FROM THE TIME I was maybe seven or eight years old, I began to be seized by a strong desire to put down my feelings in writing. Before that, I’d mostly expressed my feelings orally, sometimes in rhyme. One of my first rhyming efforts took the form of what I considered to be a praise song to my mother’s distant cousin, Mimi Blackie. The rhyme had something to do with cousin Mimi’s fondness for the Jamaican national fruit, the ackee:
Miss Mimi Blackie
She love to eat ackee
For this, my mother cautioned me that I was being disrespectful to one of her beloved relatives from Harvey River. After that I decided that it was best to write things down. But setting my thoughts down in writing also managed to get me into trouble, especially after I took it upon myself to write, on the newly painted walls of the family toilet, something that I had read in the obituary section of The Gleaner. To this day I still cannot comprehend why I was so affected by the headline: ‘Mrs Hilda Shoucair is dead’. I had never met the lady, and I am certain that nobody in my family had ever had anything to do with her. Why then was I so moved by the news of her death that I felt compelled to write of it on that wall?
‘Mrs Hilda Shoucair is dead’.
I got punished for that. Many years later I would learn from my husband, Ted Chamberlin, how some of the earliest poems recorded were words written on tombstones in remembrance of the dead. Wherever Mrs H. Shoucair is, I hope she knows that in keeping with this tradition, I tried to make sure that she was not forgotten and that I suffered for my art. And yet whenever I am asked, ‘When did you know that you were a poet?’ or ‘When did you write your first poem?’ I never think back to this incident, I usually say that the first poem I ever wrote was ‘After A Shower of Rain’. I wrote it in the aftermath of one of those sudden downpours that come to quench the Jamaican landscape in the month of August. It is the kind of rain that cleans the air and the trees and which leaves behind the most pleasing of all scents, ‘eau de rain on dry earth’. This kind of shower is usually followed by swarms of ‘rainflies’ who dance around electric lights until you hold a bowl of water up close to the light bulb so they can dive to their death by drowning.
I was not the kind of child who saved my school books, so I’ll never be able to revisit my earliest poetic efforts, but looking back now I realise that apart from early babbling and doodling (like my couplets for Mimi Blackie and Mrs H. Shoucair) maybe I first came to poetry through the hymns that I sang at my Convent infant school, where I learned to sing praises to the Virgin Mary, and All Saints Primary School, and St Hugh’s High School for Girls where every school day started with the singing of a good Anglican hymn. Poetry also presented itself early in the nursery rhymes, riddles, songs and poems my mother would sing or recite to us, like the numinous, riddling ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’ by Christina Rossetti.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
the wind is passing by.
Poetry wafted in off the streets in the cries of the mango sellers who would go about the city of Kingston calling out:
Call: Buy yu number eleven
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu Hairy, hairy
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu Blackie
Response: Mango
Call: Buy yu sweetie-come brush me
Response: Mango
Poetry provided the imagery for the ring games I played as a small girl:
‘There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la’ (Boney M later turned this traditional Jamaican children’s song into a big hit). And it provided the rhythm when we jumped rope:
Massquitta one, massquitta two
Massquitta jump inna hot callaloo.
My mother had been a teacher of small children before she married my father and had nine children of her own and she would tell me and my siblings stories at night before we went to sleep. The story of the little Hebrew boy Samuel who was the only one that Yahweh cared to address his precious words to at a time when Yahweh was withholding his speech from his chosen people, was one of our family favourites. She would accompany the story by singing the hymn:
Hushed was the evening hymn,
The temple courts were dark,
The lamp was burning dim,
Before the sacred ark:
When suddenly a voice divine
Rang through the silence of the shrine.
Oh, give me Samuel’s ear,
The open ear, O Lord,
Alive and quick to hear
Each whisper of Thy word!
Like all children, I thought literally, so I was deeply puzzled at first by the idea of asking to be given someone’s ear. Wouldn’t that mean that I would have three ears and the poor little boy just one? Also, ‘Alive and quick’? ‘Alive’ yes, but what was a ‘quick ear’? Still, I liked the sound of these words, and soon I just decided to go along with that and not worry too much about the business of the ears. If I imagined that Samuel was a little boy who lived at All Saints Church, where my family then worshipped, I could quite clearly see the picture that was being painted.
I count this as one of the poems that made me, because I am always hoping to be given the open ear that is alive and quick to hear each whisper of the word, the good word, the singing mysterious word that is Poetry.
Another poem that helped to shape me was William Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’. Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.
What I will say here is that that poem caused me to wonder why, as a Jamaican child of eight or nine, I was being made to memorise and recite a poem about a flower I had never seen, a flower that does not grow on the island. And perhaps because as a small child I had asked for an open ear, I thought I heard a voice saying, ‘Well maybe you should write a poem about the plants and flowers that grow in Jamaica,’ and I have tried to obey that voice.
The next poem that helped to shape my poetic voice was Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abou Ben Adhem’. This was another poem I’d been made to memorise at primary school by our headmaster Ralston Wilmot, who was a gentleman, a humanist, and a great lover of literature and music.
I was told a few years ago by someone who is a speaker of Arabic that the title of this poem is problematic – ‘Abou’ means ‘son of’ and ‘Ben’ also means ‘son of’ – but this has not changed my feelings towards it. I liked ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ so much that I took to reciting it sometimes when I accompanied my mother to weddings where she had designed and sewn the bride’s and bridesmaids’ dresses. As a kind of two-for-one deal, the assembled guests would be able to admire my mother’s peerless dressmaking even as they were treated to my rendition of ‘Abou Ben Adhem’. I guess these recitations can be counted as my first poetry readings.
And then there is Rupert Brooke’s poem about the little dog who went on a tear and, of course, paid for it with his life. I learned that poem at St Hugh’s High School for Girls, set up in Kingston, Jamaica over 115 years ago by the Church of England. Our patron saint was St Hugh of Lincoln, we wore two-piece shirt-waist uniforms of Lincoln green and under our pleated skirts we were required to wear knee-length bloomers. No other footwear was permitted except dark brown lace-up Oxfords, and dark brown socks, and on our heads we wore green berets. Because our patron saint was alleged to have had a pet swan who always followed him around, our school badge was a small cobalt-blue enamelled shield, upon which a swan floated on the waves of the word Fidelitas. The schoolboys of Kingston called us ‘green lizards’. We referred to ourselves as swans.
At age twelve, I sat in a classroom with a high ceiling and listened as our English teacher, who was from England, read us, with no warning or preparation, two poems: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Little Dog’s Day’. The look of pure delight on her face as she read them aloud was enough to show us how poems can give pleasure. That same teacher, her name was Mrs Junor, also read us sections of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and I remember being completely captivated by her performance. But she did not explain those poems, and she never gave us one piece of biographical information about the poets; we were allowed to let the words do whatever they wished to us, and I believe they worked some kind of magic on my twelve-year-old self. I cannot, to this day, read those poems without being overtaken by a great sense of delight, although in actual fact the subject of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is really deeply depressing. But I thoroughly enjoyed them, and I am still charmed by ‘The Little Dog’s Day’ by Rupert Brooke, particularly by the opening stanza, with its gentle description of people asleep and the sun rising; a deceptive start to what would prove to be a day of riotous canine infamy. I liked it that the dog began his twenty-four-hour spree of doggy wickedness with a dance; and maybe because of this I have always liked the idea of writing about dancing in poems.
Nine years later, when I was a student at the Art Students League of New York I bought, from Brentano’s bookstore in Greenwich Village, a copy of Rupert Brooke’s poems and I read them as I rode the subway. I particularly liked the poems from the section on the South Seas; one I kept revisiting was ‘The Great Lover’:
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men [and women] use, to cheat despair.
In a beautiful and strange come around, a few years ago I was given a copy of that same collection by George Kiddell, a wonderful Canadian who played a big part in acquiring my papers for the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. My husband, Ted, and I spent several evenings in his company at his apartment in Toronto, and towards the end of those evenings the three of us would inevitably end up reciting poems aloud. George Cadell also liked Rupert Brooke, and just before he died he sent me a leather-bound early edition of 1914 & Other Poems as a gift to replace my dog-eared copy, which I had long since left behind on the seat of a New York subway.
Looking back, I see that I was taught a very wide range of poems, almost all written by European men. Poems like Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’, Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I learned to take delight in poems like Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ and the mad funny verses of Ogden Nash and Hilaire Belloc. To this day if I find myself in the company of old school friends like Cecile Clayton and Annie Rose Kitchin, we are liable to end up reciting the long cautionary tale in verse of Belloc’s ‘Jim’, who was eaten by a lion for the crime of running away from his nursemaid.
I was also taught several of the poems of John Masefield – who used local language – and these are so hard-wired into me that occasionally, for no apparent reason, I will find myself crooning ‘The Port of Many Ships’.
It’s a sunny pleasant anchorage, is Kingdom Come,
Where crews is always layin’ aft with double-tots o’ rum,
’N’ there’s dancin’ ’n’ fiddlin’ of ev’ry kind o’ sort,
It’s a fine place for sailormen is that there port
’N’ I wish—
I wish as I was there.
The winds is never nothin’ more than jest light airs,
’N’ no one gets belayin’ pinned, ’n’ no one never swears.
To be fair to our teacher, in this case she did explain to us that to be ‘belayin’ pinned’ is essentially to get whacked over the head with a heavy blunt instrument shaped like a rolling pin.
When my father died in December 1963, I felt as if I had been belayin’ pinned. Like all my siblings I had to struggle to make sense of this terrible loss and of the dramatic changes that my father’s death brought about in our family. One of these changes was that I was sent to live with my elder sister Barbara and her husband, Ancile Gloudon, in their beautiful home in Gordon Town in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. My sister, who is one of the brightest and best-known women in the Caribbean and who has had an outstanding career as a journalist and radio talk show host, has always been a great reader, and the library in that house was well stocked with a wide range of books, including a signed first edition copy of The Dream Keeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes. I was overjoyed to discover these poems by this revered and iconic figure of African American poetry, and I got no end of pleasure from reading lyrics like ‘Weary Blues’, ‘Dream Variations’ and ‘Quiet Girl’.
On the shelves that ran floor to ceiling in that long narrow library, there were many signed first editions of books written by early authors of West Indian literature, several of whom were personal friends of my sister and her husband. Outstanding books from the New York Times bestseller list had also made it on to the shelves as well as a complete set of textbooks acquired from a close friend of my brother-in-law’s who had read English at the University of the West Indies.
In between studying the texts I was meant to be doing for my O-level English exams, I read widely from that library, sometimes drawn by the illustrations on the book jackets. For example, I was attracted to Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great family saga The Leopard because the book jacket featured a rampant leopard on a coat of arms, set against a scarlet background. But Vic Reid’s novel The Leopard actually resonated more with me because he is such an important Jamaican writer whom I was lucky enough to meet in person on a few occasions. James Baldwin’s Another Country, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man were all important works of fiction I first encountered there; but I always returned to the lower shelves where the collections of poetry were kept. I developed a fondness for one particular collection featuring the metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert. I found John Donne hard going, and most of the time I just could not puzzle out his extravagant conceits, but I am certain that I benefited from the trying. George Herbert was way more accessible, and that is because I was used to singing some of his poems that had been set to hymn tunes in church and at school. At least once a month, we’d sing ‘The Elixir’ in school assembly, and when we did I’d always find myself puzzling over these two stanzas:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
cannot for less be told.
George Herbert’s lyrics seemed always to be concerned with some mysterious and healing source of goodness that I really wanted to get close to, but I had no idea how I’d be able to do this except through reading poems like his. Roaming freely through those bookshelves was the beginning of my lifelong identification with the figure of the scholar gypsy in Matthew Arnold’s long poem ‘Thyrsis’, and I am still, to this day, drawn to poems that contain what I call ‘medicine’ in them.
But when I found In a Green Night, an early collection of poems by Derek Walcott, who had been at university with my brother-in-law, was a good friend of my sister’s, and became a mentor and good friend to me, I stopped reading everything else and took to just reading his poems.
I read In a Green Night in the way I sometimes read the Hebrew Psalms (King James version), seeking something to hold on to: poem as source of hope and consolation; poem as lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.
One of the many things I liked about Walcott’s poems was that they alluded to people and landscapes with which I was familiar, and I badly needed to be on safe familiar ground right then as my father, the North Star of our family, the light of our lives, was gone.
One poem in particular, ‘A Careful Passion’, became one I kept returning to, not just because of the subject of the poem – doomed angst-ridden love (as a teenager I was of course deeply taken with anything that was angst-ridden) but because a number of things about it taught me how a poem could be written in a fresh and engaging way.
First, the epigraph in Jamaican vernacular made me see that patois could be used for something other than humour, and that in fact no other epigraph would have been as appropriate:
Hosanna I build me house, Lawd,
De rain come wash it ’way.
Then the opening lines employed language that could have been found in an advertisement for high-end real estate or in a tourism brochure:
The Cruise Inn, at the city’s edge,
Extends a breezy prospect of the sea…
It then went on to incorporate brilliant metaphors:
From tables fixed like islands near a hedge
Of foam-white flowers…
In that poem, an old Greek freighter is quitting port, no doubt making way for a Caribbean schooner helmed by Walcott. It is not his greatest poem, but it is still one of my favourites by him, because it has so many fine turns.
So cha cha cha, begin the long goodbyes…
The cha cha is a dance where one steps forwards and backwards and marks time on the spot; who has not said such a goodbye? Also, ‘cha cha cha’, if pronounced by someone with a Jamaican accent, can sound like ‘chu chu chu’, a cry of deep frustration sounded three times.
I liked that you could do that in a poem, but back then it never occurred to me that I would ever produce a book of poetry, nor that at some point I’d become deeply invested in trying for the kinds of skilful turns I have always instinctively admired in great writing. I suppose I was always, from the very beginning, just feeling my way forward.
About a year after I started reading In a Green Night I was given a prize for English Literature at St Hugh’s. It was The Oxford Book of Modern Verse edited by W. B. Yeats. I have read this anthology from cover to cover many times. One of the first things I did was to search through it for the works of women writers. I have to confess that only a few of them stayed with me – some pieces by Lady Gregory, from the Irish of Douglas Hyde. But there was a poet named Michael Field – I did not know then that it was the pen name of two women – who wrote some pretty angst-ridden verse that caused me to weep copious and cleansing tears.
Anyway, I got way more pleasure from reading poets like Oliver St John Gogarty, Ernest Dowson, Rabindranath Tagore, and Yeats himself, and I kept returning to one particular poem by Walter James Turner. I later found out he was a theatre critic. Turner’s ‘Hymn To Her Unknown’ was a revelation to me, and it taught me a great deal about the writing of poetry. It starts off as reportage, who, what, where, when, and then gradually becomes more and more freighted with rhythm, rhyme, repetition, allusion, rendering the language more and more patterned, more dense until the voice in the poem is almost talking in tongues before Venus rising from the waves is referenced, thus cooling things off. I taught that poem at the University of Michigan for many years and I recommend it highly.
But all these poems were written by men; and as I began to think more and more about my own place in the world I really, really needed to hear and read poems written by people who looked and thought like me. I searched through The Oxford Book of Modern Verse looking for poems to which I, as a Black woman, could relate, until I came across three poems that had Africa as their subject. One by Edith Sitwell – whose bold confident writing style was of some interest until I came to her truly appalling poem ‘Gold Coast Customs’. Dread! There was also one by Roy Campbell, titled ‘The Zulu Girl’ and one called ‘The Scorpion’ by William Plomer.
The unsettling way in which all these poets quickly turned to animal analogies to describe Black people made me feel queasy, Sitwell’s poem being the absolute worst and Roy Campbell’s being the least worst. After that experience I knew that I needed to find poems that did not disrespect people like me, poems that honoured the humanity of my people.
Maybe if I had known more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning when I was searching for women poets to read I’d have spent more time with her work back then – I’d been made to memorise ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ – because her family had strong ties to Jamaica. The Barretts have deep roots in my homeland, as they used to own several large sugar estates where they profited handsomely from the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans. It was years later that I read how the source of her family’s income was apparently deeply troubling to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who once wrote, ‘I belong to a family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I should be afraid.’ The concern for freedom and justice which drove many of her works stemmed from the fact that she felt guilty about profiting from the proceeds of such monumental cruelty and injustice.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were all about freedom and justice for me; it was also the time when I really began to accept the fact that I am a poet, and when I began to actively search out the works of Black women poets who might become role models for me. When I studied painting at the Art Students League of New York, I spent a good deal of time reading the fearless and incendiary writings of African American women poets like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and others, and I even tried for some of their righteously wrathful turns in a few of my early efforts, but I eventually came to the conclusion that, much as I love and admire these poets, I had to keep searching for my own unique way of expressing myself, which can accurately represent my own life experiences and my own culture.
In retrospect, I’d say that the African American woman poet whose work nourished me the most was Gwendolyn Brooks; her voice is truly elegant and timeless. And the great fiction writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison are all writers whose work I greatly respect and admire.
But all this time I kept searching for poetry written by Caribbean women, only coming across the odd poem here and there because they were hard to locate in print back then. I’d heard of Una Marson from my parents because she came from the same part of the island as my father – the parish of St Elizabeth – and occasionally I’d come across one of her poems in the local newspaper, my personal favourite being ‘Kinky Hair Blues’, but I was not taught the work of any Jamaican women writers at school. I was vaguely familiar with the names of a few other women writers like Barbara Ferland, Constance Hollar and Vera Bell, who wrote one really powerful poem called ‘Ancestor on the Auction Block’, but at that time none of these women occupied a really central place in Caribbean literature. As proof of this, in 1971 when Bolivar Press in Kingston published a slim and handsome volume titled Seven Jamaican Poets, that publication did not include one work by a woman, although by then the great Louise Bennett had been writing and performing her poems for decades.
That the poems of Louise Bennett eventually managed to find their way into The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry was largely due to the efforts of the brilliant literary critic Jahan Ramazani, and was a case of justice being served, because, while I grew up familiar with Louise Bennett’s extraordinary satirical poems, Jamaicans were not encouraged to regard what she did as real poetry because she wrote in Jamaican English. All modern Jamaican and Caribbean writers owe Miss Lou a great debt because she took a great deal of abuse from the gatekeepers of society so that Jamaicans could one day be proud of the way we speak and write.
As far as poetry written by women was concerned, the 1960s and 70s were all about Sylvia Plath, and I learned one of the most important lessons of my life, my writing life, from reading Plath’s work. I learned that there are writers whose words are so powerful, whose ideas and images are so seductive, that a young writer can lose their own way by trying to follow them.
Sylvia Plath has written some of the most compelling poems in the English language. ‘Lady Lazarus’, with its multiple deaths and resurrections and reinventions, is the one I value most as I look back at my own, now long life, but I sensed early on that it was dangerous for me to spend too much time in Plath’s company because her world view is so inclined to be dark, and because for much of my young life I was so wounded, wayward and impressionable. I mercifully sensed that for my soul’s safety I needed to hold on to things that are life-affirming.
This need to hold on to what is life-giving also influenced my readings of Anne Sexton, and to some extent Virginia Woolf. I decided along the way to always approach the work of some writers with a measure of caution and respect, and to remind myself always that my admiration for their work did not mean that they would be ideal role models for me.
Edna St Vincent Millay was the exception to my rule. Some of the earliest poems by women I had found had been written by her, and I immediately took to her voice because I liked that she professed to being a sort of wild woman, and at the time I was getting ready to try on that persona for myself. Her influence on me was made manifest in the form of a longish mawkish rhyming poem I wrote which was heavily patterned on her long poem ‘Renascence’. Even at seventeen I realised how bad my effort was, so I tore it up. But looking back now, I’m sure that the writing of it helped me to process my grief at the loss of my father because it was a poem about resurrection, renewal and coming back to life.
I would say that the poem that has had the greatest impact on my adult life is the Divine Comedy. My engagement with it began when I was one of several poets invited by the Southbank Centre in London to rewrite one of the Cantos from Dante’s masterpiece. To date I have rewritten seven cantos, setting them all in Jamaica and employing Jamaican dialect in tribute to the great Italian poet who wrote in the local language of his people.
So, I really ended up writing the poems that I wanted to read, and writing them in a way that sounds more like the language I use when I quarrel with myself, or when I lament, praise, pray and console myself and hopefully others. A friend of mine once said that the poetry I have written can be grouped into two categories: poems about love, and poems about justice. That is probably true, and of this I am certain: I intend to keep praying for the open ear, in order to hear them if and when they come.