“Footnotes” is a series of occasional blog posts giving further information about books reviewed in the CRB

The November 2013 CRB includes a review by Ishion Hutchinson of Edward Baugh’s Black Sand: New and Selected Poems. “Baugh’s brand of poetry,” writes Hutchinson, “has given the quotidian Caribbean experience, and often the unexamined Caribbean life, an exhilarating poetic presence.”

Emeritus professor of the University of the West Indies, Baugh is a leading authority on the work of Derek Walcott — and one of the best readers of Walcott’s poems your Antilles blogger has ever heard. He published the first book-length study of Walcott (Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision, 1978), edited the St Lucian Nobel laureate’s 2007 Selected Poems, and has written copiously on Walcott’s poetry and his influence on Caribbean literature.

Baugh spent much of his career at UWI’s Mona campus, where — with colleagues like Kenneth Ramchand and Mervyn Morris — he helped lay the foundations for serious scholarly consideration of West Indian literature. In particular, Baugh’s 1977 essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” has been recognised by a subsequent generation of scholars as a seminal contribution to Caribbean literary criticism.

At UWI-Mona, Baugh also served as the campus’s public orator. His addresses delivered in this role, detailing the achievements of the university’s honorary graduands, are collected in Chancellor, I Present … (1998), which you can read in part at Google Books.

As Hutchinson notes in his review, though Baugh has been writing poems for five decades, he has not been the most prolific of poets. Nonetheless, “Baugh has patiently created an important oeuvre that is indelible.” His previous books of poems, A Tale from the Rainforest (1988) and It Was the Singing (2000), share with Black Sand the quality Hutchinson describes as “the fluid way in which he moves beyond expression into comprehension, articulating with superb intimacy those echolocations outside of the verbal framework.”

Baugh is also a longtime CRB contributor — for example, reviewing Walcott’s book The Prodigal, Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver, and more recently Vahni Capildeo’s Undraining Sea. The CRB archive also includes an essay by Baugh on Frank Collymore, excerpted from his biography of the late Barbadian writer and editor (which was in turn reviewed in the CRB by John Gilmore).

“For most of my life,” Baugh said in a 2006 Caribbean Beat interview, “people knew me simply as a critic. I was writing poems, getting the odd poem published here and there, but here and abroad, except for a few people who were into poetry, people knew me as a critic.

“I always used to say, half in jest, but only half, that the thing I would most have liked to be in the world is a poet. So the fact that sometimes now people refer to me as poet first is a kind of great thrill to me.”

Listen to Edward Baugh reading several of his poems at The Poetry Archive.

douen, duende, douaine, done, dwen, duegne n A folklore character, the spirit of a child who died before baptism. Douens wear large hats, have backward-pointing feet, utter a soft hooting cry, and often lead children to wander off.

— Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, ed. Lise Winer

Announced (by no coincidence) on 31 October, All Hallows’ Eve, Douen Islands is a collaborative project by writer Andre Bagoo (author of the poetry collection Trick Vessels), graphic designer Kriston Chen, artists Rodell Warner and Brianna McCarthy, and musician Sharda Patasar. Its first manifestation is an e-book (downloadable here) of eleven poems by Bagoo, designed by Chen, and incorporating a series of brief texts by Warner (drawn from his Twitter account). Accompanying the e-book is Chen’s video adaptation of Bagoo’s poem “In Forest and Wild Skies”. Further online publications, videos, and live performances involving all five collaborators are in the works.

For many Trinidadians, douens — like other folklore characters — belong to another era. More amusing than sinister, they suggest a pre-electric time, rural life, tales to frighten children. But traditional folklore has also proved a rich resource for contemporary artists and writers. In the 1970s, artist Leroy Clarke produced a massive cycle of paintings, drawings, and poems called Douens, portraying a post-Independence society of “giddy and lost people.” A decade later, Peter Minshall’s 1988 mas band Jumbie released hordes of blank-faced spirits in the streets of Port of Spain, their empty, staring eyes suggesting a marauding hollowness all too apt in a time of political cynicism. More recently, poets James Christopher Aboud (Lagahoo Poems) and Fawzia Kane (Tantie Diablesse) and Trinidadian-Canadian novelist David Chariandy (Soucouyant) have re-imagined other supernatural folklore characters as metaphors for personal and cultural loss, the displacements of history, and the uneasiness of self-definition.

Douen Islands, whose creators describe the project as “a devious remixing of traditional Douen culture,” suggests that the old folklore stories and images remain relevant in the wired age — still offering insights into personal and collective fears. Though the poems’ voice is introspective and many of the references idiosyncratic, numerous co-options of nationalist rhetoric — such as Trinidad and Tobago’s national motto and “watchwords” — and the e-book’s (blood-)red-white-black colour scheme unsubtly indicate an allegorical intent. A prefatory note reads:

(a) Remove the straw hats. (b) Invite them inside. (c) Straighten their feet.

Invited in from the wilderness and dark, with supernatural deformities erased, the douen looks more and more like any Trinidadian of the post-Independence generation: mischievous but bewildered, uncertain of his social birthright, possibly hapless, possibly not helpless.

Soon after Douen Islands made its online debut, I asked its lead collaborators, Andre Bagoo and Kriston Chen, some questions about the project via email.

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Nicholas Laughlin: Andre, which came first, the poems or the collaborative? Had you written the pieces before you started working with your colleagues, or did they emerge from the collaboration itself?

Andre Bagoo: I entered the collaboration with a loose idea of something I wanted to express. But it was during the collaboration that the ideas crystallised and words and forms came. I had been drawn to myths surrounding the undead, such as the zombie, which has clear roots in the Caribbean. I entered the collaboration wanting to write a curse poem in the manner of Ovid’s Ibis, aimed at Trinidad and Tobago and modelled after the 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead. Then Kriston specifically raised the figure of the douen one day over coffee. From that moment came Douen Islands. The poems flowed and flowed.

NL: How exactly did this group of creative collaborators form — who or what was the catalyst?

AB: Kriston reached out to me on Tumblr after he was assigned to do a layout for my poem “The Tourist” in [the art and design e-magazine] Draconian Switch. I was struck by the rigour of his practice as a graphic designer, as well as his appreciation of — and obvious talent for — language. We met, and he asked if there was anything else I had on which we could collaborate. I suggested a zine/e-book.

That was in March [2013]. Thereafter, we had several meetings and excursions over which we began formulating. It soon became clear that we also had our sights on including an element of performance in the project down the line, and wanted even more people involved. I reached out to sitarist Sharda Patasar, whom I had never met before. We reached out to Brianna McCarthy and to Rodell Warner, both of whom we already knew. We have more in store.

Kriston Chen: “The Tourist”, if I may interject, is a brilliant poem — heavy and light at the same time. Apparently there’s thirty more pages out there somewhere. I hope to revisit it at some point. My favourite line:

Silence: the wind is not certain.
What to make of this now?

I’m a fan of Andre’s work first. As a graphic designer, it begins with words. I put great faith in good writers. Andre mentions Sharda, Brianna, and Rodell as collaborators — they’re also good writers, in their own ways. There’s an attraction to that, and of course a good concept will go a long way.

NL: Does the idea of a group of collaborators change the way you work?

AB: You could say the process of writing is not changed by collaboration. The writer must still sit down in isolation and let the words come, or find the words and forms, invoking their own processes. This is really a personal exercise which, I imagine, differs from writer to writer.

However, it is clear to me that things done during the collaboration — comments over coffee, shared outings to see films, plays, concerts, and art shows, trips to scenic trails — all begin to inform, inspire, and move the writing. If we include the process of formulating ideas and being inspired within the process of writing, then perhaps a collaboration creates a greater wealth of discourse from which to draw at the moment when the words need to materialise.

In this way, each collaboration changes the way I write, because it changes me. W.H. Auden said of collaboration, “you can only do it with people whose basic ideas you share — each can then sort of excite the other. When a collaboration works, the two people concerned become a third person, who is different from either of them in isolation.”

KC: Well said. The same applies, I think, to designers. I saw an interview recently with the musician Sting, where he describes collaboration as “surrounding yourself with confidence.” When it comes to writing, Andre is prolific and brilliant. I don’t know if he sleeps, but I do know that the words always show up. The biggest question or concern is usually, “Where do we meet for coffee?” The unspoken confidence with those you collaborate with creates possibilities and moves the work along.

NL: Traditional folklore always draws on collective anxieties, hopes, questions of being. What can the figure of the douen, the spirit as lost child, say about (or say to) contemporary Trinidad and Tobago?

AB: Like most folklore and myth, the douen figure is at once simple yet complex. The douen is the undead: the child who dies after never being baptised and who haunts the forest thereafter. It has no face, its feet are backwards, so that hunters following its tracks go in the wrong direction. The nature of the douen alone transmits complexity: it engages questions of religion, of mortality and age, of physical deformity or difference. This makes it an ideal mirror for contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.

The douen tells us about the marginalised and the abandoned, and this is the area where I wanted to give voice to something. The douen is a nightmare figure of youth, and the story of a new generation has to be told, even if that story, in some respects, is an old one. Douen Islands is about growing up in a world while coming to terms with injustice in all its forms: violence and crime, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, classism, stigmatisation. It is about moving from a place of blind rage to a place approaching knowledge.

The douen is both anodyne yet powerful — it embodies a subversive power relationship that is the key to so much. It is at first seen as monster but then made hero through love, and the real Bogey-man is left at large. I found using the folklore in this manner to be irresistible, because of how we, as Trinidadians, immediately recognise it, but also because of how it telegraphs and taps into wider collective anxieties, as you say, such as the fact that each of us is destined to die.

KC: During the course of the project, Andre had sent me an essay about folklore by Gerard Besson. It’s a great read. The douen is revealed as a vehicle for disciplining the parent, and not the child.

Duenn did not haunt children, “No, not at all, the Duenn is haunt the parent.”

“How you mean?”

“Well, she didn’t have time for the boy. She too busy wid she business. Then the night come, she ent see the boy, she gone outside, she calling calling, she standing up in the road under the street lamp, alone, everyone inside, she calling him, ‘Robie, Robie!’ She going mad with fear. The boy loose, he dead, the Duenn take him, somewhere. ‘Robie,’ she bawl, running inside, ‘Robie!’ She crying now, she can hardly breathe. ‘Robie! What you doing there? You eh hear me calling you, come here!’ She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good.”

This intrigues me — the idea of well-behaved adults. “She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good”: what a sentence. Lots of tension and vulnerability here. Why hasn’t the narrative around the douen reached further? Why are we still at straw hats and backwards feet?

NL: Do the poems draw on any particular literary inspirations or models, other than Ovid?

AB: They draw from a diverse range of materials. There are references to the love duet in Act II of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, John Donne’s “La Corona”, and Hamlet. There are also references to Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus and to Grizzly Bear’s pop single “Yet Again”. Several aesthetic forces were also operating in the background as I wrote, particularly Neval Chatelal’s rendition of “O Re Piya” from the Bollywood film Aaja Nachle, Bunji Garlin’s “Carnival Tabanca”, and the sitar music of Sharda Patasar. And I’ve also stolen from Trinidad and Tobago’s national anthem, the national watchwords, as well as common sayings in Trinidad and Tobago dialogue, which, when rendered in this context, hopefully take on new meanings.

NL: What about Leroy Clarke’s Douens?

AB: We did not have these in mind. Another collection of poems, however, was operating in the background: Lagahoo Poems, by James Aboud.

NL: Why publish the project as an e-book? How important is the online aspect?

AB: Perhaps because of the realities of the markets, we do not have many indigenous poetry book publishers. Most Caribbean writers are published by foreign publishers, which is not itself a bad thing, and which certainly has its place in relation to the important process of reaching an international audience. But I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breath of tools and its reach.

I wanted to use the internet as a forum for sharing this particular work. I wanted to do something compelling online, in a way that we might not expect, given the subject matter, or given our idea of Caribbean poetry.

NL: Kriston, how did you approach the design elements of the project?

KC: Many of the design decisions for the e-book are in keeping with those of a traditional poetry book. The poems themselves are set in a serif typeface, called Requiem, ideal for reading but also a remnant of a long history of literature as both colonial and a printed medium — lettering from the Renaissance period is the basis of these particular letterforms.

I took a few liberties, however, to push this e-book into the twenty-first century. The use of illustration (found images, photographs, typography, etc) is dangerous ground, but used heavily. It imposes imagery into the reader’s mind. And like a film adaptation that tends to be not as good as the book itself, [images] can kill it for the poet’s readers. Designers-as-authors was another break in tradition. It went way beyond the covers and interiors: from conceptualisation to editing to copywriting. This, I think, helped create an e-book that feels consistent and complete.

As for the video, again the onus was to keep it literary — not let the images get in the way of the text. This was achieved through the use of fewer, simpler, but more powerful elements: captions, sound, moon, and vintage footage (from Carnival 1932). The viewer completes the piece by engaging with all elements, but primarily the text or captions.

In terms of references, much of my aesthetic and type treatment is influenced by contemporary designers such as Peter Mendelsund, John Gall, Jason Booher, Meg Wilson — much of the Knopf/Vintage book cover department. Several spreads reference John Gall’s beautiful and clever Nabokov series (published by Vintage in the US). There’s also reference to artist Barbara Kruger’s propaganda messages. The video contains references to Jean-Luc Godard’s film Une Femme est une femme (1961), and a more contemporary version, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009).

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“We hope to attract even more collaborators,” Bagoo writes. You can get in touch with the collaborative at douenislands@gmail.com.

Hannah Lowe. Photograph courtesy Tim Ridley

Despite the swell of her belly, Hannah Lowe is perched, apparently comfortably, on a wide bench at the British Library in London. The child who is coming will bear her father’s name, she says. “It’s important for me not to lose the name, because the child won’t feel the connection to the Caribbean that I do.”

In the November/December Caribbean Beat, Melissa Richards profiles British writer Hannah Lowe, whose debut book Chick is both named for and inspired by her Jamaican father, a professional gambler. Lowe talks about her “childhood full of contradictions,” growing up “within the façade of white middle-class family life” with a mixed-race immigrant father.

“I was always having to explain him to other people,” she says, “but it wasn’t just the fact that he was black and I was white. It was the fact that he was so old. He looked like a grandfather, and often he’d just got out of bed because he’d been playing cards all night, so he was this old dishevelled man with his hair stood on end.”

The resulting questions about personal history and ethnic identity — “what is race, what does ‘black’ look like?” — are the meat of both Chick and Lowe’s forthcoming memoir (due in 2014). And Lowe herself raises fascinating questions about how we can or should define what it means to be a Caribbean writer.

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Hannah Lowe reading from Chick at the 2012 Norwich Showcase (your Antilles blogger was in the audience!):

Édouard Glissant, Martiniquan poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker, one of the Caribbean’s towering literary figures, died this morning in Paris, at the age of 82.

Described by Le Monde as “the champion of métissage and exchange” — “le chantre du métissage et de l’échange” — Glissant was a major proponent of the Antillanité movement, articulating a unique Caribbean identity created in the collisions of cultural elements from many continents in the matrix of the Antilles. He wrote: “La Caraïbe est une réalité culturelle . . . toujours ouverte sur les autres cultures” — “The Caribbean is a cultural reality . . . always open to other cultures.”

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From the hill direction a whole expanse suddenly shoves its cart into dizzying splendour
In the factories’ mill my poverty smiles over powers of the earth
In the cane scars in shins forever black
The water so often called for reddens to my caressing voice
Rebel now from irascible depths of embrace my leap into the standstill.

Like the hougans leafed out in patience
ah the sole evidence I desire is the last voyage of my lassitude among the dry leaves of a monsoon
the flowering of islands the frothy geography of islands on eviscerated seas
our hymns our brows barred from sources our feet crammed with storms . . .

— Édouard Glissant, from “Wild Reading”, trans. Betsy Wing

Earlier this week, the CRB published F.S.J. Ledgister’s review of Edward Seaga’s two-volume political memoir, My Life and Leadership, plus historian Patrick E. Bryan’s monograph Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica. Seaga, prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and leader of the opposition for a cumulative two decades, was the last member of Parliament to have entered public life before Independence. I must confess that, copy-editing Ledgister’s insightful review a few days ago, and contemplating Seaga’s sheer political tenacity, I was sorely tempted to title the piece after Prince Buster’s catchy 1967 song “Hard Man fe Dead”. I decided to err on the side of caution, and chose the less irreverent title “Last one standing”.

Also published this week: Brendan de Caires’s thorough, admiring, and rather naughty review of Lise Winer’s Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, a remarkable reference work that sets a new standard for Caribbean lexicography. For one thing, as de Caires illustrates in detail, “Winer is commendably open-minded about recording ‘all relevant words . . . pleasant or not’”. He goes on:

This level of exactitude in country matters may not be to everyone’s taste, but Winer’s open-eyed approach to language as it is actually used is central to what makes the DECTT so useful.

I think this is the most entertaining review we’ve published in the CRB for a long while, and an excellent demonstration that an intelligent and penetrating book review can and ought to be a fun read.

Finally, this week we publish as well two poems by the US-based Trinidadian poet Lauren K. Alleyne. “The Body, Given” and “Ode to the Belly” are both wry meditations on the eternal tensions between body and soul, and Alleyne is a poet I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from in the years ahead.

Mervyn Morris

Do you know those moments when nothing has happened; nothing that you can talk about — yet you feel that some tremendous change has taken place? It is like the spinning and prickling in the limbs that you can feel at night when your bones are growing; except this other kind of change is more to do with how, and what, you are able to feel and think — a sudden roar in your secret imagination, or a new fluidity in your sense of yourself and the world, whether or not you find a place to express this.

The Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris’s poem “The Pond” is not “about” some big event or theme. It is that rare thing, a poem that brings you to one of those moments you live entirely alone and that transforms you . . .

— Vahni Capildeo muses on “The Pond” for YM, a magazine for “new readers and writers of poetry,” published by the British Poetry Society.

4 a.m., posted at Vimeo

Muhammad Muwakil is one of the emerging stars of the Trinidadian poetry scene, and recent performances in other parts of the Caribbean are winning him a regional audience as well. (Your Antilles blogger was there when Muwakil brought down the house during one of the open-mike sessions at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica in 2007.) He recently collaborated with filmmaker Janine Fung on a film version of his poem “4 a.m.”, an unsparing commentary on social conditions in urban Trinidad, set in his home neighbourhood of Belmont. Beautifully shot in a palette of shadows and streetlamp amber, it captures both the insomniac atmosphere of east Port of Spain at night and the strength and anger of Muwakil’s voice.

Wayne Brown (1944–2009). Photograph courtesy Mariel Brown

The Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown — who died a year ago this week, on 15 September, 2009 — first came to widespread attention as a poet. His debut book, On the Coast (1972), won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Gregory Fellowship at the University of Leeds. His second book of poems, Voyages, appeared seventeen years later, by which time Brown was better known as a prose writer. In 1984 he began writing a column for the Trinidad Express, and over the next quarter century In Our Time appeared in several other newspapers in Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana — well over three thousand editions, or several novels’ worth of prose.

In Our Time ranged over subjects from social and political commentary to literary criticism to personal reminiscence, and even outright fiction. “I write about anything,” Brown said in 1987, and “I use the techniques of fiction in writing these pieces.” Several dozen In Our Time columns were collected in A Child of the Sea (1989) and Landscape with Heron (2000), but the vaster part of this extraordinary oeuvre remains in suspended animation, as it were, in newspaper archives and clipping files. Elegantly composed, furiously thought out, often moving, occasionally infuriating, Brown’s columns belong to an important Caribbean tradition of literary writing in the popular press, and furthermore decisively influenced a generation of younger Trinidadian writers who used the newspaper column as a literary medium of urgency and ambition.

In the mid 1990s Brown moved permanently to Jamaica, where he had lived earlier in his life, and there he became best known as an editor — of the literary pages of the Observer, of several anthologies and collections of poems by other writers, and of the short-lived online journal Caribbean Writing Today — and as a teacher and mentor. The writing workshop he ran out of his various Kingston homes developed into an important institution in the Jamaican literary scene.

This week, the CRB remembers Wayne Brown and his literary legacies. We publish, first, “Pan Session: Laventille”, a poem found among his papers after his death; as well as an essay on Brown’s life and work by Mervyn Morris, his longtime friend and fellow poet. (This piece is adapted from Morris’s introduction to the new collected edition of Brown’s poems forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press. A new collection of his prose is also in preparation.)

We also continue our special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival, with Georgia Popplewell’s review of Orpailleur, a thriller directed by Marc Barrat and set in the interior of French Guiana.

Eric Roach. Photograph courtesy Laurence Breiner

Today’s Stabroek News includes an essay by Al Creighton on the Tobagonian poet Eric Roach, one of Caribbean literature’s great tragic figures.

Born in Tobago in 1915, educated at a grammar school in Scarborough, Roach began publishing his poems in the late 1930s in local newspapers. Over the next forty years he created an important body of work, both poems and plays, and in the 1950s developed a regional audience via literary journals like Bim and Kyk-Over-Al and the BBC Caribbean Voices programme. But, as the scholar Laurence Breiner writes,

Some fear of going unnoticed haunted Roach throughout his career. He often seemed to be caught in the wrong time or the wrong place. In the 1950s, his most productive decade, he watched talented contemporaries turn away from writing poetry, or emigrate, or both: chief among them George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Cecil Herbert, and H.A. Telemaque. Committed to the Caribbean, and sure (in those days) of his talent, he worried whether poetry could survive in the Caribbean climate (social as much as meteorological).

In 1962 Roach stopped writing poems for eight years, and though his work was now included in a number of international anthologies, he appears to have struggled with a sense of futility and despair. In 1965, Roach wrote this biographical note for the British anthology Verse and Voice:

He has been a soldier, teacher, civil servant and failed writer. Born nearly fifty years ago in the tiny, little known island of Tobago where his family are peasants, Roach hoped to become a poet, but his talent for verse did not develop beyond his native dooryard, and after a few years he abandoned the writing of verse.

In 1974, in an act better remembered than any of his poems (the final irony), Roach drowned himself at Quinam Bay.

Two decades later, Roach’s collected poems were finally published, and in 2008 Breiner’s book Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry offered a sustained critical assessment of his oeuvre. The November 2006 CRB included an essay by Breiner, “Laureate of nowhere”, drawing on his research for Black Yeats, and considering the reasons for Roach’s “low visibility” among Caribbean writers:

Roach at heart always remained a man of the dooryard and the village, but as a poet he had global instincts, a hunger to be widely heard and heeded. He saw the Federation as presenting him with a resolution for the dilemma of his generation, in the form of an opportunity to vastly expand the “horizon” of his audience while staying at home on the “private hillock” of his island, rather than emigrating. If the Federation had succeeded, he would have been its national poet, with a bronze statue on the grounds of the now-vanished capital. But it failed, and Roach was suddenly the laureate of nowhere.

In our August 2008 issue, Vahni Capildeo gave a contemporary Caribbean poet’s assessment of Roach’s career, in her review of Black Yeats. Roach’s poems and his life story — the example of his dedication and his despair — continue to haunt some younger Trinidadian writers. Jennifer Rahim’s recent book Approaching Sabbaths — reviewed by Ian Dieffenthaller in the May 2010 CRB — includes a sequence of poems titled “A Return to Quinam Bay”. Rahim re-traces Roach’s final journey and meditates on the intersection of literature and history, truth and ambition:

Quinam is a bay west of the first lies
of discovery. Three hills that never were,
people never seen. There a poet swam

to sea to reverse history. My version:
invention was his one hope all along,
but its light dulled to night in him.

I write now to make all our stories go on.

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.