Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

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Shapeshifter,
time traveller
When poet Vahni Capildeo won the UK’s prestigious Forward Prize
in September 2016, it was the third year in a row that a Caribbeanborn
writer took one of the poetry world’s highest honours. For
Capildeo, it was an affirmation of a career spent subverting the idea
of simple journeys, as Andre Bagoo explains
“
When my name was announced, it
was as if time split and there was
a parallel universe in which some
other, ‘real’ poet was receiving the
award,” says Vahni Capildeo. She
is speaking about the moment last
September when she was announced as the winner of the 2016
Forward Prize for Best Collection. “Aren’t many writers afflicted
with a feeling of being not quite real?”
Time travel, parallel universes, epistemological conundrums
— it’s fitting these fall freely off the tongue of a poet of boundless
talent, skill, and imagination, whose lines mesmerise us, show
us miracles.
Capildeo was born in Trinidad in 1973 and left for Britain in
1991. Her poetry argues that both details are at once significant
and insignificant: people do not cross boundaries; they carry
worlds within. From her first book to her most recent — starting
with No Traveller Returns and right up to her Forward-winning
Measures of Expatriation — Capildeo has invited readers to reject
the idea of simple journeys. The result is a body of work that is
now gaining greater international attention. Just weeks after
winning the Forward, Capildeo’s book was also shortlisted for
the T.S. Eliot Prize, another major honour, previously won by
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
Praise has come also from critics and colleagues. “Capildeo
prods us to re-imagine how words live, and what they do to
our sense of whatever we call reality,” says Edward Baugh, the
distinguished Jamaican poet and literary scholar. And Indian
poet and editor Vivek Narayanan remarks on Capildeo’s breadth
of interests and references. “What always impresses me about
Caribbean culture and literature is its profound need and ability
to reinvent the world,” Narayanan says. “Take nothing for
granted, but taking all materials to hand. Vahni does that, but in
her own completely unique way — Dante, the Nordic myths, Old
English, Trinidadian folklore, Hindu iconology all come together
and are transformed.”
“Vahni was making verses from the time she could hardly
write,” says her mother Leila Capildeo, in an interview at the
house in Federation Park, Port of Spain, where Capildeo spent
her early years. (The very name of the residential district
evokes memories of the Caribbean’s failed flirtation with a postcolonial
political union.) Her father, Devendranath Capildeo,
was a children’s poet. Her grandfather was Simbhoonath
Capildeo, the elder brother of Rudranath Capildeo, a major
figure in T&T’s Independence-era politics. Capildeo’s uncle,
Crisen Bissoondath, married Sati Naipaul, a sister of V.S.
Naipaul, the Nobel laureate. And her cousin Neil Bissoondath
is a novelist.
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