Redemption Ground

by Lorna Goodison

  The ancestors of the majority of Jamaican people were forcibly brought to the island on big slave ships. They were captured in Africa and transported in appalling and inhumane conditions and brought as units of unpaid labour for the island’s sugar plantations, and for this reason slavery has supplied the ongoing metaphor for almost all worthwhile Jamaican creative endeavours. From the Maroons – including Nanny of the Maroons about whom I write in many of my poems – who waged relentless resistance against plantation slavery, to Rastafarians who took up the fight against ‘Babylon’, that is, the British colonial system, Jamaican culture continually references slavery.

  Jamaican musicians like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Burning Spear, Culture, Ibo Cooper of Third World, Tony Rebel, Steel Pulse, Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley, Chronnixx and Queen Ifrica, all have at the heart of their project this focus on what Rastafarians call ‘Truth and Right.’ I think that this concern for justice is born out of an island mentality; you are there in this cut-off place, you might not be there of your own volition, but you are surrounded by the sea, marooned, so to speak, and you are going to have to stay there and actively try to work it out. I believe that is what I am also trying to do in my work.

  Being surrounded by the sea also means being constantly aware of this great force that cannot be controlled by humans. Life on an island is always punctuated by reports of people being lost to the sea. The sea is always there in the background as a force both benign and dangerous, it feeds you and it kills you and it is all around you.

  6

  Daffodil-bashing

  OKAY, SO EVERY writer who grew up under British colonial rule has had something to say about one of the most famous poems ever written, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ aka ‘The Daffodils’. And, of course, that body of musings has been read by some as constituting nothing less than a personal attack upon the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth. I have a clear and slightly frightening memory of one of the grand dames of English literature launching into a fierce scolding of a group of writers from the British Commonwealth at a conference hosted in London. Her broadside went something like this: ‘THIS DAFFODIL-BASHING MUST END! YOU KNOW NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT WILLIAM WORDSWORTH!’

  To say that we knew nothing at all about William Wordsworth was deeply condescending; and to yell at us as if we were small children simply underscored why so many writers and artists at that gathering were of the opinion that the sound colonial educations we received did not take our own opinions as thinking, feeling human beings into account. ‘The Daffodils’ merely symbolised that kind of imperial insensitivity: it was the one poem that every single person in the British Commonwealth had been taught, and it was about a flower that most of us had never actually seen.

  But the nanny-like scolding of that British woman writer, who as I recall was partial to carrying handbags that looked as though they had been passed on to her by the Queen, set me to thinking, what exactly did I know about William Wordsworth? So, over the years I have made it my business to find out about this poet whose work has had such a powerful influence on the lives of so many people all over the world. After much reading and three visits to the Lake District, including a reading of my own poetry at Dove Cottage in 2000, I must say that there are things which I found out that have made me feel way more sympathetic to Wordsworth than I did back in the days when I needed to question why I was taught to privilege his poem about daffodils above all other poems about flowers.

  This is not going to be any long defence of a poet who clearly needs no defending from the likes of me but, first of all, Wordsworth was orphaned at a very early age and he was boarded out. As a young man, he went travelling to France where he fathered a child, and he seemed to suffer from great guilt about this all through his life. He lived in rented houses. One time he had a disagreement with his landlord (or landlady) and he and his family were worried that they’d be put out of their house. His little daughter died, his son died. His beloved brother died at sea, he spoke funny, and, when he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, he declined because he did not want to have to leave the country to go to the big city (perhaps he was conscious of his Cumbrian accent, which sounds at times like Jamaican speech with that broad ‘a’ like in ‘waaata’), where he’d have to play at being sophisticated. What I am saying is, he had his fair share of hard knocks. And he did not personally command the colonial authorities to force-feed us his poems.

  He wrote poems about homeless people, people on the margins of society, like leech-gatherers and gypsies, and a magnificent poem about a Black woman exiled from France. He wrote a poem titled ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ that many ordinary Jamaican people were also made to memorise in primary school, and that may, in a strange way, have helped to anchor some of them when they went as immigrants to Britain. I have heard tell of immigrants who, at their earliest opportunity, made their way into the city of London to stand on Westminster Bridge and recite that poem, and by so doing they were able to feel briefly connected to a place in which they often felt frightened, lonely and alienated.

  I’m personally giving him a break from now on.

  7

  The groom

  BY THE TIME I was about seven or eight years old I had memorised quite a few songs and poems. I believe that I recited my first poem in public when I went with my mother to a wedding. This was the same wedding where the groom asked me to sit with him and pretend that I was his little sister.

  The groom was seated by himself on a straight-backed chair at the far end of a verandah where guests were gathering at about 7.30 one Saturday morning.

  A morning wedding, not held in a church, a ceremony performed not by a minister but by a justice of the peace, a bride who wore a short dress with a veil that did not cover her face. Even a seven-year-old child knew something was not usual about that.

  ‘Behave,’ my mother had said. ‘Sit there and behave.’ And then she’d disappeared into the bedroom to help ready the bride for her entrance.

  ‘Hello,’ said the groom as I walked by him on a reconnaissance mission to see if there were any children my age at this wedding that I could play with.

  ‘Hello, sir.’

  ‘Guess what? I have a sister who is just about your age.’ ‘Where is your sister? Is she here?’

  ‘No, I wish she was, she is in St Lucia where I’m from.’

  The groom sang his words more than spoke them.

  ‘May I see your doll? My little sister has a doll’s house; I made it for her.’

  I’d looked up at the groom when he said that. You could tell he was tall even though he was sitting down. He had a bony, handsome face and he was sweating hard although it was a cool December morning. He kept mopping his face with a blue handkerchief that matched his tie.

  I showed him the doll. It was medium-sized with dark brown hair and amber-coloured glass eyes; the doll stared straight ahead when handed over to the groom, who admired her dress, which was a matching version of the yellow taffeta dress I was wearing.

  ‘This is a really nice doll. Did you make her dress yourself?

  ‘No, my mother made my dress,’ I said, fanning out the pleats in my skirt. ‘And she made the dolly dress too.’

  ‘I help my little sister to dress her dolls sometimes, and sometimes I help her to put them to sleep.’

  ‘In the dolly house that you made for her?’

  ‘Yes. Could you do something for me?’

  ‘I don’t know, what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Just please hold my hand for a bit. I’m nervous. I don’t really know anyone here. Maybe you could just pretend you’re my little sister?’

  ‘Alright.’

  And I took a seat beside him in one of the chairs set out around the edge of the verandah and let him fold my small hand with its chewed seven-year-old nails into his large left hand that was sweaty and shaking.

  ‘How come nobody in your family came from St Lucia?’

  ‘It’s too far, and t
here wasn’t enough time. Let me show you how far.’

  The groom took a pen and a sheet of paper on which some words were written, from inside the breast pocket of his jacket. He turned the paper over, and on the blank side he drew an arc, he then filled in the islands, naming them as he drew them. He started with Jamaica, which was near Cuba, then he filled in Haiti and kept drawing a lot of smaller islands all the way down to the bottom of the paper where he said Trinidad and Tobago is located close to Venezuela. Then he showed me St Lucia, where he was from, and finally he drew in tiny Barbados off by itself, almost off the right-hand side of the paper, and he explained that there were no other islands after Barbados. He then said something I’ve never forgotten: ‘The next stop after Barbados is, guess where?’

  ‘I don’t know I am not good at geography.’

  ‘That’s okay, I’m a teacher, I’ll tell you. The next stop is Africa!’

  Then he explained how it had taken days and nights to travel from St Lucia to Jamaica by boat.

  After the groom had drawn the first map of the West Indies I’d ever seen, we sat there in silence while I thought about sailing to Africa from Barbados. Then one of the bride’s many brothers came over to the groom and said in a gruff way, ‘Your time now.’

  The groom gave my hand a slight squeeze, turned and looked me full in the face and whispered, ‘Thank you.’

  Then he got up and walked with the bride’s brother along the length of the verandah out on to the front lawn, over to where a small table draped with a crocheted cloth had been set up under a mango tree. There was a vase of lilies and a bible set out on the table and it was there, at this al fresco altar, when the bride had been led forth from her room wearing a short dress and shoulder-length veil, that my mother later described as a cocktail length gown of off-white guipure lace with a fingertip veil, that the wedding ceremony was performed.

  At the reception there were many speeches, but as the groom had nobody there to speak up for him, I asked my mother if I could recite a poem. I did not tell her that I now considered myself the groom’s little sister, but I stepped forward and recited Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ which I’d been made to memorise at All Saints School:

  Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

  awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

  And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

  Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

  An angel writing in a book of gold:—

  Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold…

  The groom stood up, and with a big smile thanked me for those ‘lovely words’, then he took the creased paper on which he had drawn the map of the West Indies from inside his breast pocket, and read the words he’d written about promising to take care of his beautiful bride and reassuring her family that he would do everything in his power to make her happy in their new home in St Lucia.

  Years later, I overheard her mother telling someone that the marriage had not lasted. The bride and groom had gone back to St Lucia to live, but the bride had been miserable because those ‘small island’ people there had been so hostile to her. She’d left the marriage and taken her child with her, travelling from St Lucia back to Jamaica on a big new ship named the Federal Palm, one of two given by Canada to the West Indies Federation to help facilitate freedom of movement between the islands.

  8

  Bush your yard

  THE DRIVER OF the tiny white van stopped and offered me a lift as I made my way across the shopping plaza towards the taxi stand. As soon as I had managed to climb in and wedge my body sideways in the narrow, shallow shelf of a backseat, she exchanged a knowing smile with the older woman seated next to her in the passenger seat. The older woman turned to me and said, ‘You are going to live long, we were just talking about you.’

  Hints. Learn to take hints, to read signs. Sometimes they are just there, right up in your face; sometimes people even tell you straight; if you choose not to believe them, then you have nobody but yourself to blame.

  I’d read this in a book: say you are a houseplant, and that you are kept indoors in a small clay pot. You are watered enough, given just enough light to do your plant duty, but your roots have grown so much that they are straining against the bottom and the sides of the pot. You have gone as far as you can go as a houseplant. The only thing to be done then, is for someone to take you outside, break the clay pot (very painful) shake off your roots and plant you in an open space where you just might, given enough encouragement from rain and sunshine, grow into a gorgeous flowering tree.

  They dropped me off at my gate, and the driver and her passenger sped off, no doubt immediately resuming their ‘susu’ (gossip) about my latest personal ‘autoclaps’, which is what Jamaicans call misfortune and tragedy.

  I noticed that the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation had sent a work crew to cut down the overgrowth in the open lot next door. Everyone on the street had been calling them to report that the lot was becoming a health hazard, a breeding ground for mosquitoes, vermin and criminals. Now that the KSAC had finally come and bushed the lot, the owner would receive a bill in the mail.

  The KSAC crew had chopped down everything in the open lot except the tree where the silver patoo lived.

  Another thing that I’d read somewhere: when you hear the ‘patoo’ (owl) call your name you will die.

  I’d been standing by the gate feeling sad and sorry for myself after the little white van drove off. With tears in my eyes I gazed over at the open lot, to see the patoo staring at me between the large heart-shaped leaves of the Bauhinia variegata, aka the poor man’s (and woman’s) orchid, also known as the mountain ebony, or camel’s foot tree.

  Me: ‘My life is a joke, they are laughing at me because I have tried to build some sort of life for myself and I’ve utterly failed again. Just like the time before, and the time before that, and all the times before… What about you? Are you going to hoot and laugh at me too? Hoot and mock and call, call my name?’

  Of course, the patoo said nothing. Not a ‘too-whit to-who’ in that gargling way of owls. It just saucer-eyed me.

  I went inside and made my will. A short will.

  That night I stood by the fence again. This time the owl spoke:

  Patoo: ‘Bush your yard.’

  Me: ‘What?’

  Patoo: ‘Bush your yard. Bush your yard. Bush your…’

  Me: ‘Alright, alright, I’ll do it. Just don’t call my name, please.’

  I wrote my old life a letter giving it notice. I put a stamp of a flowering tree on it and posted it between the pages of a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems. The poem it faced was ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord if I contend’:

  Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

  With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

  Disappointment all I endeavour end?

  Wert Thou mine enemy, O Thou my friend,

  How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

  Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

  Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

  Sir, life upon thy cause. See banks and brakes

  Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

  With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

  Them; birds build – but not I build; no but strain,

  Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

  Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

  As if the letter was prostrating itself before the poem, just as I was prostrating myself on the floor of my room calling over and over to the Rainsource to direct some rain to my roots.

  ‘Only after you bush your yard,’ hooted patoo.

  I heard somewhere that when sea captains have to turn massive ocean liners, they have to turn and turn the wheel for some time before the ship re-positions itself and begins to head in the right direction. During this process the ship is also l
iable to go badly off course.

  More about bushing that yard. Some seemingly healthy plants are going to go right along with the rank weeds when you bush your yard.

  So bush bush. Bush here, there it all goes. Weed and flowering bush and peppermint, right along with cow itch and cerasee.

  No, I can’t come to breakfast or lunch or tea or dinner.

  No, I don’t want to talk on the telephone because you will be sifting my carefree chatter for kernels of foolishness to pop to your posse as soon as you hang up the phone.

  No, I have no opinion on that matter because in the past I had a habit of thinking out loud, and many is the time that my half-digested reasonings have provided you with proof that they stopped providing Jamaicans with a good colonial education at exactly 6.45 one Monday morning; the same exact morning that I first went to school.

  Nope, I’m no longer providing the meat for you to dine out on. Not the meat, not the seasoning. From now on I will confine my reasoning to my writing. Who knows, with me gone, your sharp-fanged dinner guests might even turn to chaw chawing your flesh. That’s it, friends – not again – show done. Yard bushed.

  ‘What will I be left with?’ I asked patoo.

  ‘Wait and see. Wait and see. Wait and see.’

  I did not have to wait long. One morning I woke up early with the final line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ on my mind. I reached for the notebook I’d taken to keeping on the bedside table, and taking the last line as the title, I wrote:

  ‘Mine O thou lord of life, send my roots rain’

  For I have been planted long

  in a sere dry place,

  watered only occasionally,

  with odd overflows

  from a passing cloud’s face.