Caribbean Beat — November/December 2021 (#167)

closeup
In the
light of
language
Few Caribbean poets have enjoyed critical
acclaim as sudden and early as St Luciaborn
Canisia Lubrin. Her sophomore
book The Dyzgraphxst has won a slew
of awards, but, as Shivanee Ramlochan
learns, Lubrin’s concern is not with the
spotlight of fame, but with the luminous
possibilities of language itself
Photography courtesy Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin’s literary star isn’t merely on the rise. It’s
embedded, twinkling, in the firmament. In the past few months,
she’s won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,
the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, and a 2021 Windham-Campbell
Prize in Poetry — you might imagine glittering achievements
are now par for Lubrin’s poetic course. Yet accolades are the
least of what we discuss in our Zoom interview: instead, Lubrin tells me about
her earliest songs.
“In St Lucia, as a child, the first stirrings of language came to me in my
grandmother’s folktales, stories, and songs,” she says. “I look back and see
the markings of poetry in my life, on that small island.” Nothing has ever
been miniature about the imagination of St Lucia, Lubrin’s birthplace and
physical home till she emigrated to Canada as a teenager for education. The
countryside, where she grew up, was replete with culture: folk music, rural
theatre troupes, her mother’s storied trip to Dominica for an acting gig. These
were glowing hallmarks of Lubrin’s life in language, too.
They resided in her spirit, she says, while she devoured the plays of Derek
Walcott in high school — though, she reflects with an arch smile, she can’t recall
ever learning a single Walcott poem in those classrooms. Instead, Ti-Jean and
His Brothers straddled Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Sam Selvon’s A Brighter
Sun. When Lubrin learned that English literature would be summarily struck
from the academic offerings after form three, owing to a staffing deficit, she
was disconsolate. Literature, she knew then, was
something she needed to do.
Writing, reading, feasting on language were her
St Lucian rituals. She laughs as she summons a
memory conjured by her sister during a pandemic
chat: an image of five-year-old Canisia, lying on her
stomach, legs kicked up behind her, utterly rapt in
the pages of a massive set of newly bought encyclopaedias.
“Was I reading every word?” she muses
out loud, her eyes gleaming with the past vision of
her younger self. “Perhaps not, but I was marvelling,
in those encyclopaedias, at what a world we have.”
Others, as the years progressed, would come to
marvel at her: a form three teacher held Lubrin’s
composition on “The Day After the Storm” aloft,
running through the hallways effervescing with joy
at what she had written. “My goodness. You wrote
this? You did this? You have to keep writing. You did
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