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.

During the CRB’s break in publication last year, your Antilles blogger put his head together with two writer friends — Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan — and started a modest little publishing project, the literary and art journal Town. Each issue contains just a few short pieces of writing, poems mostly, and two or three images. Town appears at irregular intervals — roughly, every two or three months — in two formats. We print simple broadside editions, and post them in public locations — on walls, lampposts, inside bookshops, etc. — and each issue also appears online, where readers can download PDFs of the broadsides to make their own physical copies. Town is rooted in Port of Spain, but international in scope: the four issues we’ve published so far have included writers from five continents.

The latest issue, our fourth, is published this week. It features poets from Jamaica, Hungary, Belarus, and Britain — Ishion Hutchinson, Agnes Lehoczky, Valzhyna Mort, and John Whale — and images by a Vincentian artist, Holly Bynoe. Antilles readers in Port of Spain can keep an eye out for the broadsides appearing randomly around the city, and others further afield can find this issue here.

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.