A mix of memoir, poetry, life adventure and epiphanies, I loved this collection by Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison.

Bonding With the Irish Over Tea & Poetry

The opening essay ‘The Song of the Banana Man’ and ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ totally sets the scene for the rest of the book. It is an anecdotal story of the author and her friend, excited to be in London, overhearing two ‘bobbies’ (policemen) talk about a cafe they were just passing, in a way that lured them inside.

‘Whassis then, a new tea ‘ole?’

Their schooling in Kingston, Jamaica had been heavy on all things British and European, so entering this establishment was something related to that indirect familiarity. They encounter three boys from Ireland, who ask if they are from the West Indies and they begin to banter, drinking toasts to the colonial experience, singing songs and reciting poetry.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
folk dance like a wave of the sea;

The poems they chose were about ordinary people, sure of themselves, of what they did, grounding words shared by these young people, whose paths have crossed, starting out on their own journeys. The exchange lasts while they’re having their tea and comes to a natural end, upon which they part ways. The author is at the beginning of her life journey, but the lines recited by them all have staying power.

And I was not sure where I belonged or what my own purpose was in life back then…. But listening to those three Irish men recite ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ that afternoon, maybe I’d thought yes, that’s what I’d like to be, someone whose artistry makes people dance like a wave of the sea.

A Working Class Teen Dares to Do Better

In, A Taste of Honey, she recounts the experience of seeing a movie in 1963, adapted from the play created by Shelagh Delaney (who was 18 years old when she wrote it) that moves her, that is a moment of epiphany. Being one of nine children, she relished the opportunity to go and see the film one Saturday afternoon alone.

Shelagh Delaney went to a play that she found boring, pretentious and condescending, and said to herself I can do better than that, and went home and wrote A Taste of Honey.

The film would win a BAFTA award.

A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype. – extract from The Guardian by Dennis Barker

Goodison reflects on why she was so moved by this film, how it gave her some of her life and writing purpose and inspiration.

Shelagh was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everyone else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.

The Daffodil Drama

Writing poetry from a young age, in ‘Some poems that made me’ we read more of this early education and a different take on Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’ poem, after she researches his childhood and life and decides to give the poet a break. See my review Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid for another reference to the daffodil drama.

Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.

She will encounter may poets and poems until she arrives at the one voice that cause her to stop reading everyone else and just read his poems. In the work of Derek Walcott, who would become a friend and mentor, she found poem as a source of hope and consolation; poem as a lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.

As she begins to think of her own place in the world, she seeks out women poets, finding nourishment in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and other African-American fiction writers, while still searching for poetry by Caribbean women, ultimately ending up writing the poems she wanted to read and finding the right language to express them.

I learnt early in my life as a writer that if I wanted to write about my people I had to learn to listen carefully to family stories then imagine, and constantly reimagine those stories…All writer’s do this, but Caribbean writers face formidable or particular challenges because of the ways in which slavery, and then colonialism, erased or distorted so much of our lives that we have to learn to writer ourselves into the story in any way we can.

Tributes to the Mothers & Imagination

We read ‘Guinea Woman’ the poem she wrote trying to imagine a woman she had never met, her great grandmother, an elegy for her mother Doris ‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’, and another poem entitled ‘Bedspread’ inspired by news of the home of Winnie Mandela being raided by police, where they seize personal effects including a bedspread, taken because it was in the colours of the African National Congress.

The collection takes the reader to different countries and places on her journeying, sharing both fun and pivotal moments, stories of redemption, of good souls that come to set the indebted free, of her own life crisis in New York, that preceded a change in direction, acting on a promise to herself.

A Musical Accompaniment

Like my reading experience of Bernice McFadden’s excellent The Book of Harlan, whenever Lorna Goodison mentions music, like in the vignette ‘A Part for Tarquin’, I look it up and listen while reading. This one is about her friend Bernard dragging her along to a non-party that she doesn’t wish to attend, and ends with them listening into the night to the pianist Wynton Kelly playing the Miles Davis sextet Some Day My Prince Will Come.

That was the night I began to really appreciate the genius of the Jamaican-American pianist Wynton Kelly, about whom Miles himself was supposed to have said, ‘Wynton is the light for the cigarette; without him there is no smoking.’ That night I realised that if hope has a sound it would be Wynton Kelly’s piano-playing. His hope notes were like sunbeams on the morning waves coming in at Bluefields beach.

Loved it all.

Author, Poet, Essayist, Lorna Goodison

Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1947. A painter before she turned her focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art Students League in New York. She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017 – 2020. In 2018, she received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), Controlling the Silver (2005), Traveling Mercies (2001), Heartease (1988), and Tamarind Season (1980).

She is the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed (2011), Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), and the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

In 2019, she published Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures. 

Professor of English and of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison divides her time between Toronto and the north coast of Jamaica.

Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica,” Goodison stated in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. Goodison also discussed the humor in her work, noting, “Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.”

Noting that Goodison often “complements her careful observation of the physical world and her fine eye for detail with a tense, lean, elliptical style” in a review of Supplying Salt and Light, Jim Hannan observed, “At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures.”