Tag: Caribbean

NY SLIDE XXIX: SONOFABITCH RAMOS

            Brebnor told them one day he'd found his car radio antenna had been snapped. He'd
        replaced it only to  find it bent and twisted into a bit of artwork. He'd straightened it
        out, but the next day the would-be artist/vandal struck again.
           "What makes you suspect Ramos?"
           "I know he's the culprit. He's got a guilty smirk on his face, like he knows something."
           "Where do you park now?" Lightbody asked.
           "Right across the street…on the west side of the building?…on Myrtle Avenue."
            Lightbody said, "You know, this kid, he comes up to me one day, and he says to me,
        What do I have to do to pass this class? So I look at him and I say, You know what you
        can do? I'll tell you what you can do…You know where my car is parked?…since you're
        no longer interested in Earth Science, why don't you wash and wax my car…every day
        …You do that, I guarantee you'll pass my class."
           Ghamsam was the first to laugh. "Did you really tell him that?"
           "C'mon, Ghansam, of course I didn't tell him that. Do you think I'd strike a deal with a
        thug like Ramos? I said to him, Mr. Ramos, so far you've done everything in your power
        fail this class. I would suggest you don't make any travel plans for the summer."
           Brebnor looked away, impressed with Lightbody's firm handling of Ramos, but
        churning inside with leashed fury.
            "Where do you park?" he asked Lightbody.
            "The Mobil gas station?…It's about two blocks away. I pay the guy couple o' bucks to
        keep an eye on it. I walk the couple o' blocks. Good exercise. I think it's worth the
        money. I don't have to worry about some vandal slashing my tires."
            Brebnor groaned and decided not to ask if he could park there too.
           This Fall term he was lucky to be assigned classrooms on the west side of the building.
        That way he could keep an eye on his car parked across the road on Myrtle Avenue. It
        meant being on his feet most of the time, walking to the window as he talked, and
        throwing quick glances outside from the third floor. If in the middle of the lesson his
        glance told him something was happening, or had happened, to his car while his back was   
        turned, he didn't know what the fuck he'd do.
                              (from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

    
          

Review Article: BOOK OF TEARDROPS

  
      
    Poets from Guyana wouldn't be poets if they ignored the     ____________________________
    landscape. The savannahs, the dense forests, the
    grid-ordered city all invite wonder and engagement.              THE JOURNEY TO LE REPENTIR
    Among colonial labourers the first flicker of literary                by Mark McWatt 
    (self) awareness could have happened late one afternoon:
    someone pausing to look across pastoral rice fields or             Peepal Tree Press
    lush cane stalks and thinking, Hell of a country. I could          England, 2009 
    write poetry 'bout this place. Generations later a                  146 pgs.
    relative or neighbour, better educated and with fine
    penmanship, might have made the first self-conscious          ____________________________
    stab at the sonnet form.

    Today we can read what happened next to that capacity for wonder and (self) possession.
    Wilson Harris would travel and drill deep into Interior layers, extracting myths and mud- 
    obscured symbols of alchemy. The more city-bound poet Martin Carter found his fire
    as street riots & political upheaval disrupted Georgetown's colonial order, and Coldstream   
    Guards set foot on his Demerara shores.

    Newer, almost reclusive, poet Brian Chan seems "engaged" even when his poetry hints
    at disengagement. Caught up in the post-Independence turmoil his city poems record 
    the setting up of defences, private kokers to regulate (or keep at bay) the flow of 
    unfriendly governing sentiment. For someone who didn't travel far around the country 
    Chan's poems are dry, well-insulated places of empathy, buttressed by Emily Dickinson-
    style epigrams, where insight & feeling hatch.

    In his latest poetry volume, The Journey to Le Repentir (2009), Mark McWatt invites
    readers into new untractored terrain: The North West region. If Ian McDonald had 
    carved out Essequibo as his place of escape, discovery (and now faithful old world
    newspaper musings) McWatt takes us to places in "the North West district of Guyana/
    (before there was 'Region One'"); and back in time to the 1950s

    The collection contains an introduction from the author explaining how the poems came
    about, the book's narrative sequence structure; it includes the "voices" of travellers to Guiana: 
    an English sea captain in search of Eldorado; a Frenchman exiled to Demerara (not Chateau
    d'If).

    McWatt is a (retired) University professor so it's not surprising to find an academic warp-
    weave of themes in his material. The Journey to Le Repentir melds history readings   
    and personal recollection in a way that makes for an intelligent (if sentimental) parsing
    of experience.

    His "journey" starts with references to his growing up years; it moves out in sections
    through the Mazaruni; through "mortal-midway" poems, and postcard poems sent to
    friends encountered on the way; and then to Le Repentir, Georgetown's now jungle-
    overrun burial grounds.

    The Mazaruni poems are not quite what you might expect, dense, ecologically sensitive
    elegies to a landscape made famous around the literary world as an imaginary locus
    where events foreshadowed and unforeseen occur. McWatt seems wary of some poets'
    fondness for symbol-making and transcendence-offering. "I know/you poets and the
    irresponsibility/of your traffic in tropes and symbols".

    Still, like Le Repentir, the Mazaruni region encourages rapture, the way less talented,
    more calculating Guyanese writers get rapturous about (ethnic) origins, closed
    communities & victim 'hoods; reinforcing perimeters within the nation in proud columns
    and often poorly constructed lines.

    The Journey To Le Repentir is arranged in four sections, and readers might find pleasure
    in the varied narrative voices (creole chatty, lyric evocative). The opening lines - "This is
    my song of the universe/of the past that is now and the future that is never" – set a   
    pulpit high tone of sincerity. Again, unlike Ian McDonald – bypassing that poet's excited
    scenery description - McWatt  searches for language that makes the landscape more
    globally meaningful, not  just parochially lovable. 

    He is less concerned with rhythm in his lines or with word precision ("vast as estuaries, he was
    that riparian aristocrat/whose alluvial accent sounded in the bedrooms of all rivers.") Craft
    though important seems secondary to his heart's content and motion. When he reaches for
    metaphors he picks sumptuous, ripe ones: "All the rain long/the world wept/like a wound in
    the soft/of you."

    There are moments, too, when you wonder what to make of strange lapses into banality:
    "Beyond this destination/there are other destinations and still/another Destination". And
    soppiness: "Sometimes I look at my hands/the hands that wield pen and pointer/that cup
    your rounded breasts/that chop garlic and green onions."  

    Though one can't be sure how deep the incisions go the collection is marked by lament,
    confession, gratitude, innocence; and pain, under the mask of poetry's "luxurious atone-
    ment". What the back cover commends as "brave candour" in his lines feels sometimes 
    like the brave armature of a poet of faith who, on occasion, can be "ambushed by sudden
    tears." 

    Readers in mid-adolescence could share McWatt's delight in revisiting places: "our first
    house in Mabaruma", "the wind-kissed river"; glimpses of Amerindian "budding breasts
    exposed", and a black tiger which to a school boy might have seemed a manifestation
    of the forest spirit, Kanaima. These perceptions have stayed with the poet and have
    accrued over years into deep affection for his cultivated swath of Guiana. 

    Somehow in his forays into living environments and inner life experience McWatt steers
    clear of the toxic air in Georgetown politics ("fleeing the vulgar coercions of Burnham's
    land" is as close and as current as he gets). There are poems that offer reprise and 
    variation on a familiar theme, "Independence"; and poems about love (in "The Museum
    of Love") which are done with a curator's sensitivity to human loss and revaluation. 

    Heart-energized, magnanimous in its navigations The Journey To Le Repentir makes a
    plea for teaching moments in Guyanese classrooms. As a teaching tool, beside a porten-
    tous Martin Carter volume (filled with stoic lines & solitary foreboding) it could achieve
    an odd coupled partnership of spirit.

    Mark McWatt – winner of the Guyana Prize (1994), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2006)
    and a university professor – has come a long way since boyhood days walking home from
    school through the jungle (when not riding in daddy's Land Rover). Readers might sense
    some measure of unease in the poet's divided self, as establishment and native identities
    jostle. The pull seems stronger toward a romancing of McWatt's unusual forest origins – his
    intimate rivers, its memories and ghosts, "the [native] solitude and detachment" they
    engendered.

    The Journey To Le Repentir ends with a postscript; the poet takes one last updating stroll
    through the Georgetown burial grounds. "So our places of death, like our lives/are tainted 
    with the rot, the disorder." (Flag: authored insights like that might upset the retro
    ideologues currently on stage who bristle at any form of "negative" or "unpatriotic"
    sentiment).

    The poet's closing thoughts are expressed in a sonorous swell, not unlike the chords ("This
    is my song of the universe") with which the book opened. You sense a choral build up, and 
    (for all the rumours and deformities of State) a purity of message meant to bring long-
    patient Guyanese readers to their feet: 

                 "Yet we live with the transfiguration of rain
                   and bright sunlight on grass…
                                             …the consecration of sorrow,
                   of memory, of hope – and thoughts of that chalice
                   filled with the blood of love, and the Amen
                   of forgiven yesterdays, the Amen of all tomorrows."

    In other words, like those plantation labourers in the Guiana cane fields, at the end of
    the day or the work song or the journey, looking back might leave you feeling tearfully
    cued up to gasp or sigh, Goodness, grief! or What a country!   (W.W.)

 

                               

 

 

   


 

NY SLIDE XVI: LABOUR DAY

               On Labour Day Radix was pressed into driving upstate to visit Amarelle's sister
          who with her husband always arranged for friends from the city to get away from
          that boring Labour Day parade, with its corrupt union leaders and fawning politicians
          walking down Fifth Avenue; away, too, from the violence prone West Indian carnival
          in Brooklyn with the steelbands and the bum bum rollers and revelers playing mas'.
          Get away from all that, drive along beautiful highways to a place called Poughkeepsie, 
          where they promised good food, clean air and quiet leisure activity.
              There was the problem of getting there.
              The Bronx had its own travel frustrations, the narrow choked roadways, careless
          people walking and claiming as much right to the streets as any BMW; the potholes
          that weren't there yesterday. Radix had grown accustomed to all that.
              When he started travelling too far out from those landmarks and had to rely on
          those green oblong signs he felt a strange fear.
              He wasn't much good at road map reading; he felt certain he'd get lost somewhere
          along the route, miss an exit, run into strange territory, some tiny close-knit town
          whose residents could tell straightaway he didn't belong there. For her part Amarelle
          couldn't understand why someone with a college degree would find it so difficult to
          follow a road map.   
              Once they got to the three-lane highway Amarelle immediately adjusted her seat
          from the straight-up position; she lay back and commented on passing scenery; then
          she closed her eyes behind her sunglasses, coming alert only to remark how lovely
          it must be to live out here once they'd saved up enough money to buy a house, which
          was what upward-thinking people did.
              The long rolling expanse of road, other people leisurely in their cars, the trees
          changing to fall colours – what freedom!
              She was looking forward to the comfort and space upstate, to meeting friendly
          people who had jobs and could afford the things they owned. No hostile stares; no
          Fordham Road; no sidewalks choked with people peddling cheap watches and ency-
          clopedias.What freedom!
              For his part Radix, driving in the centre lane, pretending to focus on his driving,
         was thinking of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. Did these people rushing
         by strapped in their seatbelts understand the significance of what was happening in
         the Soviet Union? Did they have a clue?
              He'd come to associate the rise and fall of nations with the fortunes of one man,
         be it an Abraham Lincoln or a Napoleon. Now it was the turn of Mikhail Gorbachev.
         Of course, it was a far more complicated process but it pleased him to think that way.
             When he came off the highway and turned into what looked like suburban, not
         upstate New York, he followed Amarelle's directions (her car seat was upright again);
         he drove slowly through neat orderly streets; past a white kid in a bright blue parka 
         pedalling his bike and trying to outrace a chasing dog; past a stretch of wooded area
         beautiful and desolate, a shopping plaza.
              And he hoped that when they arrived at Amarelle's sister he'd meet someone he
         could talk to about Mikhail Gorbachev, for at that moment nothing else in the world
         mattered.   
                           (from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams)

 

 

       

POEMS FOR JAZZ ICONS (& THEIR SOUND)

                                                                 

                                                                          – Miles Davis 1926 – 1991

               [That climate changing horn, breath and instrument twinned 
                after centuries of mating, since chance & genes
                in consummation = 'the one' a Mary knows; like no sound on earth.
                There, too, birth marked in (our) Kitch, Sparrow, Marley
                Shadow (few since). 

                I mean the Miles sound, sinew & curve pristine
                until he took off into 70s fusion, bored with gigs cool
                & origins; playing back to audience bored
                with audience; asking all to listen like birds
                alight on power lines sensors gripping;

                until he started chasing young girls' gold-
                haired hits like Lauper's "Time After Time",
                and you wondered: where's he going with that?
                the hot breath quick of pretty young songs? new
                hip swing for hipsters grown too old to rock?

                In the ballads, I know now, he felt the tremble of innocence
                & risk, heard chords immortal blue;
                horn husks to dig for.

                I hear Young Jeezy "Crazy World", Phoenix "1901";
                and think: Miles would have loved vamping that
                juiced up throng and throb; shoulders hunched to shaft in
                for a sweaty duel or three then turn away;
                streaming up a brew fresh as tomorrow, horn-
                miracled; like no bitch on earth, yo!]-W.W. 
 

                                    THE SONG IS YOU
                                                         – Ella Fitzgerald 1918 – 1996

                                    Now, more than before, we know
                                    there is no song you have not
                                    sung: we have only to think
                                    of one for it to become
                                    a bell whose tongue is yours,
                                    moreso now in the silence
                                    of its new dangling balance.
                                         (from "Gift of Screws" by Brian Chan) 


                                    
                                    SONNY STITT'S SAX

                                             A voice like a boy's sure scrawl
                                    of question marks across a blackboard
                                    of silence, a chalky scrape
                                    whose tails fade to fine points as though they
                                    are their own firm erasers.
                                       (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan)            

                                        BIRD,

                                    your silence of screeches lends me
                                    the faith to scratch on the air one more
                                    noise of us who fly without wing.
                                          (from "Thief With Leaf" by Brian Chan)  

                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

POEMS FOR DISTANT FATHERS (& THEIR ‘SPRING)

 

               Your mother blames the breakfast scramble, late commutes
                why you never "took" to Sunday mass; cat
                sleeping like your father 'til midday. She shows off
                postcards mailed when the carrier drops anchor - 
                her only son leaving family footprints 'cross the globe!
                Handsome, unsmiling in uniform your picture's framed
                for duty in the living room.

                She'd much prefer you
                wear a gentler safer (Ph.d not Sgt.) badge on your chest.  
                She worries: who are these older women showering
                gifts on him? what do they ask in return?
                In the wilderness cries of loss
                & loneliness are not wolves' only.

                The Marine Captain's retirement party must have been
                a blast, though why is he the greatest guy you know?
                (Sometimes the enemy's in camouflage salutes
                or bows; 'the kiss', remember?)

                Always too busy, orifice-overwhelmed: your mother's
                pow! pow! at my hard boiled eggs. Might be true; too late
                to reel you back in. Stay in touch
                   on line is all
                                      for now I ask.
                                                                        -W.W.

 

                  TO A DAUGHTER

                  He never hoped for you, he never not:
                  it was you who gave birth to a father.

                  A baby, you wanted often to play
                  with the only friend you had all day long

                  but the drug of Work would pull him away
                  to a desk, piano, easel or stove.

                  If he felt you were keeping him from other
                  life like salt running out, he might bark

                  Leave me alone, in the anger of fear,
                  and he would feel his voice quiver your spine.

                  But you never stopped running to embrace
                  him, teaching how gratuitous is love.

                  Your father's love for you, shadowed by pain,
                  clouded by duty, was never as free.

                  Yet though you're now 'tall as a lantern post',
                  you still sit on his knee and hug his neck; 

                  but that he once frightened you still frightens him
                  should he snap Leave me alone, meaning now Don't.
                     (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan)  

                  POEM FOR DISTANT CHILDREN

                  A mother gives
                                           birth a father
                  can only witness,
                                            separated
                  from the fruit of his seed, his only
                  cord of connection (which must also
                  be cut) between soul and soul, mind
                  and mind, heart and heart (for as long
                  as hearts allow), all intangible
                  except the giving witness heart 
                  which still moves and
                                                    can still be touched. 
                       (from "Gift Of Screws" by Brian Chan)

 

 

   

 

 

 


 

   

  

ARRIVAL DAYS, DEPARTURE TIMES

 

               Rigged to happen every year now, with onion skin speeches and
             bright remembering fabrics; jerky-hip dancing girls and servers
             fanning coal pots of blame and avowal; though bet your bulging
             jewelry box there's a man in the crowd counting head like votes,
             and women looking man like mate. Party time, yes.

             The horror is gone; but someone on mission & Ministry,
             who frowns on Carnival & chipping bass lines, softens
             for these microphone solemnities: the field of faces,
             the whipped-up batter of maltreatment. 

             The stage is set so walking off the ships dubs every cane bound cutter 
             hero; every scribbler, poet; those labour strikes, famed victories.
             Who can refuse these reparations to the spirit? ignore
             the "time for reflection" drizzle?

             Well, after the plantation, "flight" (& cunning) slipped in
             our DNA, the notion of "anywhere but here". Consider
             what happens now on crafts outbound to any "there".   

             Knees bent in cabins cramped like old mizzen-mast ships;
             air like seasick puddles at your ankles; seat belts, the chains;
             someone in the walk space making sure you're strapped in.

             Time to disembark, the drill's the same: step off
             the transport, follow signs, straight verifying lines; turn right
             to fat free runaways, the heat of welcome in wintered eyes;
             row houses, burrows leased to guard the old ingathering ways; 
                                                                                            turn left
             alone to wonder: your first powerbike down expressways! far   
             off to Chance! Discover! the toll?  paths grassy green, trails
             stone strewn to Growing Old.

             Trust me, go left, left, young man; and pay attention.
             There's more to any "there" than changing seasons.

             This city puts on street shows for Arrivals: marching bands,
             the Mayor sashed & waving, crowds with flags and iPhones;
             back to work, yo!
                                                  -W.W. 

 

 

                    THREAD

                    Last year's song's easier to recall
                    than today's which has slipped in and out
                    of the cloth of the air, a needle I forgot
                    to thread, a thread I forgot to knot.
                    Nothing to retrace but a line of shrinking holes,
                    shadowed punctures in a field of white.
                           (from "Thief With Leaf" by Brian Chan)

                     BARFLY

                         Here I pause
                    to  remember how not
                          to sleepwalk
                    through trenches of custom,
                          how to wake
                    the one essential voice
                          held like wine
                    in cupped hands whose fingers
                          lust to spread
                    themselves apart to shed
                         their burden.
                         (from "Gift Of Screws" by Brian Chan)   

 

 

 

 

  

  

 

 

 

 

POEMS FOR SONS RETURNING (& THEIR SONGS)

               

               What he confessed, studying wet circles on the beer table, was:
              he could have married Margaret of England:
              her mouth a glossed red line, the way her knees pressed
              his on the bus, promising downy empires.

              His indigene ferocity tamped down like the Queens horse
              on clopping parades, he liked her; he liked
              her student frugality of lust, always holding back some
              for the library & 1st Class Hons.

              Usually they went back outside (proper again) to patted cushions,
              her legs like blue-breast feathers tucked in; to conversation, she listened
              with Ludwig seriousness, brushing hair from her eyes; 
              opinions gliding down her Alpine nose; flutters of glee.

              The more he thought about it: she could have played
              the bhowjie for his people: sandals, the mosquito net; 
              the politics of retribution; saris gold-laced with tassels of self
              reassembling; or the old khaki parsimony.
              What might have been he dared not dare so he came home.   

              A girl was waiting; a position was waiting; service
              to the nation, to pretty Vrajisha of Corentyne.
              They bypassed romance like eels sliding to ceremony,
              heritage lamps lit; and silvery-haired moomas
              brooming the yard for the harvest of grandchildren.

              The patacake she'd oil, spread & turn pretty much
              anytime he liked. Comrade, what else was there?
              what more? 

              Years of tribe agitation; seasons of theatre in the mouth;
              late afternoons when the seawall knows the ocean of bent
              back riders (puffed amateurs, ghost overseers) winds up ashore. 
              
              Over and over how we dig up &
              bury comfort shrouds of the past. The old bulbs.

              Two hours past midnight. Two cars race by, windows tinted,
              hounds for some snatched pleasure kill 
              or drug letting in villages back dammed.

              And every time the power fail, frighten tighten she belly,
              "You lock the door?"

              See the ladybird۞ nesting under him? 

              The feeling you get waking up wedged in this niche!
              What's that? There's fear & life rot all over the world?

                                                                                  – W.W.  

               NO RETURN:

              what we might have been is
              the ghost of a chance: now
              we are virgin ghosts
              desire would pervert. Fate
              is no master but
              desire itself, a blank
              to scrawl a burden on
              or one to keep

              erased.
                   (from "Thief With Leaf" by Brian Chan) 

 

              LOVESONG

              Whenever it's raining at midnight
              I'll be taking a walk and towards you.
              It's your coat I'll be wearing when I must go back home. 

              Everywhere young men are paid to slam
              bullets into one another's bodies
              but this can't stop two souls from containing each other.

              People are still dying in hunger
              but somehow I keep enjoying these grapes
              and bergamot tea with you at 2 in the morning.

              From now on 2 a.m. is the time
              I'll be knocking on the door of your dreams
              to make you burn the butter for the next day's omelette.

              Before the clouds dry up, let us go
              walking in a different town of our own.
              Wherever we stop to eat, we'll insist on plum wine.

              Dream this town whenever we must meet
              as mutual angels full of voice and tears.
              Wherever  we walk, the moon will keep her eye on us.

              I kiss the back of your neck before
              it fades with you down your road without me.
              The shifting cloud mirroring your steps is your best friend.
              
                     (from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan)