(Poui, Number 7, December 2005, J.Bryce, H.Simmons-McDonald, M. McWatt (eds.); Dept. of Language, Linguistics and Literature, UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados. 114 p)
You will not get any better criticism of the work published in Poui Number 7, (December 2005), than the volume’s own Editorial Preface. In this extremely helpful introduction the editors of the Cave Hill Literary Annual declare that “as a literary journal, part of Poui’s role will always be the celebration of creativity for its own sake, but diversity of expression is its lifeblood.” This issue welcomes “verbal wit and gentle satire, the asking of ‘difficult’ questions and writing that looks at the world with an ‘askance.'”
The journal is edited by Jane Bryce (prose writer, critic of film and literature), Hazel Simmons-McDonald (poet, linguist, anthologist and Dean of Faculty) and Mark McWatt (poet, fiction writer, critic, anthologist) and published by the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature of UWI, Cave Hill. In earlier years it seemed to be largely the output of both the practical/academic courses and the summer workshop in Creative Writing run on the campus.
However, if that perception was ever accurate, the journal has outgrown it, as evidenced by the editors’ preface and the contents of Number 7 as well as recent issues. Of 24 contributors to this volume (No. 7), three have been students in the undergraduate courses and three in the summer workshops. Well beyond that reach, the contributors have come from various countries and linguistic backgrounds around the Caribbean region and include writers of considerable talent.
Moreover, the editorial policy of “creativity for its own sake” is remarkably evident in the selections. As the editors tell us, there are “themes of blindness, breakdown and destitution, (alternating) with lyrical invocations to the orishas, hymns of praise for the survivors of disasters – the flooding in Gonaives, hurricanes Frances and Ivan – songs of love to the sea and stories of migration … and humour.”
Among the outstanding features of Poui 7 is the “tension between celebration and the darker side of the human psyche” as hinted at by the editors. This may be found in some of the fiction, particularly in those that belong to what may be described as a fairly newish development. They are pieces of short prose which, although they began to appear several years ago, have been slow to establish themselves as a settled genre past the experimental stages. The Poui 7 selections include some of these, very economically composed, sometimes as sparse and taut as well-honed verse, although they are deliberately prose, not the kind of ‘prose poems’ of earlier vintage. They have managed to contain whole experiences in very brief stories that make complete statements.
Feelings, situations are condensed, delicately and sensitively handled in concise pieces of work.
The best examples of these treat variations on the theme of love, a prevalent preoccupation in this volume, with elements of betrayal, estrangement and testing experiences. Deanne Kennedy’s Between the Two of Us is an excellent example of this in which a musing father confronts the arrival of a baby. His wife had “promised it wouldn’t change anything, except bond us even closer”, but he now feels supplanted by the infant who now lies between them “in the centre of the nest once built for two”. He fears/suspects the new bond between mother and baby excludes him, barring him from the woman with whom he started out hotly in love.
Similarly, Crossroads by Renuka Maraj explores the waning of a lesbian relationship in the mourning of a married woman at the departure of her female lover. Again, it might well have been the arrival of a baby born to the heroine and her husband that might have caused the lover to feel somewhat estranged. Like Kennedy, Maraj handles this with considerable subtlety and effective implicit suggestion.
This freshness of form in short prose is also strong in Cracks in My Mother’s Heels by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming in which an eight year-old girl is very sensitive to the perceived implications as she witnesses her mother having an affair. The plot threatens to be predictable and ordinary, but is well saved by the metaphor/symbol of the cracks observed by the girl in her mother’s heels. She associates them with imperfection, a mythical culture trait caused by her mother’s unfaithfulness of which the child disapproves.
While these work better and generate more excitement than most of the longer short stories such as Kevin White’s Seeing Raymond about a blind man’s uncertainty that he could be normal and fall in love, they are simply a different type when seen against others of the best prose writing in Poui 7 over which they can have nothing. The reference here is to Country by Philip Nanton and Jane Bryce’s In the House of Wonders – A Visit to Zanzibar.
Nanton’s Country is an extremely crafty piece full of ironies about identity. Set in Bridgetown, Barbados, it has a strong sense of place lacking in most others and is carried by a very realistic journey on a Bajan ‘ZR’ mini-bus. Nanton begins with a few casual references to tokens of religion and culture that the driver, whom everyone calls “Rasta,” has about him.
These turn out to be very important questions raised about identity and whether the driver is truly Rastafari or is just trying to relate to all his passengers of different persuasions. Ironically, ‘Rasta’ proves to be steadfast in his orientation, confidently uninfluenced by the popular tastes of passengers who disapprove of his ‘un-Rastaly’ country and western music. The narrator skillfully adjusts the control of sympathy, turning it in ‘Rasta’s’ favour and against his antagonists, passengers who betray their own lack of consciousness and identity.
Bryce’s travel account of a visit to Zanzibar is autobiographical. Like Nanton she raises questions of identity, but is more profound because of the greater depth and complexity of the enquiry. This is so because Bryce, although at times mistaken for British, is a white Swahili-speaking African, a being that sounds contradictory in the Caribbean with its history and upbringing of white colonialism. She is aware of all this and provides in this piece a thorough search of her consciousness as one born and grown up in what is now Tanzania. She explores the many ironies of these connections, including how her British parents were given ten days to leave Tanzania after 19 years’ contribution to its development.
However, where one might expect bitterness, Bryce evokes understanding, few details or no details in an expertly handled narrative that is full of subtleties and almost dispassionate. One cannot help being captivated by Bryce’s prose, “crisp as sand, cold as the curled wave.” If I remember Naipaul while reading Bryce, it is, unlike current popular anti-Naipaul sentiment, a reference to the quality of her narrative, which is first class, its tension between cynicism and belief, and its endearing ability to be at once unemotional and moving.
The best pieces in the collection define Poui 7, lifting it to its place as a journal of high quality. To Bryce’s prose, one may add the work of Mark McWatt, whose excellence sets the standard for the poetry. Treatment of themes of love is quite strong in this volume, and this is best exemplified by McWatt’s Surface and Surrender. The poet plays with expressions of love, devotion, faithfulness, which are paradoxically fortified by his misleading references to unfaithfulness. These are deliberate false leads. The poet’s lover who has “slept with the rain” and the poet himself who hides from her his own “love of the river/and how I let her mistress my lost body/In ways beyond wonder” pretend to deceive only the audience.
McWatt plays with them and leads them on with undercurrents of “betrayal,” “truths,” “surface” and depths of meaning. His erotic poem is as much about a love of the landscape, the river and the rainforest as it
is for the poet’s human sweetheart. This poem is a continuation of the author’s indelible recollections of the Guyanese interior and its lasting, unfathomable wealth. It is a further expression by McWatt of the treasure hidden in the heartland of El Dorado.
There is a quality worthy of comment in Manoo-Rahming’s poem The Poet, dedicated to Lorna Goodison, which matches metaphors to the kind of fabric woven by poets like her, to whom Manoo-Rahming ascribes a healing function. The same may be said of Dee Horne’s Mask.
The better poems in the collection confirm what the editorial Preface says. “The Poui 7 writers offer us glimpses of secret lives, hidden feelings and forbidden desires, reminding us that we can’t take anything for granted and hinting that there’s more out there to be explored.”
We certainly look forward to Poui 8.
