Representations of the Tropics in Caribbean Poetry

FROM ARCHAEOLOGY TO ICONOLOGY: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TROPICS IN SENIOR'S
"GARDENING IN THE TROPICS AND IN GOODISON'S TO US, ALL FLOWERS ARE ROSES"
Author(s): Jennifer Rahim
Source: Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (APRIL 1999), pp. 68-82
Published by: Journal of West Indian Literature
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23019792
Accessed: 13-09-2017 11:29 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Journal of West Indian Literature is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Journal of West Indian Literature
This content downloaded from 181.41.108.168 on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 11:29:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
FROM ARCHAEOLOGY TO
ICONOLOGY: REPRESENTATIONS
OF THE TROPICS IN SENIOR'S
GARDENING IN THE TROPICS AND IN
GOODISON'S TO US, ALL
FLOWERS ARE ROSES
- Jennifer Rahim
In her article, "A Piece of Land," Marlene Nourbese Philip addresses th

atic of belonging to the Caribbean by.extending the geographical defin
noun islands to include the historical and contemporary reality of the r
fore islands are lands surrounded "[b]y the sea and the colonial condi
continues to beset them." For Philip, the journey to sovereignty is conc
a movement from "islandriess" (where "everything around and surro
conspiring to make you alienstranger to yourself') to "I-landness,"
mous state of being that is essentially about coming to know oneself apar
negative hermeneutic metaphors of lack and "secondclassness," with
em Europe, from an assumed position of geographical and ontological
first branded the tropics.
Derek Walcott, in his Nobel lecture, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic
(1992), poetically describes the malady of the colonial eye which
infamous words of James Anthony Froude, that "[t]here are no people
true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own." Walco
A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong

with the wrong eye. It is such pictures that are saddening rather than
themselves History can alter the eye and the moving hand to con
view of itself; it can temper the glare of tropical light to elegiac m
prose, the tone of judgement in Conrad, the travel journals of Froude
18)
68 Journal of West Indian Literature
It was from this hermeneutic model which equated the Caribbean lands with
deficiency and imitation that the colonized and ex-colonized would contract the
contagious "malaise" of reducing "landscape to melancholia and self-contempt"
(18). The island from this perspective was not a "home" (if one understands home
to be a centre of nurturing and development), but a "penitential" space, a
"temporary" prison from which one must escape or be doomed to failure. The real
landscape was located in the idealized "north" which for many, like Alford George
in Earl Lovelace's recent novel Salt (1996), constituted "the world." For the
Caribbean writer who produces in the shadow of history's "misunderstanding" of
place, literature can be both resistant and restorative by offering a counter
hegemonic representation of the tropics. Walcott describes Antillean art as the
restoration of our "shattered histories" and "fragmented memory" (18). He asserts
that "the process of poetry is one of excavation and self-discovery"(9,10; emphasis
mine). This position is certainly not new to Caribbean thought. In the Anglophone
tradition, Brathwaite, Lamming, Harris and others have long since established the
role of literature in the reconstructive exercise of regathering the "scattered
skeleton" of New World peoples. The idea that Caribbean poetry is an enterprise of
the recovery and, therefore, the re-presentation of the people and the spaces they
inhabit, remains pertinent given the ongoing dialogue of Caribbean literature with
history and identity. This dialogue is evident in Olive Senior in Gardening in the
Tropics (1994) and Lorna Goodison in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (1995). Both
poets write with an understanding of the dialectical relationship between language
and representation. Their texts work against configurations of the almost
predetermined hopelessness which prompted the Guyanese writer, Eric Waldron, to
entitle his collection of short stories on the Caribbean, Tropic Death, and V.S.
Naipaul to later conclude fatalistically that the islands "... will continue to be the
half-made societies of a dependent people, the Third World's third world. They will
forever consume; they will never create ... ." Olive Senior is perhaps best known
and appreciated as a writer of fiction. Her first collection of poems Talking of Trees
(1986) was virtually over-shadowed by her short story collections Summer
Lightning (1986) and Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989). However, the
intelligence, breath and virtuosity of Gardening in the Tropics, makes it an
important collection that cannot be ignored. Senior uses her skill as a versatile
storyteller in the creation of evocative and sensitive narratives that give substance to
Philip's concept of "I-landness."
The metaphor of "gardening" or "digging" functions throughout the collection
as a sort of archaeological methodology which facilitates revoking and revisioning.
Significantly, the text is prefaced by a calligraph or pattern-poem "Gourd." The
Vol. 8, No. 2 69
poem has a dual function. First, it operates as a counteractive ado or charm,
neutralizing the "bad eye" of the colonial gaze which saw the tropics as inferior
"other." Second, the gourd, in its capacity as an invocatory instrument, functions as
a communal summons to engage in the sacred rite of "re/membering."
The poem invites a deep sensory awakening by its focus on the practice of
looking and hearing in order to facilitate the renewed perceptivity necessary for the
recovery process. From the stance of a curious contemplative, the narrator makes a
pseudo-innocent inquiry of the "hollowed dried / calabash": "what lies beneath that
crusty exterior?" (vii) The question releases a recollection of stories, myths and
rituals relative to the gourd's place in African and Amerindian ritual, mysticism
myth, and folk culture, and by extension, their cultural and cosmological retentions
and evolutions in Caribbean culture.
The calligraph's visual immediacy in the form of a shak-shak crowned by a
crucifix (testimony to the eclectic nature of New World spirituality), is
complemented by the sustained aural resonance of onomatopoeic words like "took
took," "knock-knock," "shak-shak," "rattle," all cousins of the African shekere.
The narrator, like a priest, houngan or shaman, upholds the gourd (sacred vessel of
sacrifice and libation, protective adolcharm, container of the power of the gods,
invocatory instrument of the spirits) as an icon for contemplation. The gourd
contains and represents, albeit "faintly," the ancestral memory and mystical power
of New World peoples who had wandered "far from those [primordial] mystical
shores" (vii). The stage is then set for the historical, cultural and spiritual
archaeology that will regather into "wholeness" the muffled sounds and scattered
fragments of selfhood from the gourd of the Caribbean's literal and metaphysical
landscape.
The narrator adopts various voices/personages/masks as she digs into the
historical and contemporary memory of the islands, unearthing under the centuries,
stories of various kinds: those layered with pain, dislocation and loss; those that tell
of heroic survival, miraculous restoration and promise. In the opening poem,
"Meditations on Yellow," from the section "Travelers' Tales," Senior attempts, like
an etymologist, to deconstruct the word "yellow," unlocking its associations with
the geography and history of the Caribbean. The yellow of the tropics is presented
as being more curse than gift as Senior considers its pivotal role in bringing first the
conquistador plague of plunder in the avaricious quest for the mythical El Dorado,
then the oppressive economy of the sugar plantations, and finally the tourist
industry, the new system of servitude and exploitation. The poem privileges the
marginalized Amerindian and African perspectives. Ultimately, both voices are
representative of a collective New World consciousness. The time span of the
narrative's first movement embraces the region's long experience of colonial
domination. However, the speaking personas display an autonomous spirit and
defiant satirical wit that expose the injustices and greed of European rule, on the one
hand, and celebrate the uncompromised dignity and "high" humanity of the
supposedly civilized "natives," on the other.
In section two, after five hundred years of serving the superstructure the best of
the tropics, the African Caribbean voice makes a concerted claim to the landscape
by demanding the right to live finally as an owner, not a servant, "to move / from
kitchen to front verandah" and "feel mellow / in the three o'clock yellow" (16). The
reclamation of landscape is more of an actuality than a dream because revolutionary
change is already underway, "bursting through the soil" (16), in the confident, self
possession of islanders "flaunting themselves everywhere" (17). The rebellious
assertion "you don't own / the tropics anymore" (16) is a reality which can no more
be reversed than the advent of "Bob Marley wailing" (17) out his redemption lyrics.
Senior's "journey" through the tropics in section one is chiefly about the
redemption, through narrative, of small lives whose stories of struggle against the
mammoth difficulties and disadvantages of living on islands are in themselves
testaments of belonging and possession. She probes the geographical, historical,
sociological and political currents that affect and shape the lives of Caribbean
people. Her series of hurricane narratives tell of love, family, labour, survival, loss
and aspirations. Ingenious metaphoric use is made of the major hurricanes that
extensively damaged the Jamaican landscape and economy in 1903, 1944, 1951
(Charlie), and 1988 (Gilbert). The poem "All Clear 1928" builds upon the storm that
almost hit the island that year. These storms leave serious casualties such as the
tragic end of the family in "Hurricane Story, 1951." The Delberts are scattered
literally as both parents leave their son behind to seek better economic opportunities
in England and North America after hurricane Charlie struck. The inclusion of
poems like "Caribbean Basin Initiative," "Stowaway," "Illegal Immigrant," and
"Meditations On Red" in this section suggests that the hurricane analogy may be
extended to include all storms and disasters that threaten Caribbean societies.
While there are disappointments and abuses that leave islanders "like limpets
clinging "on craft that ply / in these waters / where our dreams lie" (33), there are
also heroic tales of survival and strength. In this respect, a fine example is the family
in "Hurricane Story, 1903" that braces itself against the wrath of the hurricane in a
fashion reminiscent of the Biblical story of Noah's Ark. The poem celebrates in
these simple country folk an intuitive knowing and "hand-me-down" wisdom
which make them experts in "all the ways of orchestrating disaster" (20), and leaves
them undaunted in their determination "to put [their] lives back together" (21). The
Vol. 8, No. 2 71
ability to respond creatively to the landscape in its most turbulent of moods
demonstrates the authority of ownership and the blessedness of place that
empowers those who belong with the will and secrets of survival.
Several of the poems that comprise Gardening in the Tropics represent an
intermarriage of history and myth, pragmatism and faith, realism and magic,
episode and parable. Whether the poems are meditations on the natural world of
plants (for example, "Pawpaw," "Anatto and Guinep," "Pineapple"), or on the lives
of the folk, Senior transports the reader into the realm of magical otherworldliness
by weaving poems out of fragments of fact, gossip, myth and folk beliefs. This
hermeneutic approach to presenting lived reality is integral to the counter
hegemonic mission of the text and reveals Senior's confidence in the transformative
power of stories to hold up before us in a new light, the sometimes hidden,
sometimes distorted images of ourselves that invite recognition and validation. In
Gardening in the Tropics, Senior's use of narrative and allegorical forms such as the
parable and the fable demonstrates her storytelling skill. Given the text's restorative
agenda, the built-in didactic dynamic of these narrative forms further serves this
purpose. Yet, one cannot also help but see the relationship between this dominant
stylistic feature and the distinctly oral nature of the Amerindian and African
cultures which Senior uses to create an ancestral, ontological link to contemporary
Caribbean culture and experience, so as to reaffirm their "underlying patterns and
connections." (See footnote 11)
The objective stance of the storytelling convention and the double-entendre
built into allegorical forms allow the narrating persona to wear the trickster mask of
innocent naivete at times, thereby making political use of the stereotype of the
"native" as gullible and ignorant. Although some of the poems utilize a first person
narrator, Senior manages to establish the speakers' credibility and omniscient
authority in a manner that resembles Earl Lovelace's politicizing of village gossip
through the narrator, Eva Dorcus, in The Wine of Astonishment. The poem
"Amazon Women," for example, demonstrates.Senior's creative manipulation of
the storytelling voice to reconstruct history/myth and at the same time conjure a
sense of Wilson Harris's "presences in absences." The narrator unearths bits and
pieces of historical information, tales, and hearsay in order to fashion an intriguing
story about these legendary women. In so doing, she resurrects their warrior-spirit
from an almost forgotten past. The narrator freely and wittily verifies her narration
with qualifiers like "I hear," and "my auntie says so / and her husband's uncle's
grandfather / told him as a factand he got it from someone who knew" (96),
thereby winning the reader's assurance that she is a "true-true" participant in her
oral culture.
However, unlike Lovelace's Eva who stakes her integrity on a tale that "am t
make one cent profit" (Wine 207), Senior's narrator consciously operates beyond
the boundaries of realism, since the truth of "living" also resides in invention and
imagination. She confesses remorselessly at the end of the tale:
... I hadn't meant

to tell tall tale or repeat exotic
story for that's not my style.
But we all have to make a living
since there's no gain in telling stories
about ordinary men and women.
Then again, when gardening
in the Tropics, every time you
lift your eyes from the ground
you see sights that strain your
credulity.... (97)
The narrator revels in the mischief of "scandal" and takes full advantage of the
possibilities offered by storytelling space to exercise her own re/creative, image
making authority.
This valorization of "scandal as a method for narration and reinvention makes
"Amazon Women" an apt analogy for Senior's archaeological poetics which seeks
to unearth and piece together ("to make a living') the fragments buried in the New
World consciousness, whether fact or fiction, memory or imagination. It is in the
magical "twilight" of imagination that the poet is able to resurrect the past and allow
us to see our uncelebrated history made present, myth made real, as in the image and
spirit of "those strong / Amazon women striding daily across / our land..(97), or
in the "rebellious pride" of the old woman in "The Immovable Tenant" who will not
surrender her sovereignty to "Uncle" or any force of domination (99-104).
The collection's most appealing allegorical narratives, from the point of view of
Senior's artfulness in managing the storytelling voice and structure, are to be found
in the section "Gardening in the Tropics." She exhausts plant and gardening motifs
to explore a range of issues that are immediately pertinent to regional development.
These include the farce of local politics, foreign manipulation of Caribbean
economies, the threat of modernization to the natural environment, and the evils of
color and class prejudice. "The Knot Garden," for instance, is a parable which
unveils a scenario of political insincerity and dishonesty. The poem criticizes the
general failure of politicians to effectively define and so influence the course of
their countries' development, having forfeited this right by opting for dependency
Vol. 8, No. 2 73
on dictatorial lending agents such as the International Monetary Fund. While the
regional specificity of Senior's concerns are obvious, the expansive range of
allegorical forms allows her poems to attain universal relevance. This fusion is
beautifully achieved in the poem "The Colors of Birds." It is an exquisitely crafted
fable which employs an ancient Taino legend of how tropical birds got their
kaleidoscopic colors in order to comment on timeless human issues. The fable
thematizes vigilance through the plight of the parakeets, who were laughing so
much at the tricked Anaconda that they neglected to look after their own affairs and
so remained monochromatic. Additionally, the poem penetrates the heart of the
"monster" race and colour prejudice which has a specific New World relevance as
well as a general global appeal.
Similarly, in "Plants," the life and behaviour of verbiage function as a metaphor
for the deceptive movements of conquest, rebellion and revolution which have a
particular applicability to the New World's history of domination and counter
revolution: but these are just as relevant to the power politics at the heart of all
human relations. Admittedly, an intellectual intrusiveness sometimes detracts from
the artifice that is so characteristic of many of the poems. However, at their best,
they provide intriguing tales that surprise and instruct the reader with their
luminosity, wit, gentle didacticism and the rich dynamism of their interpretative
field.
Senior's multi-dimensional fascination with the theme of Creation repeatedly
surfaces and is worth mentioning. The poet's concern for the wanton destruction of
the natural world, evident in poems such as "Seeing the Light," "Advice and
Devices," and "The Tree of Life," is not simply an environmentalist one. It is
essentially a spiritual matter whose pantheistic perspective (like many traditional
African and Amerindian cosmologies) is grounded in an understanding of the
universe as a holistic space where the temporal and the celestial realms are
intercommunicative and interrelated. Indeed, the narrative voice is consistent in
lamenting the destruction of the earth for materialistic ends, as well as warning
against the inevitable nemesis of the "gods" for our abuse of Creation. In contrast to
the timeless temptation to plunder the landscape, the simple spirituality of
belonging manifested in the ordinary folks' reverence for the land, and their
unschooled wisdom about growing things, is affirmed and celebrated in the
mischievously triumphant "Live Right / and Do Good" refrain of the farmer in
"Advice and Devices." This sensitivity to the instructive capacity of nature is also
evident in the unshaken confidence of the peasant farmer in "The Tree of Life," who
remains committed to his traditional ways of land management in spite of the fast
yielding but ultimately damaging "modern" methods promoted by young, highly
qualified agricultural officers, "(those long-sleeved white-shirt boys)" (92).
Fundamentally, the Creation theme operates as a trope that demonstrates how
the landscape as primary text engenders the written text through the poet who is
interpreter (as opposed to inventor, which implies loss) of an already existent
reality, a culture not deficient, "not evolving but already shaped" (Walcott 19).
Senior's method of grafting the historical and imaginative gives birth to a hybrid
text which attests to the self-possessed, resistant "basement" meta-scape of those
who "belong".
The representation of the tropics as holy ground, a "bamboo cathedral," appears
in the final section of the collection, "Mystery." The island-home is a sanctuary
where one can encounter the divine anywhere. It is a home that "provides gardens
for everyone" (94), but repossesses "inch by inch" from those who steal. This
section echoes and completes the invocatory summons or signal to worship issued
in "Gourd." Therefore, the climax of the text's archaeological probing is the
discovery or rather rediscovery of a landscape that is infused by instructive,
protective, and restorative ancestral deities. Gods are literally to be found
everywhere, presiding in and over the elements and life sources. Ogun, Shango,
Babalu, Oya, Guede, and others have made the New World their shrines; their
influence and relevance are retained within the collective psyche despite the
process of time, the attempted "erasure" of colonization, the betrayals of
independence, and the artificiality of modernization. In the closing section of the
text, "the circle comes around" as Yemoja, Mother of Waters, regathers her
scattered children (131).
The poems in "Mystery," however, do not always demonstrate the technical
control and authorial sympathies evident in the previous sections. Perhaps, this is
because Senior's intellectual intervention is most apparent here. Albeit the text
travels credibly from the initial summoning of history in "Gourd," which facilitated
an archaeological excavation of generic memory, to the reassembly of people and
place, and culminates in the transformation that re-represents landscape as mounted
with the power of divine entities.
Lorna Goodison's To Us, All Flowers Are Roses is her fourth and perhaps most
accomplished volume of poems. She shares with Senior a talent for storytelling, but
her approach is without the self-conscious intellectualism of some of Senior's
poems. The mature detachment and casual eloquence of Goodison's poetic voice is
evidence of an untroubled rootedness and unstressed confidence in her "I
landness." From the outset, the poet consciously privileges an indigenous
perspective in the title of the collection To Us, All Flowers Are Roses. The comma
Vol. 8, No. 2 75
after "us" signals the cognitive reordering and reclamation of place by the
historically voiceless, faceless "native."
The acute consciousness of history's sins that permeates Senior's poems is also
present in Goodison's collection. So too is the quest for healing and wholeness
which must necessarily involve an unburdening and reformation of the individual
and collective New World psyche. "Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move" is a
powerful poem of lament and plea for release from the oppressive "stones" which
have rendered us invisible and kept us imprisoned throughout the course of our
history. Ultimately, the poem's concern with injustice and oppression attains a
universal expansiveness that is typical of Goodison's range: "Mother, the great
stones over [human]kind got to move" (5).
Like Senior, Goodison links story and voice to the heart of the healing and
recovery process. These are the keys to unlocking and releasing Caribbean lands
and people from history's "hole" of silence, so that "our side of the story," "the half
that has never been told" (4) may be heard at last. Herein lies the poet's mission
statement: that is, to be among those who "must tell it," having been commissioned
as an "offspring" of the Biblical visionary "Joseph" to "sing," "dream and interpret"
(17) on behalf of her people and place.
Wilson Harris, in Tradition and the West Indian Novel, argued that since the
environment of the Caribbean is "steeped" in "broken conceptions as well as
misconceptions of the residue and meaning of conquest;" the writer, like any other
individual in such a context, may find herself/himself "upon a reactionary
treadmill," which will dismantle the inherited literary tradition or "monument of
consolidation" as "the need for a vision of consciousness" emerges (31). I use the
term "vision of consciousness" to refer to the resistant perceptual space where
"native" consciousness engages in the "inward dialogue" which facilitates
revisionary language. New language, as we know, primarily suggests new modes
of self-understanding and self-presentation. Harris cites language as the centric
weapon of "native" resistance to the "mass" distortions of Western thought:
... the concept of language is one which continuously transforms inner and
outer formal categories of experience, earlier and representative modes of
speech itself Such a capacity for language is a real and necessary one in a
world where the inarticulate person is continuously frozen or legislated for in
mass and a genuine experience of his distress, the instinct of distress, sinks into
a void.(2)
Two organically interdependent processes are operative in the space of

"visionary consciousness": the iconoclastic movement that dismantles old models
of representation and the iconologist movement that raises revelatory and
revolutionary images of reality.
In a foundational essay by Hamish F.G Swanston which discussed the word as
icon, the point was made that divine self-disclosure is always "addressed to the
sight." Revelation is therefore "image" oriented; but more importantly for our
purposes, the new language which is necessary to articulate the received truth is
dependent upon the recognition of the icon. This implies, of course, that the
image/icon precedes language; that the transcendent reality is already existent, but
must be revealed; that "seeing" is the stimulant that releases the benedictory tongue
or the "visionary character of fulfillment" that makes word and image/icon one.
This is the dynamism of the "inward dialogue and space" of Harris' "vision of
consciousness" (33), a dynamism which Goodison's poetic methodology
approximates. Certainly, her gift of using language may be described as
iconographic. She possesses the ability to create reverential, verbal portraits and
images of the ordinary folk who occupy her Jamaican landscape, a skill that is
perhaps sharpened by her talent as a painter. Her style, however, is essentially
iconological (as in the Greek root Logos meaning word, Word of God, Truth), in
that in her representation of people and place, she moves, like the iconologist,
beyond the analytical towards a (re) interpretative commitment to reality which,
according to Erwin Panofsky, is essentially motivated by the need for "synthesis"
and "correctness." Indeed, the fragmented, misrepresented history from which
Caribbean literature emerges makes the exercise of "synthesis" and "correctness"
intrinsic to the reconstructionist methodology of its practitioners. Goodison's re
interpretative motive is evident in a poetic eye that recognizes and articulates the
grandeur and pathos infusing the lives of the "small." She contemplates the lives of
history's nobodies: Rassy, Elephant, Bag-a-Wire, Bun down Cross Roads,
Papacita, the tenement dwellers of 117 Orange Street, the school gate vendors,
Brother Kingsley, Annie Pengelly, the cooks of "Coarse Cuisine," and so on. They
are the "royal" dwellers in the "kingdom of the poor" (2) whose stories testify, not
merely to their social disadvantages, but also to their power to take possession of
their landscape through their labour, suffering, love, aspirations, naming authority,
wit, and language, thereby claiming it, along with the poet, as "home."
Toni Morrison's statements on language, narrative, and creation in her Speech
of Acceptance, Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize, captures well what Goodison
has achieved in her imaging of people and place: Morrison writes "narrative is
radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created" (27); indeed, "language is
the only meditation"(28). Goodison brings to her poems a vivid textuality and
depth that reflect the quality of her involvement in the world she interprets. For
Vol. 8, No. 2 77
instance, her rich portraits of Rassy in "Coir," the elephant man in "Elephant," her
tapestry of tenement life in "In City Gardens Grow No Roses as We Know Them,"
and the vendors in "Outside the Gates" invite focus and meditation through the
governance of space and time that the language of poetry affords them.
The power language possesses to summon a reality from invisibility to
visibility, from margin to centre, is made even more potent by Goodison's ability to
represent her landscape in the voice, rhythms and sounds of her people. The poems
"Annie Pengelly," "Nayga Bikkle" and "Bun Down Cross Roads" are excellent
examples of this. In "Annie Pengelly," the relationship between language and
autonomy is ingeniously portrayed. The persona's declared mission to "represent
the case / of one Annie Pengelly" is essentially to demand atonement ort Annie's
behalf for colonialism's reductionist recreation of her as gift, therefore, "object,"
"non-person" to serve the fancies of a neurotic planter's wife. Annie's rejection of
her slave name and her wish to be called by her "real [ancestral] name" (the one that
exists outside the colonial hegemony and language which created it), is a bid to
reclaim her personhood, to become again an owner of language and, by extension,
an owner of time and space:
We lay claim to a group of sounds

which rise up and down and mark out our space
in the air around us.
We become owners of a harmony of vowels and consonants
signing a specific meaning. (28)
Throughout the collection, in the tradition of Walcott and Brathwaite, Goodison

celebrates the god-like naming capacity of the dispossessed. This facility is a
signifier of the people's possession of their landscape in spite of the conspiracy of
history to the contrary. In the poem, "In City Gardens Grow No Flowers as We
Know Them," the ordinary folk's instinctive exercise of etymological
reclassification is beautifully demonstrated. In response to their austere, poverty
stricken experience, the tenement dwellers make "roses" a generic for "all flowers."
The need for specificity, for calling the plants they grew by their "proper" names, is
subordinated to the greater importance of their aesthetic and healing properties.
In a manner that echoes Walcott's "The Almond Trees, Goodison transforms
her opening image of the weather-beaten, "decapitated" breadfruit tree that leans
"forward to the East / as if hoping to receive something regenerative," into a symbol
of the endurance of the "yardboys and maids" who live in the "many-celled"
tenement yards of downtown Kingston. The poet's voice sings on their behalf,
unfolding in the miracle of her telling, the metamorphosis by which the "unyielding
red soil" is literally transformed into a ghetto greenhouse by the flowers and herbs
they plant, visible testimony to the poor's will, not merely to survive, but to
transcend, "[r]enewed, renewed by the angel smell of mint" (16). Whatever the
context, whether it is the naming of local fruits and confectionery in "Songs of the
Fruits and Sweets of Childhood," or the praise-song of "Coarse Cuisine" in "Nayga
Bikkle," or her recitation of the rapturous litany of names that make her island "an
everywhere" in "To Us, All Flowers Are Roses," Goodison's poems conjure the
rich lexicon that signs the meaning of her landscape, recreating from a history of
disadvantage "the bounty born of the plenty of our poverty" (34).
For Goodison and Senior alike, the tropics is primarily a life-giving, healing,
mysterious sanctuary, where each life and place is an icon for reverential
contemplation. In several poems like "Speak of the Advent of New Light,"
"Mysteries," "To the Creator of All Bodies of Water . . "Morning, Morning
Angel Mine," "Trident," and "To Us, All Flowers Are Roses," to name a few, the
various aspects of the natural world (plant life, birds, light, earth, mountains, rivers,
seas, bays and sky) are potential spiritual guides, protectors and healers in
Goodison's cosmology. When wedded to the poetic imagination, the beauty and
mystery of the landscape become a balm of regeneration and transformation. The
fruits of Goodison's ruminations are spiritual gems like the poet's "one blue stone
mined near mountain heart" in "Missing the Mountains" (1). They bless their
owners with renewed perception, courage and freedom to fly rather than remain
earthbound like ground doves, scrambling "for used bread / and left over things"
(38).
In telling the stones of her landscape, in chanting its names, the poet becomes a
prophet/psalmist of the people in the tradition of Bob Marley whose spirit she
identifies with and invokes as a Muse in the poem "Calling One Sweet Psalmist:"
(Come in now one sweet psalmist)

new songs are being released
in me, I chant now
celestially, I am become
what I was born to be
I am, I am sweet psalmist. (54)
The ultimate symbiosis achieved between the geography and the voice that
speaks its names is evident in the closing lines of the title poem, "To Us, All Flowers
Are Roses," where Goodison achieves a "long panorama of scenes" in the tradition
of Walt Whitman as she assembles the names and places of Jamaica, which are both
self-signifying text and temple:
Vol. 8, No. 2 79
... O heart
when some nights you cannot sleep,

for wondering why you have been charged
to keep some things of which you cannot speak,
think what release will mean, when your name
is changed to Tranquillity. I was born at Lineen -
Jubilee! - on the anniversary of Emancipation Day.
I recite these names in a rosary, speak them
when I pray, for Heartease, my Mecca, aye Jamaica. (71)
Like praying with icons, the result is to move the contemplative to a point of
transcendence, a way of knowing and perceiving a Truth that has always been, but
has hitherto remained invisible and unknown, partly because it had never before
been considered and partly because previous renderings were unfaithful
representations having been seen, as Walcott argues in the "wrong light and with the
wrong eye." Like Senior's, Goodison's collection is centrally concerned with
dismantling the negative hermeneutic metaphors with which history has branded
the tropics, and with rescuing the islands from superficial representations as "dots,"
half-formed societies or idyllic playgrounds lacking seriousness.
The power of iconic representation is its disciplined honesty in rendering the
"correctness" of the world of motifs: the co-existence of pain and joy, defeat and
triumph, ugliness and beauty. Goodison does not deny or romanticize the
Caribbean's experience of deprivation and suffering (past and present) in order to
represent what she obviously sees as a deeper reality of wholeness and belonging.
Her honesty allows her to embrace even the most deformed dimension of the
region's collective self which the elephant man in the poem "Elephant" epitomizes.
Goodison's spiritual vigour seeks out and celebrates the transcendent spirit which
defies centuries of attempts to erase a people and their landscape from the arena of
"real" relevance, hence her vision of renewal in the closing poem "Trident". It is a
poem that summons the Trinitarian harmony of "the unity in all things." This is the
fulfillment of Goodison's mission. However, to see the landscape of the tropics
"afresh" requires a visionary quality of seeing:
Within the blackbird's feathers glow

all colors, but you have to have the eye
and to trust the second layer of sunlight
in order to truly see them. (72)
In Gardening in the Tropics and in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, Senior and
Goodison offer new ways of contemplating Caribbean reality. While it may be
useful to take cognizance of Seamus Heaney's practical reminder that "[f]aced with
the brutality of historical onslaught, [poems] are practically useless," it is also worth
noting what he has to say about the subtle revolutionary potential of the word-image
since: "poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure
concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on
ourselves" (108). The "pure concentration" Senior and Goodison present is the
iconic tropics, an invitation to meditate and so perceive "for a space" the truth of our
transcendent selves.
Notes
' Marlene Nourbese Philip, "A Piece of Land," The Trinidad and Tobago Review
(December 1993), 12.
2' Philip, 13.
' Derek Walcott, The Antilles Fragments of Epic Memory (NY: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1993.
. From J.A. Froude's The English in the West Indies (1887), quoted in V.S.
Naipaul's, The Middle Passage (London: Deutsch, 1962), 9.
5. Earl Lovelace, Salt (London: Faber, 1996), 34.
6. Olive Senior, Gardening in the Tropics (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994).
7. Lorna Goodison, To Us All Flowers are Roses (Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1995).
8. See Kenneth Ramchand, "The Writer Who Ran Away: Eric Walrond and Tropic
Death in Savacou 2 (Sept. 1970), 67-75.
9. V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Baracoon (London: Deutsch, 1972), 250.
10. Olive Senior, Talking of Trees (Kingston: Calabash, 1985); Summer Lightning
and Other Stories (Essex: Longman, 1986); Arrival of the Snake-Woman and
Other Stories (Essex: Longman, 1989).
11. The power of the word to reimage the world is addressed by Merle Hodge in
"Challenges of the Struggle for Sovereignty: Changing the World versus
Writing Stories," Caribbean Women Writers, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe (Wellesley,
MA: Calaloux, 1990). She writes: When fiction draws upon our world, when it
recreates our reality, it helps give validity to our world. It helps us to make sense
of our world, for it shows us underlying patterns and connections which give our
reality a satisfying order.... For fiction (and perhaps all art) casts redeeming
light back upon the reality from which it springs, endowing it with meaning,
Vol. 8, No. 2 81
credibility, and authority. It allows a people not only to know its own world but to
take it seriously. (202)
12. Earl Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment (London: Heinemann, 1982).
13. Hamish F.G. Swanston, "Icon and word," Prose for God: Religious and anti
religious aspects of imaginative literature, eds. Ian Gregor and Walter Stein
(London: Sheed & Ward, 1973), 154.
14. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; London: Penguin, 1970),
58.
15. Toni Morrison, Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, Upon the Award of the
Nobel Prize for Literature (NY: Knopf, 1994).
16. Derek Walcott, The Gulf (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 17-19.
17. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (NY: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1989), 107.

Representations of the Tropics in Caribbean Poetry

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Representations of the Tropics in Caribbean Poetry

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

FROM ARCHAEOLOGY TO ICONOLOGY: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TROPICS IN SENIOR'S

In her article, "A Piece of Land," Marlene Nourbese Philip addresses th

A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong

68 Journal of West Indian Literature

70 Journal of West Indian Literature

72 Journal of West Indian Literature

... I hadn't meant

74 Journal of West Indian Literature

Two organically interdependent processes are operative in the space of

76 Journal of West Indian Literature

We lay claim to a group of sounds

Throughout the collection, in the tradition of Walcott and Brathwaite, Goodison

78 Journal of West Indian Literature

(Come in now one sweet psalmist)

when some nights you cannot sleep,

Within the blackbird's feathers glow

80 Journal of West Indian Literature

82 Journal of West Indian Literature

You might also like