The Leaf in His Ear

Left, the golden leaf bears from his ear.
At eighteen, Bushman fighting to control diamonds
in his glass head. The waters of the river
swirl by.

I and I Rastaman, with knotty India hair, has long ago ceased.
The good Lord swallowed him up.
Into Guiana forests. North-west.
Dogs bark and howl.
In this first of May day, the Almighty is rain,
voices, wind in banana suckers.

The poem that lends its title to A Leaf in His Ear, the collected poems of Mahadai Das, exemplifies what her publisher calls the “oblique, gnomic” style of her later writing. Das, who died in 2003 at the tragically early age of forty-eight, published three collections of poems and did not manage to complete her fourth. “There is no way Mahadai Das’s work can ever be other than an unfinished project,” writes Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press. “Readers need to be trusted to see what is absolutely essential and fully accomplished in her work.” A Leaf in His Ear, edited by the Guyanese scholar Denise De Caires Narain Gurnah, assembles the poems from Das’s three previous books with forty-two uncollected poems ranging from her whole career. This is a book I’ve been looking forward to for the better part of a decade. I’m thrilled to have it in my hands at last, and a full review will appear soon in the CRB.

De Caires Narain Gurnah writes:

The poems collected here are characterised by a restless determination and energy as well as by unexpected and startling imagery. Amidst the air of sorrow that permeates many of these poems, there is a sharp wit and a keenly reflexive intellect at work sifting through the joys, disappointments, frustrations, and pain of a life lived through the fervour of nationalism and the bitter realities of independence in Guyana under Burnham and the mass migrations that followed . . . The trajectory her work charts from nationalism to disillusionment is not uncommon amongst Caribbean poets; what is distinctive about Das’s oeuvre is that this shift is so dramatically and decisively mapped. This, along with the space (I am tempted to say “jangling”) dissonance of her poetic voice and the intensity of the work, make hers a powerful and unique contribution to Caribbean poetry.

You can follow that “trajactory . . . from nationalism to disillusionment” even in the titles of Das’s three previous books. I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976) includes the much-anthologised “They Came in Ships”, memorialising the Caribbean’s Indian immigrants. My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) suggests a determined turning inward, a phase of reflection. Bones (1988) explores even deeper privacies, or more private depths. Illness during the final decade of her life made writing difficult, and the handful of strange, startling poems that end this volume have been lost to us for too long.

Read two more of Mahadai Das’s later poems in the February 2010 issue of Town.

Edgar Mittelholzer

For the past thirty years Mittelholzer disappeared totally, his books obtainable only second hand, and his reputation solidified as at best being that of a literary ancestor, a pot-boiling writer obsessed with sex and race-mixing and given to right-wing, authoritarian views . . .

— At the Caribbean Literary Salon blog, Peepal Tree Press founder Jeremy Poynting writes about returning Edgar Mittelholzer to print and the importance of reconsidering the work of this writer “of immense literary ambition and imagination”:

There is his fascination with musical form as analogous to the form of the novel and his idiosyncratic take on a number of the devices of modernist fiction. There is his perception that the confrontations manifest in early nineteenth century writing (between the optimism of the rationalist project, the gothic sensibility of darkness and disorder and the romantic discovery of truth to inner feeling) were pertinent to Caribbean societies in the process of making themselves after the sleep of colonialism. And with this seriousness went a compulsive urgency to tell stories.

(For more on Peepal Tree’s Caribbean Modern Classics series, see this interview with Poynting in the May 2010 CRB.)

Self-portrait by Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, stenciled in an old novel; part of his Adjie Gilas installation. Photograph by Christopher Cozier

This week’s additions to the current issue of the CRB look south and north at a fascinating emerging artist and a major player in Caribbean publishing.

“A place to stand” is a portfolio of images from a recent project by the Surinamese artist Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, accompanied by an essay written by your own Antilles blogger. Ramsamoedj’s Adjie Gilas was created for Paramaribo SPAN, an exhibition of recent work by Surinamese and Dutch artists that opened in Paramaribo in February 2010. Christopher Cozier, artist and SPAN co-curator, also wrote a note about Adjie Gilas published on the project’s website last October. And one of Ramsamoedj’s self-portraits — a recurring motif in his work — was featured in the February 2010 issue of Town, the poetry-and-art broadside magazine co-edited by Vahni Capildeo, Anu Lakhan, and (once again) your Antilles blogger.

Peepal Tree Press, based in Leeds, has grown from its very modest foundation in 1986 to become arguably the leading publisher of Caribbean fiction and poetry, with dozens of new titles each year and a long and increasingly distinguished backlist. That makes Peepal Tree’s founder, publisher, and chief editor Jeremy Poynting one of the key people influencing the direction and development of contemporary Caribbean literature. “Writing worth keeping alive” is a conversation with Poynting about the state of Caribbean literary publishing and the Caribbean literary landscape, and in particular about the press’s new Caribbean Modern Classics series, which aims to bring an ambitious number of inaccessible but significant books back into print. “As a publisher and editor I’m very much in favour of contemporary writers being aware of where they’ve come from,” Poynting says.

I felt that readers were being deprived of good books, and that societies need a sense of their recent past. The Caribbean novel is still by far the best window on how Caribbean people have led their lives.