(for Anya) by Jennifer Rahim

To a stage that rivals any brand of farce, a light–
a young woman comes, a rainbow. No sign
taken for wonders hitched to dead pasts,
but witness of prophecy’s advent –Walcott’s
new Athens. Her field, a runway stylin’:
raiment as phenomenal as the language
islands stitched from worlds made seamless
as the weave of sea her hands command
into artefact . The eye astonished as at the dawning
of a star – the bright that explodes the possible,
even as we punish time for our failure to draw
nearer the distance for which Carter’s every-
child dreams: to live the will  to change tense– 
make miracle present, be blessing cup
that redeems the fault we all fit and silences
the mind’s bench of bats eager to tie millstones
about the necks of sunbeams. Anya,
architect of how we may wear our tomorrows, 
delight in this sad carnival of waste and mamaguy,
may your challenge be always what Thursdays
have come to mean, for us: our colours lifted up 
and the inexhaustible grace that is your name. 

© Jennifer Rahim, 2011




About Jennifer Rahim

Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. Her first collection of poems, Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists was published in 1992, followed by Between the Fence and the Forest (Peepal Tree, 2002). She also writes short fiction and criticism. She currently teaches at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.


Her poems have appeared in several Caribbean and international journals and anthologies. Some of these include The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe, The Trinidad and Tobago Review, The Graham House Review, Mangrove, The Malahat Review, Crossing Water, Creation Fire, The Sisters of Caliban, Crab Orchard Review and Atlanta Review. Short stories have appeared in The New Voices, The Caribbean Writer, and Caribbean Voices I.


Awards include The Gulf Insurance Writers Scholarship (1996) to attend the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, Univ. of Miami; The New Voices Award of Merit (1993) for outstanding contributions to The New Voices journal; The Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago Writer of the Year Award (1992) for the publication, Mothers Are Not The Only Linguists.

"Pelicans at Evening" by Jennifer Rahim

Pelicans at Evening

(for Pat Bishop)

Pelicans,

as many as seven,

steadfast as pointers

press heaven,

push east along Toco’s

unquiet run of coast.

News comes here

unhurried

as the beat

of ample wings

holds the eye true

 to evening’s fall.

Now, –

when an ocean’s peace

is gathered into beaks

that could deliver

the miracle of a child,

I hear you are gone.

And what is this word

bequeathed us

as you pass into earth ? –

Our souls full yet

with every

 bold

and fragile

note

you shepherded to birth –

not one

orphaned

or unformed sound

left  unhoused.

So Miss B., 

what is this nothing

as you go your way

to Mucurapo?

What parting gift –

your baton’s final call? ‒

Our tongues stilled,

grief left broke,

for your wanting

no more

than servant’s pay,

wanting too

a sunflower’s witness

at the close

of your giving days.

In this crude season

of curfew 

from ourselves,

your cowbell’s

chosen metre

is perfect song, you

knowing  well

silence earned strikes

the purest note,

speaks clearest,

being free

of all regard ,

being free blesses

with its own question.

           

So, Sister Pat,

is it that you saved

your best wine

for last?

Your passing’s ripe Art –

this holy hush

as that arcane flock journeys

routinely home.

About Pat Bishop

Pat Bishop, a business executive, painter, musician, historian, media commentator, choreographer and fashion designer, was also a renowned ethnomusicologist who, according to Dr. Selwyn Cudjoe, “sang with the Esso Tripoli in 1967; arranged music for Fonclaire, Birdsong, Skiffle Bunch and Desperadoes Steel Orchestra among other groups; conducted Trinidad All Stars, Phase II, Renegades and other steelbands; performed with Desperadoes at Carnegie Hall, New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Philadelphia Academy of Music.” She also directed music for the Morne Diablo Folk Performing Company, worked with Daisy Voisin’s La Divina Pastora Parang Group and directed the Lydian Singers for the past eleven years.

She lectured History at the U.W.I. St. Augustine and Mona campuses as well as the history of art and design at the Jamaican School of the Art between 1970 and 1972

Source: http://www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog/?p=5560

Image Source: http://www.ncctt.org/home/news/164-steelband-panorama-judges-seminar-in-the-works.html



About Jennifer Rahim

Jennifer Rahim is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is a critic, poet and short story writer. Her articles on Caribbean literature have appeared in MaComere, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Small Axe and Anthurium. She edited with Barbara Lalla a collection of Cultural Studies essays entitled, Beyond Borders: Cross Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon (UWI Press 2009).

Her creative publications include three poetry collections: Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists (1992) and Between the Fence and the Forest (2002) and Approaching Sabbaths (2009). She has one collection of short stories, Songster and Other Stories (2007). Approaching Sabbaths was awarded the 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize for best book in the category Caribbean Literature in English or Creole and has been shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature.

New Book: Redemption Rain by Jennifer Rahim

Redemption Rain invites the reader into its profound epiphanies through patient revisitation and introspection. Rahim’s voice weaves the explosive power of her lively Trinidadian Creole with the searching intensity of one given to appreciating memory’s redemptive light. A book about the necessary and the unexpected, about costly arrival in the sacred spaces of realization and recognition.

Praise for Redemption Rain

Jennifer Rahim is a poet whose work allows us to feel the vastness and reach of the Caribbean... Her authority is rooted in her attentiveness, and her good mannerly humour emphasizes the unflinching honesty with which she engages the toughness and vulnerability of the world. — Earl Lovelace, author of Is Just a Movie. Here ... is a poetry that speaks directly to our sense of human belonging, our recognition of smallness within vastness, our experiential encounters with love and loss. — S Rose-Ann Walker, The University of Trinidad and Tobago 

Jennifer Rahim is a critic, poet, and short-story writer. Her creative publications include three volumes of poetry, Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists (1992), Between the Fence and the Forest (2002) and Approaching Sabbaths (2009), and a collection of short stories, Songster and Other Stories (2007). Approaching Sabbaths was awarded the 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize for best book in the category Caribbean Literature in English or Creole. She is also a co-editor of two collections of essays, Beyond Borders: Cross Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon (UWI Press 2009) and Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on VS Naipaul (Ian Randle, 2010). She is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

Redemption Rain will be available

April 30, 2011

Pre-order from bookstores or the TSAR website

www.tsarbooks.com

Book Review: Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez

“Over there in America, I’m a Caribbean-American, but that hyphen always bother me. It’s a bridge, but somehow I think there is a gap on either end of the hyphen. Sometimes I think if I am not careful, I can fall between those spaces and drown” (347).

Paul Bishop, the speaker in this section of Anna In-Between, voices the apprehension of many Caribbean-Americans about the lack of rootedness they encounter in North America and it is one of the themes in the latest novel by award winning novelist, Elizabeth Nunez. But to limit any reading of the novel to yet another treatise on Caribbean alienation in a metropolitan country would be to miss the intricacies of Nunez’s storytelling. For Anna In-Between is a novel filled with intriguing characters written by a author with a catholic literary imagination.


It is tempting to think of Anna In-Between as merely the story about a Trinidadian woman, Anna Sinclair, who returns to the island for a vacation only to discover that her mother, Beatrice Sinclair (with whom she has never been close) has breast cancer, and to watch how the family members cope with the disturbing change. But in this aptly named novel, Nunez explores nearly every variation of Anna’s in-between-ness through highly charged scenes and with characters perfectly suited to explore the ideas that Nunez presents in the novel.


As a highly literate protagonist, Anna Sinclair, a senior editor at Equiano Books and who is fast approaching mid-life, is caught between the limiting stereotypes of African-Americans, “For in America she is black, and in America the ways of black people have been defined, set in stone,” and Caribbean-Americans, “Is a true West Indian woman one who plasters her face with make-up, layering her cheeks with rouge, her lips with bright red lipstick?” (75). Anna bristles at either definition, for she is in many ways a crossroads figure and as such possesses a Janus-like capacity for being able to comprehend disparate points of view.


As a member of a privileged class in Trinidad, Anna is also caught between the democratic ideals of North America and the old colonial values that are preserved by compliance with unspoken rules of privacy and “knowing one’s place” (26). In her discussion with Singh, the family gardener, the social inequity is placed in stark contrast:

“How casually she accepts that. He knows his place. Her friends in America would be shocked to hear she thinks this way, her African American friends especially… but having a place and knowing where others are in relation to one’s place is to have the comfort that order brings, the reassurance of stability” (26).

Anna is able to parse the difference between privacy and intimacy in the relationship of her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, and her father, John Sinclair, another theme that Nunez explores throughout the novel. “This obsession with privacy” (73) is carried to absurd lengths when Anna’s father, John Sinclair, becomes aware of his wife’s cancer: “I saw blood on my vest, he says,” (57), yet John Sinclair does not say or do anything to violate his wife’s sense of privacy.


 When Anna confronts her father, whom she had always adored, she is flabbergasted by his response:

“You saw blood on a vest she wore. Blood, Daddy?”
“I knew she would tell me when she was ready.”
“But you must have known…?”
“Yes.” It is a simple acknowledgement of information he has kept to himself” (57).

Nunez’s prose cuts through many of the social hierarchies that still divide post-colonial Trinidad and the West Indies. The characters “know their place” and do not want to disturb the boundaries. Anna, on the other hand, while cognizant of the social constraints tries to break through her parents’ frame of reference because of the limits they place on her connection with her mother, who enforces colonial mores in nearly every social interaction: “In my day,” she says, “mothers did not do that; they did not hug and kiss their children. The queen…” (317).


To which Anna counters:

“She was protecting her progeny.”
“I don’t know what you mean.’
“Lust,” Anna says.
“Lust?"
“They weren’t as lucky as we are. They didn’t have birth control. So no hugging or kissing relatives. Not even your children. It was one way to prevent pregnancy, to keep bad thoughts out of the minds of relatives” (318).

I usually develop an immediate disdain for books in which the main character is a writer or editor, but in the case of Anna Sinclair, Nunez has found a character perfectly suited to deconstruct ideas about class, race, and socio-economic relationships in the Caribbean and North America. Anna’s knowledge of literature (from Shakespeare to Derek Walcott) and music (from Bach to Nat King Cole and calypso) doesn’t seem forced and her musings place the action within a historical and cultural context. With Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez, the author of many other award winning novels such as Prospero’s Daughter, has written the quintessential Caribbean-American novel.

***