I’ve missed a few days of my series but I’m convinced I’m going to catch up, or at the very least – this amazingly creative and powerful poet who hails from the country of my father, will hopefully make up for a few missed posts.
Dionne Brand is one of the most intense, lyrical poets living in our modern times. How lucky are we to be alive during the same time she is? Born in Trinidad & Tobago in 1953, and educated in Canada, she earned her first degree from the University of Toronto in 1975. Her writing shares her sense of urgency and dedication to exploring the intersection of race, culture and gender. She’s been awarded many prestigious honors including the Canadian Griffith Award, Fellow of the Academies for Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada and Poet Laureate of Toronto. In the poem below, an excerpt from the 2010 novel-length poem Ossuaries, which is not quiet epic poem but not quite a novel either, the narrative follows Yasmine’s travels through Havana, and shows what it is to be seen and unseen, all the while collecting pieces of one’s life and simultaneously fleeing from the past.
Take your sweet old time with this one. It’s worth the read.
ossaries VIII
Havana. Yasmine arrived one early evening,
the stem of an orange dress,
a duffle bag, limp, with no possessions
the sea assaulted the city walls,
the air,
the birds assaulted the sea
she’s not coastal,
more used to the interiors of northern cities,
not even their ancillary, tranquil green-black lakes
though nothing was ever tranquil about her,
being there out of her elemental America
unsettles her, untethers her
being alive, being human, its monotony
discomfited her anyway, the opaque nowness,
the awareness, at its primal core, of nothing
a temporary ache of safety,
leafed her back like unfurling fiddleheads,
she glimpsed below the obdurate seduction of Atlantic
and island shore,
when they landed, a contradiction,
a peppery drizzle, an afternoon’s soft sun
the oiled air of Havana pushed its way onto the airplane,
leavened, domestic,
the Tupelov cabin like an oven darkening bread
she was alive in this place,
missing forever from her life in the other,
a moment’s sentimentality could not find a deep home
what had been her life, what collection of events?
these then, the detonations,
the ones that led her to José Marti Airport
so first the language she would never quite learn,
though determined, where the word for her,
nevertheless, was compañera
and there she lived on rations of diction,
shortened syntax, the argot and tenses of babies,
she became allegorical, she lost metaphors, irony
in a small room so perfect she could paseo its rectangle,
in forty-four exact steps,
a room so redolent with brightness
cut in half by a fibrous bed,
made patient by the sometimish stove,
the reluctant taps, the smell of things filled with salt water
through the city’s wrecked avenidas,
she would find the Malecón, the great sea wall
of lovers and thieves, jineteras and jineteros
and there the urban sea washed anxiety from her,
her suspicious nature found,
her leather-slippered foot against a coral niche
no avoiding the increment of observation here,
in small places small things get their notice,
not just her new sign language
oh yesterday, you were in a green skirt,
where’s your smile today,
oh you were late to the corner on Tuesday
don’t you remember we spoke at midday,
last week near the Coppelia,
you had your faraway handbag
your cigarette eyes,
your fine-toothed comb
for grooming peacocks, anise seeds in your mouth
you asked for a little lemon water,
you had wings in your hands,
you read me a few pages from your indelible books
what makes your eyes water so,
I almost drowned in them on Friday,
let me kiss your broken back, your tobacco lips
she recalled nothing of their encounters,
but why,
so brilliant at detail usually
the green skirt, the orange dress, the errant smile,
the middays all dissolved into
three, five, ten months in Havana
one night she walks fully clothed, like Bird,
into the oily pearly of the sea’s surface,
coral and cartilage, bone and air, infrangible
and how she could walk straight out, her dress,
her bangles, her locking hair, soluble,
and how despite all she could not stay there
On The Pavement - A Place for Books and Culture 