Reviewer: Dr. Sara Florian
American professor Dr. Ivette Romero affirmed that one
can experience “Defiance, movement, and renewal” by reading the bilingual anthology Corazón de pelícano –
Antología poética de Lasana M. Sekou / Pelican Heart – An Anthology of Poems by
Lasana M. Sekou edited by Emilio Jorge Rodríguez.
But I think that Passion for the Nation
is what comes out of Sekou’s poems at a first glance and at a deeper reading.
The book is a selection gathered from eleven of
Sekou’s poetry collections between 1978 and 2010. Rodríguez is an independent
Cuban academic, writer, and essayist. He has been a researcher at Casa de las
Américas’s Literary Research Center and founded the literary journal Anales del Caribe (1981-2000). María
Teresa Ortega translated the poems from the original English to Spanish. A
critical introduction, detailed footnotes, and a useful glossary by Rodríguez
are also found in the book of 428 pages. The collection has been launched at
conferences in Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico.
Rodriguez’s introduction to Pelican Heart refers to Dr. Howard Fergus’s Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, which is the critical
commentary to Sekou’s work that identifies three cardinal points in his
poetics. I would add as cardinal points: Belief
or Driving Force of people in
political processes, like his political commitment to make St. Martin independent,
as the southern part of the Caribbean island is a territory of the Netherlands,
while the northern part is a French Collectivité d’outre-mer; Excitement over his literary passions,
which led him to found House of Nehesi Publishers at age 23; co-found the book
festival of St. Martin, organized with Conscious Lyrics Foundation and to
expand his culture considerably; Enthusiasm,
which springs out of his eyes and words when you listen to his poetry being
performed or when you speak to Sekou in person.
In
his proliferous production Sekou has published fifteen books, among which
resides thirteen collections of poems since the 1970s: Moods for Isis –
Picturepoems of Love & Struggle (1978); For the Mighty Gods…An
Offering (1982); Images in the Yard
(1983); Maroon Lives – A Tribute to
Grenadian Freedom Fighters (1983); Born
Here (1986); Nativity & Dramatic
Monologues for Today (1988); Mothernation:
Poems from 1984 to 1987 (1991); Quimbé:
The Poetics of Sound (1991); The Salt
Reaper – poems from the flats (2004, 2005); 37 Poems (2005); The Salt
Reaper – selected poems from the flats (Audio CD, 2009), Corazón de pelícano –
Antología poética de Lasana M. Sekou / Pelican Heart – An Anthology of Poems (2010), Nativity/Nativité/Natividad – Trilingual
edition (2010), and two collections of short stories: Love Songs Make
You Cry (1989) and Brotherhood of the Spurs (1997, 2007). Among his critical works are
The Independence Papers – Readings on a
New Political Status for St. Maarten/St. Martin (1990); National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer (1997);
Big Up St. Martin – Essay & Poem
(1999). He also produced Fête – The First
Recording of Traditional St. Martin’s Festive Music by Tanny & the Boys
(LP/cassette/CD, 1992, 2007).
The poems elected
(an anthology is a selection and election
of the best poems by a poet) are from Moods
for Isis, For the Mighty Gods...,
Images in the Yard, Maroon Lives, Born Here, Nativity, Mothernation, Quimbé, The Salt Reaper, and
37 Poems. From Moods for Isis (1978) we can read a poem like “Rebel hunt,” which
professes the Black thought and unity. Despite being an early collection, Moods for Isis hints at revolution and
struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and poverty.
The Cuban writer Nancy Morejon recognized in Sekou
“ritmo de tambor innombrable,” unmentionable or is it shocking drum rhythms
that echo the African origins of this oral poetry, this performative
storytelling, modus narrandi typical
of Sekou, which moves from African griots
to contemporary dub poets to Rastafari. Its parallels with Cuban literature
have already been imbricated and compared to Cuban writers like Nicolás
Guillén. But the relation that comes to my mind between Cuba and Sekou’s poetry
is related to runaway slaves and to what I define as his “aesthetics of the
village and the maroon” (English maroons,
French marrons, Spanish cimarrónes, Brazilian quilombos), see for instance his 1983
collection Maroon Lives—A Tribute to
Grenadian Freedom Fighters, written that same year during the period of
crisis for the Grenadian Revolution. The “aesthetics theory of the village
chiefs and the maroons” of the St. Martin poet is concerned with a general
attitude of Caribbean heads of states or politicians being very much xenophiles
and suppressing their people’s culture or even the spirit of marronage among the nation’s population.
For instance, in the poem “Maroon Lives,” dedicated to
Walter Rodney, Sekou addresses, in a Rastafarian tone, the Brazilian maroons,
the “quilombos”: “Oh, restate the quilimbos / Organize there / In the camps of
Accabre,” inspiring principles of the Cuban revolution and the struggle for
freedom. But the theme of the maroon is still haunting Sekou’s poetics less
than a decade after in the collection Quimbé (1991), where in “maroon nation,” he spans to the politics of Haïti,
Argentina, Jamaica, and the US. That is how this phenomenon of the “runaways”
and indefatigable warriors can be grouped under a same “family” or what I term,
“resistance nation.” Similarly in The
Salt Reaper’s “Visit&Fellowship II,” Sekou claims freedom and
liberation: “para sembrar luces de
libertad,” “to kindle fires of freedom.”
The poem “On Caribbean Aesthetics,” which was recited
during Pelican Heart’s book launch in
Santiago de Cuba by the poetess Teresa Melos, is taken from the 1986 collection
Born Here, an affectionate chant to
his own roots and origins and appropriation of identity:
I still question
The way my fathers danced
While our mothers bore children
Stooped in labor over the clean Salt
Ponds of Great Bay
Where you can still see them
Chanting ponums (...)
So many musical references are made in Sekou’s poems
that Rodríguez identified Sekou’s versatility as “fusion works.” In his poems
we find a fusion of several different styles and rhythms, like the merengue,
the Dominican bachata, African drums, new age, soft jazz, steelpan, electronic
music, Spanish guitar, as in the CD he recorded in Hong Kong in 2004 when he
was on a literary Fellowship at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Sekou shows
other musical influences, such as the Caribbean
musical forms of calypso, reggae, ponum,
and quimbé.
After an “aesthetics of music/ality,” we can speak of
– as I recognize in a study of the poet’s work – “an aesthetics of salt &
sugar,” because the recurrent themes of Salt Pond as crop and sweat, of the
hard labor of the enslaved in the colony translate into a “salty,” “tangy”
wittiness in the use of language and of poetic forms. In his
introduction to Sekou’s The Salt Reaper
the academic and calypsonian Hollis
“Chalkdust” Liverpool defined the poet as “the salt reaper, for his land, his
labors, his ideals, and his values.”
Sekou’s use of language and graphic layout are
variegated as his polymorphous use of graphic signs – such as brackets,
periods, lower case, extension of vowels and reverberations of sounds – and his
Plurilingualism, his use of French, Spanish, Dutch, and English (languages of European
colonial successive dominations of the Caribbean), creole languages, as well as
German or Chinese (the languages of his travels).
The delivery of the word comes across as a powerful
performance both visually cemented on the page by means of many typographical
devices and inventiveness and orally with his strong use of the voice. His
rough poetics, and aesthetics, have been compared to those of the
most-prominent Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and his Video Style, with a graphic use of the fonts, spaces and pauses
indicated in a written text by means of different font sizes or brackets and
spaces, as in Sekou’s Nativity.
In 37 Poems
there are what can be defined as his “Hong Kong poems,” among which
particularly pregnant is “xinXin,” chosen by Rodríguez. Now, the word “xin” in
Mandarin could mean “star” and “heart,” but also “new” or “fishy.” The word
“star” might hint at the five stars on the Chinese flag. By describing his
missed trip to the imperial palace of Beijing, the “forbidden city,” he thinks
about certain historical incidents that occurred in China, this allows the poet
to consider the different experiences or viability of various political or
governing systems in the Caribbean region and to draw poetic international
comparisons.
Enjoyable for the ear, powerful for the heart, this
brain-teasing collection, Corazón de pelícano – Antología poética de Lasana M. Sekou / Pelican Heart
– An Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou, is available at bookstores, www.amazon.com
and www.spdbooks.org.
About
the Author:
Dr.
Sara Florian is an Italian Caribbeanist scholar who holds a Ph.D. in Modern
Philology and is working on a new book about the writings of Lasana M. Sekou. Pelican Heart is a recipient of the
Annual Culture Time (ACT) Award 2010.
Photo
caption1: Dr. Sara Florian, Italian Caribbeanist scholar. (courtesy SF photo)
Photo
caption1: Emilio Jorge Rodríguez’s bilingual Pelican Heart – An
Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou
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