Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

Hayley Madden for The Poetry Society
Capildeo studied first at Dunross Prep School (where a school
magazine published some of her early poems) then at St Joseph’s
Convent in Port of Spain. “I was very eager to learn, and I wasn’t
getting pushed,” she says. “That can be quite frustrating as a child.
I was envious of my brother Kavi, who was at St Mary’s College.
He was under a lot of pressure there, getting pushed.”
She would later read English language and literature at
Oxford University, where she was involved in a serious car
accident in March 1994. On her way to hand in a Shakespeare
essay, she was knocked over and suffered head injuries. But
she survived — and thrived. (She got a first.) Capildeo later
pursued a DPhil in Old Norse on a Rhodes scholarship, seeing
parallels between medieval Scandinavia and its colonies, and
modern-day regions with asymmetrical power relations with
a “mainland” territory. After graduating, Capildeo became a
research assistant at the Oxford English Dictionary, delving
deep into the roots of language.
Capildeo’s books remind us that words inhabit the present,
manifest the past, and are deployed in poems that are, by
definition, open to future readers. In these feats of timetravel,
language is our home.
“She liked to sing, she did a lot of music, piano, classical
guitar,” says her mother Leila, a former national scholar who
also writes. “It came to the point where she could just take up
an instrument and play it. Except the violin. I couldn’t find a
teacher for that.”
Something of this virtuosity is apparent in Capildeo’s poetry,
particularly her prose poems. They implicitly argue that the
idea of writing a poem halfway across the page is relatively new.
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