Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

ookshelf
Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World War
edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Nine Arches Press, 124 pp, ISBN 9781911027294)
If war songs praise bloodied heroes, then
the unsung ballads of martial engagement
point to those soldiers blotted out of
the hymnals. So it has largely, historically,
been, in Britain’s paltry recognition of the
Caribbean servicemen of the First World
War. The 1915 British West Indies Regiment,
the BWIR, enlisted roughly fifteen thousand
men across eleven battalions: many of
those men never made it home.
Who would the black Caribbean Siegfried
Sassoons and Wilfred Owens have been,
if allowed prominence to tell their own
stories? Unwritten — which assembles ten
commissioned poets and one essayist,
from the Caribbean and its diaspora —
speaks into history’s silencing void, pulling
WWI testimonies, fragments, and elegies
into contemporary verse. These poems strive not only to
describe our maligned military volunteers, but to imagine
what they might have said, and what their loved ones might
have endured. Potent among these is Guyanese-Grenadian-
British Malika Booker’s “Her Silent Wake”, which chillingly
centres a mother’s loss of her war-slain
son, a mother who seethes, “that bitch of a
stepmother England built a forest / of bones
for rats to feast on succulent black men, the
scent of her / actions rancid as hell.”
Though they speak in the main of families
and lineages long deceased, the poems
in this anthology are blisteringly, tenderly
stitched through with the personal. Take
Trinidadian Jay T. John’s stirring, powerfully
sentimental imagining of the pioneering
social worker Audrey Jeffers, “There
are days where my hands”, which names
Jeffers’s home street, summoning the
domestic anchor of “Aunt Sherry’s gallery,
where pools of / cool cotton lay draped
before us, when a pricked finger was the
only / worry of blood.”
Unwritten doesn’t wrestle the poetic crown from Wilfred
Owen or his brethren. It demonstrates, with all the resonant
urgency of a mission long past due, that black Caribbean
post-war survival needs — deserves — its own soldiers’ and
storytellers’ crowns here, too.
Theory
by Dionne Brand (Knopf Canada, 240 pp, ISBN
9780735274235)
Teoria, a graduate student
mired in the completion of
an increasingly elaborate PhD
thesis, is easily distracted from
the purity of academic purpose
by three very different, sensually
compelling women lovers. A
novel of scholarly frustration and
heartbreak hullabaloo might be
desiccated in anyone but Dionne
Brand’s hands: Theory, a genrecrumpling
philosophy of a story,
shows up the dustiest, most
terminally hidden corners of the human heart, and reveals
the aching limitations of a thinker’s intellect. Looking up
at the window of one of their lovers, Teoria nocturnally
muses, “Does she see me there, dressed in paper, dressed
in the cuts on my fingers from turning pages?” Don’t be
surprised if this sharp, erudite novel, as much thought
experiment as it is institutional critique, keeps you up late
at night with your own ponderings on unfinished romances
and languishing dissertations.
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
by Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf Press, 200 pp,
ISBN 9781555977771)
“Sometimes we must become
our own holy places, roaming
cathedrals, and memory
mausoleums,” pronounces
Edwidge Danticat. No stranger
in experiencing ultimate
loss, and writing it on the
page, the Haitian-American
novelist and essayist guides
us through the sepulchral
cloisters of mortality through
the testimonies of others.
Using the lives, deaths, and
creations of Gabriel García Márquez, Sylvia Plath, Ta-
Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, and others both perished
and present, Danticat reveals the underpinnings of our
obsession with passing on, peering into portals such as
the rise of self-penned obituaries, and the ravaging grief
left in suicide’s wake. When the author describes her own
mother’s death from cancer, her sorrowful gratitude leaks
with illuminating light.
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM