Kingston Afternoon

There is something physical about the comfort of Kingston for me. Clearly, stitched into my skin is the memory of the body’s reaction to this heat, these smells, these sounds and the sudden amazement of pouis trees blooming with uncanny colors—bright surreal yellows and delicate light blues as if someone has decided to create an otherworldly landscape. I feel the trickle of sweat on me, and find comfort in the cool shade—the heat seems to understand the covenant of heat and shade. I walk into family and friendships as if I have never left, and I know that I can make art here. There is still so much to write about, to chart . . . It is hard to sigh with ennui, to say I have nothing to say, I have nothing to write.

And this is what I am preaching today to the workshop of talented writers that I am teaching. They are all working on manuscripts of poetry and they are all Jamaicans writing in Jamaica. I want them to look around, to try and chart the metaphysics of this landscape and this world. Is that unfair of me? We argued yesterday of what a writer should write about. I spoke of the need to engage the landscape of Jamaica, the heart of the island, to make poems that resonate with its culture and art, and even as I spoke, I wondered whether this was a doctrinaire kind of nationalism that was limiting and myopic. So they argued with me. And it made me think of Langston Hughes’ take on this matter:

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange un-whiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid too of what he might choose (My emphasis)

This is the ideal freedom—the freedom to do whatever one wants, but the freedom to do whatever one wants. An odd construction but one that makes sense in this context. The writers, living in Jamaica and feeling quite certain that their Jamaicanness could be read as exotic and irrelevant to a non-Jamaican audience, do not have the luxury of simply saying, “Okay then, I will only publish in Jamaica.” As in many developing countries, there are, in Jamaica, very few publishing opportunities for poets. Most of the poets in the workshop have lengthy publishing credits of work that has appeared in one of the three or four daily newspapers. A few have appeared in locally produced anthologies. Most have not published outside of Jamaica.
But there is more to it than that. The model of Jamaican success has always been rooted in a strange arrogance about their sense of importance and relevance to the world. Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley had no hesitation about who should hear them—the world was their audience. Yet in the case of Marley, his art remained rooted in Jamaica.
Like Hughes, I come into this Jamaica space with a hungry eye, looking for the opportunities for art and I see them. Does one have to be away to see what has been there all along? In a sense I want the writers I am working with to start seeing the strange wildness of the blooming pouis trees.
My mother, a wonderful artist and the model of humanity and art for me, is going blind in one eye. She wonders if she will be able to paint. I told her about Monet or one of those French impressionist painters whose name begins with M, going blind and painting still, and she smiled, saying, “Yes, I will do impressionism, I will paint what I see.” There is a blindness that is needed for us to see things we have always seen in a different, and perhaps more essential light. The poet who is struggling to make a living as a teacher in high school, a university lecturer, a business woman, a lawyer—a person who is raising children, trying to make ends meet, reading the news of violence and an economy in crisis, gossiping about the adulteries and abuses and lies that spin around their lives—that poet is caught in the tyranny of reality and is understandably inclined to abandon it, to flee from it through poetry. They want to engage other worlds—more “poetic” worlds. That poet can only benefit from the muting of pseudo-blindness—a kind of engagement with the world that is askance.
The truth is that these writers in my workshop are carrying in them the art that will chart the Jamaica that is unfolding today. And I want to see this world treated with beauty and craft and to see the limits of English stretched in ways that only Jamaicans can do so. Is this nationalism run amok? Is this chauvinistic? Is this a straitjacket on the freedom to create art, to explore the universal or the cosmopolitan worlds outside of the country? I don’t think so. I do think, though that the ambitions of these poets—some of the best writing in Jamaica, should include at least an awareness of their role in shaping the poetic apprehension of their society for a new time.
In my lecture I will tell them that they have benefited from the work of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Mervyn Morris, Linton Kwesi Johnson—all poets, who, in some way, offered us a way to apprehend our worlds through poetry. They named streets, named the buildings, spoke of the political world and the domestic worlds, and they gave us a chance to see the poetic possibilities in what we always thought was mundane. In a sense they spoiled us into thinking that such work was now done and that only the interior landscapes should interest us. But this is wrong. The energy of the culture, the ancient way in which it has mutated, sucking in other influences and spitting out something “torn and new” is begging for some attention. These poets are the ones who have the exciting challenge of finding their voice while making poems that are shaped by this tyrannous present. If they don’t, who will?
It is now 4:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. A cool breeze off the Blue Mountains is drying the muggy air. The tick of rain water slipping off leaves and falling to the grass is soothing. Outside my window I can see the purest green evenness of a jelly coconut tucked in among the complex angles of coconut fronds criss-crossing around the bent trunk.
Here in Kingston, even the scent of Carib Carbolic Soap, a heavy duty red bath soap that doggedly resists sweetness, is a trigger for memories—for hard working men and women who shower in the back rooms of middle class homes, and then garden, cook, look after babies and clean. When I see a brown skinned, middle class woman buying such a soap bar, which is still sold without any packaging—the red bars sitting in an ordinary basket of the supermarket—and saying that her husband told her to buy it though she can’t stand the smell, I know at once that there is a narrative of family, class, history, gender and power being played out by that single act, that single moment. And it is a distinctly nuanced and complex Jamaican drama. Her husband is trying to recall some existence in which the intimate ablutions of the working class have intersected with his middle class life. I want to own these stories. I want these poets to own them, too. To be fortified by the excitement of telling that which has not been told yet, and by the challenge of legacy that is so much larger than them. This is the ambition of writing in Caribbean. This is the ambition that writers must have in a place where it is not easy to publish, not easy to meet other writers, not cheap to buy books.
I want you to look out with me for the work of these poets. I “out” them here as a way to challenge them and celebrate them: Niki Johnson, Mbala, Saffron, Tanya Shirley, Ann Margaret Lim, and Raymond Mair.