Since I was last here, Martin Mordecai, my husband of 54 years, father of David, Rachel and Daniel, Zoey’s Aba, brilliant writer and photographer, has died. (If you have not read his historical novel, Free, you absolutely need to.) I took leave from this blog, this website, to be with him as he made that last journey, one that took him the better part of six years. He departed last year on the 19th of February. Ten days before him, his friend and fellow photographer, Peter Ferguson, took his leave. After Martin, four family members made their exits, two young, and two old. As I type, we watch, wait and pray with the oldest remaining member of Martin’s family, but one.

I have walked the bereavement journey with four other women—one family member and three good friends. I saw photos of H_____ looking lovely today, a luncheon celebration I should have been at. I am behind on pancakes for brunch with P____, and I haven’t managed to get A________ on the phone, but I plan to try again soon. D____ just sent me a WhatsApp message from Jamaica. She completed her Realtor’s exam. So we begin to slip away from one another into some kind of other life, even as our common loss binds us for always.

I tell everyone I am a poor pupil at Widow School. I don’t know anyone who is good at it, and it is a course of tough lessons.

Martin and I shared a writing life. It is a terrible tragedy that he did not get a chance to write the many stories he still had in him. Jean D’Costa writes on his obituary page, “Martin’s novel Free stands as a mighty testimony to our strange Jamaican past. He is not only a brilliant story teller and magician of character and place, but he is the most honest and reliable creator of worlds that I have met in the last 50 years. (My italics) One trusts him, and he never fails his reader. He carefully, painstakingly, describes every wood splinter, every humble garment or distant voice in the world of our past as if he had lived there himself. And then he helps us to go there too. Working with this careful, patient, inspired mind was true joy.” Martin appreciated Jean, as he appreciated so many people. They all loved him back. He loved life. He loved his two callings, writing and photography, and he served them both with terrible care. He could make anything look like a symphony of light and dark. If he died with endless stories still in him, thank God he managed to create thousands of images, a vast collection that would fill many grand books.I hope in time to see his photographs in the Art Gallery of Ontario, in their collection of works by black photographers. Rachel and I, or, if I die before we manage it, Rachel, his most beloved dawta, will collect his stories into a book. I suspect he’d like it to be called, Jesus at the Door.

When one marries as we did in the middle of the last century, it is a wholehearted affair—you give it all of your body, every organ, your heart above all. I and my widow compañeras scramble around to find hearts to travel on with, grateful for the many kindnesses of friends and family. It’s a cruel game of “Hide and Seek” where every piece of heart you think you’ve got ahold of slips from your fingers with a memory. To breathe, to eat, to touch, to walk, to speak, to think are now for me the miracles—that they’ve always been. All my life I have known, but now, alone in all these doings, my trillions of cells affirm this divine prestidigitation. Each day, as I check the number of steps I have taken on my Fitbit, the conjuring is brighter…

So sit, and really look at one thing for five minutes, after you read this. It doesn’t matter what. Look at it till you meet it, until you hold the miracle…

Below is a poem that explores colourism. It comes from my fourth collection of poetry, The True Blue of Islands, published by Sandberry Press in 2005. Another poem that explores colourism, “Yellow Girl Blues,” which comes from the same collection, can be found here on Poéfrika, an amazing website run by my friend and Sesotho poet, Rethabile Masilo: https://poefrika.blogspot.ca/2017/03/yellow-girl-blues.html?m=0

Tomorrow I’ll visit a session called “Colourism: What is it? Why should We Care about It?” at Wilfrid Laurier University, part of Course RE 285 “Religion and Culture of the African Diaspora” taught by Professor Carol Duncan. Many thanks to Professor Duncan for yet another opportunity to engage with her students.

Elsie

Elsie could cuss like a sailor
rip masts too when she swept
like a storm upgrading
minute by minute trading
levels of intensity spit
shooting like sea foam from
the O of her mouth the eye
of her fury.

                     Of fourteen children
Elsie was last and lightest.
When they said she was no black,
had no fro, meagre melanin,
she don’t protest just slip
out of her blouse peel off
her vest and say “Okay: come
make we take the nipple test.”
And there they were brown crowns
resplendent on each breast.
 
“If me was white, dem would be pink.
Ink. Quink. Your belly rotten stink.
White. Black. You decent and me slack.
Hip-hip-hurray! Areolae carry the day.”
 
Elsie could cuss like a tar
Drink any tippler under any bar.
Recite Shakespeare; bring a tear
to your eye rendering Portia’s speech
to the mean moneylender from Venice:
“The quality of mercy is not strained…”
Reaching deep down for feeling
Elsie come up to make you laugh
till your sides hurt expatiating
on the nature of the selfish dirt
a leaven for the unstrained gentle
rain that droppeth down from heaven.
 
Brown Elsie could cuss like a salt
swab a deck ship invading bilge
water to hold a craft safe
let down any size anchor
haul it up with her hands
and no pulley from the blue
deep. Shin up to the topsail
unfurl a whirl of cloud
so a vessel could fly past
 
 a hurricane upgrading
minute by minute trading
levels of intensity
winding up ocean and air
thunder and fire
the very stratosphere spun
into the blackening
ire of her fury.
 
“No way I letting skin and melanin
degrees of kink in hair and booty-size
downpress the little levity that live in my
small chest, bounce in my little tits.
All that is shit. I eating pills enough.”
 
Same time she lifting up a little miss
eyes beryl green, hair streaming
down her back. “ See. She is mine
and Jesus know how she come so
because her Pa’s pink like a pig –
look how the pikni black!”

Exactly 4 weeks have gone since Nicole Dennis-Benn, Diana McCaulay and I kicked off Calabash 2016, reading in the first set, “Cooking with Gas”. Nicole read from her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun; Diana read from her YA novel, Gone to Drift, and I read from my debut novel, Red Jacket. After that came an amazing night and two extraordinary days… I record now, albeit a little late, my big-big thank you to the citizens of Treasure Beach, the fab audience, and especially the team that engineers the Calabash Affair! Kwame Dawes, Justine Henzell & the Calabash Company are first class prestidigitators, controlling weather, music, venue, line-up and the lit-loving massive. Big Ups! Nuff clapping and stamping and cheering and wild carrying on!

On Friday, 2 June, the audience of 2500 folks is gathered under a gigantic complex of tents next to the sea. The mood is warm, expectant, convivial… Not carnival excitement. Not snooty international literary event. It’s a Jamaican family affair, country Jamaican, and more especially Treasure Beach Jamaican, a place that has a kind of stripped down, essential goodness, a bare bones beauty to it. I am sitting beside Diana McCaulay, who tells me that it may well rain, and heavily, for the afternoon has been overcast, the skies gunmetal, broody. This is part of the festival mystery. Treasure Beach is in arid St Elizabeth, but ask anybody and they will tell you – anytime there’s Calabash, there’s rain! Diana recounts an occasion when,  as she was waiting to read, a cascade of water plunged from the edge of the tent above her, just as the set was to start. The waters tumbled terribly and then cleared up quick-quick, so things could begin as scheduled.

This is my first Calabash, so I don’t know the runnings. (The organizers have asked me more than once before, and I almost came a couple years ago, and then discovered a prior commitment.) But, as I firmly believe, “Nothing before its time!” and Calabash 2016 is it. Before we go on, Justine teases that I didn’t get the memo about the colours. I blink, stupidly. It makes sense when I see the photos…

Kwame Dawes, Host and Curator of Calabash 2016, wrote afterwards to say that mine was “a homecoming of a reading”. In many ways, it was indeed that. I come back to Jamaica often enough, and have read at home as recently as in 2014, when I launched my fifth collection of poetry, Subversive Sonnets, with the help of friends, Earl St Hope McKenzie and Jean Small. But at Calabash this year, family surround me: my two sisters, Mary Cresser and Betty Wilson, Betty’s husband, Don, both formerly of UWI, Mona, my nephew, Julian Cresser, currently of the History Department at Mona, my niece, Karin Wilson-Edmonds, as well as old friends like Victor Chang, Esther Figueroa, Ifeona Fulani, Lixie Brodber (whose writing we will celebrate on the last day of the Festival), Velma Pollard and Jean Small.

Plus, there are other family and friends, some of whom husband, Martin, and I have not seen in many years. Justine Henzell,Co-Founder and Producer of Calabash, and her mother, Sally, are special people in that group of long-time-mi-neva-see-yu folks, Sally being one of 19 poets in Jamaica Woman, the first ever anthology of poetry by Jamaican women, which Poet Laureate Mervyn Morris – also in Treasure Beach with his wife, Helen – and I co-edited and published in 1980 (Jamaica) and again in 1985 (UK). Sally is effervescent as ever, a joy to hug after so long. And of course, Mr Calabash self, Kwame Dawes, though I am sad to have missed his better half, Lorna. And I am finally going to share the stage with my cousin, Wayne Armond, who has been a part of the Calabash music scene since ever, and to meet his wife, Mitsy, and his now grown-up children after much too long.

A big treat was finally seeing in the flesh virtual friends like young St Lucian poet, Vladimir Lucien, 2015 BOCAS overall prizewinner, and Kei Miller, Jamaican poet, fiction writer, blogger, essayist, and fellow tweep, and Marina Salandy-Brown, BOCAS Lit Fest Founder and Festival Director. (We enjoyed opening night dinner with Marina whom we were meeting for the first time, and who shared tales of Cairo times, as well as old paseros, Prof Carolyn Cooper and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Also got a warm greeting on opening night from Booker Prize winner, Marlon James, who would eventually read three fab excerpts from A Brief History of Seven Killings, and had a long chat with social activist and theatre person, Sheila Graham.)

And so the Bash was off to a super start…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I’m back in my likl gyaden!

I tweeted a couple of days ago that the maples clearly know something is up. In five years of living here, I’ve never seen so many little maple seedlings. They’re in the grass, in the garden beds, in the flowerpots – everywhere they can get a root in. I’d said it reminded me of how amoebas encyst and split in dry times. At that point I hadn’t read the weather predictions for the summer. It turns out that heat is hell bent upon us, temperatures turned up, with ideal weather for forest fires like the one in Fort McMurray. A vast beast leaping across the western Canadian landscape, it has now crossed from Alberta into Saskatchewan. Folks in its path must be terrified. God help them!

Nothing to do with global warming, of course, just as last year’s being the hottest year on record means… Well, it seems not to mean anything to a lot of people. Still, all growing things round here seem to be battening down for something, for it’s not just the maples. There’s another tree with seedlings all over everything. I thought it was an oak, but there aren’t any acorns on the roots, so oak seedlings they are not. And the dandelions are gone wild… but they’re wild beasts anyway, dents de lion, as my friend Sonia Chin first pointed out to me. Lion’s teeth! They’ve been taking over in this neck of the woods for some time. My primitive solution to the dandelion scourge is to behead them. Each dandelion decapitated represents fifty future dandelions nipped in the bud. At least that’s what I tell myself. I’ll get around to digging them out eventually, but I’ve got to get the garden going first.

It is exhilarating to be back busy about plants and grasses and lawns, even though it’s so dry. I grieve for some things. I lost every fern this winter, never mind it was the mildest of the last few years. Perhaps they missed the snow water? You can see a couple behind the campanulas in this photo.

 

There was that small grove of green ones in one corner of the garden, and some silver ones in a long bed by the fence with our neighbour to the north. Ah well. A grove of forget-me-nots has replaced the green ones, sprung out of nowhere, and they are a pretty comfort.

So, back to my tentative gardening efforts, for I wasn’t much of a gardener in the tropics and am very much a novice here in the north. I do know one or two things by now. Bark nuggets are a great investment. They really keep the weeds out. Something interesting, though… The bark nuggets of 2016 aren’t like those of a mere two years ago. They are chunky rather than flat and they look less like bark. I wonder why? I also suspect that the same actuaries who worked out the savings on a pair of jeans if it has five loops instead of seven, have worked out the savings over millions of bags of nuggets if each contains a couple large chunks of wood, as in board, lumber. I have had the opportunity of studying bag after bag of nuggets, for my solution to the intimidating problem of the front ‘lawn’ has been to make a huge newspaper+bark bed out of most of it. (See the one with the campanulas above, which I made with great success three years ago). It is this close scrutiny that has revealed at least one chunk of board in every bag of bark!

As for the rest of the lawn, I shall band my belly and try my best to create a rain garden that will make use of the water from the rainspout on that side of the house. Forget-me-nots and rudbeckia, both of which thrive here, are apparently good plants for a rain garden. I shall start with them.

Rain barrels are also a great investment. I have just bought our third, and in this city, it’s possible to apply for a rebate on one’s storm water charge if one has two or more rain barrels – a bigger one if one also has a rain garden! We do have to find a better way to get the water to flow out when it’s down to the bottom of the barrel, though, perhaps by mounting the barrels on a platform.

Today I worked hard at the “English garden” that occupies a large oval in our backyard and is ringed with a flagstone path. I struggled with the grasses. A warning again about grasses! Some of them won’t stay in place and you will struggle with them once they commence walking about. So know your grass before you sweep it up and take it home.

Sadly, the delphiniums didn’t make it back in quantity this year. Here they are making a splendid show a couple years ago.

Two sturdy plants made it through, so I’ve planted new ones, though they will take time to establish themselves. They were my pride and joy! A bit of possibly important serendipity: the seeds and young shoots of delphiniums are poisonous. They can kill if ingested.

Now I shall have to make a decision on the grape vine, for which we don’t have an arbour. We can’t control its mad excursions with the curved trellises we’ve tried to train it onto, and we’ve never reaped grapes, not even two summers ago when it was covered with bunches, which we bagged with brown paper bags. The critters ended up getting them all. For that reason, my tomatoes are growing inside this summer!

More in due course from this apprentice gardener! Meanwhile, happy gardening!

I used to blog, when the going was good, as often as one post a day. I’m not sure how I did it. I don’t write slowly but I do go over and over what I write. I suppose I feel that one can never be too cautious, or too picky. I’m not just talking of mechanics here, though they are important to get right. It’s the relevance of ideas, the clarity of thought. It’s how thoroughly the subject, whatever it is, has been addressed. So I’m having another go at the question of whether writing poetry is hard, not because I want to take back anything that I’ve said. Rather, having borrowed that remarkable insight about poetry’s interrogative intent from Dionne Brand, and turned it from the reader to the poet, I’ve hardly done it justice.

Writing poetry surely interrogates the poet in the general ways that I suggest in Is Writing Poetry Hard (1)? However, it also cross-examines her in the course of her writing every poem, and as in every good inquiry, the questions are specific to the poem. And that is, literally, the rub, the erosive drip-drip-drip of queries, the near drowning demands of waterboarding. Every word set down is tested for what it means, what it implies, its near, nearer and farthest resonances, its satisfying the purposes of thought and wit and fancy, by itself and in combination with its neighbours.

It’s as well that poetry is seductive, an enchantment that begins in nursery rhymes, hides in plain sight in hymns and chants, pop songs and musicals and pantomimes, sustains itself in song and story. It thrives in oral language. Jamaican patwa, built on the scaffolding of the King James Bible, driven by the substrate structures of West African dialects, shot through with Irish, Welsh and Scots sounds and sayings, is an ideal medium for the poetic message. (For information, a dialect is a form of language specific to a place or group of people. It is not a sub-standard form of language and so not a pejorative term.)

Well and good, but what does that have to do with the matter at hand? Absolutely everything, for the Q&A between poet and poem is conducted in a language that the poet learns in all the aforesaid ways, as well as others, peculiar to him, related to his experience of life and language overall. Perhaps he is bi-lingual or tri-lingual, so he knows all kinds of lore, all kinds of literatures. And out of those come his vast store, his poetic lexicon, his imaginative grammar, and his metaphoric suprasegmentals.

I think a poet submits to these ongoing interrogations because they are question and answer, summons and response, a conversation between self and word. I say something when I put words down, and the words come back at me, with an echo, approbation, suggestion, objection or question…The feedback loop keeps going, and like an energetic child determined to play, the poem leads the poet on until he tires and puts the lines he’s written aside for another time. Either that, or it keeps pulling the poet till he achieves a first draft, at which point the he says to the pushy poem: “Enough. ‘Another time/ we’ll do that take/ again.’”  (A quote from “No Take,” a poem of mine in Journey Poem, my first collection.)

When they get together again, of course, poet and poem, the whole exercise starts over. Perhaps it is why poets often say a poem is never finished. What has any writer ever said of any subject to exhaust it? Which poet provides the answers to all the questions about a grain of sand – or the world in it?

… poetry interrogates the reader… “Dionne Brand in Conversation.” Interview by Christian Olbey (2002)

I’d say writing poetry is a hard thing, yes.

In an oft-quoted statement in a 2002 interview with Christian Olbey, Dionne Brand tells Olbey “poetry interrogates the reader” while “the reader interrogates prose”. If poetry interrogates the reader, it grills the poet much more. It is in part that cross-examination that for me, at any rate, makes writing poems such a tough business.

The probing proceeds at all kinds of levels. Do you, the poet, have wit enough? Wisdom enough? Watchfulness enough? Words enough? Do you have craft enough? Stamina enough? Patience enough? Daring enough to bare your body – breasts, belly, booty of images – to the casual stare of any old reader, pinching your ass on any old passing page? Will you choose to share, or, like Ken Ingram, Jamaican librarian-poet, take a manuscript of maybe your best writing to the grave?

Those are just some of the queries. Then there’s Emily Dickinson, writing nearly two thousand poems, all but a dozen or so unpublished in her life, and raising a question about the necessity of audience, a question that Louise Bennett would appreciate. The Hon Miss Lou would no doubt laugh, allowing it was Providence alone that made Dennis Scott, Mervyn Morris, Rex Nettleford and Ferdie Sangster come along to help arrange an answer for her.

And there are the terrible queries, every time, of whether what one is trying to say is worth it.

Fine… Enough with the smoke and mirrors, you say. Is the actual writing difficult? The answer depends on the individual poet, of course, but it’s only ever happened a couple times in my life that a poem came out, ten perfect fingers and toes, yelling at the top of its lungs. Mostly they are preemies, needing an incubator and lots of TLC over days, weeks, even months… There are the ‘rules’ of course. Pare it down, for every word must work. Cut ‘the’s’ and ‘and’s’ and ‘then’s’. Watch the adjectives, adverbs, -ing words. But rules cannot a poem make.

One of the reasons I sometimes write in traditional forms is that they help me mind the baby. I can’t entirely explain how that works, but, in the case of metre, the rhythm reassures me, and I now know enough about the music to mash it up when I need to. The rest of the time we hold hands and walk together, and it’s comforting. Similarly, I’ll reach for a rhyme and it will lead me to an image, or some other kind of word play, or drag my imagination in a new direction. At which time I am at a crossroads, with decisions to make. Follow the rhyme? See where it’s going, but keep a version of things as they are, so I can come back if I decide that I’ve strayed? Crash on through the brush, prepared to throw the whole thing up if it doesn’t work?

This last is perhaps the greatest challenge. I recall a poem I once saw Surinamese poet Robin Dobru perform, counselling that sometimes the poet must give a poem to the wastepaper basket. He’s right. One must be prepared to do that. And not find it hard.

 

 

 

Thanks to Carol Narcisse for the question, a perfect one for Poetry Day.

If there is no rhythm, there is no God. – Derek Walcott

A sad day it was when learning by rote went out of fashion – after all, acquiring native and other languages is one long, elaborate, ongoing process of memorizing – words, structures, idioms. Then there’s math and periodic tables, definitions, user instructions, recipes, important addresses and telephone numbers. I am always amazed when my 16-digit phone card number instructs my fingertips as I dial my sister in Jamaica, overriding worries that I’ve forgotten it. Long gone – I hope long gone – is the concern of educators who thought we’d be damaged by being obliged to learn things by heart. Memorizing is here to stay. In addition to the above, we’ve learned too many proverbs, songs, hymns, chants, and wise sayings that way…

Sorry. Rhyme often creeps upon me. That’s just as well, for into this brief discourse I wish to slide the matters of the two Rs, rhyme and rhythm. I’m a big fan of both, perhaps because I write poetry for children as well as the adult stuff. They love the music of those Rs as utterly as they love jokes, which I throw into the mix when the Muse of Hilarity is about. See “Toes Knows” here http://www.pamelamordecai.com/hello-world/#more-1 Rhyme and rhythm are mnemonic devices, as any parent or teacher of reading, or anyone who’s ever watched Sesame Street knows. It’s worth learning a poem by heart for there’s no power like that of letting your internal or external voice recall and rehearse words with the measure of moans and mirth those two Rs can conjure.

But alas, there’s the danger of doggerel once a poet gets into words metred and rhymed! Thus, not every poem profiling the two Rs is a poem that deserves to be committed to memory. Rhyming is a heady but dangerous business, and if you are not Keats or Walcott orJane King, you should tiptoe around end rhymes. Run-on lines are saviours, as also slant rhyme, and rhymes in places other-than-the-end-of-lines. As for measure, it is there to be crossed, fractured, all shook up for the poem’s purpose.

The truth is these two Rs are playmates. If you frolic with them long enough they can lead you into the ways of meaning, and in the last analysis, what makes the poem is the depth and breadth of the subject that rhyme and rhythm are servicing; it is how these Rs transmit image and word play; it is how they convey the meat that metaphor explores. So Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Brook” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-brook-2/ is not as fine a poem as Edward Thomas’s “The Brook” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-brook-6/. “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/trees/, though much beloved, wont bear comparison with Housman’s, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now.” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/loveliest-of-trees-the-cherry-now/ William Shakespeare and William Blake, Philip Larkin, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Louise Bennett and Derek Walcott show us what poems can be, even if one is working within the most traditional constraints.

The truth is also that what seems to be free verse is often hiding metre in plain view. Nose through Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Envoy to Palestine”and find the iambics.  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/247308  Ignore the line breaks and scan the lines as they run on. Hear the half rhymes – wheat and beneath (full rhymes for a creole speaker like me), coat and lute, and the complete rhyme of dead and ahead. It’s not that the poet doesn’t know he’s deploying these tools, for he’s too fine a craftsman. It’s just that he mayn’t be such a free versifier as we like to think.

The Rs live in language. It’s tough to escape them. So let’s learn poems by heart so we can taste them as and when we like.

“One can argue that, to earn mainstream cred, [black] artists typically had to be culturally inert, pandering to the masses with racial broad strokes at the expense of artistic integrity. Alexis has risen above, delving into universal themes and cultural commonalities that are enriched by his racial makeup and illuminated though (sic) his methodology to prose.” So says Ryan B. Patrick in a recent piece entitled “André Alexis and the changing narrative of popular black literature” http://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/shared-values/andre-alexis-and-the-changing-narrative-of-popular-black-literature

In the concluding comments in a recent post entitled “Publishers vs People of Colour Who Write” https://www.dundurn.com/news/Publishers-vs-People-Colour-Who-Write I remark, “It’s hard to resist conforming with ‘mainstream’ values, aesthetic and otherwise, when that conformity opens doors.” It’s not just a problem for People of Colour. (Hereafter POC.) We all know very well that some writers choose marketability over deep truth. Writers, like other people, have got to eat.

Whereas I agree with much of what Ryan has to say about the difficulties writers of colour face, I also know, as an old editor, that generalities are sensible cover, especially when one qualifies them carefully. When one proceeds to specifics, it’s a different calabash of crabs. So, though I do not know what Ryan Patrick means by André Alexis’s “methodology to prose” and I’d disagree with his describing Alexis’s work – or for that matter the writing of Marlon James or Ta-Nehisi Coates, who also figure in his post – as ‘popular’, my ignorance and our disagreement about terms needn’t constitute a problem. I must also say that I admire André Alexis’s work, and that I enjoyed Fifteen Dogs. (I’ve just finished Childhood on my second attempt and will reserve judgment on that book.)

But if man going bring dis kind o argument – “[black] artists typically had to be culturally inert, pandering to the masses” – no mind if him is Marlon James (who just now make a similar comment) or Ryan Patrick, him must come better dan dis.

I note Patrick’s careful, “One can argue…” Indeed. One can argue that Donald Trump would make a fine president of the United States, or that the earth moves round the sun – and persuasively, if one has wit enough. “One can argue…” can also shape shift, Anansi-like. Is one making this argument? And if one is, as seems to be the case, upon what basis? Who and how many are these black writers? African? Black British? Caribbean? I’d be glad if any of these had that much of a look-in to publishing!

I’m left to think they must be Black American or Black Canadian writers. But it doesn’t really matter. Whoever Ryan Patrick is flinging stone at (perhaps in the wake of Marlon James’s comment?), he needs to name at least some of those he indicts for selling out. That there may be many in some respects would be a good thing. It would mean writers of colour are getting published. But if one is going to praise and name (as in André Alexis’s case), one should, in fairness, damn and name. It needn’t be a long list; just a couple examples would firm up Ryan Patrick’s case.

It’s true that for some a publishing contract with a big house – or any contract at all – may be a temptation to desert the narrow path of honest insight. Others, though, like Ezekel Alan , self-publish to answer their responsibilities as griots in this millennium. The irony is that Ryan Patrick is making this argument in the midst of self-searching by the publishing industry, which at all its levels and in all its permutations, includes a miniscule proportion of POC in both Europe and North America, and, as it is now admitting, systematically whites out these writers.

That said many black authors accept that, even if their work is good enough to warrant their becoming “authors of note”, they will likely have to wait till they are dead for that recognition. In this, they follow writers of all colours through the ages. As Lydia Davis says of Lucia Berlin, “I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top…sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be…” The struggle meantime is for all the people to hear their stories told, to see their lives and experiences thoughtfully and skilfully explored, their sorrows mourned and their triumphs celebrated. Black writers will write bad books, mediocre books, and fine books, just as all other writers do. They are perhaps the most to be forgiven for selling out. The sad truth is that for a young person to merely see the name and photo of a black author on a book is still eminent cause for rejoicing.

An aspiring novelist from the Caribbean who grew up in England recently asked me about ‘appropriation of voice’. Her novel takes place in both these locations, places where people speak a variety of Englishes, or dialects of that larger dialect, English, for the word applies to a national, as well as regional or local language. She didn’t feel confident in accurately representing all these language varieties, since only some were native to her. It’s a concern that I appreciate, since, for one thing, it irritates me enormously when I come across writing purporting to represent Jamaica Talk and it no sound like no patwa me know.

So how to avoid insulting people by writing their languages inaccurately?

I pointed her to Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, which is full of Jamaican language that doesn’t hardly stumble — well, maybe in one likl place, but is ongle one likl one dat me did find inna de whole entire book. So is how him manage dat and him no talk patwa, tall tall? (I could have written ‘t all ‘t all, a question of orthography that we’ll come back to.)

I took to the Internet to find out if there was a place where Neil Gaiman explained, but there wasn’t one that I could find. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out, though, that he probably wrote down what he wished his Jamdown characters to say in the best Jamaican he could come up with, then sent it to a native speaker or two to fix anything that wasn’t authentic Jamaica Talk.

That’s one solution for an author creating characters who speak a language that he/she doesn’t speak fluently – or at all – and so doesn’t feel confident putting down on the page. Another, perhaps faster way would be for the author to invite one or more folks who are native speakers of any or all of the languages used in the text, ask him/them to listen as the text is read to them, and, in consultation with the native speakers, make any necessary adjustments.

A time intensive method that involves lots of invention but can work well, is to comb the Internet for posts, documents, articles and books (creative, linguistic, historical, etc.), and using these resources, cobble together dialogue, narrative, or both, out of written speech as represented therein by native speakers, always being careful of copyright issues. In fact, if one is creating characters for a story in any language set in the past, this approach is pretty much the only one possible. So, for example, to discover eighteenth century spoken English, one might forage in Defoe and Fielding, while to ferret out nineteenth century English as spoken by folks of various classes, one might search Dickens and Thackeray. One might research monographs by linguists and historians as well, of course, but I would go first to the writers with the hope of getting inspired as well as informed.

A further, and challenging problem that arises, regardless of whether the author is a native speaker or is working with ‘strange’ languages, is that of orthography. Representing the sound of a language is not so easy. The most accurate means, which would be to use a phonetic alphabet, is often not helpful, since only the initiated are able to understand these writing systems. Many people complain about Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment for that reason. Delighted at the idea of a Bible, or portion of it, in patwa, they are distressed to find that they can’t cipher it out!

I tackled that problem when writing my most recent collection of poetry, de book of Mary, published by Mawenzi House in November of last year. The book is entirely in Jamaican Creole, and is intended for audiences of creole speakers, as well as those who don’t speak patwa. Jamaican writer friends like Mervyn Morris, who has used patwa in his own work and also edited Louise Bennett’s poetry, as well as Jean D’Costa, Olive Senior and Velma Pollard, were generous with advice, and I eventually arrived at a method that was workable. There’s a note on language in de book of Mary, but I’ll share more of the process by which I arrived at the method I used, and the rationale for my choices, in my next post.

Whatever the means, it is worth taking the time to get down dialects, patwas, local and regional forms of speech in a respectful and reasonably accurate manner. In addition to which, meeting the challenge is inevitably instructive for the writer himself or herself…

 

Wishing you all the best for 2016, as I note, with a sigh that winter is back. Half a foot of snow at the window, and a driveway that needs clearing once a day. We listened one winter to a wonderful poem about a man who died from a heart attack while shovelling snow as we drove back from visiting our daughter and her family in the US. I seem to think we were driving past Albany at the time. After that, it seemed sensible to pay someone to clear the snow, thereby creating employment and heading off heart attacks – in that situation, at least.

It’s hard to believe that we are already two weeks into 2016. I don’t make resolutions, not usually, or at least I haven’t made them for so long, I’ve forgotten if ever I did. What I will try to do more of, though, are the things I’ve been concentrating on for a while, like being more mindful; hooking up more regularly with the Great Spirit, the cosmic Christ and his lovely Mum, and the holy ancestors; being thankful for family and friends, and for the earth, food, shelter, freedom of expression and worship, and a system of socialized medicine that more or less works. And the new Canadian government that 3 million young voters turned out at the polls to give to Canada! Thanks too for the spirit of generosity that has impelled so many Canadian communities to embrace refugees.

Some utterly unexpected things have occurred since my last post in August 2015. (A mere three posts in all of 2015! It won’t do!) I freely and joyfully admit that Red Jacket’s shortlisting for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize was utterly unexpected. http://www.therecord.com/news-story/5939178-kitchener-author-national-finalist/ I was very happy to have the book published, flattered that it was one of the first three to be produced by Dundurn’s literary imprint, Thomas Allen Publishers, glad to work with Diane Young to born it, as we ‘d say in JA, and prepared to work hard to promote it. Dundurn offers its authors a small subsidy to help with launches but leaves the authors to organize and arrange. I want to say belated but no less hearty thanks to Ben McNally Books on Bay Street in downtown Toronto, Wordsworth Books in Waterloo, Ontario and Coles Bookstore in Corner Brook, Newfoundland for hosting launches. Thanks too to Claire Grady Smith, my personal publicist at the time, and to the many friends and family who pitched in to promote and make them possible and turned out to in dire weather (all three!) to make them a success.

However, I’ll be forever indebted to Aislinn Hunter, Shani Mootoo and Richard Wagamese, the jurors for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. http://writerstrust.com/Awards/Rogers-Writers–Trust-Fiction-Prize/2015-Finalists/Jury.aspx That they defiantly selected the work of an apprentice novelist writing in unfamiliar Englishes and largely ignored by the bigtimers in the print media restored my faith in juries of my peers. My thanks go also to Shelagh Rogers whom I was truly delighted to meet at the Writers’ Trust Awards and privileged to talk to after that on The Next Chapter. Our conversation was a very special one. Listen out for it on Monday, January 18th at one o’clock in the afternoon on CBC One.

And to the amazing Janet Somerville, maven of books and all thing literary, I have only this to say: “Good fren better dan pocket money!” Mwah! Mwah!

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Last year, for the first time since 2001 I had two books published. Come November, Mawenzi House released de book of Mary, which the OAC had funded a couple years ago, and which I had been working on for a while. (I had long ago finished with Red Jacket, and set it aside ’till someone bought it’.) de book of Mary was launched in November at Beit Zeitoun – again in bad weather. Here I am signing a copy for my friend and faithful supporter these many years, Marlene Bourdon King. I look forward to readings in 2016 and will keep you updated on the “News and Events” page. Stay warm! Bless!