create a poetic narrative that indicts the selfishness and greed which has historically enabled those with power to violate the rights of others. Combined in this way, McCallum’s poetic re-memory of time and place reflects the disturbed consciousness of the young persona, who must disentangle herself from the web of deceit that generates her fractured sense of self-identity. The narrative begins at home, in the context of the family structure, the most basic political unit of society. The collection encompasses a “womanist discourse” which re-writes history so that it becomes, to use Alice Walker’s discourse, “a history arranged the way tale-telling women tell it,”28 Critic Aoi Mori, in her discussion of Toni Morrison’s narratives, points out the differences between womanist discourse and feminist discourse asserting that, “womanist criticism [is] a reconstruction of feminism [used to] establish subjectivities for all women which will liberate them from patriarchal limits and promote an understanding among them which can overcome differences.”29 Speaking from within this discourse, McCallum’s The Water Between Us points a finger at the original violence at the heart of the master discourse of identity created by Western patriarchal systems. Claudia Rankine’s poetry collections are used to close the discourse in this book for they both make and answer the call for poetic transformation. An intriguing crossing of genres, their structural use of time and space reflects the stylistic inventiveness that has become a hallmark of transnational poets of the black diaspora. Plot performs a dramatic exploration of the origin of identity, demonstrating the process through which the subject “I” becomes a shifting signifier. In Plot the parturient body of the woman becomes a “Signifyin(g)” body, speaking to the poet’s compulsion to give birth to a new form of poetry that has been growing within her. In its transformation of language, and of images that remain open-ended in their meanings, Plot introduces the poetic strategies that shape the poet’s discourse in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine’s latest collection. An infusion of poetry, dialogue, and prose, combined with images from the television and other forms of communication media, Rankine’s latest collection openly challenges Western conventions and ideologies. Creating what Rankine herself calls “micro moments” the poetpersona confronts the subtle aggression of the television and questions

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the way communication media control and dictate our responses to events that arise out of moments of cultural tensions or conflicts. All four poetry collections mentioned above serve to demonstrate that the question of language and identity in transnational poetic works, emerging from within the black diaspora, is understandably complicated not just by issues of gender (already inscribed within the discourse of race) but the experience itself of migration. As a body, these collections enable readers to reflect on some important ways that transnational women poets of the black diaspora are using tropes of mobility to create a renewed sense of identity, and a sense of belonging to a communal network. In these collective works, re-memory becomes a significant poetic strategy that transforms history, transmuting time and place in the process.

CHAPTER ONE RE-MEMBERING THE JOURNEY: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN LORNA GOODISON’S TURN THANKS

My mother’s journeys re-define space …. She lives in the Caribbean; she lives in the United States; she lives in America. —Carole Boyce Davies

In the excerpt from Boyce Davies that forms the epigraph to this paper, women’s journeys speak to the right to travel, re-arranging one’s personal effects in the process so that home can become the place where one is. A discussion of the right to re-define home appropriately enables a discussion of women’s right to re-gather personal and family history, remembering them and imbuing them with renewed meaning. In Black Women, Writing and Identity, Boyce Davies foregrounds the importance of “re-membering and reconnection” for women who find themselves living in two or more places at once.1 Pointing to the way women’s migratory journeys enable the re-negotiation of personal identity for them, Davies refracts the journey motif through the lens of personal, familial history. Using such history as sociological authority in her text, she examines the process through which journey and memory evolve as a performance “strategy,” whereby “the question of identities” is concretized (2). Boyce Davies’s reflections on “re-membering” and “re-connection” speak of “crossing the boundaries of space, time, history, place, language;” so that, firstly, we consider “re-membering” as a poetic device. In “re-membering” the poet makes use of the function of memory, and goes beyond it, to engage in the task of “bringing all the parts back together” (17). A necessary function of these works is the bringing together of oral histories which are subsequently refracted to complete or extend the body of Western canonical writings, from the perspective of the black community.

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Chapter One

This chapter on “History and Memory” examines Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks (1999),2 a collection of narrative and lyrical poetry that creates a panorama of Caribbean heritage folding, and refolding, through cycles of generations now brought together in a collapse of time. This collection of poems enables us to reflect on some of the ways that black women poets are using tropes of mobility to create and maintain a renewed sense of identity, a sense of belonging to a communal network. Through the process of re-membering that is empowered by the poetic performance of re-memory, the poet re-gathers the events and experiences of history in a new way, challenging traditional conventions and stereotypes. The poetics of re-memory at work through this medium enables the poet to uncover the “repressed” past,3 bringing together the experiences of peoples of the black diaspora. Such experiences are contained in oral histories, narratives, and myths that have been passed down from one generation of women to the next by word of mouth. As other studies have shown, women poets of the black diaspora are using their personal experiences to direct attention to what Paul Gilroy describes as “social, familial, historical, and cultural factors that bear upon the formation and social reproduction of masculinity and femininity.”4 Goodison’s collections of poetry emerge from within the black diaspora, a transnational space defined by “the convergence of multiple places and cultures” (3); a space which demands that individuals come to terms with their lived experiences in the in-between spaces of their multiple homes. According to Boyce Davies, this cultural convergence becomes a process, through which the individual “negotiates and renegotiates” self-identity.5 As Boyce Davies’s discussion shows, within contemporary identity discourse unconventional forms of history are recognizably an important component of the literary journey toward the construction of self-identity, particularly for poets of the black diaspora. Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection, viewed as poetry of re-membering, allows us to examine the poet’s intentional use of language as the poems bring to the fore gaps in memory which the writing of conventional history dismisses. The mosaic of memorialized events within the body of Goodison’s poetry marks the poet’s attempt to re-gather events in the process of writing/righting history, or as Mori explains it, “re-writing a history written by mainstream historians.”6 The gaps in memory highlighted by the poems function as signifiers for moments of subjective repression in women’s history which the poet is compelled to fill in, and in the larger cultural context of the black diaspora the gaps also represent the erasure of black oral cultures. Energizing the poems are moments when the literal act

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of remembering occasions surprise; when bits of memory overtake the persona in the re-telling of events. To that end, I offer re-memory as a poetics of re-membering for reading Goodison’s work, as well as poetry of the black diaspora in general. This chapter will demonstrate the effectiveness of this reading strategy by highlighting ways in which the poems in Turn Thanks open up a discourse on conventional history. The selection of poems herein all speak to the poetic will not just to recall history, as in the act of remembering a past event but to create a new body of poetry that calls into question history itself.

Turn Thanks: Re-Membering Caribbean Heritage Goodison came from a typical Caribbean background, growing up with family who were not rich but who had status because they owned land, in a village named for and by her paternal grandfather. The family all lived together in Harvey Village, and her mother was well respected by the community, known as she was for her hospitality and caring spirit. Goodison’s English and Irish male ancestors married black island women, Africans through whose wombs the history of the island was largely engendered. According to the history Goodison provides in her mother’s memoir, From Harvey River, her paternal grandfather, William Harvey, was “one of the few Englishmen in his time to legally marry a black Jamaican woman,” Frances Ann Duhaney, a direct descendant of Africans brought to the island under slavery (Goodison From Harvey River 34-35).7 Their son, David Harvey, later married the daughter of the Irish man, George O’Brian Wilson and his beloved African, Leanna Sinclair, the woman at the heart of Goodison’s Guinea Woman poems. This cultural mix of privileged English, free Irish, and poor African on the island has engendered a heritage of mixed blessings for Caribbean born descendants such as Lorna Goodison, who grew up with the island in the post-World War II years, when the economic downturn further exacerbated the poor living conditions for the majority of black islanders, whose only hope at the time lay in eking out a living off the hard land. In the Caribbean world in which Goodison grew up, the education system, under the tutelage of the British, was designed to reinforce as fact the ideas that the islands of the Caribbean have no history of their own, and that the communities of black islanders were uncivilized, lacking in culture and refinement. Not only were History lessons used to expose and fan the cultural flames of shame, reminding all and sundry that nothing good ever came out of the Caribbean, but class consciousness became a contending force, wielded to divide the communities against themselves

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Chapter One

into haves and have nots. Time’s unerring hand, however, was not short in setting the record straight, and soon a younger generation would be introduced to a revised version of cultural identity, wrought at the hands of those who were privileged to gain an education and who used it to reeducate their people. Goodison herself grew up with a love for books, which were readily available in her home, and a strong desire to express her creativity in painting and writing. Although her main focus was in Art Studies, she published poems anonymously as a teenager, and in 1980, her Tamarind Season collection drew critical acclaim for innovative use of language. Thereafter, she began to read her poems in Britain, U.S.A., and Europe. The opportunity to migrate to America has no doubt opened opportunities for Goodison to develop as a writer. She was among the group of post-Independence women writers in Jamaica whose first collections of poetry flourished during the late 1970s. Her early collections were published in Jamaica and London and her second poetry collection, I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), was winner of the coveted Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region. During those early years, Goodison received several prestigious fellowships to American Universities, including a fellowship to Bunting Institute/Harvard Radcliffe in 1986 and later, in 1991, the Commonwealth fellowship to the University of Toronto. From there she was invited to do a public reading performance of her poetry at the University of Illinois, which led to yet further publishing opportunities by the University Press there. Goodison feels strongly that wherever she went her poetic works “spoke for her,”8 and before long she was offered a faculty position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she has been employed for the past 17 years. To date, Goodison has published nine books of poetry, two books of short stories and a Memoir, which won one of Canada’s largest prizes. All of her poetry collections have been published by the University of Illinois Press and her poems appear in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces as well as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and they have been translated into many languages. Having spent most of the past two decades living and working in America, Goodison has used her later collections of poetry to create space for revisiting themes that she had introduced in her early works. However, in the mobile landscape of the poems, which are continuously shifting between the social spaces of Jamaica and North America, the issues are determinedly more complex in scope. It has been generally acknowledged by transnational writers and critics that the experience of migration creates an expanding consciousness that apprehends time and space in ways that

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are new and different. Many Caribbean writers have also acknowledged that cultural difference, more easily discernible through the lens of the transatlantic eye, creates a strong impulse in the writer to re/visit home as often as possible. The same is true of Goodison who spent many years travelling back and forth between her home in the Caribbean and her home in North America. Her strongest concern in writing has been to remain true to the voice of the everyday person living in the island; to represent in her poems the Jamaican Creole language as it is spoken there. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Critic Carole Boyce Davies’s discussion of writing by black women creates a thoughtprovoking context for this discussion of Goodison’s poetry, pointing to the way migration impacts the creative process at work. “Black women writers,” she says, “are engaged in all kinds of processes of reacquisition of the “tongue,” and these, I assert, are movements of re-connection and, at times, of re-evaluation.”9 For these writers, finding a poetic voice, recreating the speech patterns of their mother tongue, and using this as a medium of self-expression becomes increasingly urgent. Boyce Davies further points out that “boundaries of orality and writing, of geography and space, engender fundamental crossings and re-crossings”10 as part of the natural processes at work in the collections produced by transnational writers. It is evident that Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection, written in the spaces between her homes in Jamaica and America, constructs a discourse of orality and writing that reflects on the relation between geography and home, between location and subjectivity. In Goodison’s case, the poetic desire to revisit home again and again has led to occasions for rewriting History so that it includes and transforms all aspects of her cultural heritage. In this way, the poetpersona in Turn Thanks re-evaluates the traditional presentation of Caribbean identity as one forged through disinheritance and loss. Goodison thereby creates a collection of poems that are rich and complex in their transformation of Caribbean cultural experience. As indicated above, an important aspect of this collection is the poet’s deliberate use of language. In an interview with students, recorded in an essay published by the University of Minnesota, Goodison is appropriately described as finding reconciliation in “using her “woman’s tongue” to blend the rhythm of words with the brush strokes of history” (Voices from The Gaps). The poetpersona of Goodison’s poems exercises her right to speak as a woman, and in a voice that is true, slipping and sliding from one end of the language continuum to the next as Jamaicans are known to do, and the characters in the poems do the same.

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Chapter One

Reading Goodison’s poems within the context of a tradition of “African Praise poetry,”11 as Hannah Chukwu and Susan Gingell suggest, it is also clear that the titular phrase “Turn Thanks” signals the act of turning things around so that a new perspective is gained, compelling the poet to recognize and voice her personal appreciation for the cultural inheritance she embraces. The poems initiate a process of “turning,” as in moving past the traditional perspective, inverting and reverting individual memory. As a craftsman takes a plain piece of wood and “turns” it on a lathe so that it becomes a beautiful work of art, so the poet takes each personal experience in the poem and “turns” it through the poetic process of re-memory into a historical thing of beauty and value. The collection is replete with images that are nourished by the Caribbean consciousness of historical events. Celebrating and redeeming the otherwise ordinary existence of all the women in her life, the poetpersona creates her own sense of Caribbean identity. Gathering the experiences of women in her patrilineal and matrilineal heritages, mother, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and aunts, she stitches together a history of strong womanhood rooted in a deep sense of Caribbean community. In this way, Goodison’s poetic discourse of identity creates a physical reminder of the “other” parts of Euro-American history, the absence of which has marked a spiritual loss. Re-membering this loss, Turn Thanks replaces valuable networks of memory that keep emerging through gaps in the crossings that time and place allow. The collection as a whole makes the case for re-reading the conventional discourse on Caribbean history, a history replete with images of dispossession. Indeed, there seems to be no cause for thankfulness or recognition of any cultural heritage worth mentioning, that is, unless individuals within the society “turn” things around in a renewed evaluation of past events and experiences. This is a task that the poet must accomplish. In the Turn Thanks collection, therefore, Goodison creates a turning to the diverse sources of giving within the community, and performs a ritual thanksgiving that reflects appreciation of her cultural heritage. Using an autobiographical poetpersona who gathers her family history, the poet celebrates and redeems the otherwise ordinary existence of all the women in her life, in the process creating her own sense of what it means to be Caribbean when one lives also in America. Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection reflects on notable absences and gaps in family histories, gaps that are representative of the repressed past and the conventional erasure of black oral cultures. The poet relies on memory, her own and that culled from the community through oral histories, not just to fill in the gaps but

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more importantly to create a collection that celebrates her heritage and, in the process, make space for Caribbean poetry to take its rightful place in world literature. Using the poetics of re-memory as a studied approach to reading Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection, allows readers to access nuances of the language that speak to the poetic will not just to recall history, as in the act of remembering a past event, but to create a new body of poetry that calls into question history itself. The readings of the poems selected for this discussion are designed to shift the parameters of the literary discourse on identity politics beyond conventional praxis. The discussion that follows also shows the leitmotif of redemption as the organizing principle beneath the work, ascribing a spiritual quality to the poems in Turn Thanks, as it does in all of Goodison’s work.

Caribbean History and the Redeeming Power of Re-Memory Goodison’s Turn Thanks is divided into four sections creating an interesting mix of poetry that is lyrical in force and narrative in intent. In Parts I and II, the autobiographical poetpersona enacts a gathering of her family history, focusing first on the maternal and then the paternal lines and the heritage she receives from them. In Part III she reflects on her cultural heritage re-aligning the conventional literary landscape of Western tradition to include poetry written by Caribbean people. Finally, in Part IV, re-memory brings the poetpersona to the crowning moment when she celebrates self-identity more directly. Here, as she examines the gift of poetry that enables self-recognition, the poet turns her attention to the challenges she faces as a transnational Caribbean poet whose artistic endeavor seeks to create for herself and her community a body of poems that take their proper position in the poetic landscape of Caribbean and American writing. In Part 1, “My Mother’s Sea Chanty,” Goodison pays tribute to the maternal heritage. The first three poems are elegies with the central theme of the celebration of her mother’s life and death, the celebration registered through the pulsating Reggae musical rhythm which structures the poems. As seen in the poem that opens the collection, “After the Green Gown of my Mother Gone Down” (3), dreaming and remembering allow space for redemption of the lost loved one. The poems generally close with an affirmation of life continuing through the power that comes from faith, and the act of remembering. For example, in “After the Green Gown of my Mother Gone Down” (3) the poetpersona interacts with several

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Chapter One

different memories all at once, which allows her to integrate the death of her mother with that of Caribbean legendary music icon, Bob Marley. Her allusion to two of Marley’s famous works, “Redemption Song” and “Catch a Fire,” speak of them as “hymns.” The use of this word recalls the those songs which were sung in celebration of the lives of all the slaves who died at the hands of slave owners, whether in the holds of the slave ships or on the battlefields of the plantations to which they were chained. This is a history never to be forgotten, a history that is told from the perspective of the black community of the African diaspora. This communal memory of the vicious cycle of death and life becomes the context within which the poetpersona remembers and mourns the death also of her mother. The poem itself becomes Goodison’s hymn celebrating her mother’s life, and it reflects with deliberate consciousness on this Caribbean poet’s sense of her African cultural heritage. At first, the memories come sparsely and fragmented, like scattered thoughts being gathered. However, by the second half of the poem the lines thicken as memory flows full and free, and the poetpersona moves into a surreal description of the funeral ceremony and the burial of the body. Notably, the poem does not end in death as conventionally conceived in Christian theology. Instead, the affirmation that her mother is still alive in a spirit world of sorts and that her body has fittingly returned to nature creates a harmonious mix of African and Christian beliefs in the afterlife. We see this clearly at the end of the poem where the poetic performance of re-memory allows the poetpersona to “dream her mother,” speaking with her as if she is still physically alive. The final lines create a lasting impression of her mother and her already deceased aunt as of “two young girls / scampering barefoot among / the lush fruit groves” (5) of their childhood. “After the Green Gown of my Mother Gone Down” clearly makes several boundary crossings as re-memory takes over. First, we note that Reggae music and poetry merge to become one voice in the poem; next we see that African and Western traditional beliefs of death and dying are woven together to create a new life affirming mythology; and finally we recognize that family values and communal traditions are re-inscribed in the poem, clearing the way and “turning” new paths for women writing Caribbean poetry. As the poetpersona moves through the process of remembering her mother, family re-connections take place and help shape the poetic consciousness of the relation between history and identity, as they are lived and experienced. The rest of the poems in this first section of the Turn Thanks collection serve to single out women in Goodison’s maternal line, to whom the poet

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is indebted. In “Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry” (12), for example, the poetpersona makes a re-membering of ancestral heritage, reconnecting the African spiritual rituals with Caribbean folkways. The poem describes the cultural estrangement that Miss Mirry, a domestic helper to the Harveys, experienced as a woman displaced by colonial forces. The poetpersona explains: “She was the repository of 400 years of resentment / for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned / to being a stranger …” (lines 911). Celebrating a weakness as strength, she takes pleasure in describing Miss Mirry’s epic battles with the Queen’s English. She explains that Miss Mirry “twisted” the English words into making new meanings and that she “took every vowel and consonant of it / and rung it around,” in much the same way people wrung the neck of the chicken for Sunday dinner. Miss Mirry’s battle with the English language was at its most compelling best when she was angry. The poetpersona tells us that at such times “she stabbed at English, walked it out, / abandoned it in favor of a long kiss teeth” (lines 6-20). Yet, the recall of memory shows that Miss Mirry’s inability to speak English was not the defining quality of the woman. At the end of the poem, the poetpersona speaks in awe of Miss Mirry’s healing powers as she worked miracles with natural herbs and bushes. This moment of re-memory transforms the humble, alienated figure of the woman into a spiritual figure, one who is “speak-singing in a language / familiar to her tongue which rose unfettered / up and down in tumbling cadences, ululations (lines 41-44). The poet redeems this lowly domestic worker through the contrast she makes between the linguistic struggle to speak English and the poetic overflow of African language emanating from her mouth as she works at ease in her “true self … [the] “African bush healing woman” (lines 45-48). Following like strategy, all the poems in Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection become portraits, as the poet performs a remembering that creates a family album of strong willed women who helped others, passing on spiritual treasures of advice and experience. This depiction of the history of shared heritage becomes a powerful force through the processes of re-memory which the poet accesses to quicken her poetic consciousness. The poems show that the women themselves have crossed racial boundaries, creating a clash of European and African cultures out of which a new sense of identity emerges, creating possibilities and hope for future generations. The poems celebrate and sing praises to the lives of these women, regardless of their status and racial origins. This is true also of the poem “Notes from My Mother’s Village before the Village Got Light” (20), in which the poetpersona speaks of cultural struggles that play out in the bodies of women, such as

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her grandmother, the “Guinea woman” who gave birth to “a blue-eyed high yellow child” (20). In “Notes from My Mother’s Village before the Village Got Light” there is a strong sense of the beginnings as the poetpersona reflects on colonial times and the ways that the politics of colonization affected the way of life for the small village in which her mother grew up. The poem speaks of her grandfather who loved to drink rum punch (an island specialty) and play the violin in his own celebration of “St. Patrick’s Day,” a holiday new to the islanders. This imported celebration created a new cultural mix which the poetpersona describes: “Colonial combination, rum and violin […] / the Lake Isle of Innisfree now became Harvey River” (18-19). The poetpersona further represents the postcolonial struggles that are played out on the domestic as well as the national level, as she speaks of the Creole offspring of her grandparents “whose loyalties were torn and divided / between mother Africa and a son of the British Empire” (20). These historical events become moments embedded in the beginnings of Harvey village, the “village named after her grandfather,” the poem closing with nature imagery that foreshadows the islanders impatience for change on both the political and cultural level. As is evident in the foregoing, a close reading of Goodison’s poetry reflects the impossibility of separating gender issues into categories of male and female for not only does the poetic representation focus on issues relating to women but it is clear that their experiences are integral to those of the men in their lives, experiences the poet embraces as rememory takes over in the crafting of the poems. To quote Caribbean critic J. Edwards Chamberlin on this: “Goodison’s poetic imagination includes both men and women in Jamaica and elsewhere, with whom she shares a life of struggle and freedom.”12 Accordingly, in Turn Thanks Part 2, “This is My Father’s Country,” the poet re-gathers several memories in the history of her paternal heritage. The section opens with a recounting of the paradox of life as she describes the wealth of her father’s heritage and the instantaneous poverty that overtook him. This paternal narrative is grounded in his mother’s history, his wealth depending on the inheritance he would receive from her. His was a heritage grounded in the ownership of land, a possession which he lost before attaining manhood. In the titular poem, “This is My Father’s Country” (27), readers note the poetpersona’s personal distress and sense of outrage as she recounts how her father’s heritage of land, a God given “birthright” was stolen by “Sly Russel,” a colonial representative described in the poem as a thief, a man without spiritual mores, “whose intention it was / to store up much treasure here on earth” (stanza three). The biblical allusion to Jesus’

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Sermon on the Mount reflects on the spiritual impoverishment of a materialistic society over which self-love and greed dominate. The poet makes use of the Afro-Caribbean folk ritual of the call and response as a poetic strategy, a way of signaling the close ties between individual and community. The poem begins with the voice of the poetpersona whose dry, factual recounting of her father’s history gives way as it enters the personal, painful voice of her grandmother’s lamentation, in her call to the community to respond to her grief and bear witness against the man who has stolen her son’s birthright: “St Elizabeth, come and see / this woman’s dying trial” (stanza 7). The rural parish of St. Elizabeth which lies to the south of the island, in the poetic distillation of re-memory, becomes a symbolic representation of the Catholic saint, the village community, and the land itself. In her distress, the poetpersona’s grandmother calls out for the saint’s intervention to cope with the injustices created by colonial greed for land and power. The ritual call and response gives the woman “consoling strength”; it is what she needs to bear the evil of injustice that has overtaken her and it brings comfort also as she reflects on and learns from their history. St Elizabeth is personified, and the personal hardships of the land, seen in its dryness, conflates in the woman’s mind with the hardship and poverty of the people who live there, and who try to eke out a living from the dry, stony, red, alluvial soil. The land responds to the people in what Goodison describes as a miracle: like a biblical prophet or saint, she “changed the bread of the poor into roses / and then converted the roses / into the bread of the poor again” (stanza 11). This miraculous process speaks of the transformation of the physical debilitation that comes from “wounds and losses,” and “suffering,” into spiritual strength. The individual’s ability to transcend pain and suffering is a characteristic mark of Caribbean poetry, as it is of poetry written by women of the wider black diaspora. The poem moves from lament to celebration grounding as it does so the natural birthright of the poetpersona’s father in the history of the native Arawak. Theirs is a history of oppression, a hard life lived and quickly extinguished by the colonizing enterprise. Goodison remembers her father’s life and early death in the poem, the poetpersona describing him as “My father of the tribe who came singing,” a line that stands by itself among a group of quatrains (Part II, line 10). The “tribe who came singing” is itself a memorialization of the Arawaks (whose names are changed to Tainos by modern scholarship). In the Prologue to her mother’s memoir, Goodison says, “my father’s people do not live long” and she explains the sense of loss she felt as a fifteen year old whose father died before she had time to truly know him.13 In the poem she

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remembers him as a hard-working man but also as her “sweet-foot father” and “nightingale-throat father,” a dancer, singer and musician whom “wind and string instruments obeyed” (Part II, stanza 10). As she did in the poem about her mother, the poetpersona mentions a religious experience in which she “dreams” her father. There she was, spending Christmas “in New York alone” and yet, she says, “my father appeared to me on Dry Harbour Road,” a main road on the way to St Elizabeth, the country where her father was born Part III, stanza 2). The image of him as he “burst through the doors of the funeral home / […] / then hovered as a bright ball of light” creates its own epiphany (stanza 3). The poetpersona closes the poem as she does in “After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down” with a celebration of life, which transcends death, and a clear sense of belonging, of always participating in the rituals of Caribbean life.

Transforming Caribbean Poetic Identity Part 3, “The Mango of Poetry,” picks up the thread of spiritual sustenance and nourishment, introduced in the first two parts of the Turn Thanks collection. Goodison’s use of food imagery in this subtitle points to the elemental role of poetry as both a source of nourishment and satisfaction for the poetpersona, but reminding us at the same time that the sweet, succulent flesh of poetry is formed around the hard stone of history and experience. According to different myths of origins, the mango bears the history of the transatlantic crossings, making its way variously from one part of the Americas to another, including the different islands of the Caribbean. Mango trees are plentiful in the Jamaican country side. Deeply rooted, and well-anchored in the soil, the trees bear fruit that nourishes and easily become a metaphor for the roots of Caribbean poetry spreading far and wide, creating and becoming part of a network of black diaspora poetry. The titular poem in this section, “The Mango of Poetry” (43), recreates a childhood memory the poetpersona has of eating mangoes from a St. Julian mango tree planted by her father. At the beginning of the poem, the poet persona grapples with the lofty ideas given in conventional textbooks regarding what poetry is. These formal definitions do little for her and as her mind wanders off, she finds herself thinking about what she would give just to get one mango from her mango tree back home. Soon she is deep in reverie, re-living a memory of a time she picked and ate mango from the tree. As she re-plays the moment, she stretches out the sweet delight of washing the mango, squeezing its sweet juiciness out into her mouth; eating without fear or caution, as the juice runs freely down her chin; the luxury of eating freely

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because she is wearing a “bombay-colored blouse” and the mango stains will not show. By the end of the poem both the reader and the poetpersona are fully conscious that through her act of re-memory she is defining poetry in a new way. The poem occasions a defining moment in Caribbean poetry, as it embraces the everyday rituals of life: her father planting the mango tree; his own premature death as he falls sick, like a premature mango falling from the tree; the profusion and overabundance of its fruit, three years later. The pleasure of eating to satisfaction and remembering her father provides the immediate source of inspiration and nourishment for the poetpersona. Goodison’s “The Mango of Poetry” asserts that the poem is what you do; it is who you are. The poem defines itself. The poem is. Through the poems in this section of the collection, Goodison creates cross cultural bridges bearing the recognition of loss and renewal, acceptance and change. Invoking the presence of literary giants of the Euro-American canon, the poetpersona performs a discourse of remembering that reclaims severed connections between European and Caribbean literary heritage. This poetic performance yields material currency for the transformation of cultural exchange that re-charges the journey which contemporary poets of the black diaspora must continue making. In “To Mr. William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland” (45) the poem enacts a re-reading of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” nicknamed “The Daffodils”14 by a whole generation of Caribbean students. Goodison’s poem sets up a poetics of Relation between English poetry already accepted into the literary canon and poetry of the rural folk in the Caribbean and, by extension, the wider black diaspora. Described in the poem as “lyrical ballads on air,” (45) these Caribbean poems were composed by women, such as the greatgrandmother of the poetpersona, who did not have the luxury of wandering idly through the countryside writing poems, because they had been denied literacy and, in any case, they were too busy with the daily rituals of making a living. Yet, as the poetpersona sees it, the songs they composed in their heads and “on air,” as they sang aloud in accompaniment to their daily journeys and chores, are legitimate counterparts of their European “other.” The poem operates on a principle of doubling, the poetpersona replacing the figure of her great-grandmother, whose image in turn is a double of the great British poet, William Wordsworth. The images of the women, superimposed on the original image of the male poet, manages to replace it but not without leaving a trace, for it performs also the trick of

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collapsing time, so that the women, in their own time frames, are suggested to be walking with Wordsworth. In one fluid movement created by the process of re-memory, the gap between the present, past and more distant past is erased as is the gap between Western and Caribbean poetic traditions. Recalling the figure of Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet who himself challenged poetic conventions of his day, and who made the case for recognizing oral poetics, gives the poetpersona grounds for her case as she calls for the inclusion of Caribbean poetry in the Great canon. The entire poetic scene set in the Jamaican countryside is transposed onto the English countryside, and achieves the effect of transforming the discourse on poetic identity raised by the original Wordsworth poem: The host of golden flowers at my feet were common buttercups not daffodils, they danced and swayed so in the breeze though overseer thorns were planted among them. (stanza 1)

Several significant changes here effect this transformation of the discourse. Firstly, the Jamaican countryside with its “host of golden… buttercups,” is evoked in place of the English landscape with its “host of golden daffodils.”15 Next, the buttercups are described as beautifying the countryside despite the invasion of “overseer thorns,” a deliberate poetic allusion to colonialism, which introduces the postcolonial discourse on location and subjectivity. Finally, the narrative voice unexpectedly creates a sprung rhythm, as it disrupts the poetic rhythm of the English ballad. By deliberately changing the metric linear flow, the poem becomes a cross between narrative and lyrical, at once sounding familiar and strange. The doubling we recognize in the tonality of the poem is largely created by the linguistic shift from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, as the language of the poem slips and slides along a Creole-English language continuum. This shift is another poetic device that marks the poetpersona’s subversion of the mainstream poetic genre. Note the subtle use of the word “so” in the first verse of the poem, which inflects the line with a Creole accent. By the fifth verse the poetpersona relaxes her use of English so that the poem subtly and gradually becomes a Creole composition. For example, speaking of the oral dynamics of her greatgrandmother’s poetry, the poetpersona says: “She never did arrange them / the exact same way twice” (stanza 5). While the first line of this verse is grammatically correct by English standards, “did arrange” is a doubling, being perceived as an emphatic form of the English simple past tense, at the same time that it is recognized as Creole, following the Jamaican Creole grammar practice of indicating the past by the use of the word

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“did.” In the very next line which completes the sense of the first, the doubling is reversed. The poetpersona uses the identifiably creole emphatic construction in saying, “exact same way,” which by English grammar standards is tautological, “exact” being the double of “same” as far as meaning goes. Serving also to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jamaican Creole as a poetic medium, the use of creole language structure and grammar in an otherwise English poem begs the question of genre. Is this poetry? What kind of poetry is it? As seen thus far, the point-of-view of the poetpersona makes it clear that the poem is embarking on a poetic discourse of identity. She makes the point deliberately in her choice of diction, employing images and verbal phrases used in the original Wordsworth poem. The “host of golden…buttercups” are just as effective, says she, in opening up “the inward eye” of her own poetic imagination as the “host of golden daffodils” did Wordsworth’s and, more importantly, it inspires her with a prophetic vision of “the overflowing bounty” or the cultural “wealth” that exists despite “[her] people’s poverty” (stanza 2). The question regarding what constitutes poetic genre haunts the poem, the answer itself evolving through the strategy of rhetorical questioning and the use of exemplum drawn from personal family history, that constitute the verses of this poem. Assuming the form of a poetic apostrophe to the long dead English poet, Goodison’s poem performs a one-sided conversation with Wordsworth, which ends with the poetpersona asking the great English poet to deliver a message to her great-grandmother for her. The tongue-incheek reminder that death is the great leveler also works to suggest that her great-grandmother is no less a poet than Wordsworth. According to the linguistic logic of the poet Wordsworth, known for his use of the colloquial tongue, and canonized as a poet, surely would recognize her great-grandmother as a poet. Like him, she walked along the countryside in Westmoreland, (the Jamaican parish named for the English County) composing her oral chants. Since the process of composition is identical and the use of language is generically the same, this woman’s oral chanting, her “guinea griot style” (stanza 8), must take its rightful place as poetry beside Wordsworth’s lyrical compositions. The poem moves into its closing argument at the end of stanza 9, the poetpersona carefully explaining how she has loyally “collected up all her [great-grandmother’s] songs and poems” and “rescued them” (stanzas 1011). The question of what is poetry, raised in the title poem, is thus resolved: poetry includes all the work songs and poems that have been written down in the “book of memory,” by the rural folk (stanza 4), a book

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which Goodison’s collection opens and transforms through the poetic processes of re-memory. Contemporary women poets of the black diaspora are engaged in the project of re-collecting oral traditional forms of poetry and transforming them through the use of print and performance media. Goodison herself makes use of the oral chant as a structural device in many of her poems, and to listen to her as she performs a reading of her own poems is to succumb to the pleasurable experience of listening to a chanteuse performing in the “guinea griot style” (stanza 8). In the final confrontation with the question of poetic identity, the poetpersona is not afraid to name and re-label the poetic works that litter the landscape of Western poetic convention. The trash and refuse of oral poetry, once discarded as worthless and left to lie unforgotten beneath banana leaves in the field, or underneath the bed, is finally re-membered, “recollected” and “written down” in “black-face type / against a light background” (stanza 12). This black and white image of Caribbean poetry performs an act of recognition long overdue; it creates Relation, bringing an awareness of renewed connections and challenging the Euro-American poetic canon. In the end, Goodison’s poetry is that challenge. Invoking the Western canon as a space from within which the poetic imagination may set to work, she successfully creates a network of poems that generate new power relations through linguistic diplomacy. The Turn Thanks collection as a whole performs a re-evaluation of language as a means of fore-grounding “questions of power and speech” as well as authority and locationality.”16 In the poem to Wordsworth, the English disdain of the dialect is invoked and rejected by the poetpersona in her description of her great-grandmother’s poems, being composed in “[what] they call broken / and indecent, [language] patois, bungo” (otherwise called Jamaican Creole by Caribbean linguistic scholars). The poetpersona further explains that such descriptions are meant as “words for bondage and shame” (46). Whose bondage and whose shame? The words are left hanging at the end of the penultimate verse of the poem, but the poetpersona goes on to demonstrate her rejection of such nomenclature and identity as she affirms: “And I’ve written them down for her / […] / Mr. Wordsworth, / Please tell Miss Leanna her poems are now written down” (stanza 12). The past is laid to rest as the present affirms its continuity and power.

Re-Inscribing Caribbean Poetic Identity In the fourth and final section of the Turn Thanks collection, rememory brings the poetpersona safely through the corridors of the distant

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past and delivers her up to the more recent present, at which point she intensifies her reflections on her personal journey towards poetic identity. The subtitle, “God a Me” creates a spiritual resonance for the poems within this section of the collection and reflects a sense of personal intimacy with the divine creator. The Creole structure of this title performs a call for divine help, and emphasizes the persona’s weariness of spirit as she makes the journey back and forth between America and the Caribbean, between land and island, struggling to maintain and confirm her sense of self, heir to the double consciousness that afflicts the transnational writer. The title poem for this section, “God a Me” (65), opens with an image of a loss of personal control. Recollecting earlier poems in which she describes herself as a “mermaid,”17 a native of the “water culture” of the Caribbean, the poetpersona in “God a Me” describes the events, “the live currents of the big rivers,” that pull her away from here natural home. The description becomes a metaphor for the lack of control over the forces of life, as the poetpersona explains: “Tide wash me out of the river / sweep me up onto the bank” (stanzas 1-2). The “tide,” the “live currents” seem to conspire against her and she loses bodily control as they “sweep” her onto the river banks. Out of the “water culture / where fish flourish and grow” (lines 11-12) the mermaid finds living on land a challenge. It is unnatural, and “breathing” becomes an act of will power. Employing the form of the traditional oral invocation, the poem becomes a prayer, a chant with every other line repeating the refrain, “God a me,” calling for help, or pleading for salvation. The poetpersona’s sense of personal unease is reflected in the description of herself as a “fish out of water,” a Caribbean metaphor which describes the physical and spiritual distress she endures in living away from her island home. She has been able to survive, but barely, “outside of the water culture” of the Caribbean and her breathing is “uneasy.” Yet, note how she says it: “On land I breathe uneasy / but still breathe though” (66). The Creole structure of the second line here conveys the persona’s pride or, perhaps, satisfaction that she has so far survived the alienation of self from identity that comes with the crossing from “[sea]/water” to “land.” Finding it difficult to breathe, she makes the plea for divine assistance: “God, a Me.” Her repetition of the phrase, “God, a Me,” is both an invocation to God, and a chant to reassure her that essentially she still is the same person. It reflects her desperate need to maintain her identity as a woman and as a Caribbean. In harmony with the invocation, the next line appropriately reflects on the assurance of the future. With divine help, the journey will end in success, for the poetpersona knows without doubt that she will get help; that “the tides of mercy” will pull her “Back into / the

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flow” (lines 23-26). The “tides of mercy” speak to a spiritual connection with God. It speaks of the experience of redemption that is also life restoring. The poetpersona has been swept out of the “live currents” of the Caribbean society and culture in which she flourishes, but the “tides of mercy” will pull her “back into / the flow”; the “flow” or “current” of life, perhaps, or of human society (66). For the persona in “God a Me,” and other poems in this final section of Goodison’s Turn Thanks collection, the journey toward identity is represented as a spiritual quest for self-acceptance and self-identity. The poems are marked by the energizing flow of life. The sea and river imagery speak of the importance of being connected to oneself, finding spiritual ease and grace through the journey. In “Sometimes on a Day Such as This” (67) the poetpersona speaks of “medicinal silence” that enables her to transport herself to a spiritual place of safety. She describes this as the “return home to [her] self” (stanza 2). The return calls for the stripping away of every vestige of learned social behavior and leaves the poetpersona with a sense of identity rooted in the spiritual. Speaking to the need to exchange the sense of shame imposed by the alienation encountered in the space of migration for the inner peace that comes with acknowledging the “whole” self, the poetpersona explains: “Inside me I am never ashamed, / I am whole and me” (stanza 7). Meditation is presented in the poem as the means by which the poetpersona experiences a kind of re-birth, a process through which she restores her sense of cultural identity. Through this process, history itself is also transformed as she becomes the very embodiment of time and place. She says: like the Tiber or the Black River. My body contains a body of strong surging water. And I can hear it. (stanza 9)

The reference to the “Tiber” and the “Black River” in this stanza reflects the poetpersona’s need to restore the cultural imbalances that make it difficult for her to function well. In her use of the word “coursing” the reader receives its double, “cursing,” which alludes to the mental and psychological distress that the cultural divide creates. The meeting of the rivers within her speaks of her recognition of cultural “currents” that flow between and within the transnational spaces she inhabits, the Tiber representing the Euro-American and the Black River representing the Caribbean. Both rivers are re-membered, brought together in a new way, in an experience that transcends time and place. Meditation creates space

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for the “medicinal silence” which allows the poetpersona to find spiritual healing. All the “transmuted” cultural “errors” are transformed and “now become iron,” she says, “fed back into my blood”; it serves as a source of personal empowerment. Locating the self within a spiritual discourse of redemption and restoration to spiritual health, the poem emphasizes the need to be “connected” with an inner source of energy that is fed by a reconciliation of cultural difference. Only then, the poem indicates, can one “return home,” that is, arrive at self-acceptance. Spiritual meditation is thus shown in the poem to be an exercise of the will to re-member. The individual must withdraw into the inner sanctuary or “chamber of [the]self” and listen to the “strong surging water” of identity, the “iron fed back into [her] blood” (stanza 3). Where this balanced sense of identity is missing, the individual suffers from a heightened awareness of being alienated from “home,” home being selfacceptance, self-unity. This idea is highlighted in those poems in Turn Thanks that invoke the Caribbean as “home,” and depict the American landscape as a cold environment within which the poetpersona struggles to maintain her self-identity. In “I Have Spent These Snowbound Days Away from Myself” (79) the poetpersona speaks of the loss of self–identity occasioned by living away from the warm tropical climate of the Caribbean for months at a time. In the poem, the poetpersona’s inability to recognize the self creates a psychological disorientation that borders on schizophrenia, and highlights the struggle to regain self-identity in the alienating space that the transnational migrant inhabits. “Snowbound” becomes a metaphor describing the difficulty of the journey toward a new identity, and the feeling of total alienation that comes upon the individual is marked as a period of traumatic loneliness and pain. The poetpersona describes the effect as the blood hardens in the arteries, “icicling slowly,” creating “ice shards” that “sever [the] heart” (lines 9-10). This death-in-life experience simulates the loss of identity that the poetpersona suffers. That she awakens from this death sleep suggests the possibility of renewal and awareness, but it is a possibility that is deferred, the search for the old identity retarding the birth of the new, which now becomes a necessary condition for survival in this transnational location: I wake up to find my heart has left a red note, saying, Gone in search of my identity, don’t wait for me. (lines 11-12)

The heart goes out of the persona, dampening any desire to continue living, but the message, “don’t wait for me” indicates the persona’s recognition of the need to move ahead – keep on living. The “frozen foreign landscape” in the poem creates a sense of unreality that questions

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the making and breaking of self-identity. Alluding ironically to early Jamaican poems which the poet had used to assert her identity as woman and as poet, the poetpersona now points out that she is no longer able to claim these identities that once seemed so clear-cut and right for her as a Caribbean woman: Not the figure of the “tiger,” of the “wild woman,” of “Amber,” of the “Tightrope Walker,” of “Penelope” or of the “Mulatta.”18 Stereotypes superimposed on the self though they were, the poet had nonetheless earlier recuperated them to embody a newness of identity that embraced the mix of cultures. Now, in light of the poetpersona’s present dilemma, these new revised identities have lost their appeal. This inability to identify with her earlier project marks a loss of spirit, and of spirituality that is vital to the poet’s art. In Turn Thanks, the “frozen foreign landscape” of North America brings only “Winter Dreams,” (80) the subject of the next poem, in the sequence. The dreams are consistent, and are filled with a strong sense of spiritual connection to the African cultural identity that many Caribbean artists of Goodison’s generation feel is essential for creativity. This is the connection that is missing from the poetpersona’s daily life experiences in America. She dreams of spiritual blessings and of renewal, and lastly, she dreams of “life” which she is “clutching” in the dream, in the figure of a “semicircular vase” with the word “life” “inscribed in raised letters around its lips” (stanza 3). The deferral of cultural identity plays out in the subconscious of the poetpersona, as the dream experiences all carry images of African-centered artistic life. For the poetpersona, however, real “life” is filled with images of snow, “unrelenting” in its force and she is unable to see the future, or even recognize herself. Self-identity is elusive, mobile, and the persona sadly admits: “my heart / still absent as I pass by myself” (stanza 4). Nevertheless, Goodison’s poetpersona has the will to live and, as seen in her way of perceiving her experiences, she searches for life and for beauty in the self. Speaking of the emotional pain that alienation brings, the poetpersona says: “…from overscarring / my heart has been carved into a rose.” Her use of “overscarring” speaks of the multi-layering of painful experiences, but it is as much a testimony to her creativity and the redemptive power of poetry, the medium through which the “raw, red, throbbing” heart has been transformed into a carved rose, a tribute itself to Caribbean poetry. Later, in the poem “A Quartet of Daffodils” (84), re-assessing her journey to see just how far she has traveled, the poetpersona puts in perspective her poetic experiences in the snowbound landscape of North America. The coldest days of winter have passed, giving way to spring, and the “frozen” landscape has begun to thaw allowing the daffodils to

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bloom again. These daffodils (not the Jamaican buttercups) are “her very first quartet,” serving to mark her survival, a new year, and new beginnings. The daffodils, transplanted from England to America, survive the winter, and are the first to emerge in the spring. Meditating on the winter hardships she herself experienced, the poetpersona says: “I think that they had a hard time making it out / of their frozen birthplace inside the earth” (stanza 3). Like the daffodils the poetpersona herself experiences a re-birth of sorts and the American landscape no longer speaks to her of hostility and alienation. Here, identity with the landscape marks the reconciliation that leads to poetic self-affirmation. Marija Bergam’s critical essay on Goodison’s use of flowers makes a similar comment. Bergam points out that the poet is “slowly learning how to recognize the coming of spring and how to come to terms with her displacement. She achieves this by allowing for the daffodils to bear spiritual potential as signs of regeneration and blooming, cardinal concepts in her oeuvre.”19 Meditation brings a sense of peace and reconciliation and the poem ends with the persona’s conviction that she has been pulled back “into the flow” (66) of life. She measures and accepts the distance between where she is from and where she is. She states meditatively, “Where I am born …/ seasons just shift over a bit to accommodate / the one following” (stanza 5). For the poet, the memory of home that this act of meditation releases brings renewed understanding of life and with it acceptance, as the poetpersona realigns the painful fragments of her history. Like the Caribbean seasons, she recognizes that she must “just shift over a bit” in her way of thinking to “accommodate” the new cultural experiences. So, with a renewed sense of identity Goodison’s poetpersona exults: And even if I am coming in exhausted, bowed, bent, drawn, and yellow-skinned like my very first quartet of daffodils I know now that this is undeniably spring. (stanza 6)

Notwithstanding the challenges and the struggles, the poet closes on the assurance that as surely as the daffodils survive each year’s winter, so too she will survive this freezing that being transplanted into a “foreign landscape” brings (79).

CHAPTER TWO HOME, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY: SHARA MCCALLUM’S THE WATER BETWEEN US

When we sing they hear their lives retold in our song they see the course they chose not to chart —McCallum “the sirens’ defense”

This chapter on Home, Memory and Identity takes as a given, the assumption that memory is an integral element in any discussion of identity. Much of what we claim as identity has been wrought through the annals of time, the force that complicates and belies our claim to a singular sense of self. Common to the poetry collections under consideration in this book, is the examination of traditional assumptions about Caribbean identity. Such assumptions must be reconsidered in order to reflect the poetic movement of the discourse in the texts themselves. In Chapter One, the discussion of identity issues has shown that for Caribbean women poets who occupy transnational space identity discourses are complex and varied; that examining the distillation of memory through the poetic process of re-memory allows readers to see how the poet re-members and re-connects the events and experiences in new and compelling ways; that such memorializing of the personal enfolds the historical experience so as to challenge conventional Western discourses. The poetic process of rememory applied to Shara McCallum’s collection of poetry discussed in this chapter will yet again allow readers to reflect on meaningful shifts in the discourse of identity, the linguistic nuances being very different. Consider again Boyce Davies’ comment on “re-membering” and “reconnection” highlighted in the previous chapter. These terms which are clearly talking about “crossing the boundaries of space, time, history, place, language”1 open up room for the expression of difference in the cultural experience of sameness which belies such difference. In her

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articulation of the importance of contemporary writing coming out of diaspora spaces, Angelyn Mitchell quotes American poet and critic Toni Morrison in making the point that a major task for writers and poets is to “resist the displacement within” and create an “extension” of the Western literary canon (Mitchell 379).2 By engaging in this task of re-membering, re-aligning the body of black diaspora literature, poets who are seen to be creating from outside the Western canon can work to challenge, as well as extend, the discourse of identity. As suggested by McCallum’s words from “the sirens’ defense” (67) used as the epigraph to this chapter, an important process recognizable in these works is the bringing together of oral histories. These oral components can subsequently be refracted to complete or extend the body of Western canonical writings from the perspective of the black community. Mitchell’s work also significantly points out that it is important, therefore, for critics to examine the literary use of language, “its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked, and unmasking language.”3 Like the preceding chapter, therefore, this chapter also highlights the particular importance of examining the way language functions in the poetic construction of the discourse of identity in transnational societies of the black diaspora, where a plurality of language systems exists, and where the national language interfaces with creolized forms of local speech. Shara McCallum’s The Water Between Us (1999)4 localizes creolized forms of speech that allows the persona to use the full range of the language continuum, as she easily slides between standard English and Jamaican Creole or “patwa,” as she calls it in some of the poems. Importantly, also, her poems enable a reading that furthers the discussion in Chapter One, showing how the question of language and identity is further complicated by issues of gender (already inscribed within the discourse of race). As this chapter will later demonstrate, the reflections made by McCallum’s autobiographical persona in The Water Between Us, like those of the poetpersona in Goodison’s Turn Thanks, create a Relation between public and private history, in the sense that Glissant uses the word. The personal experiences and apprehensions of the autobiographical persona of McCallum’s collection are brought to bear on public knowledge, much of which is institutional and national in scope. Readers familiar only with the tourist images of the Caribbean islands dispensed by international media are easily (and deliberately) estranged by the unfamiliar in McCallum’s work: the realities of the interplay of national and familial politics in the lived experience of the Caribbean people. Another significance that shows up in this chapter lies in the recognition that the cultural and historical milieu of McCallum’s and

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Goodison’s personas are the same, both related to the network of Caribbean American poets whose social relationships and consciousness are shaped by the crossing of waters. However, while the autobiographical persona of Goodison’s Turn Thanks focuses on adult memory and its regenerative spirit, McCallum’s poetpersona in The Water Between Us takes readers through an exploration of the adult’s painful, childhood memory for most of the collection. In an unpublished telephone conversation with me, McCallum shared her reflections on what it means to be Caribbean and yet grow up in the US, pointing to the way migration creates loss. Unlike her younger siblings, when McCallum left Jamaica she was old enough to have already formed an attachment to home and family. She felt acutely conscious of being taken from her beloved father and her homeland at the same time. Speaking of “the feeling of losing a place permanently and the inability to go back,” she says, “Jamaica was lost to me.” From that time onward, she also explained, she has always felt as if she were standing, “one foot in and one foot out of wherever [she has] been… a product of two worlds.”5 Shara McCallum has written four books of poetry and several critical essays in the field of Caribbean and American literature. She has gained prestigious awards, fellowships, and recognition beginning with her first collection, The Water Between Us (1999), published by the University of Pittsburg Press. Her latest collection, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (2011), was published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press Ltd. McCallum’s work as a poet and scholarly critic is found in diverse cultures and languages, appearing in journals and anthologies from the US to Latin America, the Caribbean, the UK and Israel. The narrative lyricism of the child persona that emerges in McCallum’s poetic works tugs at the heart of the reader as she calls for the uncovering of truth hidden beneath layers of deception and lies told in the family. The discourse in McCallum’s collection is familiar to all, but specific to the Caribbean community. The language, carefully shaped by the poet, is filtered through the growing child’s consciousness so as gradually to show the adult’s perspective of a world that is deliberately designed to be unstable and is therefore now recognized by child and adult as untrustworthy. In this way, the poet creates a collection of poems that are overtly political in spirit, calling into question the play of gender politics in the child’s life. The poetic material in The Water Between Us resonates on both the familial and cultural levels and, shifting boundaries, it extends outward beyond the national to embrace the transnational discourse of identity.

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Home as Identity in The Water between Us In Shara McCallum’s The Water Between Us the Caribbean landscape haunts the poetpersona, who has been transplanted in the American soil. Hers is a transnational identity, rooted in the experience of the changing same; a manifestation of Relations that occur in and through the cross cultural processes of being. Using her personal history and that of her family, McCallum weaves a network of personal and communal experiences that resonate on the larger geopolitical and sociohistorical levels of the national and diaspora communities. The book’s epigraph ironically uses a quote from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, establishing the style and tone of the collection of poems: “Only the magic and the dream are true. / All the rest’s a lie.” If the reader accepts this statement as a way of saying that the child’s mind can only apprehend the lived experience through the salutary “magic” and “dream” that have always acted as filters for her imagination; that memory can do no more than register these familiar figures; that armed with memory, the persona is only enabled to reject reality; then, this collection of poetry would be no more than ordinary. A close reading of McCallum’s collection, however, shows that the poetpersona progresses beyond the Caribbean world of Rhys’ protagonist and, in effect, this reveals that the epigraph is acting as a disclaimer. It allows the poet to remind readers that she cannot be held accountable for any “lie” that she uncovers; furthermore, that she rejects all the lies she has uncovered, and in the face of those lies there is a compelling desire to find or create what she calls “other kinds of truths;”6 finally, and most important, McCallum emphasizes that she retains the right to dream, and to experience the magic of life, as she holds onto her hope in the future. The movement from Rhys to McCallum is drawn along lines relating to issues of identity that have marked Caribbean people throughout history. The shifts in experience between generations are reflected when we examine their experiences on the individual level. Critical history shows that poetic works of the older generation of Caribbean writers dwelled on the anxieties related to finding and claiming kinship through the wider Caribbean community but McCallum’s work has largely focused on the individual, her own troubled family dynamics and the anguish of her personal journey toward selfhood. McCallum’s sense of self is complicated by the cultural complexity of her origins. Born in Jamaica, to a Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother, McCallum migrated to the US with her maternal grandparents at an early age, just as she was turning nine years old.

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The impact of migration on the young McCallum shapes the thinking and actions of the adult so that the autobiographical persona in her poetry collection keeps searching for the truth about her family history, the time before migration, and the memories with which she struggles thereafter. “Every migration” McCallum says, “is marked by loss…caused by political forces at large” (telephone conversation). Unable to travel back and forth between her new home in the US and Jamaica, she grew up with the stories her grandmother told her, stories that left her feeling afraid and largely unsafe, any happy memories of home besieged by stories of betrayal and violence in the family and the nation at large. McCallum explains that her first collection of poems, The Water Between Us is “compelled by patterns, histories, and migration.”7 Divided into four Parts, the collection charts the evolution of self-identity as the poetpersona regathers fragments of memory from personal, family and communal, or national history. It bears the mark of transnational poetry, crossing the waters of time and space in its structure, lamenting the loss of cultural memory but doing so to recall it into being, and using it to fashion a new body for Caribbean poetry. At the heart of The Water Between Us is the issue of identity, naming oneself in relation to the family, society’s smallest unit, with exception of the individual. The fragmented Caribbean family in the poems is shown to be a symptom, marking society’s design to destroy the individual’s sense of both personal and communal identities, which are necessary building blocks for proper growth and self-fulfillment. The collection begins with individual poems, photomemories that the poetpersona recalls as she flips back in time to trace the beginning of her confusion. I use the term photomemories to describe visual photographic images that create a dramatic reenactment of history on the personal level. In the poems’ photo collections, memory is shown to be increasingly fragmented as the poetpersona begins to move beyond the immediate need to remember and she starts the process of analyzing and reclaiming self-identity. The titles of the photo poems in The Water Between Us are allusive and largely ironic. They create a symbolic landscape which captures the child’s memory of her fall from Eden, the garden of paradise. It recounts the feeling of betrayal she suffers at the hands of her parents, spinning her into a world where loss is unimaginable, and memory can only recapture the silences of a child waiting to be heard. Part I locates the poetpersona in the Caribbean, perhaps at home in Jamaica, even as it makes clear that the geophysical location of the persona’s present moment might well be elsewhere. The opening poem, “In the Garden of Banana and Coconut Trees” (3), the child’s memory draws a picture of Edenic landscape

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“before” time started; that is to say, before the child became aware of the passing of time and the changes it brings. The poem is obviously ordered by the adult desire to analyze what went wrong and how it had all gone wrong. The first stanza creates an overview, reflecting the adult’s present consciousness of change, while the second goes back into her childhood past to recall the time before that change. This structure thereby allows the poetpersona to put the pieces together in a powerful demonstration of the alliance between memory and reality, producing evidence for the double betrayal she experiences. The first stanza of this two-part poem creates an overview of time, which makes clear that the child’s memorialization of a world gone wrong, ironically, is ordered by musical harmony and its narrative counterpoint. The adult poetpersona is able in hindsight to recognize the harmony that existed between her parents at the beginning when her mother’s every movement was pleasurably controlled by the presence of her father. At first, her mother would “sashay” around the house, reflecting her love for him and the excitement he aroused in her. The poetpersona could also recognize the time when her mother stopped responding and the devastating effect this had on her father. His loss of physical and mental control was reflected in the musical compositions he then played; “songs of angels and demons” finally giving way to a new ways of thinking, molded by Rastafarian theology, which she describes as “the gospel and herb” (3). In stanza 2, she recalls the way the sound coming from her father’s guitar was always there, as he played outside in the garden. It was a guiding force which soothed, as it ordered the daily flow of life in the household. The moment is magically real, recalling the power her father’s playing had on nature: “his music, breathing, / lifting leaves / that would collect and stir at his feet” (3). Her mother’s natural response to the music is reflected in the parallel world of nature. The child poetpersona remembers how the powerful music personally moved her mother who was always “clapping hands, bells jingling, / on her ankles” in accompaniment to “her singing” (3). Ultimately, the poem serves to reveal that the betrayal which the child’s experiences follows her into adulthood. It comes at the hands of both mother and father, whose preoccupation with their personal struggles intensifies the child’s apprehension and sense of loss. In “Apple,” (4) the next poem in the sequence, the poetpersona’s recollection of the child watching her father peel an apple becomes an allegorical moment for further examining what the child perceives as the father’s betrayal of her. Words such as “flesh” and “skin” and “white

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meat” reflect the intensity of her emotional pain. “Father,” she declares, “… I think I love you,” but that is not the end of the statement, only the end of the line. She continues in a new line, “as Eve must have loved her father / when He turned her out,” giving the reader another pause for thought: How exactly might the Biblical Eve have felt? What does this historical narrative have to do with the poetpersona’s own lived history? Finally, the full effect of the betrayal comes at the end of the statement, when the reader is made to go beyond the Biblical moment wherein a father is rejecting his daughter for her disobedience, for it speaks allusively of Adam as “the man who only knew / how to follow” (4). In the adult consciousness that drives the child’s re-memory of events, the whole poem points to the greater ultimate betrayal of the divine Father. It becomes a rejection, perhaps, of religious doctrine that reads the serpent literally, and positions him in intimate relation to the Father. The poem ends with the two, in unity, “eating the white meat,” and in the magically real moment, it is the flesh of the apple, of the woman Eve, of the girl poetpersona and all girl children all at once. The world, says the poem, is built on a series of lies: that a girl’s father loves her; that the father is bound to protect his girl child; that man was created to love his wife; that he had the ability to care for her. The poetic discourse ends by positing the greatest of all religious lies (from the Christian perspective): that the divine Father, God, is the author of good and evil alike. In the final analysis, the poem enacts a bitter and complete rejection of traditional religious institutions that control the human family structure at large. As the readings of these two poems show, re-memory working alongside it’s alter companion, magical realism, is a basic structural device underpinning the flow of McCallum’s poetic discourse of home and identity in The Water Between Us. Use of the magically real as part of this poetic device facilitates the poet’s representation of the double experience of time consciousness: the child’s consciousness of events as they are happening is integral to the adult perceptions of reality that the poetpersona shares with readers. This is true of the third poem in the Edenic sequence, “Pleasant Hill” (5), where the poetic representation of the child’s world as a place of loss and exclusion is reinforced by acts of nature that are described alongside human behavior. First, as if looking at pictures in an album, the poetpersona presents a photomemory of home, in Pleasant Hill (located geographically in the rural parish of Manchester, Jamaica). First she says, “This is the house you don’t want to remember,” and then she proceeds to describe the place. The family home is located on a steep hill that deters visitors from dropping in, so no one can hear the crying child bereft of parental consolation. It is a

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troubled place, where everything that happens signifies the tensions within the home. By the end of the first half of the poem, the reader learns that it is a “haunted” house: Set amidst woods where the onlooker can see “branches / whispering to leaves” outside, while inside, “rugs cling to sliding floors” and “dishes sing to pots.” Finally, the reader learns that the house is feared by all so that, as the poetpersona says, “no car, trike, nor foot / would tread [there] past midnight” (5). The poem itself focuses however, on the unreliability of memory, as reflected in the two sides of the stories that the poetpersona’s mother and grandmother tell her “years later” in their remembering of the place. Perhaps to fix the imbalance their narrative represents, McCallum’s poetpersona creates a poem that gives voice to a father she has lost, imagining his perspective as a contesting narrative. The mother’s memory speaks of the terror of living in a place where the green grass becomes “green waves moving about her feet,” and the father’s memory, no less terrifying, speaks of the “feeling of sinking / into the earth, of being lowered / deeper and deeper into a pit” (5). The child’s memory of walking on “sliding floors,” brought into relation with these adult recollections, becomes part of the poetic discourse on family, home, and identity. It marks the unstable world in which she grew up, her feelings of things being out of control, and her prevailing sense of powerlessness and insecurity. In the final two stanzas of the poem, the poetpersona again rejects the lies she was told as a child, speaking of the way adults “fashion the truth- / piece by piece by piece,” until it is impossible to know the Truth (5). The only pointers along the way reside in what is left of the physical landscape in reality, perhaps the photomemory in the album: “the driveway, the single tree / against a moonless night” (6). This image represents the sketchiness of the child’s memory, and the impossibility of ever knowing what really happened there. Superimposed onto the landscape of this photomemory is the final haunting image of the child: “the child waiting to be hushed” (6). Readers are brought full circle back to the beginning of the poem whereby the child’s painful memory is all that matters: She is left alone, at night, in an abandoned house and she is crying in vain because no one ever dares to pass by at midnight.

Home and Memory: Fables of Identity The poems discussed above all carry a fairytale like quality. They are poems about children and childhood, but they are not written for children. As in the European fairytales culled by the Brothers Grimm, the child

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faces the terrors of the dark, growing up in a world inhabited by cruel and violent adults, humans and non-humans that either disregard the child’s fears and pains, or take pleasure in further increasing them. It is not by chance, therefore, that the closing sequence of poems in Part 1 more openly moves toward examining those fairytales with which the poetpersona grows up. However, being from the Caribbean, the poetpersona’s narrative repertoire also contains African folktales that allow for a comparative reading which takes her exploration beyond the intimacy of the family, outside into the wider social space of the national community. Altogether, this later group of poems reflects on the child’s increasing knowledge of the ways of the world, as she rehearses the stories she grew up with on the island, and begins to recognize and examine the underlying deception that structures human social behavior in general. The poems in this section of Part I take the shape of fables, or allegories, in which fairytales are mixed in ad hoc with folktales known as Anansi stories or, as the poet would say, “nancystory.” These stories came to the Caribbean via the Africans who were brought to the island as slaves. They tell about the exploits of the anti-hero / protagonist, after whom the stories are named. Anansi is the trickster figure whose deceptive behavior has become proverbial in Caribbean circles, so that a person who comes up with a tall tale as excuse for some negligence or action on his part is described as telling a “nancystory” (read lie). In this chapter, I refer to McCallum’s new body of poetic narratives in The Water Between Us as nancy fairytales.8 The poet uses these nancy fairytales, to create a counter-weaving of myths and family stories that acquire political status through the processes of re-memory. The nancy fairytales themselves are created through a network of Relation that, as pointed out in the earlier chapters, brings together the oral traditions of the black diaspora and Western oral traditions. As so far demonstrated, Part I of Water Between Us locates the central concern of the persona in foregrounding the politics of identity through a demonstration of the difficulty of defining the self in a social landscape that is ever shifting outside of existing frames of identity. McCallum explains in her telephone conversation with me that, “in a world where it is not safe” and where you have “no control over so much that is happening,” there is a point at which you recognize that “you have to let go…of harder emotions” (See footnote 5). This may explain the poetpersona’s movement, in the next group of poems, beyond her personal and familial sphere toward an exploration of the traditional communal narratives that also helped to shape her growing sense of loss and apprehensions. The discussion of these poems will show that examining

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personal, family history through the transforming lens of McCallum’s nancy fairytales releases painful shards of memory for the poetpersona, which she nevertheless re-gathers and re-members, over and over again, into a narrative of self-identity that becomes intrinsically, politically potent. Like its generic Anansi stories, these poetic nancy fairytales subversively appropriate traditional myths and fables to expose the underlying violence of post/colonial imposition of authority; an act which reduces those within its gaze to the status of marginalized “others.” The poems in this group reflect, therefore, on the subversive nature of the fairy tales and Anansi stories, speaking to the violence of patriarchy alongside the loss / betrayal by the mother. This narrative the poetpersona then re-inscribes within her own poetic narrative of identity. An ironic apprehension of Euro-American fairytales comes through the adult reflective gaze of McCallum’s autobiographical persona. In a significant act of re-memory, the adult persona becomes child again: Rehearsing the Jamaican Anansi stories and the European fairytales she grew up with, the poetpersona is deliberately con-fusing them. Allowing the creation of a body of poetic narratives which exposes and condemns acts of selfishness and greed within the personal space of the family, the wider, political space of the Caribbean as a community, and the world at large, this poetic performance both creates and consumes myths of identity at will. The poetic discourse begins at home, in the context of the family structure, a space of intimacy from within which the poems force readers to contemplate how those with power, intentionally or otherwise, violate the rights of the individual who is reduced to voicelessness. Combined in this way, the fragmented poetic re-telling of the stories reflects on the disturbed consciousness of the young poetpersona, who consequently faces an identity crisis that never goes away. In a lengthy poem entitled “Jack mandoora me no choose none” (17) the title carries the ritual disclaimer with which all Anansi story performances closes. Having come to the end of a story telling performance, the story teller always ends the tale by saying, “jack mandoora, me no choose none!” In McCallum’s poem this closure becomes a device to portray the ironic self-distancing of the poetpersona who refuses to choose the lie. The poem itself reflects on the changing sameness of all fairytales and fables, using these as a medium for examining the history of political violence that marks the Caribbean. Encompassing a “womanist discourse,” which re-writes history so that it becomes “a history arranged the way tale-telling women tell it,”9 The Water Between Us points a finger at the delinquent father and the loss of the mother as the source of original violence that creates a fragmented

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sense of identity for the child. Turning to the oral traditions of Europe and the Caribbean, the poetpersona uses the Anansi stories she learned as a child to re-interpret the European fairytales of Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella. The growing awareness with which she retells the stories endows them with new and personal meaning; furthermore, they reverberate with political persuasion as the reader applies the familial to the national landscape. In the opening lines of Fragment 1, the poetpersona first points the finger at the mother’s self-deception as the source of the child’s anxiety, saying that the story (hers and the Caribbean’s) always begins at the same point: where the mother would rather have straw spun into gold unable to turn her face

from the golden light would rather become queen than know the child she will bear (17)

Laid out mimetically on the page, the poem becomes representative of untidy scraps of thought, the gaps in between representing narrative pause, and reflecting the unspoken thoughts of the persona, whose realization of the mother’s guilt overtakes her in the telling. The story is told under the influence of the powerful force of re-memory which interrupts the narrative flow strategically, so as to analyze it. Reminding the reader of the earlier poetic narratives in which the child begins to sift through the debris of family lies, this poem examines the evidence of the mother’s abdication of maternal power, to linger on her motives and motivations. The poetpersona transforms the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale, in which the queen makes a pact with the little man to give up her baby to him in exchange for his help, deliberately confusing the details of the narrative plot ( much as a child would). In the poetic process of rememory, it becomes a tale of treachery and deceit on the part of the Queen mother and the absent father King. The politically expedient agreement to exchange baby for straw-spun gold is used to foreground and condemn the greed of a post/colonial Caribbean society that sells its own children into a life of slavery. The Queen mother’s agreement to go along with this arrangement shows her to be just as self-serving and greedy as the materialistic society that has nurtured her. In the poetic remembering of the narrative, the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale bears the weight of historical injustice in its repetition and its

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recounting of the evils of the political imposition of power. Subverting traditional romantic readings of this fairytale, the poetpersona first brings it into Relation with other fairy tales, inverting the social order in its questioning of the familiar faces of evil. Since the fairytale world is populated by maternal and paternal figures who betray the child’s trust, could the King and Queen be the real culprits, the evil ones, “denying the little man the child / he would have loved” (18)? In McCallum’s revised social order Rumpelstiltskin becomes “the little man whose fingers bleed” from the hard work imposed on him by the greedy commercialism of the colonial powers, who reduce him to impotence (18). Their lack of humane qualities is imaged in the turned away gaze of the mother, “who would rather become queen / than know the child she will bear” and of the delinquent father who, by his very absence, is “conceding to her” evil design (17). Spinning the fairytale into a new poetics of Relation, the poetpersona reflects on the dominating influence of the evil design: “it is the same story enchantment / answers the call of many names” (18). By re-reading the European fairytales through the lens of magical realism the poetpersona becomes increasingly suspicious that the “enchantment” needs to be reversed or subverted if the evils of the age old social structures are to be exposed. This idea is also woven into the narrative fabric of the Anansi stories of the Caribbean, which makes a hero of “the little man,” she describes as “bredda anancy…de smartes spider in Jamaica” (19). Anansi’s exploits, a traditional narrative fare for Jamaican storytelling audiences, are re-positioned by the poetics of Relation that weaves it into the framework of its European counterparts in the second fragment of the poem under discussion. In “Jack mandoora me no choose none,” Fragment 2 (19), the poetpersona rehashing an Anansi story, creates a conventional fairytale within a realistic Caribbean landscape as setting. It is a “land of banana and coconut trees” where “beautiful princesses married whoever could guess their names” (19). The poetpersona’s memory of this Anansi story is generated by the patriarchy in the personal face of her father. The story begins with a reminder of the Caribbean man’s right to travel as it begins with Anansi walking along the street seeking intercourse with another human being. The child poetpersona remembers her father’s very words as he describes the little man’s unsavory characteristics: Anansi is a man who thinks too much of himself and who is always meddling in the affairs of others: (so we say fas im fas) (19). The child’s inclusion of the choral response to the narrative retelling of Anansi’s exploits, seen in the

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parenthetical statement here, reminds adult readers how easy it is to go along with the crowd and accept an identity that others impose on us. The creativity of these opening lines lies in the poet’s use of the creole word “fas” which bears the English equivalent of “inquisitive” or “nosey,” but it often carries more weight as a description of the political act of selfwill that creates social chaos. In the scheme of things, the little spider man is “always tricking people an doin mischief,” and in this account his trick is to get somebody to “give up im magic calabash.” McCallum’s poetic performance of this fairytale shows that the story is nothing short of a replay of colonial politics complete with its trickery and deceit (19). Readers are reminded of the poetpersona’s caution in part 1 that “it is the same story enchantment” (18). So, Anansi’s theft of the “magic calabash” in this story is a reproduction of colonial politics that spawn greed and violence in the society. The child’s memory of the answers she receives as she questions of her father and grandfather about Anansi’s behavior reinforces the idea that patriarchal explanation of the abuse of political power leaves the child with no satisfying answer. As she remembers and reconsiders the patriarchal wisdom, the words reverberate with double meaning. She says: Me papa say Yu caan splain wha mek some people Ac de way dey do… (20)

This doubling is a direct result of the poetic process of re-memory, and is integral to the structure of the collection as a whole, in McCallum’s The Water between Us. The ironic impulse of the poem is contained in its double structure, narrated as it is as a poem within a poem, and an interlacing of multiple memories. Each poetic frame creates a mirror of deception that reverses the normative order of perception. The poetpersona’s own position as narrator within this framework becomes suspect, as the nancy story she retells is a recollection of previous story telling performances by her grandfather, and father, all rolled in one by the deliberate confusion of memory and re-memory. As if to absolve herself from guilt for repeating the Anansi stories which serve largely to emphasize the flaws and weaknesses in Caribbean society, she explains that their meaning is open to interpretation, and she rejects the interpretation of events given by her grandfather: im sey yu mus forget yu mus no wan fi know so much yu mus jus haccep

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tings appen dat way jack mandora me no choose none (20)

The patriarchal explanation of the ethos of political greed and violence is unsatisfying. In the poem, the poetpersona says that the political abuse of power causes “much weepin an wailin / an gnashing of teet” (19). That is to say, the abuse of political power causes great distress of Biblical world ending proportion. The poem seems to ask: What is there then to celebrate in Anansi’s acts of trickery? In this context, therefore, the closing words of the poem become more than just ritual closure; the statement is a poetic act of defiance that challenges the social scheme of things. In Fragment 3 of the poem, the poetpersona rejects the very notion that it is best to leave things alone, suggesting that colonial or postcolonial in origin, there is no satisfying excuse for the abuse of power. In the poem, she reflects on conventional wisdom only to reject it, pointing out that by simply passing blame onto others, such as the little man or the evil witch, or even Anansi, she could be passing on a lie. Re-considering the events of the narrative, she also suggests the need to examine motives from both sides of the narrative spectrum: you have to remember

only the spinning wheel drops of blood light leading the child from her parents (21)

As the poetpersona records her memory of the stories she is actively thinking and analyzing the way the stories become vessels for reproducing a flawed social superstructure that serves to hinder the revealing of truth. In re-telling her nancystory, she is fully aware of the limitations of each story performance: “it is not possible / to go back / to uncover / cause,” she says (21). She is telling the story to help her remember, sort through the facts, but the truth is that no one likes remembering the unpleasant: it is only a story you are trying to remember (to forget) (21)

Calling her memory of events “only a story” reflects the poetpersona’s ironizing gaze, which serves further to objectify the mother. This act is a duplication of the betrayal of womanhood, the very thing she criticizes in her narrative. Furthermore the ironic gaze is conscious that the re-telling

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further serves to re-inscribe the wrong so that it always already is remembered. Still, the process must be endured if one hopes to make any sense of history and find one’s identity, so the persona must keep on “trying to repeat / to remember / to ear again / to unforget / to mek whole / parts” (26). Each clause in the foregoing poetic lines performs a repetition of memory that figures in this chapter as re-memory. In “trying” to reproduce the facts the persona ends up re-membering the events, “trying to repeat” them in order to “make them whole.” The phrase “to ear again” carries the homophone “to air again” and doubles as a reminder that in some Caribbean communities talking out loud is an important way of sharing grievances and settling matters, even as it speaks of the poetpersona’s need to keep repeating the stories until they make particular sense to her. The Jamaican Creole tendency to drop the “h” signals the reader to consider the word “ear” as the double “hear/ear” which further complicates the meaning of the poetic performance, and perhaps privileges the art of listening, as the source of discovery or “uncovery.”10 Uncovering the deception does not necessarily help, however, as indicated by the particular nancystory that is used to shed light on, and interpret, the fairytales. The persona says of Mongoose, who has been tricked by Anancy: “no matter / if you were to tell him / the truth / take him back / show him / how anancy deceived him / it wouldn’t matter” (22). In the performance experience of Jamaican Anansi stories, although Anansi is blamed for all the bad things that happen, the audience is encouraged to receive him as hero, but McCallum’s poetpersona cannot do this because she sees in his ability to manipulate others and maneuver events for his own purposes a repetition of the evils of colonialism. A later fragment of the poem shows that Anansi is made in the image of his European “other” father whose devious exploits his own behavior serves to extend. The poetpersona, reaching for the originary source of the problems, insists on the importance of finding out the truth. Pointing to the need to go beyond the “stories” that we are told she says: “a beg to ask you / if is not anancy / is who?” (26). So then, in the discourse of poetic identity performed by these nancy fairytales in The Water Between Us, Anansi is shown to be at least as reprehensible as his European “other” whose trickery and deceit conspire to rob the child of a legitimate sense of identity. Fragment 5, using the Cinderella and Snow White fairytales, represents the poetic narrative as further subverting Western notions of paternity and complicating existing conventional theories of the absent father. The poetpersona proclaims: the king cannot be present

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(present)

this is how the stories are told this is the way they want you to believe them this is the account offered up as the true tale) (24)

In the narrative framework of this poem, the underlying notion is that the “true tale” is presented as a “trick” to distract and control the individual in search of true identity. Fragment 6 then adds the Anansi story about Ma Kayke and her Daughter, Dora, as a Caribbean version of the Western narrative, to further drive the point home that human society has an inbuilt system of controlling women’s responses and behavior. In McCallum’s nancystory, the mother is offered as protector of her daughter and Anansi is the culprit who manages to “separate” them by trickery and cunning. Ultimately, the poetpersona admits to the flaw in her narrative design, for memory in itself is unreliable: “me caan remember all de tings dat appen / or ow anancy get imself mix up inna dis story (25). The poetpersona here makes another accusatory move against the Anansi stories and its Western counterpart, pointing out that they also serve to re-inforce cultural amnesia. These two fragments of McCallum’s nancy fairytales reveal that the just as the truth behind the fairy tales and Anansi stories is elusive, so everything is already suspect on the social and political levels. The poetic mythology that the poetpersona re-members is based on memory and the repetition of memory performed by succeeding groups of story tellers long before they were written down, and her own memory has created the “mix” of reality, on which she has had to rely in her search for the missing pieces of her own family history. Her own narrative performance, in danger of becoming “the changing same,” nevertheless, contains its subversive intent, by going beyond merely repeating the original myths. Further, these myths clearly inform the child persona’s repertoire so as to energize the adult’s search for the truth. In the moment of re-telling the tales to herself, re-membering them, she finds space to gather her thoughts. For both the persona as well as the reading audience, the spaces on the page become signs. Symbols of silence, the silencing of the voice, they represent the gaps between knowing and telling, memory, remembering, and re-membering. In this sense too they might well be read as moments when memory overtakes the persona and overwhelms her, so

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that, in bewilderment, she cannot or will not speak. Readers are left to fill in the blanks as they go along. This sequence of McCallum’s nancy fairytales closes in Fragment 7 with a story that the poetpersona remembers hearing from her grandmother as a child. It is the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel and it takes the reader back to the beginning of the cycle of poems. Focusing again on cause of the fragmentation of the family, the poem speaks of the betrayal the girl and her brother experience, as they receive only breadcrumbs “from their parents” to guide their journey through the woods. This poetic re-memory of the story is double edged, beginning as it does with the subversive re-reading of the fairytale related by the poetpersona’s grandmother, and ending with the poetpersona’s own re-interpretative analysis. According to the poem, Granny’s narrative lays blame on everyone in the family. Identifying with the witch who captured the children, Granny shares an unconventional reading of the fairytale with her granddaughter: If the children “had remembered the first journey back,” the lessons of history, they would have been safe; then they would have recognized the betrayal by the mother and father who “had forsaken them,” and they would have had the strength to resist the greed they had learned at home. Granny’s reading of the witch as a grandmother who only wanted the children to love her also places blame on the children. The poetpersona, however, poses a parenthetical rejection to Granny’s assertion that the witch “would have loved them adding, “(as she had not loved her own child)” (28). Granny’s story is nevertheless compelling to the poetpersona who rehearses it through the poetic process of re-memory. The poem ends with the suggestion that it is the children who needed saving from the patriarchal society, “from the axe / chopping steadily / into the woods” (28). In the final analysis, a close reading of all the poems in Part I of The Water between Us ultimately reveals that McCallum’s autobiographical persona is caught up in a smokescreen or fog of childhood memory that stops time from passing. There is no sense of future time in these poems, only of the past which the poetpersona keeps mulling over in an attempt to make sense of the present. Underlying all the poetic fragments is the notion that any “account offered up / as the true tale” already points both the poetpersona and the reader in the opposite direction, and indicts society on the whole as being hostile to the growth and development of the individual. The photomemories in the first section, as well as the fragmented memories of the nancy fairytales, turn on the poetpersona’s “magical gaze” as a strategic counterpointing of Western poetics. Her use of magic realism in the poems empowers the poet to challenge

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conventional approaches to writing and reading Caribbean cultural identity. In the final sections of McCallum’s collection, the poetpersona is content to move forward in time, wading in shallower waters of memory, creating a network of poetic fragments that speak more immediately to the present. In the poem “Yu no send. Me no come” (59) the poetpersona shares memories of her return home after years of living in America. The poem foregrounds the importance of name and naming as birthright and locates the poetic identity in the soil of the Caribbean. Memory, once awakened, creates a renewed sense of self and empowers the poetpersona to re-shape and re-claim an identity she herself fashions. She remembers a visit home to Jamaica where her identity is challenged by a local bartender who pins her as “yankee,” an American tourist. Traditional markers of identity, her skin color, her speech, place of birth are rolled out as evidence between them and the poetpersona points to her rightful identity as a Caribbean woman by reference to the local “ketch arredi” flower. The plant’s name is self-descriptive and is proof that an offshoot of a parent, can rightfully claim natural identity in the space where it grows, such identity remaining for life: “Dats why it call ketch arredi. / Dats why it call never die,” she says (60). Even when transplanted in American soil, the poetpersona’s identity as a Caribbean woman remains intact. Reflecting on the day’s experience, she envisions the airport as a transnational space where “sea comes in to land,” but at the moment she is safely ensconced on her sister’s patio, protected by “hibiscus and banana trees / [which] fringe the planes taking off” (61). In the poem that follows, the poetpersona celebrates childhood as an affirmation of Caribbean identity and cultural upbringing. The title, “In my other life,” alludes to a collection of poetry by Caribbean great, Derek Walcott, 11 paying tribute to their shared Caribbean cultural heritage. Reciting a litany of proverbial sayings and childhood experiences common to the islands, the poetpersona revels in the memory of home, a memory that waters the “seed” for the next poem (so named). Moving from reality into magical reality, “Seed” (63) represents the poetpersona as a “child of the sun, balancing / the wind on [her] hips”; she is also a “child of the hushing sea” its waves and its salt smell belonging to her personally, and influencing her identity anew. She gains access to a new language, giving her the power to transform herself so that, “Wherever I am, I am,” she says (63.) The line, as those that follow, shows her acceptance of liminality as a natural space of being: “the space between / the husk and heart / of the fruit” (63). Through this magical representation of reality nature gives voice to the poetpersona, teaching her to use the landscape and its natural

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resources as building blocks in her re-construction of Caribbean poetic identity. Fittingly, then, the collection closes in Part IV with a group of poems identifying the poetpersona in multiple roles as a siren, and the daughter of a siren, invoking the pantheon of ancient Greek mythology, another body of canonic waters for the creative imagination to cross in the poetic journey “home,” toward self-realization and identity. In her closing words to this collection, the poetpersona reminds herself that the exchanges made in the cultural crossing come with a price: “You will leave your home: / nothing will hold you / … / The sea will never take you back” (85). McCallum’s collections of poetry are an important addition to the American and Caribbean literary landscapes, giving voice to the traditionally voiceless and articulating silences that have long been maintained by critics of the Euro-American canon. Contemporary critics of Caribbean poetry are increasingly cognizant of the urgent need to read McCallum’s work in relation to others within the network, and as an important collection in the larger offering of the Caribbean poetic body as a whole. In an article on the silencing of “Caribbean women’s voices / texts” in the English literary canon, Caribbean writer and scholar Ifeona Fulani speaks to the complexity of the communication process for Caribbean writers in America, noting the various levels on which interpretation takes place in the reading communities, when she says: …for Caribbean women, the unhearing ear is not only masculine but also Eurocentric and colonial/neocolonial. Its owner may be the European/American critic, the gatekeeper and defender of the “standards” of the Western literary canon; he may also be the Caribbean or African American critic who unmindfully or deliberately mimics the standards and exclusions of the Western literary tradition. He may be the editor or publisher who also serves this tradition; and in this latter capacity especially, he may actually be a she.12

Fulani’s comment helps ground McCallum’s collection among a rising corpus of works from the Caribbean that have been confronting the silences in the Master discourses on Caribbean identity from the 1970s onward. he challenges appear daunting for Caribbean writers living and working in America but Caribbean poets such as Shara McCallum, and Lorna Goodison, as well as Claudia Rankine (discussed in the next chapter), continue to forge ahead in extending the frontiers of Caribbean literature in America so that the boundaries that were once closed will remain open to newer generations of Caribbean writers in America.

CHAPTER THREE RE-MAPPING POETIC IDENTITY: CLAUDIA RANKINE’S PLOT

To want is always To breathe is always To wonder without, to brood inside a world given within, without “I” in it. —Claudia Rankine

During the 1960s and 70s the insistent movement toward inclusion of women in the literary landscape in America gave rise to a growing body of literary works written by women poets of the black diaspora. Within a decade, American feminist critics would sharpen the focus on the issue of representation itself as the movement towards transforming the poetic body took on greater compulsion for many women poets. In some collections, the female body is repeatedly invoked as the poetpersona insistently calls attention to the physical being of the woman, locating it outside the body of conventional discourses of identity, but ultimately to incorporate it within that body. Female body parts - head, face, voice, legs and breasts - are re-assembled to construct a conventional countertype that offers an extension of the larger prevailing discourse of poetic identity. Claudia Rankine’s Plot (2001),1 her first collection of poetry, emerged out of this poetic climate as a body of works that goes beyond the call for the inclusion of women’s writing. Markedly feminist, Rankine’s collection uses the female body to personify the poetic discourse itself, the parturient body of the woman signifying (in the sense that Gates uses “Signifyin(g)”)2 the poet’s compulsion to give birth to a new form of poetry that has been growing within her. Operating in much the same way as in the poetry collections discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, memory directs the lyrical flow in Plot, in the process marking the gaps between inner and outer perceptions of reality. Signaling these gaps, the poems within the collection appear as poetic fragments juxtaposed with, or becoming part of, a larger narrative that questions how issues of identity are positioned. In the opening epigraph to this chapter,

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Rankine’s persona “broods,” hovers over like silence that is threatening, or like an impending storm. Creatively constructing the pathway to change, she is “circling” the boundaries erected by a world that excludes her, which she describes as a “world …without “I” in it” (89). This imagery reflects with immediacy on the issue of language as a speech act that has gender constraints imposed on it, effecting boundaries that limit the black female persona’s movement toward self-definition. A “world …without “I” in it” highlights a blindness or lack of perception; it reflects on the way the body of Euro-American literature has been conventionally prescribed by male dominated ideology and experience. Importantly, it marks the absence of black female subjective experience in canonical writing. The poems show that the fragmented female experience is already subjective experience within the subconscious recesses of the poetic mind. It is left to memory as a site of Signifyin (g) to pull such experiences to the foreground of conscious thought and re-position it within the canonical body of American poetry. To borrow Deborah Cameron’s terms, in the poetic fiction we are reading memory is “grammaticised, built into the rules for constructing”3 women’s experiences in mainstream literature. Memory becomes feminine when it is used to represent the repressed or silenced voice of the woman, refracted in Rankine’s poem as “brooding,” which is metaphor for quiet but threatening movement that needs no speech. Feminine memory is constructed through the woman’s act of gathering or re-collecting fragments of events or situations that signify what Barbara Christian calls the “ordinary rituals” of life. 4 In Rankine’s poetry, the personal experiences of women and the memories they unleash interface with Western historiography to provide new ways of thinking through identity. Through the trope of memory the poet creates a metalanguage to redefine the discourse of black female identity, the language of memory providing new ways of perceiving the self in the symbolic world order created by the male dominated language of Western poetic conventions. As has been demonstrated in the earlier chapters on Goodison and McCallum, the reading of Rankine’s poetry collection here represents the woman as active participant, writing and consciously performing in her own work, so that the voice in the poems is that of an autobiographical persona. The collection presents a subject that is constituted as being multiple in identity and mobile, as the poetpersona slides effortlessly between the mind of the expectant mother and the mind of the maturing embryo in her womb. While the discussion in Chapter 2 examines the prismatic effect of memory on identity through the effective strategy of rememory, in this chapter the focus shifts toward a detailed examination of

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the way memory is structured as prememory through the process of parturition. By prememory I mean, the apprehension of women’s experiences that are “internal,” inscribed, though not necessarily articulated, within poetic fictions of self- identity. The readings that follow will also demonstrate that in the displaced time of feminine memory, the past becomes also present and future since, as Rankine says, “expecting was also a remembering” (6). The ordinary word, “expecting” resonates on the colloquial level to signify the image of the female body heavy with the child it is bearing. The word alludes also to the knowledge that comes from memory of what the woman has experienced before, personally or vicariously through the experiences of other women. Rankine’s representation of the woman as she “broods inside a world given within” marks the poets’ consciousness of the need to construct the woman’s “path of movement outside the terms of dominant discourses,” as Boyce-Davies explains, and that the poems conceive of “black female subjectivity in terms of “slipperiness, elsewhereness.” 5 In line with this discourse, Susan Friedman’s locational feminism speaks of “moving beyond gender” in the sense of “returning to it in a newly spatialized way.”6 According to Friedman, Locational Feminism calls attention to the “rhetoric of spatiality” which allows the poet to (re)locate women’s identity, placing it “within the mappings and re-mappings of everchanging cultural formations” (19). Like Boyce-Davies and other contemporary critics, Friedman is engaged in the task of recuperating feminist criticism, and she is making the call for “a form of critical practice that applies the lessons of the new fluid, relational, and situational geography of identity to the act of doing feminist criticism itself” (34). These critics point to a pressing need to forge ahead in reconceiving female subjectivity in light of the work being done by contemporary writers and poets like Claudia Rankine who place the female body at the heart of their work. Engaging with Friedman’s, the reading of Relational identity that I apply to Rankine’s poetry collection is used to demonstrate a shifting poetics that moves beyond academic gender discourses of feminism and Caribbean postcolonialism. Claudia Rankine migrated to New York from Jamaica, at age six and she grew up in North Bronx, a big West Indian community. Later, as a young adult in her twenties, the Caribbean “called” to her and as she lived in Grenada for a year, teaching at a Catholic school for little children, she identified fully as Caribbean. After her return to the United States, however, Rankine pursued graduate studies, and she found herself faced with issues of injustice and racism. Turning to poetry, writing became her way of coping with these issues but, she says, “it was

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hard to become a poet when you are from a working class family…work was a way to arrive at that decision.”7 Her work as a poet has reflected her interest in the dynamics of social relations, in power dynamics, thematics that are clearly embedded in Plot, her third collection of poetry. The woman’s body lies at the center of this collection which is composed of a mosaic of conversations, dialogue and lyrical expressions of the raw emotions that assail the poetpersona as she struggles to make the poetic journey worthwhile. The reading that follows locates Rankine’s poetry in the literary landscape of the geophysical spaces between America and the Caribbean, wherein the poet is enabled to apprehend her poetic identity as a process of being-becoming. This approach is in keeping with Rankine’s own perspective of herself wherein, after publishing four collections of poetry that have been generally received as American, she speaks of the pressing desire to include “recognition of the Jamaican landscape” in future compositions. She further explains: “Across the poetry landscape I feel American – on a personal level, Jamaican.”8 Ultimately, this chapter performs a close reading of the formal process by which the discourse of Caribbean poetic identity becomes manifest in the poems.

Rankine’s Plot: Remapping the Poetic Journey The collection of poems in Plot performs a dramatic exploration of identity at its very source, demonstrating the process through which the subject “I” becomes a shifting signifier. The collection as a whole performs a transformation of the poetic genre, offering an interesting mix of novelistic and dramatic styles and techniques, and grounds it in the woman’s body. The title word, “Plot” deliberately evokes the older novel writing tradition with its emphasis on “plot” in the shaping of novelistic form. It also evokes the older Caribbean sensibility with its consciousness of an identity rooted in the land, one’s own “plot” of land, where one is born and where one is buried at death. As the title of a poetry collection, the word “Plot” introduces the poet’s own purpose to break new ground in poetry. On several levels, therefore, the poetry collection becomes Rankine’s own “plot” (of land) for planting the seeds of women’s experience that will grow and hopefully acquire its own identity as a poetic discourse. Early in the collection, the poetpersona declares: “mothery is the drowned self, drowning all that is, all that clings” (18). To use Alice Adams’s words, therefore, Plot “offers images of a selfgenerating mother / subject.”9 The poetpersona’s experience of pregnancy and birthing initiates a poetic discourse of identity, the “action of the

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narrative” taking place in the stream-of-consciousness of the female protagonist. On a metapsychological level, her poetic mind performs an exploration of the way the (pro) creative process engenders, deconstructs, and then reconstructs issues of identity. In Plot, the poetic drama shows the protagonist’s struggle with the twin forces of the life drive and the death drive, the poetic will-desire, to reconceive her own identity as woman, wife, mother, and poet. Creating an inversion of Western tradition with its emphasis on the phallus, Plot depicts the womb as the generator of language and meaning in both the imaginary and symbolic orders presented by Lacanian discourse. Moving between layers of the ego’s unconscious and preconscious, the poet creates a metapsychological discourse in which the narrative flow takes the reader from the moment of (pre) conception towards the moment of (re) birth. In Plot the reader is “submerged” (4), to use the poet’s word, in the woman’s pre-conscious which gives access to and empowers the force of memory. The emerging discourse of identity, central to Plot’s poetic drama, depends on the poetic imagination empowered by this form of memory. I use pre-memory to describe memory of time and events that exist outside the conscious or what the poet calls the “true real” (77) experience of the individual. Made up of pre-conscious memories that have been acquired by the mechanism of cultural and historical association, pre-memory nevertheless also exists within the conscious, inscribed as it is in the human body which holds traces of time passing. Trin T. Minh-ha describes the relation between body, time and memory in this way: “Every gesture, every word involves our past, present, and future. The body never stops accumulating.”10 Within this context, the pregnant womb, like the mind, becomes the container of pre-memory, marking a psychological topography or “landscape” of the self, as the poetpersona in Plot says: “By landscape we also mean memory” (70). Pre-memory, therefore, is a feature of pre-symbolic experience, “a region where language has not yet intruded.”11 Triggered by the mechanism of the preconscious, pre-memory enters the poetpersona’s conscious through the “play” of “free association,” 12 which then blurs all the conventional boundaries of genre. Free association becomes the structural motif in Plot, guiding the reader’s mind through a network connection of images that acquire symbolic, and thereby political, resonance in the body of the emerging poetic discourse of identity. The mother/poetpersona invokes the power of memory as she narrates the history of her awareness of identity which she encases within the historical recounting of her pregnancy. Read within the context of woman storytelling traditions of the black diaspora, it is her history, her story

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which is not hers alone, because it is self-consciously the repetition of an event, the “total event of a community, a people.”13 As Trin Minh-ha points out, it is “a story that repeats itself endlessly despite our persistence in denying it” (122). So, the poetpersona embarks on this journey through memory and it becomes for her a process of “not having to learn. knowing by herself” (6) and as she does so, she undergoes a transformative experience; she “revives the forgotten, to survive and supersede it” (126). Immediately signaling the poetic strategy underpinning this poetry collection, the book opens with a title page containing the single word: “inverse,” written just so, in lower case. Inverse speaks to the poet’s calculated desire to create a new form that recognizably becomes the “inverse,” the missing element in contemporary poetic discourse of identity.14 Responding to the “pressures of orality,”15 the word also alludes to “inversion” as in the rhetorical strategy used by the poet to “invert” the normal order of words and along with it the normal perception of meaning. Finally, functioning as Preface to the poetry collection, the word “inverse” becomes direction to the reader who is being guided into a new way of reading and understanding poetic fictional discourse. Read as “text,”16 Plot releases a possibility of meanings that combine to form a network of Relation, images relating by “free association” and taking the reader back and forth across the landscape of the body of this new collection. Plot is divided into 10 sections which include an Afterword, each section presenting the “fragmenting experience” of the woman as a positive force, one “that generates life and language.”17 The individual poems are dramatic fragments, each enacting a moment of time within the stream-of-consciousness of the woman/mother/poetpersona, the main protagonist in this poetic movement toward the transformation of the conventional discourse of identity. In Section 1 (Plot 4 -14) readers are introduced to the protagonist Liv, her husband Erland, and her yet to be born son Ersatz, a nod to Bergman’s film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973). Rankine’s interest in turning language into image helps her create for readers a strong sense of the visual. In Plot, Liv’s stream-of-consciousness reveals immediately that her pregnancy is creating a crisis for her, a “confusion in [the] head” which arises from her intimate identification with the fetus. She describes it as a “fusion that keeps confusion” (9). Chris Bongie’s use of the word “confusion” in the context of his discussion of creolization creates a helpful gloss for readers. Bongie describes it as: “a (con) fusion that is always also, as the etymology suggests, a “fusing with” or a “(con) fusion of the Many” that comprises the “One” of self-identity.18 Bongie’s description echoes Glissant’s discourse of “Relation” which describes a process of continuous change

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wherein identity is refracted multiple times through a complex network that keeps reproducing itself and through which it is experienced as an “open totality.”19 The woman thus experiences the fetus, whom she addresses as Ersatz, also as a complexity of self, a “many,” to use Bongie’s term, and she addresses him as “the everyone you are” (10). Through Liv’s conscious struggle with the reality of pregnancy the poetpersona creates access to the preconscious “underground streams” (5) where the mind and womb of the woman are “con-fused” or conjoined, brought together so that the two spaces become one. The writing process is also thereby the (pro) creative process that brings to birth, the utterance of the word (s) creating a presence for the self, a means of self-identity. The poetpersona highlights the importance of this poetic process and emphasizes the woman’s deliberate and purposeful movements as she undertakes this symbolic journey of being/becoming. She explains: What Liv would make would be called familial. not foreign. forsaken. She knew this. tried to force the scene. focus the world. in the dream …. (5)

The poetpersona’s use of “knew” in “She knew this” speaks of a conscious attempt to order events that the stream-of-consciousness will present in its own chaotic way. She “knew” the fetus as “familial” through the biological discourse of genetics, but she attempts to re-order this knowledge. The poetpersona tells us that she “tried to force the scene. focus the world. in the dream.” The lexical arrangement of the lines shows that through the power of the imagination, the woman enters a dream/vision and she is transported to a “world” in which prememory exists, a memory that gives in(ner) sight so that, by the end of the poetic process she is able to “arrive beyond knowing” (72).

Subjectivity and the Cannibal Discourse Locating identity within the realm of preconsciousness marks a significant shift in poetics for Rankine’s poetic discourse in Plot, a movement away from traditional discourses of identity rooted in genealogy and physical geography. Signaling this shifting identity, Section 1 of Plot creates a foreshadowing of the main event of the collection: the fulfillment of the poetpersona’s will to give birth to a new form of poetry that is composed by rearranging the formal elements of the mainstream collective body. The poetic collection opens with a short fragment in the surrealistic mode which evokes the “maternal cannibalism”20 of Western fairytale tradition, but the woman is not depicted as simply consuming the

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child; instead, she is presented as re-arranging its “freakish anatomy” or body parts. The arrangement of word images in the fragment creates an ambivalence which suggests that the speaking voice is personally connected to the woman, and is in fact the woman herself. Through memory and the suspension of time that it allows she is “submerged deeper than appetite,” and she can stand at a distance and re-call her dream experience: “she bit into a freakish anatomy. the hard plastic of filiation. / a fetus dream. once severed. reattached. the baby femur / not fork tender though flesh. the baby face now anchored (4). A close analysis of the specific word imagery here takes the reader from a superficial reading of the woman as cannibal mother to a metapsychological level, where her actions are reasonably interpreted by the application of rules of psychoanalysis, which necessitates a breaking of other conventional rules of constructing subjectivity. Using the “fundamental rule” of psychological “free association,”21 readers may well interpret Rankine’s use of the maternal cannibal in relation to other images of the cannibal figure in Western literature. In Plot it becomes a device to invoke Western tradition in order to invert it. Twentieth century criticism reveals a history of this kind of manipulation of the cannibal figure in literature. In his discourse on the (mis)use of cannibalism, Richard C. King outlines a history of European deployment of cannibalism that was designed to “challenge Western cultural practices,” so that the use of the cannibal becomes “parody” aimed at unsettling “taken-for-granted practices and precepts.”22 According to Maggie Kilgour, also, many critics working in Postcolonial studies have suggested that the cannibal figure “was created to support the cultural cannibalism of colonialism” and that while “in the past this was used to construct differences, today it is invoked to deconstruct them.”23 Postcolonial critics have pointed out that this re-inscription of the cannibal figure in Caribbean discourse opens up new approaches to the question of identity. Eugenio Matibag states that “the literal reference to barbaric practice or its “authentic” image [becomes] refunctioned as a literary figure.”24 Since Rankine can be considered a transnational Caribbean poet, in the sense described in the Introduction of this book, her use of the cannibal mother figure in Plot can reasonably be read as an attempt to reposition woman at the center of the enterprise to locate Caribbean American identity through discursive morphology. Using the power of the word to “open up the search for identity to new [and] unexpected articulations of the self with “an other and with others,”25 the poetpersona “sever[s]” and “reattach [es]” the “freakish anatomy” imposed by Western conventions.

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The poetpersona’s attempt to bite into the “freakish anatomy” of the “fetus” ultimately represents her repressed desire to re-position Western discourse on language and identity. Rankine’s use of the phrase “fetus dream” (4) can be understood as the dream of a fetus, or the dream that is not yet a dream, or the beginning of a dream-in-the-making, all of which speak to the newness and change that defines the mobility of the subject self. Through the medium of the dream/vision the woman is able to grasp the “hard plastic of filiation,” the word “filiation” invoking the Western system of representing the social arrangement of human relations in their specific order. Within the context of metapsychology the “fetus” becomes the “repressed ego,” or the unborn self to which the woman must give birth, and the final image of “the baby face now anchored” gives a rereading of the Lacanian discourse of the “mirror phase”26 in which the mirror image introduces a discourse of differentiation between male infant and its mother. In Plot, however, the process where the child confronts the mother image is reversed, and it is the mother who confronts the mirror image of the male child, and she sees (her) self both as a part of him and apart from him as she looks into the fixed gaze of his face. Within this context, the “baby face now anchored” (4) becomes a metaphoric device to represent not the infant’s, but the mother’s imaginative experience, an inversion of conventional norm. Ultimately, the symbolic cannibal act introduced at the beginning of Plot is used to accentuate and signify, in the sense of the black Signifyin(g) tradition, the woman’s desire to re-place self-identity within the conventional world view. At the end of Plot, the neonate ego voices the “hard question” central to Rankine’s poetic discourse: “What is the world without I in it? I who am nothing without plots / propping me up-” (100). Armed with visionary hindsight provided by prememory, the poetpersona is able to foresee the deformities or “freakish anatomy” that must be corrected before she appropriately re-creates self-identity. At the level of fictional “plot” the experience blurs the boundary between the “insular” (5) preconscious space of the womb/mind of the mother/poetpersona and the “outside” space of conscious reality. Taking a symbolic approach, the poetpersona examines the woman’s desire, “deeper than appetite,” to re-order the abnormal “freakish anatomy” of the fetus, and so the body parts, “once severed” are “reattached” and not eaten. Rankine uses the culturally offensive image of the cannibal to deconstruct the political agenda that divides writers into opposing camps. The poetpersona’s discourse occasions a transformation of the poetic genre itself by this daring

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representation of the urgent need for change in the body politic of the Euro-American literary canon.

Cultural Cannibalism and the Discourse of Genealogy The poetpersona’s representation of the poetic will to rearrange the formal elements of the discourse of identity is seen in the recurring “fetus dream” (4) that becomes controlling metaphor throughout the collective body of Rankine’s Plot.27 In the second poetic fragment on page 5, the poetpersona’s stream-of-consciousness reveals the woman’s desire to submerge herself in the procreative activity taking place in her womb and the identity crisis that such an act initiates: In the dream waist deep, retrieving a fossilized pattern forming in attempt to prevent whispers. or poisoned regrets. reaching into reams and reams. to needle-seam a cord in the stream… (5)

The poetpersona’s use of “cord” carries echoes of “chord” that work back to form a network of ideas relating the poetpersona’s dreaming to the creative act of “singing” through the procreative process of prememory. The foregoing lines reflect the ego’s desire to re-arrange the elements of the genealogical discourse of identity, challenging the superego’s memory of the formal “pattern” of this discourse. The entire fabric of the discourse, represented by the descriptive “reams and reams,” must be re-woven using what is at hand, “the fossilized pattern” of Western conventions. To begin the process, the right “cord” or strand of idea must be extracted from the “[main] stream” view. Once grasped the “cord” is used to form the “needle-seam” that creates a new generic pattern for the discourse, a pattern guided by the poetpersona’s “wish” that, already fertilized, or “sporded,” has begun to divide itself into the complex components of the discourse. The painful process of conceiving and birthing the new discourse is carried in the image of the “tearing placenta” (5) which the woman retrieves and reattaches to the wall of her uterus. The “tearing placenta” speaks of the ego’s painful movement away from the given “pattern.” Furthermore, since the discourse of identity has traditionally been nourished by Western conventions, the disintegration taking place in the “placenta” is analogous to the disintegration embedded in the very “root” of the discourse, which the ego is driven to correct. Ultimately, the “tearing placenta” also represents the birthing process as the fetus breaks away from the mother’s womb, on its way to entering the real world as a distinct body and identity.

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Looking past conception toward the final birthing, the poetpersona experiences “an outbreak of doubt” that she can successfully birth the “infant” discourse she seeks to produce. The question “why birth the other.” (5) is presented as statement, or argument, reflecting her search for reassurance. As “other” the discourse is already marked as different, and therefore potentially unacceptable to a society steeped in convention. The “seam” of the discourse may “rip” open revealing inherent flaws: The poetpersona laments that the neonate discourse can only “roughly conjoin the lacerating generations” of the discourse of identity (5). The latter image symbolizes the effect that Western discourse of identity has on the Caribbean “other” as it tears apart the fabric of human society. The poetpersona’s use of “lacerating” is similar to her use of “tearing,” evoking a history of human pain and distress. The soul searching response to the question is that to birth the neonate discourse will create a new “lineage,” which she explains: “Lineage means / to step here on the likelihood of involution,” (5). The word “involution,” referring literally to the reduction in size of the womb especially following birth, suggests that instead of drying up, the poetic womb-mind will continue reproducing and generating new patterns of the discourse on identity. Nevertheless, the poetic self-scrutiny also reveals “the depth of rot at the fleshy roots” (5). Since, as Plot represents it, the “lineage” of the new discourse is an offshoot of Western convention, the “rot at the fleshy roots” (5) suggests the impossibility of producing an untainted discourse. This representation of the identity crisis reappears in another fragment, “The Extended Root,” (11) where the poetpersona uses another moment in the woman’s stream-of-consciousness to examine the creative source or origin out of which the poetic discourse emerges. The poetpersona, pregnant with the developing ideas on the discourse of identity, focuses on the “root” or source of the problem as lying within her consciousness of the Western discourse of genealogy with its conventional representation of human relations as a tree and its roots. Just as the woman “fears” that birthing the fetus “reduces” it to the level of flawed humanity, the poetpersona fears that writing the poetic discourse developing in her mind will do little more than reproduce an unhealthy discourse, tainted by its source. She says: “What comes through the bloodstream to be flushed reduces him / to human …” (11). The self/other binary upon which Western discourse relies is dissolved, as the woman recognizes that “Ersatz” “comes through the bloodstream” that has nourished them both. If Ersatz is “other” he is also recognizably “self.” On an ideological level, the poetpersona here recognizes that “what comes through,” that is, the poetic composition that emerges, is a product

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of the “bloodstream,” or sociohistorical context of mainstream Western thought. The poetpersona fears that when the new discourse is “flushed” out, or brought into the open, what seems ideal is shown to be so only in conception. This fragment seems to reflect on Kristen Guest’s discussion of the “taboo” of cannibalism, which he says depends on “its recognition of corporeal similarity.”28 As Guest explains, cannibalism “calls traditional boundaries of identity into question” and “reflects on how the construction of difference is always limited by the sociohistorical context in which it is produced.” 29 In reality it is “reduced” to its human level, as a mere cultural product and, repeating the network imagery, the poetpersona points out that woman and embryo become an “estranged interlacing” of selves (11). The difficulty of naming, of creating an identity for the new poetic form described and performed in Plot is illustrated in the name, “Ersatz,” which Liv gives to the developing fetus. The word “ersatz,” defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “substitute; imitation thing,” becomes generic name for the collective fragments of the “freakish anatomy” that the poetpersona is re-assembling to create the poetic discourse. Each fragment in the collection becomes the “ersatz” self of the others, the name reflecting on the complex make-up of self-identity. Directly addressing the fetus in her womb, Liv calls Ersatz “the everyone you are… overlapping a trillion faces” (10). Since the woman’s experience of the “other’ in the self creates a structure of mobility, identity is never rendered as stable but always changing and the subjective “I” becomes a shifting signifier in the poetic discourse. Furthermore, the poetpersona’s apprehension of the difficulty of naming the new poetic form engages a discussion of Identity as always being a Relation of identities. .

Pre-memory as Agent of Mobility and Identity The fragment entitled “The hope under which Liv stood” (6) enacts a moment of “(con) fusion” in the woman’s stream-of-consciousness, which reflects on the way self-identity is already conceived as a social construct. The poetpersona explains that Liv experiences maternal desire as the desire of the other: “She wanted what he had been told she’d want. What she was. / expecting” (6). Using “expecting” as synonym for pregnancy, the poetpersona explains its Relation to memory in this way: “the expecting was also a remembering. / remembering to want” (6). This act of “remembering” is first described in terms of conventional (male) expectation which conflicts with the woman’s: “She wanted what he had been told she’d want” (6). The ambiguity in expressing her desire

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represents a moment of crisis in which she finds it difficult to say what she wants. The woman wants only to be “what she was.” Liv can only remember or expect what is already there, and at the very moment she attempts to speak, “filling her mouth up with his-” she finds it difficult, and she recognizes the impossibility of speech. The woman’s utterance is held in check, her voice suspended in time, as reflected in the poet’s use of the dash. This use of punctuation marks a moment of suspension, of time and of speech, as the woman searches into her pre-memory recollection, for a “depiction” or “picture” of the birthing process that her body “remembers” (6). The event of birthing the baby becomes a process of estrangement as Liv can only perceive the baby as “someone else’s boy,” and when she called out his name, she says, “it was not. / it was not” (6). The repetition of “it was not” emphasizes the depth of her disappointment, and suggests that she was bewildered by her inability to experience the maternal bond. Her use of “it was not” becomes symbolic of the negation of this maternal bond which, as Liv experiences it, was “not” anything it was supposed to be. Her attempt to “fill her mouth” with the baby’s name was unsatisfying, leaving her with a feeling of emptiness, for all she could say was “Ersatz,” a “substitute thing” name, the equivalent of any name, which did not make her “mommy” (5) or mother to this infant. At this moment, the “fiction” of “motherhood” and “mothering” is exposed as being “more forged than known.” In another related fragment entitled “Another Frame of Mind” (18), Liv registers another prememory experience in which, as woman, she is subjected to the male iconic gaze. Here, her inability to experience the fabled motherhood is described in iconic terms: she is “mother coded / for other, a gate only, a mighty fortress, a door swinging open…” (18), and the poetic fragment performs a self-reflective gaze in which she sees herself as the conventional “(m)other.” It marks a moment of conscious recognition as Liv faces the im/possibility of motherhood, as prescribed by the generic Western fairy tale, with its fictional depiction of woman as the split mother/witch. The ellipsis marks this moment as a psychological transition in which prememory takes her back in time allowing her to scrutinize the iconic myths of motherhood. The poetpersona wonders: or is she that – that vessel, filling up, swelling to overflow and mothery is the drowned self, drowning all that is, all that clings” (18)

If “mothery” or becoming mother means self-negation, then “motherhood” is “the hood…meant to blur her from herself” (20). So, the pregnant poetpersona comes to experience herself as, “A mother, but not a mother

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really. / A woman, but not a mother.” The line speaks of the woman’s desperate need to identify with something beyond a label bestowed on her by society. Her inability to decipher what is behind the “hood” leaves her feeling as if she is just “A desperate woman or perhaps a / woman only” (21). For the poetpersona, the (pro) creative process obviously creates an identity crisis, as she experiences a “(con) fusion” of self and other(s) and the gaze into the mirror of the “other” of poetic convention does not return an image of the imagined / imaginary self. Through prememory, she recognizes that the neonate poetic discourse she is delivering is “someone else’s” and she keeps playing with it: “Liv forever approaching the boy like toddler to toy” (6). This image of play evokes Kleinian discourse of the play technique as a “preverbal way of communication.”30 (Mitchell 18). According to Mitchell, “her [Klein’s] ideas led other analysts into working with psychotic conditions in which the patient has no access to language or may not be able to use the normal structures of language” (18). Furthermore, “Klein claimed that the play technique, as a technique for gaining access to the unconscious, was the complete equivalent of free association.”31 Read within this context, Rankine’s poetpersona in Plot is seen to be psychologically afflicted by Western conventional representations of mother, motherhood, and mothering. Struggling to find the right words, the “language” for this neonate discourse of identity which she is “expecting” to reproduce, (since in Rankine’s poetic discourse the woman gives birth to herself) she resorts to the language of “play” in which the mother becomes “toddler” and the boy child becomes “toy.” Neither is “true real,” and each symbolizes the constraints created by using the conventional language of communication. As Rankine’s poetic discourse challenges conventional discourses of representation and form, it points out the poetic limitations that accompany self-representation. In the fragment entitled “Ersatz” (9), describing the challenges, the poetpersona speaks of the “[con]fusion” in her head that makes them (mother and son) a twin-self so that birthing him is also an act of birthing herself. She cries out in fear and distress: “Oh, Ersatz… / I could not wish a self / on any self as yet unformed, though named and craved” (9). Accordingly, in the fragment entitled “The Extended Root” (11), the poetpersona recognizes that she must devise a strategy for filling in the “hollow form” of her new poetic discourse. Calling it by the generic name “Ersatz,” she describes it as:

Re-mapping Poetic Identity: Claudia Rankine’s Plot Ersatz of freehand sketchiness anonymous

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of hollow form

delineation of bone (11)

The poetpersona uses a “free hand” as she sketches the outline of the poem’s “hollow form,” so that it creates an “estranged interlacing,” an unconventional form that depends on the poetics of Relation to establish its poetic identity. As ‘Ersatz” or “imitation thing” the poem is not entirely new, as she points out in the poetic pun, where she speaks of its giving voice to an “initialed script” (11). The term “initialed script” can mean a script that is “initialed,” signed, or marked by a previous writer, as being authentic, or original. There is also an echo of “initial script,” as in a script existing from the beginning, one that perhaps could be described as bearing the “markings” of Western ideology upon its “face” (11). A close reading of these poetic fragments shows that the poetic discourse of Plot proves to be more than “ersatz,” going beyond the “initialed script” of postmodern and European writing conventions.

Displacement of Time in the Cannibal Poetic Discourse As the foregoing discussion has shown, Rankine’s poetic drama demands the reader’s suspension of conventional markers of time, place, and event. Travelling through “underground streams” of consciousness (5) the poetpersona finds her way back to a prehistory of the self. Focusing the poetic gaze more closely on the source and origin of the discourse of identity, the penultimate fragment of Section 1 presents a “scene” in which Liv is undergoing an ultrasound procedure. Here, the ultrasound is a poetic device, a kind of time-space shuttle that transports the poetpersona to the site of origin of the fetus. She gains access to this site that empowers the imagination and releases a stream-of-consciousness, fully empowered by pre-memory. As the woman contemplates the developing fetus, she is pulled between the twin desire to abort it, and the desire to let it live. She reconsiders her options: how not to? when in utero a fetus heartbeat bounces off. scanned vibrations of this newer soul making a self whole. (12)

The poetic arrangement of images creates a “fusion” of senses that makes it easy to read the fetus’s experience as being exactly the woman’s experience. The “heartbeat [that] bounces off’ the uterine wall is hers and that of the fetus at the same time, so that she becomes the “fetus” a “newer soul making a self whole.” In the ultrasound experience the boundary

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between time and space collapses and the experience brings the poetpersona in touch with her maternal side, creating for her a pre-memory of her own beginnings. She becomes the fetus-mother, as she joins her embryo in the “volumetric space that is him” (12). This fluid image marks the “volumetric space” as a space without boundary, a space that is “spilling.” The poetpersona’s use of “pencil movements,” repeats the image of “freehand sketchiness” (11) and creates an image of the woman as artist, laboring to paint a portrait of the self. Giving the closing speech in this first act of Rankine’s poetic drama, the poetpersona enacts a preview of the “consequence” of not birthing the discourse. In the opening lines, speaking poetically (and prophetically) of the mourning that follows Liv’s hesitation to experience the birthing, the poetpersona distances herself from the woman: Imagine them in black, the morning heat losing within this day that floats. And always there is the being, and the not-seeing on their way to- (14)

The poem shows that the journey “home” to self-identity is filled with agonizing doubt, and self-questioning, “the being” yet “the not seeing” and the sense of always being “on the way to.” A response to postmodern productions of literature, Plot is generated by the poetic “drive in utero” (5) to create a new form of poetry that represents identity as Relational and as a process of being-becoming that the poem itself enacts. If the transparency of self-identity lies in the opacity of the other, to know is not always to know how, or “how not to” (12). Significantly then, in Rankine’s Plot the poetic attempt to “know” the self through the experience of the “other” leads ultimately to “knowledge” that is “translucent,” (14) rather than “transparent” by Western convention or “opaque” as contemporary postcolonial critics would define it. As “translucent,” knowledge becomes “diffusive,”32 widespread, and therefore Relational, creating an awareness or recognition of sameness and difference, without seeking to erase the difference. Liv recognizes her painful meditation on birthing the child as a recognition of the self’s endless possibility of being. She says, “Were we ever to arrive at knowing the other as the same pulsing / compassion would break the most orthodox heart” (14). By this definition, “knowing” leads to “compassion,” which leads to a “break [in] one’s “heart,” and which further mirrors the way the artist/poet self must “separate from the surface, to throw oneself into relief” (38). Further, the poetpersona’s use of the term “the most orthodox heart” locates the difficulty of the poetic proposition in the woman’s

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attachment to the “orthodox” or currently accepted, and even unoriginal, conventional discourse of identity. No discussion of Plot is complete without recognition of the unconventional structure of the poem. Rankine’s poetpersona re-conceives and disrupts traditional representations of time and subjectivity, through a linguistic display that breaks conventional rules of grammar and writing. The poetic representation of time as fragmented is inscribed within the poetpersona’s use of language. Noticeable at first glance is the fragmentation of the sentence by an “outbreak” of the grammar rules of punctuation, which fills the sentences with a rash of period marks. Rankine places the periods and question marks at unusual points in the sentence, marking time in an unconventional way. The poetic representation of time, however, is largely inscribed in the woman’s body, as reflected in the poetpersona’s description: “her voice suspends the day itself” (88). The poetic device here is to suspend time through the voice of the poem, each punctuation mark creating a moment in the poetpersona’s stream-of-consciousness, a moment of choice, or decision, or soulsearching. The woman uses “her organized breath” (11) to give shape and form to the developing poetic discourse. The term “organized breath” also reflects on Rankine’s unconventional poetic strategy of using the human breath as measure for the lines of the poem, for marking poetic time. Time is also represented in the “changing conditions” (7) of the woman’s pregnant womb and mind. In a poetic fragment reflecting the mind of the pregnant woman near the end of her experience, the poetpersona says, “her pregnancy was a way to put the self she did not like behind her” (77 italics mine). Further showing the relation between time, space, and language, in “Liv’s View of Landscape 1” (70) Liv describes herself as a “landscape” a physical body in space bearing the marks of time, “memory- the swept under. / covered over. skin of history” (70). The physical body becomes a “long line arriving” but never getting “from there. to here.” In this journey through time she experiences a feeling of timelessness: I am all of me feeling I am in a constant paraphrase. loosely. without the fence of time. In time losing to form (70)

The reference to “constant paraphrase” describes the performance of language in Plot, as a whole. Going by the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of “paraphrase” as “a free rendering or re-wording of a passage,” the woman’s self-identity keeps changing in a process that “renders” it different, by using new terms to “express [the] meanings.” It also points to the poetpersona’s emphasis on marking language

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unconventionally, so that the sentence is fragmented and received as “paraphrase,” a new expression of meanings, or fragments of selfexpression. This unconventional “form” removes the “fence of time” in the poetic play since it “(con) fuses” in Bongie’s sense of the word, and thus changes the readers’ apprehension of time. The self “in constant paraphrase” also draws attention to the structure of the poetry collection itself, as each poetic fragment becomes a rewording of another, saying the same thing differently each time. For example, the thematics of “Liv’s View of Landscape 1” is reworked in the fragment entitled “In Play” which sits next to it on the opposite page. While it expresses the essence of the first fragment, structurally it is markedly different, and in this way new meanings are generated. The body of the woman is also used to reflect the poet’s “plot” to regenerate time in another way. Towards the end the poetpersona describes the woman’s walking at the onset of labor as an attempt to “move time through her body, its unfolding / making its way by marking” (95). Significantly she ends this fragment saying that, “the battlefield we live / is the body to use in favor” (95). The woman’s body thus becomes, in the poetic imagination, a “battlefield,” the womb-mind being “her site of murmur” (7) where the struggle starts surreptitiously. “Murmur” speaks of the importance of the woman’s voice in the poetic representation of the woman’s struggle for identity, and is echoed in the voice imagery which closes the collection, as the neonate discourse acquires its own voice, “a breath soaring in / now out now slower” (103).

Conclusion: Locating Self within Cannibal Poetic Discourse As far as the discourse of Plot goes, in the pre-memory experience of birthing, the woman sees “a self / …as yet unformed,” and this precipitates a maternal complex, which includes the woman’s awareness and recognition of her own limitations. The woman’s promise of support expressed in the word “here” at the beginning of this fragment is thus repeated to register the ambivalence of the creative experience. She continues, “Ersatz, / I am here. And here is not analogous to hope” (9). Recognizing self as alien “other” the mother poetpersona moves toward “reassembling” the locators of this identity. She speaks to the neonate, saying: Ersatz, Here. Here. I am here.

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inadequately and feeling more and more less so because of not feeling more, but stopped. For I am of course frightened of you, what your bold face will show me of me. (9)

Locating the self through the “other” of the male child she bears, Liv comes face to face with her own fears. “Here. I am here” marks the woman’s position as well as her emotional state. To be “here” speaks of the psychological possibility of presence being registered both as self and other. The woman is “here” because Ersatz is “here.” In the Afterword (100-03), the emerging infant cries in response to the mother’s “Here,” his response admitting the presence of the woman as mother, “a Mom” (100). He states also, “I am / because “here” exists” (102). By the end of Plot, the emerging consciousness is thereby fully inscribed in the woman’s presence, and “the shape she takes” (75) directs the development of the neonate poetic discourse as it emerges. Claudia Rankine’s Plot demonstrates through performance that the unilateral identity of woman constructed by conventional gender discourse is nothing but fictional and flawed by human imperfection, thereby opening the way for current postcolonial discourses of identity and subjectivity. In the process of locating identity, the poetpersona marks the subjective “I” as a shifting signifier, the woman’s act of cannibalism which introduces the collection being used to question the cultural act of “engaging, appropriating, representing, and consuming differences.”33 Plot formulates a new “plot” and follows its own rules of poetic discourse, offering cannibalism as “an imaginative context for framing and addressing ideological issues related to identity and difference.”34 The poetic drama attempts to “conceive” this traditionally negative trope within the context of pregnancy and mothering, feminine metaphors that allow the female poetpersona to use the “free association” of metapsychology to facilitate the development of a new form for the poetic discourse of self-identity. The poetic fragments in Plot function to deliver a discourse of identity as Relational. They locate identity in the powerful imagination of the mother artist/poet whose very body bears the inscription of time and space within itself, in the womb as much as in the mind.

EPILOGUE MAKING HISTORY HAPPEN

Contemporary critics of Caribbean and African American literature are reflecting to varying degrees on the strong impulse in transnational writers to explore the Relations between home and local identity. The increasing urgency with which writers are focusing on the interrelations between the local and the global points to the importance of continuing to examine the way their collective outpourings are expanding literary history by their critical praxis. As the previous chapters have made clear, given the fact that Caribbean people have historically migrated to North America, it seems natural to bring Caribbean poetry into a poetics of Relation with African American poetry. Like its African American counterpart, Caribbean poetry has historically and culturally engaged with issues of identity on both the national and local level, and contemporary critics in the field are taking a comparative approach to reading these two bodies of poetry. Additionally, since Caribbean writers who gain a foothold in the American literary establishment are categorized in American anthologies as African American writers, the matter calls for critical address in the areas of identity studies. Isabel Hoving’s In Praise of New Travelers (2001) reviews the issue of the relation between journey and identity to point to the way voice and voicelessness are constructed by one’s sense of belonging or not belonging to a place. Significantly, she argues that “cultural, racial, and gender identities are often constructed by means of the notion of journey.”1 Hoving’s postcolonial approach to reading literature written by Caribbean migrants is among those that paved the way for others to make the comparative crossing. Reading together several poetry collections by Caribbean women poets in England and America, Denise deCaires Narain offers a discourse that questions the impact of gender on women’s identity in Contemporary Caribbean Women Poetry (2002).2 Importantly, she suggests the need to recognize fully sources and origins in the literary outpourings of the Caribbean diaspora community, and to leave the way open for inclusion of “other versions of this ‘tradition’ … allowing continual mutation in definition of Caribbean poetic identity, both male and female.” Narain’s discourse calls for critics and scholars to work

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toward “facilitating a shift beyond the category of gender altogether,”3 a call to which others have been responding. More recently, Caribbean scholar Christopher Winks (2009) has drawn attention to the importance of creating “a transformed space of enquiry and dialogue” through a comparative reading of Caribbean texts. He also speaks of the need for critics to maintain a focus that is “worthy of the wealth of thoughts and traditions of the region that inspired [the work].”4 Emerging during the same period as Winks’ discourse, Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics (2009) also highlights the necessity for cultural criticism to keep up with the kinds of identity discourses being offered by contemporary writers. Ramazani’s work highlights a tendency in mainstream criticism to overlook the rich cultural offerings in modern Caribbean poetry collections by overlooking the cross national and migrant inflections of the work under the “banner of the single-nation norm.”5 His main contention is that “mononational constructions of modern and contemporary poetry do not suffice,”6 and that where such readings highlight transnational poetics they do so merely as a secondary or marginal scope, thereby losing the opportunity to advance the field of studies. Another critical perspective is offered by Li Yun Alvarado’s “Beyond Nation: Caribbean Poetics” (2010), which highlights the necessity for cultural criticism to take a comparative approach that crosses linguistic borders. Alvarado encourages such an approach even in cases where the texts themselves do not directly articulate the need to do so and he suggests that Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean poetry may reflect a shared transnational experience, which he describes as originating in the “congruent lived experiences of emigration and exile.”7 Significantly, Alvarado also highlights the importance of resisting a theoretical approach that embraces “an all-encompassing ‘Caribbean Poetics.’”8 Such comparative readings as offered by Alvarado, Winks, and Ramazani, demonstrate transnational poetics as a fertile source of enquiry. Transnationalism has indeed become a common place on the literary scene in American studies in recent decades, highlighting cultural recognizance of the history of migration politics, as it relates to issues of identity in the global society. It is important to note that the approach allows the critic also to demonstrate that the outsider/insider perspectives embraced by Caribbean transnationals allow them to retain strong cultural ties to the Caribbean, which are reflected or inflected in their writing. For Caribbean poets living in America, language becomes a marker of identity in the way it reflects their attitudes to the dominant cultural hegemony. The chapters in this book has offered a close reading of some

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poets who carry the double identity as Caribbean and African Americans to give evidence that the discourse is shifting gears, moving beyond the boundaries of traditional cultural communities as poets explore their current standing in relation to the wider diaspora. Through the trope of a shifting landscape the physical geography of the Caribbean, already transposed on the frontiers of America, gradually gives way to the psychophysical terrain. This allows identity to be inscribed as a locomobile phenomenon, where the speaking subject is located within a mobile frame of reference. Within this locomobile terrain poets assume varying positions that show the tensions inherent in the insider/outsider perspective, as they speak to social and political issues that afflict the individual’s sense of identity. Caribbean poets of the region, in particular, are demonstrating their commitment to shifting identity politics by writing works that engage in the task of revising history and re-inscribing the black community as a speaking, subjective presence within the body politic. A case in point is Caribbean American poet, Claudia Rankine, whose collections are strongly entrenched in the immediate and the local manifestations of identity politics. Rankine continues the quest for a new poetics of identity in her fourth collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric (2004).9 Creating a fascinating telescape of the human mind floundering at the edges of the shore just before making landfall, Rankine’s collection speaks to the terror of culture in the making, as the poet lives it from day to day. Rankine, as speaking subject, does not hesitate to offer a reading of the spirit of fear and terror that mainstream American society has inflicted on the voiceless and the dispossessed individuals in black or ethnic communities. As a collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is relentless in its confrontation with the way the dominant culture in American society creates cultural myths that help to maintain its status quo. This American lyric collection demonstrates the urgency, and sets about fulfilling its own demand for a new poetics. Throughout the collection, the poet’s personal recollection creates a mosaic of events which serves to reconstruct, even realign, the conventional records of mainstream media. The first page of the collection positions a comment from Aime Cesaire as epigraph at the top of the page. The quote from Cesaire encourages active participation in life, in the making of history. In Rankine’s text, it speaks to the danger of complacency and unquestioning acceptance which accompany the media’s propagations of the lived experience so that it becomes mere spectacle for the American audience. The blank spaces at the bottom of the epigraph merges with the blank spaces three pages over, where there is nothing but

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space and the photo of a television set at the bottom of the page. The entire collection, so structured reads like a stream-of-conscious representation of the undercurrents driving communal responses to living history. This deliberate manipulation of space and technology creates an opening for questioning the familiar medium of communication in every American household and nudges readers into assuming a conscious frame of mind, aligning them with the autobiographical poetpersona who contests the media’s representation of the docudrama of life as it unfolds before her eyes. Immediately, on the page following the epigraph, the narrator explains that the experience of death or dying was unfamiliar to her from as far back as childhood, and the third grade in school. She says: “people only died on / television ---if they weren’t Black” (5). Rankine’s poetpersona clearly opens the collection with the suggestion that the black child is socialized to imbibe the pain of death as part of the natural experience of living, and that “death,” as an event worthy of mention, did not happen to those in the black communities of America. She highlights the damaging psychic effect of the media’s portrayal of historical events, speaking of the child’s apprehension of time as a confusion of senses that hinders her comprehension of reality. The collection of lyric fragments, however, moves forward in time to reread the child’s perspective of history, bringing together narrative and lyrical fragments of experiences that, when read as a poetic composition, represent the psychic disorientation that haunts the poetpersona. The death of the collective individual in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely speaks gruesomely about a society that has already died. The collection goes back and forth between the inner and outer consciousness of the poetpersona who refuses to take a spectator position on life changing events that unfold in contemporary American society. She takes seriously Cesaire’s instruction not to “assume a sterile attitude,” as she creates her mosaic of grief that either outrages or shocks the reader into becoming active participant at the events, personal or historical, that are replayed by the poetic account. The poetpersona details her work days throughout which she jots down and rehashes a mix of experiences that give pause for thought: conversations in passing; personal interactions with friends, colleagues, neighbors; immediate thoughts and musings that follow televised accounts of social, political and historical happenings. Early in the collection the poetpersona’s notebook entry records a dialogue that she creates apparently just to pass time along. Alluding to the overarching theme of the poetry collection as a whole, the dialogue reflects the mental and emotional disconnect between the closest of intimate acquaintances; it Signifies on the impossibility of sharing the

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deepest felt fears about life and death that estranges the individual from participating in the community of the living. On the printed page the dialogue looks like a poem; read as such, the last two lines carry the punch in the gut for the reader: You’d let me be lonely? I thought I was dead (16)

Readers are left hanging, trying to make sense of a world in which such a dialogue exists. Interestingly, if they wonder at the lack of forgiving spirit shown by the one who voices the question, the poetpersona’s definition of forgiveness applies. First, she says: “it is simply a death, a dying / down in the heart, / the position of the already dead” (48) and then she elaborates: It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved. (48)

Here the thematic issue is repeated: the loneliness of the individual is a symptom that marks him as already dead, or dying. The rest of the collection moves relentlessly forward in a cinematic roll, recreating televised snapshots of news accounts and documentary, forcing the reader to review them critically, see them anew first as fragments and then as a collective whole. It is hard to drag the eye away from the photoscreen. If Rankine’s collection criticizes “the American fantasy” of life (25) that as television audience readers might see themselves buying into, it criticizes also the complacency with which individuals tend to participate in this wholesale production of culture, the mindlessness that says, “we can just lie back, close our eyes, and relax,” postponing the moment when we start living because the television allows us to choose the channel we want, knowing that “[our] life is waiting” (24-29). This is the attitude, subliminally imposed by the media-driven society, which allows individuals to step safely around sociopolitical issues as if they don’t exist, or as if they don’t personally apply. The poetpersona’s anger, which marks her refusal to participate in this culturalization of social paralysis, grows incrementally from one poetic fragment to the next. The female body as receptacle for pain dominates the horrifying retailing of history as it is archived, not just by the media resources but in the physical embodiment of the poetpersona herself. The memory of events exists long before they are televised, in the pain she has always experienced and which she describes graphically:

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Epilogue Not quite a caving in, just a feeling of bits of my inside twisting away from flesh in the form of a blow to the body. Sometimes I look into someone’s face and I must brace myself - the blow on its way. (56)

The blow comes with each new account of acts of injustice carried by the media. From re-memorializing Abner Louima, the black thirty year old Haitian man who was “sodomized with a broomstick” by New York City police in 1997 (56) and Amadou Diallo, the twenty-three year old black man from Guinea who was shot down in cold blood by city police (57), the poetpersona fast forwards to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center at the hand of terrorists. This act ushers in the twenty-first century recognition of America’s vulnerability by state media. The new era of American nationalism that follows hot on the heels of the attack on the World Trade Center initiates a turning “inside” for the poetpersona who undergoes self-scrutiny with surgical precision. Referring to the spread of fear and panic that shook the nation, she examines the media’s representation of that fear through a symbolic notice she receives from the New York City Postmaster General. The urgency of the need to respond to that fear, accompanies instructions to be cautious when receiving or handling unexpected mail. The poetpersona embodies the nationwide panic as she follows protocol, only to discover that she is unwittingly becoming the thing she rejects. The moment speaks volumes. She says: “The America that I am is washing her hands. She is check- / ing for a return address” (92). In the washing of hands, the poetic image makes a Biblical allusion that becomes a strong invocation of the betrayal which the innocent experience at the hands of those who should protect. It marks, too, the infiltration of fear that transmutes and transcends all that is positive and wholesome. It is catching, like an airborne disease over which one has no control. In dismay and disbelief, the poetpersona questions herself: “Do I like who I am becoming? Is this me? Fear. / Fear in phlegm. Fear airborne. Fear foreign” (92). The question is rhetorical. Several lines later she says sadly, “I used to think of myself / as a fearless person” (93). Rankine’s collection of poems poses questions and hopes that readers will at the very least acknowledge them. She explains her purpose in writing the collection, in the closing pages of the book: “I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness” (129). She laments the way people in the “world,” (readers wherever they are, wherever they represent) tend to ignore what they refuse to acknowledge: They “move through words as if the bodies / the words reflect did not exist” (129). Poets and writers

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outside of mainstream literary or cultural circles are conscious of this behavior that excludes them, even when they are anthologized as belonging. The “feeling of uselessness” (129) that lies beneath the artistic endeavor dominates the poetic fragments in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Rankine offers the collection of poems as a “handshake,” a gesture that affirms the individual’s dignified presence. Citing Paul Celan’s theoretical discourse on poetry, she explains: “The handshake is our decided ritual of asserting (I am here) and hand- / ing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here. […] Here both recognizes and demands recognition” (131-32). The collection thereby closes with a sense of goodwill, of hope that readers will reach a hand out to receive the gift, not sought but yet extended. Ultimately then, the question of how to read poetry written by Caribbean poets in America cannot be answered by formulaic responses. While some scholars acknowledge the importance of the Caribbean culture in the work of Caribbean transnationals, others hasten to draw a line that separates transnationals from their colleagues who remain at home in the Caribbean and work completely in that field. For some critics who hold fast to the traditional school of thought, the very identity of transnational poets as Caribbean is at best debatable. Lorna Goodison, who has maintained strong ties with the Caribbean, and whose poetry collections clearly reflect the poet’s concern with Caribbean identity still receive censure from some critics for not being Caribbean enough. On the other hand, while Claudia Rankine identifies on a personal level as Caribbean, “across the poetry landscape,” she says, she feels American.10 To date, by virtue of its poetic oeuvre, her work has almost exclusively been received as an American product and she is anthologized as an African American poet. In her essay, “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style,” Ifeona Fulani (2005) highlights how identity becomes a burning issue for Caribbean writers in America as they face the publishing market. She asks: Will the writer be marketable as an Antiguan, Haitian, or Other American? Or will she insist on maintaining a singular Caribbean identity? The decision not to adopt a hyphenated identity may carry more serious consequences than its alternative, but either choice gives rise to the question of aesthetics, a key consideration in the complex of concerns I 11 call the politics of style.”

A by-product of the issue is seen in the growing demand for works that are “representative” and “authentic” and poets and writers alike face the

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challenge of adapting to the demands of the market while “retaining their unique voice and style.”12 The readings offered in this book highlight a growing body of poetry collections that are marketed in America as African American poetry, but that are written by poets who struggle to maintain their Caribbean identity. These poets make up a new transnational diaspora, as part of the wider black diaspora existing within the geographical spaces of America. This book calls for continued exploration of the kinds of poetic works emerging from within this field of studies, and for new approaches to envision them, recognizing and accepting their presence. Critical readings emerging from within discrete literary communities must reflect the texture of richness being produced in the field of studies. It is not enough to speak of Caribbean or American, or black, or diaspora poetry, in today’s world, when writers themselves are crossing boundaries as never before, shifting the poetics of being/belonging and making history happen as they live it, as it is experienced in the embodiment of their own creative works.

ENDNOTES Introduction 1

In Brathwaite’s description of “immigrants,” while he acknowledges the difference between exiles and immigrants, he uses the term “second exiles.” See Talk Yuh Talk, ed. Kwame Dawes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 28-29. 2 Colin Channer describes himself and earlier “so-called exile writers” as “immigrants.” Channer’s view is that they are “not in exile” because their experience of distance is different “in kind and in degree” from those “early exiles” of the forties and fifties. Obsidian 2.2 (Fall/Winter 2000-2001): 44-45. 3 Mary Chamberlain, ed., Caribbean Migration: Globalized Identities (London: Routledge, 1998), 5. 4 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2000). 5 Brathwaite’s discussion of Relation as being a discourse that embraces “all things at once,” compares with Glissant’s, in that he speaks of the intricate involvement of all internal relationships with all possible external relationships, the known unknown for, “Relation is all these things at once.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation 171. 6 Edouard Glisssant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996), 102. 7 Francoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 14. 8 David Scott describes the black diaspora as a “discursive tradition or discursive community” that is discursively constituted principally (though not exhaustively) in and through the mobilization of a common possession … “Africa” and “Slavery,” and their deployment in the ideological production of effects of identity/difference, of community.” See Refashioning Future: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 124-25. 9 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: a New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of poems by Brathwaite will be taken from this edition and will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text. 10 Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Tunapuna, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981), 22. 11 J. Edwards Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 28. 12 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 64. 13 Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 22.

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14 Michael Jarrett describes jazz as posing an “alternative to “classical” ways of thinking, writing, and producing art,” and he speaks of it as providing “strategies” or “tropes” for the artist. Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 3. 15 Ibid., 31. 16 Stephen Henderson, “Saturation: Progress Report on a Theory of Black Poetry,” in Winston Napier’s African American Literary Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 102-12. 17 Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 71. 18 Ibid. 19 Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language, 18-28 20 “Chaloir,” Grand Dictionnaire. 1993. 21 Homi K.Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 90. 22 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 18. 23 Frantz Fanon says, “The myth of the Negro, the idea of the Negro, can become the decisive factor of an authentic alienation.” Black Skin, White Masks, trans., Charles Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109-110; 204. 24 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91. 25 Rodney Dale, The World of Jazz (n.p.: Pub Overstock Unlimited Inc., 1996), 4849. 26 Cheryl A. Wall, Changing our own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 9. 27 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: The Penguin Press, 2000), 123. 28 Alice Walker, In Search of our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt, 1983), xi-xii. 29 Aoi Mori, Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse, Modern American Literature: New Approaches, Volume 16, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 1-28.

Chapter One 1 Carole Boyce Davies, points out that she locates herself “in the context of migration, [her] mother’s experience … as a necessary strategy of concretizing the question of identities.” Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 2 Lorna Goodison, Turn Thanks (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of poems by Goodison will be taken from this edition and will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text. 3 Pin-chia Feng, “Rethinking the Bildungsroman,” The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: a Postmodern Reading (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998), 39. Feng’s discussion of the novels written by these women interfaces with my discussion of their poetic contemporaries; Feng insists that, “the narrative by ethnic women dives further down into the repressed memory

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of society and reveals the work of racism, sexism, as well as classism at every level of social institutions past and present” (19). 4 Paul Gilroy, Between Camps (London: Penguin, 2000), 107. 5 Boyce-Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity, 3. 6 Aoi Mori, Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse, in Modern American Literature: New Approaches, Vol. 16, ed., Yoshinobu Hakutani (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 7 Derrilyn Morrison, telephone conversation with Goodison, April 4, 2014. 8 Ibid. Goodison explains that her work was valued by the American academic community at large and that “at every turn [her] work spoke for [her]; they allowed it to speak for [her].” 9 Boyce-Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity, 23. 10 Ibid., 20. 11 Chukwu and Gingell, “Our Mother’s Kitchens and the Domestic Continuum: a Reading of Lorna Goodison’s Turn Thanks,” Ariel 36, no. 3 /4 (2005): 43-66. 12 J. Edwards Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 203. 13 Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: a Memoir of my Mother and her Island (Canada: McClelland &Stewart Ltd., 2007), 1-2. 14 William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth: A critical Edition of the Major Works, ed., Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 303. 15 Ibid., 303. 16 Boyce Davies points out that “Black women writers are engaged in all kinds of processes of reacquisition of the “tongue,” and these, I assert, are movements of reconnection and, at times, of re-evaluation.” Black Women, Writing and Identity, 22. 17 Lorna Goodison, “On Becoming a Mermaid,” Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 55. 18 See the following poems in Goodison’s Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): “On Becoming a Tiger” (134), “Farewell Wild Woman (I)” and “Farewell Wild Woman (II)” (115-16), “Recommendation for Amber” (132), “Tightrope Walker” (52), “The Mulatta as Penelope” (50), “Mulatta Song” (36), and “Mulatta Song II (49). 19 Marija Bergman, “Transplantation: Vegetation Imagery in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison.” European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (August 2012): 113–124.

Chapter Two 1

Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women Writing and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17. 2 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Within the Circle, ed., Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 379.

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Mitchell, 377. Shara McCallum, The Water between Us (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of poems by McCallum will be taken from this edition and will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text. 5 Derrilyn Morrison, telephone conversation with McCallum, July 14, 2014. 6 In the telephone conversation with McCallum, 14 July 2014, she spoke about the way memory functions in recalling truth and points out that there are always “unresolvable questions for her and her only recourse is to “settle for other kinds of truths.” 7 Ibid. 8 Anansi stories are part of the heritage of Caribbean oral tradition, passed from one generation to the next to expose human vices such as greed, obsession with power, and selfishness. The structural irony of these narratives evokes bursts of laughter at the exploits of Anansi, the rascal hero, marking significant moments of self-recognition in the audience. While Anansi stories relentlessly expose the ugly tendencies in humans, fairy tales suggest that the ugliness is not natural to humans and is an aberration in some that is counteracted by noble humans who fight to protect the weak. By transposing the Anansi stories onto the fairy tales McCallum sets in motion a process that produces what I call nancy fairytales, achieving a deeper psychological reflection of humans as co-conspirators in the destruction of the very fabric of human society. 9 Alice Walker is generally recognized as being the first to use the term “womanist” in literary criticism. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983), xi-xii. See also Aoi Mori, Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 1-28, for a discussion of the differences between womanist discourse and feminist discourse. 10 Boyce Davies makes the point that re-memory is used as a strategy in black women’s writing to “uncover the repressed past and provide a possible route to healing for her characters as well as society.” Black Women, Writing and Identity, 39. 11 Derek Walcott, Another Life, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1973). 12 Ifeona Fulani, “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: a Case for Literary Anancyism,” Small Axe 17 (2005): 64–65. 4

Chapter Three 1

Claudia Rankine, Plot (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of poems by Rankine will be taken from this edition and will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text. 2 See Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., The Signifying Monkey (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988). I use the uppercase “S” to invoke Gates’ discussion in which he speaks of the relation of identity inscribed in the use of the African American words “signify” and “signification” and their English homonyms. He

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cites the importance of the “repetition of a word with a change denoted by a difference in sound” and of the “ambiguity” this difference creates, that is “the play of differences generated by the unrelated concepts, the “signifieds,” for which they stand” (45). 3 Deborah Cameron, “Feminist Linguistic Theories,” Contemporary Feminist Theories, ed., Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 151. 4 Barbara Christian, “Trajectories of self-definition: Placing Contemporary African American Women’s fiction,” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed., Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 238. 5 Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994), 36-37. 6 As Friedman uses it, “beyond…does not mean forgetting it, but rather returning to it in a newly spatialized way.” Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 18. See also pages 31-32 where Friedman discusses the limitations and dangers of this discourse. 7 Derrilyn Morrison, email message and telephone conversation from Claudia Rankine, December 29, 2011. 8 Ibid. 9 Alice E. Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 19. 10 Trin T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 122-23. 11 Adams, Reproducing the Womb, 12. 12 Juliet Mitchell, Introduction, The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 11. 13 Minha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 124. 14 See The Concise Oxford Dictionary, eighth edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990,) for definitions of the words “inverse” and “invert;” the mathematical and musical definitions of these words have shaped my reading in particular. 15 Stewart Brown, ed., The Pressures of the Text, (Edgbaston, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1995), 1. Brown asks several relevant questions regarding this phrase: “Is the text applying pressure or is it rather the victim of it? Is the pressure on texts to do with the status of orality as represented as text, or on the definition of text which might be expanded to accommodate the scriptless occasion of oral performance…? My own view is that the reader’s consciousness of the interplay between orality and textuality facilitates a reading of words that allows the poetic apprehension of meanings that are not readily available in normal narrative discourse. 16 Curwen Best discusses the necessity of paying attention to all the generic components of Caribbean literature, such as folk songs, myth, dream, which “exhibit their own sense of “text” as comprising a variety of elements namely: musical accompaniment, setting, dramatization, and audience participation, in

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addition to the words or lyrics. “Text, Tradition, Technology: Crossover and Caribbean Popular Culture” in Stewart Brown’s The Pressures of the Text, 77. 17 Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature, 17. 18 Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. 19 According to Glissant, Relation “functions both in internal relationship and at the same time, external relationship”; it describes the process in which a network of relationships continuously forms, reforms, and deform its “afferents,” creating an open ended discourse so that “the thing that makes the understanding of every culture limitless [allows us] to imagine, without approaching it, the “infinite interaction of cultures.” Poetics of Relation, trans., Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 170-73. 20 See Willard Tracy’s discussion in “Tales at the Borders: Fairytales and Maternal Cannibalism,” Reconstruction: a Cultural Studies Ejournal 2, no. 2 (2002). < http://.reconstruction.eserver.org/issues > accessed October 14, 2014. 21 Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein, 11. 22 Richard C. King, “The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique” Diacritics: a Review of Contemporary Cultural Critique 30, no. 1 (2000): 110. 23 Maggie Kilgour, Foreword, Eating their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity, Ed. Kristen Guest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) vii-viii. 24 Eugenio D. Matibag, “Self-consuming Fictions: The Dialectics of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives,” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 1, no. 3 (1991): par. 9. See also the depiction of the cannibal figure in George Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile (London, New York: Allison & Busby, 1984), Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s Caliban: apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra america (Mexico: Editorial Diogenes, 1971), and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978). 25 Ibid., Matibag, par.34. 26 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 27 C.f. Section 2, Plot (22-24). 28 Kristen Guest, Introduction, Eating their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 29 Ibid., Guest, 3-4. 30 Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein, 18. 31 Ibid. 32 The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “translucent” as “allowing light to pass through diffusely,” and “diffuse” as “spread or be spread widely; reach a large area and “intermingle by diffusion.” 33 Richard C. King, Diacritics: a Review of Contemporary Cultural Critique 30, no. 1 (2000): 8. 34 Guest, Eating their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity, 5.

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Epilogue 1

Isabel Hoving, “Tropes of Women’s Exile,” Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 29. 2 Denise deCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 3 Ibid., preface, vii-viii. 4 Christopher Winks, “A Great Bridge that Cannot Be Seen: Caribbean Literature as Comparative Literature,” Comparative Literature 61, 3(2009): 254. 5 Jahan Ramazani, “A Transnational Poetics,” 332, Project Muse, Web. March 30, 2013. 6 Ibid., 333. 7 Li Yun Alvarado, “Beyond Nation: Caribbean Poetics in Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” and Kamau Brathwaite’s “Islands and Exiles,” Centro Journal xxii, 2 (2010): 52. 8 Ibid. 9 Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric (Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press, 2004). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of poems by Rankine will be taken from this edition and will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text. 10 Rankine, telephone conversation with Derrilyn Morrison, December 29, 2011. 11 Ifeona Fulani, “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style,” Small Axe 17 (March 2005): 70. 12 Ibid., 73.

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Adams, Alice E. Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature. New York: Cornell University, 1994. Bergman, Marija. “Transplantation: Vegetation Imagery in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison.” European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (August 2012): 113–124. Best, Curwen. “Text, Tradition, Technology: Crossover and Caribbean Popular Culture” in Brown’s The Pressures of the Text, 77. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. —. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London: Routledge, 1994. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Interview.” Dawes, Kwame. Talk Yu Talk 28-29. —. The Arrivants: a New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brown, Stewart, Ed. The Pressures of the Text: Orality, Texts and the Telling of Tales. Birmingham University African Studies Series, 4. Edgbaston, Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1995. Cameron, Deborah. “Feminist Linguistic Theories,” Contemporary Feminist Theories. Ed., Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978. Chamberlin, J. Edwards. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Chamberlain, Mary. Caribbean Migration: Globalized Identities. London: Routledge, 1998. Channer, Colin. “Interview.” Obsidian 2.2 (fall/winter 2000-2001): 44-45. Christian, Barbara. “Trajectories of self-definition: Placing Contemporary African American Women’s fiction.” Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense J. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition 238.

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INDEX Africa, 3, 26 African desert, 3 Africans, 19, 47 cultural heritage, 24 cultural identity, 36 cultures, 25 diaspora, 5, 24 Praise poetry, 22 African American, 5, 57, 79, 86 alienation, 13, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 body, 7, 14, 24, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 77, 83 Boyce Davies, 17, 21, 39 Brathwaite, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12 Chamberlin, 3, 6 Child, 26, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 61, 67, 82 childhood, 24, 28, 41, 44, 55 community, 12, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24, 27, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48, 61, 64, 79, 81, 83 Creole, 21, 30, 31, 32, 33, 40, 51, 53 Cultural, 2, 5, 12, 18, 21, 22, 25, 29, 34 cannibalism, 65, 66, 70, 77 cross cultural, 9, 14, 29, 42, 57 cultural identity, 20, 34, 36 culture, 9, 81, 85 diaspora, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 27, 31, 40, 42, 59, 63, 81, 86 difference, 1, 2, 6, 11, 14, 21, 35, 39, 66, 70, 74, 77 Double, 5, 33, 34, 44, 45, 51, 53, 55, 81

doubling, 3, 5, 10, 29 exile, 1, 2, 3, 6, 80 fairytales, 14, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55 family history, 14, 17, 31, 43, 48, 54 Fanon, 8 folk, 7, 25, 27, 29, 31 folktales, 14, 47 Fragmentation, 4 fragmented, 2, 12, 24, 48 fragments, 13, 37, 43 Gates, 5, 59 gathering, 22, 23, 54, 60 Gilroy, 12, 18 Glissant, 1, 9, 64 Goodison, 12, 13, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 36, 41, 60 home, 4, 6, 17, 18, 21, 28, 34, 35, 41, 43, 45, 46, 56, 85 island, 4, 21, 27, 28, 33, 40, 47, 56 islanders, 19, 26 journey, 2, 3, 4, 6, 17, 18, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 55, 57, 62, 64, 65, 74, 75, 79 journeys, 6 landscape, 13, 20, 23, 32, 37, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 56, 62, 63, 64, 75, 81, 85 location, 2, 21, 30, 32, 35, 43 McCallum, 12, 14, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60 memory, 17, 18, 22, 24, 31, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 51, 56, 60, 68, 83 migrant, 6, 12, 79, 80 migrated, 20, 42, 61, 79

100 migration, 1, 2, 4, 15, 20, 21, 34, 41, 80 music, 5, 7, 8, 11, 24, 28, 44 orality, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 40, 47, 48, 64 performance, 17, 24, 29, 32, 48, 51, 53, 54, 75, 77 poetic discourse, 11, 12, 22, 31, 45, 48, 59, 64, 67, 69, 72, 75, 77 poetic identity, 30, 32, 53, 56, 59, 62, 73 Poetics, 11, 18, 19, 30 pre-memory, 61, 63, 71, 73, 76 Relation, 1, 29, 32, 50, 64, 70, 73 re-memory, 2, 15, 18, 23, 25, 45, 49, 51

Index Rankine, 12, 14, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 68, 72, 74, 75, 81, 83, 85 ritual, 22, 27, 48, 52, 85 rituals, 4, 25, 28, 29 Signifyin (g), 5, 14, 59, 60, 61, 67 struggle, 9, 25, 76, 86 tradition, 2, 6, 8, 9, 22, 23, 24, 30, 57, 62, 63, 67, 80 traditional, 13, 18, 33, 39, 50, 75 transnational, 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 voice, 4, 7, 21, 24, 30, 46, 54, 60, 76, 86 voicelessness, 48, 57, 79 womb, 19, 63, 65, 68, 75 womb-mind, 67, 69, 76