I began to wonder too if giving a hurricane a human name is necessarily a good idea. Anyone who has lived through a Hazel or a Gilbert or a Charlie must acknowledge that no human power is faintly equal to the primal force and might of a hurricane. Maybe we should just concede supremacy to hurricanes and give them numbers, or, if we insist on giving them human names, at least call them after great warriors like Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis or Nanny of the Maroons.
Strangely enough, the loss of most of my material possessions after Gilbert passed through freed me to take up opportunities to work and eventually live outside of Jamaica, and for this mixed blessing I will be always grateful. I was not in Jamaica for Hurricane Dean, but my husband and I must have made twenty telephone calls to my son, to my siblings, to friends who all mercifully came through unharmed. ‘The eye missed us,’ they said, ‘or it would have been much worse … but remember, the hurricane season isn’t over yet.’
The people of the Caribbean have had to come to terms with the fact that the mnemonic about September remember, October all over does not hold any more. We’ve also had to concede that a woman hurricane – Katrina – can do more damage than any man hurricane, and that there is nothing like a hurricane, named after a man or a woman, to remind you of your own human frailty, to make you grateful when the terrible eye happens to look away from you and your loved ones.
15
For Derek Walcott
I OWE DEREK. He told me I was a poet and I knew I could believe him because nobody who knew him can truthfully say they ever heard him pay a false compliment to an aspiring writer.
In fact, the opposite was true: his standards were so exacting and his critiques so uncompromising, and he set the bar for poetry so high, that everyone coming after him will have to do – as old time Jamaicans say — ‘their endeavour best’. He was the best.
He was a poet-playwright who lived for poetry, and he was born into a community that seemed to have been waiting for his coming, because his gifts were whole-heartedly embraced by St Lucians from the time he first published his verse as a schoolboy. He reciprocated by writing his people into literature. He never tired of praising St Lucia, the Helen of the Caribbean, and because he was proud of being a Caribbean man he exalted and lamented all things Caribbean: our wretched history, our perplexing present, our abiding beauty.
Derek was all about beauty. The entire body of his work can be read as a deep and wide engagement with beauty in all its manifestations.
He made ordinary St Lucian fishermen the subject of great myths.
He gave a simple Black woman sitting on a bus in Castries earrings of good gold – he stipulated that it had to be good gold – and likened her to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. He called her Beauty, and he declared that Beauty is the light of the world.
And Derek’s poems are a constant source of enlightenment, wonder and delight. No modern poet ever handled the English language with more authority, skill and mastery, but he was also a very playful poet and I often engage in a game with myself in which I try to spot some of the many joyful little ‘signatures’ with which he marked his work.
I like his deft deployment of citrus fruit like lemons and tangerines to stimulate the sight, smell, touch and taste senses of the reader. I treasure his outrageous puns: a figment of the imagination, the banana of the mind – people from the eastern Caribbean call bananas ‘figs’. My husband, Ted Chamberlin, who brokered the deal that got Derek’s papers for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and who drove said papers from Boston to Toronto for twelve straight hours with only brief stops for fear one draft of a poem be lost, always says that his favourite pun in all of English literature is ‘An adamant Eve’. I admire Derek’s bad jokes. O, how we will miss his outrageous loud-laugh jokes, but when the phrase ‘the light of the world’ comes up in his poems as a quotation, as a title, in English or in Latin, ‘lux mundi’, I always feel as if he wants me to bow my head in prayer.
If I’d seen him one more time, I’d intended to ask him if he thought that by writing so much about the light of the world he was doing his part in keeping encroaching darkness at bay, but I know he’d never answer a question like that, he’d expect me to figure it out for myself, and to do my part in keeping the light project going.
He was my friend. He was famously difficult; but he could also be amazingly considerate and sensitive. He was blessed with the love and devotion of extraordinary women like Margaret, and for the last half of his life the amazing Sigrid. He loved family. Anyone who ever saw him in the company of his children, Peter, Anna and Lizzie, and grandchildren could see that he held them close with a fierce and all-protecting ‘hoops of steel’ love.
He gave me my first creative writing lesson, and to this day I tend to look at some poems, if not through his eyes, with the awareness that he might be looking over my shoulder. I already miss him. In the over fifty years that I knew him, he gave me some of the best advice anyone has ever given me about poetry, and about life. He once insisted that I go with him and Sigrid to a gathering in Atlanta to meet Josef Brodsky. He introduced me to the great Russian by saying, ‘Josef meet Lorna. She’s a poet.’ I still feel obliged to try to live up to that introduction. I miss him already. I will always miss him.
16
Native(s) with the warmth
AS MY COUSIN Joan Moran lay dying in a hospital bed in Calgary, Alberta in the summer of the year 2001, I would sometimes fly from Toronto, where I’d moved the year before, to sit by her bedside. If she was well enough, we’d tell each other jokes and stories as we’d done ever since we were small girls, and we would remember the good old days when we were teenagers and mad over Elvis Presley.
When she came up from Lucea, Hanover to spend summer holidays with us in Kingston, my cousin Joan and I would always go to Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre, and our joy would be complete if there happened to be an Elvis Presley movie showing, like Jailhouse Rock or Blue Hawaii or King Creole. We bought magazines like Photoplay that carried stories about Elvis, his life in the army, his marriage to Priscilla, and we’d sing along to his songs when they came on the radio. When Joan went back to Lucea we would write to each other, and she once wrote me a letter that described how she had been swooning over an Elvis Presley song playing on the radio when our Aunt Cleodine, who was a stern model of Victorian propriety, declared, ‘I am sick and tired of your stupid giggling behaviour over this man Willess Bessley!’
My one consolation is that I now laugh at that joke with my cousin Myrna, Joan’s sister, who looked after Joan in the last days of her life with amazing loving kindness and tender mercies, while at the same time she was taking care of her mother, my beloved Aunt Ann who died, maybe of a broken heart, a year after losing Joan who was her youngest child. I just want to put on record here that Myrna is a kind of saint.
My visits with Joan in the hospital are now all a blur and I still tear up at the thought that I won’t see my beautiful cousin ever again on this earth.
When she wasn’t up to chatting and making jokes I’d sit by Joan’s bed and read out loud to her, sometimes from the Book of Common Prayer – my mother’s people are big on The Book of Common Prayer – perhaps even more so than the Bible, except for the psalms. Number 139 which begins, ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me,’ was Joan’s psalm of choice.
But my cousin also liked me to read poetry, especially the poetry of John Keats, and one of the things she willed to me was her book of Keats’s poems and letters with her notes in the margins. In her elegant handwriting, in dark green ink, on a narrow strip of light green notepaper she wrote:
Keats is the Romantic poet who looks outward –
to grasp the true reality of the human situation.
He is the most detached of the poets –
he sees the importance of the distanced perspective.
And then she wrote:
Negative capability – the ability to step outside himsel
f.
One of Joan’s very favourite John Keats poems was ‘What the Thrush Said’:
O Thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth…
‘We are from Jamaica, we are natives with the warmth,’ my cousin and I would joke; and I’d say, ‘[I] Fret not after knowledge, for I have none.’ And after that she would sometimes just fall asleep smiling.
17
A vulgar upstart with ‘no right to aspire to poetry’
A BRITISH CRITIC once said that about John Keats. It is safe to say that his judgment was as accurate as that of the music teacher who informed Ray Charles that he could not sing. But I’ve always been fascinated by the phrase: ‘with no right to aspire to poetry.’
I recently heard of an academic who vehemently expressed the opinion that only the learned have the right to express their views on the poetry of John Keats, a poet whose work received some pretty savage reviews from critics in his time, and who, as I understand it, never used to be considered a ‘difficult poet’, like Gerard Manley Hopkins or John Milton. Difficult poet he may not be, but the Cockney Keats is possibly one of the most beloved of poets, and he is the one to whom many people feel directly connected. Most people who love Keats’s poetry have at least one poem of his that they experience ‘on the pulse’, a poem that they feel speaks to them directly.
My experience with Keats began at the all-girls school I attended in Jamaica where I once had the distinction of collecting seventeen demerits during the course of a single term. Demerits were handed out for various infractions from insubordination to ‘daydreaming’, and I am certain-sure that I must have collected more demerits for ‘daydreaming’ than any other student who ever passed through the gates of that school. Twinned, in pairs. Coupled, in couplets. And whether they were given for ‘inattentiveness’, ‘carelessness’ or if the truth be told ‘just not fitting in’, I was always being punished for the flights of imagination that would often set my mind to wandering away from the classroom, past the netball court, across the playing fields, and up into the top branches of one of the many Lignum vitae trees covered in mauve blossoms that used to grow on the grounds. Once up there I’d sit and stare from a higher vantage point than my viewless seat in the back of the classroom. Almost invariably I would be called down from my daydreamer’s perch in the Lignum vitae tree by a teacher awarding me a demerit or two. It was in my A level English literature paper that I first encountered the image of another daydreamer in ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats.
When I read it through, I just sat there and cried. I didn’t know why, but I now believe that, as Rastafarians say, I ‘sight up’, for there in autumn, personified as a daydreaming voluptuary, I saw myself.
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
I immediately identified with this poet who reassured me that dreamers are of value too.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too…
Many years later when I found myself teaching an Introduction to Poetry course at the University of Michigan, I had a student whose parents (both academics) were going through a bitter divorce. She came to my office one day to tell me that the only way that she had been able to survive what for her had been a devastating experience was by papering a wall in her bedroom with the John Keats poems we had read and examined in class. My student said she often woke up late at night just to read and be sustained by Keats’s medicinal words. Her favourite poem was ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’.
Keats must be the poet you get up and read in the middle of the night, because I too have risen at 3 and 4am, struggled up out of deep sleep just to read his great Odes. I did this many times after my cousin’s death and during the twelve years that it took me to write From Harvey River, a memoir of my mother and her people. Something in me wanted to write a praise song to my people, my blood relations as well as the people of Jamaica, but the writing of that book proved to be a long and difficult process. I experienced numerous false starts and setbacks before the very beautiful Ellen Seligman – Peace be upon her – at McClelland and Stewart accepted the manuscript and said, ‘I want to be the one who brings this book home.’ And God Bless her, she did. But during those years of uncertainty as to whether the book would ever become a book, I thought much about potential not being realised, about the frustration of what Keats called, in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘winning near the goal’. But I also just drew great comfort and consolation from reading Keats’s poems mainly because John Keats is all about truth and beauty. He, more than any other writer, has caused me to think long and hard about the love of what is true and beautiful, and how the Creator of all things seen and unseen, who bestows such gifts, is obviously totally impartial, because some of the most unlikely people have been given this gift.
But Keats is the one who wrote that a great poet has no personality. It took just such a writer to be able to rise up and fly with the song of a nightingale for eight exquisite stanzas. A writer whose sympathetic imagination could completely identify with the most beautiful and faithful of exiles, the widow Ruth who refused to abandon her own widowed mother-in-law and followed her instead to Bethlehem where their impoverished circumstances found her gleaning in a foreign field, where she heard the song of the nightingale:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn…
I have, on occasion, been reduced to tears while reading those words in a winter classroom in blessed Ann Arbor where for over twenty years I found a home at the University of Michigan, in a supportive community of people like Bob Weisbuch, Lemuel Johnson, Lincoln Faller, Sidonie Smith, Michael Schoenfeldt, George Bornstein, Laurence Goldstein, Tish O’Dowd, Thomas Toon, Nick Delbanco, Linda Gregerson, Keith Taylor, Doug Trevor, Paul Barron, Michael Byers, Marion Johnson, John Whittier-Ferguson, Theresa Tinkle, Eileen Pollack, James Jackson, Lester Monts, Michael Awkward, Evans Young, Derek Collins, Tiya Miles, Frieda Ekotto, Elizabeth James, Arlene Kizer, the two people I think of as my Ann Arbor family – Kate and Ed West – and all the others at the University of Michigan who are true lovers of poetry.
I believe that ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is quite possibly the best poem that has ever been written by anybody. It is a poem with universal appeal, for who has not heard the song of a bird and wanted to rise up and fly away with it, leaving behind life’s weariness, fever and fret? To fly so high that your ordinary eyesight is of no help and you to have to be piloted by your other senses.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows.
I believe that this guessing at the sweet in the state of ‘embalmed darkness,’ is a way of describing faith in a fresh and moving way; and there is no one more qualified to speak on this subject than that fine young man who had to endure so much suffering and loss during his own short lifetime.
In 2013 I was fortunate enough to take part in a poetry reading at Keats House in London that was hosted by Judith Chern
aik to celebrate thirty years of Poems on the Underground. I kept hoping all the time I was there that Keats, who was big on the supernatural, would show himself to me in some way, and I guess he did, because it was a truly beautiful evening.
Keats, like Ray Charles and Bob Marley and Mahalia Jackson and John Dunkley, came ‘native with the warmth’, and they were all in their own way vulgar upstarts with no right to aspire to poetry and music and painting. Which is why, whosoever will, without permission from Babylon’s gatekeepers, can profit from the great riches they have brought forth, like the leaves of the tree of life.
‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all,’ wrote the sweet boy about the writing of poetry for the benefit of all lovers of truth and beauty – including and especially my dear departed cousin Joan Moran – everywhere.
18
For Lee Jenkins – Cork
IN MY POEM ‘Guinea Woman’ (p.30) there is a sailor whose ship sailed without him from Lucea Harbour. The sailor was named George O’Brian Wilson; he was my maternal great grandfather, and he was an Irishman. He was probably Scots-Irish, because he named my grandmother Margaret Aberdeen Wilson.
The Jump Ship Irishman
Redemption Ground Page 8