In each issue we ask a contemporary poet for a poem which draws inspiration from another poet’s work. Shivanee Ramlochan responds to Meditation on Yellow by Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior.

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Say to my pyre that I wore only gold to death
by Shivanee Ramlochan

not that I came to this island with blood smeared between
my inner thighs / not that in the wind-whip of the atlantic
the word ‘indenture’ sounded like brass coins, crumbling
to dust / not that my husband could have been any of those
men on our ship, watchful and wet-tongued, but Durga
in her wisdom found me one who was kind / not the colour
of my first sari bought in Trinidad, saffron bordered
by a rough umber hem / not the two teeth I lost in my thirties
to the blunt end of a scythe, hot breeze whistling through the gaps

not even that I stood in the canefields, sweat staining the bound thicket
of my breasts / the ache of my third baby against my bladder, seeing
the sunset bleed yellow across the Caroni / falling over fields of sugarcane
and the ghosts of good, murdered wives / not even that I still hear them in
my eighties, and the longing in their voices is molten, sunny as fresh dhal,
glinting / off the surface of the green stalks like teardrops of pearling amber –

daughter, when you stand before my pyre with your hands full of poui, each petal
glowing as a tropic star in your grasp / know I loved well / know I journeyed here
to find you, dancing free in my womb / let them know as I burn in the open air

I wore gold, in my nostril / bright gold on my tattooed wrists / gold, hard-
fought and fearless, notched in the softness of each lobe / gold, grinning in
place of the teeth that labour knocked out / all my gold, gleaming fearsome
from this life into the next / rising up to meet me as the fire melts me down.

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Shivanee Ramlochan explores the true inspiration of Olive Senior

Some years ago, I interviewed Olive Senior before a full auditorium of secondary school children, here in Trinidad and Tobago. A grateful intermediary, I was quietly astonished simply to be there. I listened, grinning wide, as student after student plied Olive with questions correlating to those they were accustomed to fielding in their English Literature mock examinations. Senior’s work was, and still is, a mainstay in Caribbean curricula across the region, at both secondary and tertiary levels. They were asking her about the technical, craft-based aspects of her writing, presumably the better to face the standardized tests that loomed ahead of them – but layered in and among their formal queries were more elemental concerns. Hidden in their asks, I heard the curiosity and excitement that not even years of militarized academia can crush: “What were your origins?” “Tell us about why this word, and this one, and this one also, matter to you.” “Why, out of every possible path, are you with us Now?”

The truth is that I cannot imagine a Caribbean literature without Olive Senior. As a multi-genre writer, a sensitive short story writer and novelist and a prodigious non-fiction researcher and reporter, those books of hers are cultural mainstays, prize-winners and frequently-cited treasures: no library in our region should consider itself complete, or striving for completion, without them. Yet I confess I love Olive as a poet best, selfishly and with unflinching certainty. I’ve heard her read her own work to audiences within and outside of Trinidad, from the urban stages of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest to a windswept Barbadian harbourfront at dusk, and most recently in a well-appointed salon tucked into a London enclave. Each time, it’s a sonic, sensory concert for me, like listening to a beloved chanteuse. Each time – again, selfishly – I hope Olive will read Meditation on Yellow, from her 1994 collection Gardening in the Tropics. Joyously, she often does. Each time, I swear, the experience is a rapture.

Meditation on Yellow is a political firebrand of a poem whose genius lies in never announcing itself to you. Sly and subversive, in the convivial tone of a dear friend wielding a dagger behind her back, the narrative wends you through generations of First Nations indigeneity, empire’s brutality, slavery’s persistence, right up to the modern embodiments of these, the oldest spectres of greed and profiteering in our so-called idyllic isles. Theses and dissertations, keynotes and profuse papers have all been offered up in service of what Senior’s doing here, and I encourage you to seek those out – but first, spend time with this poem. Search up an audio recording of Olive reading it to you herself, and by the end of those six-odd minutes, feel yourself remade, consciousness blazing at the frontside of your being, ready to holler and whoop and punch the air, or else ready to contemplate which side of history you stand on, and whether you want to keep positioning yourself right there.

If poems were songs (and who says they aren’t?), Meditation on Yellow is on my everlasting hit list. When it comes on the radio of my repeated reads, I always turn the volume up as high as I can bear it. I know I’ll always come away from the reading, the listening, with something vital and impossibly new, scorching me alive more radically than I was mere moments before. So many of Senior’s poems do this: alert you to the fact that the existence you imagined you were carving conscientiously has room yet within it for further joy, deeper feeling, heightened imagination, prolonged wonder, amplified activism, more fiyah. There is no voice like hers, and also no denying that her poetic voice has fed and watered so many of us, who write to imagine the highest/deepest/truest frequencies of ourselves and our societies.

How, then, to respond to a voice so transformative, without feeling inherently unequal to such a mission? The answer, as Olive herself might say, with her signature, irresistible archness, is not overthink it. Say to my pyre that I wore only gold to death chases this impulse: to surrender, as both poet and spectator to life and death, to the most alchemical moments of witness I know. For me, these have long been subsumed in the legacy of indenture my East Indian ancestors experienced, a complex and complicating history I best understand through the relay of sensations, like receiving generations-old information on the wind. As the speaker of Olive’s Meditation moves their body through lifetimes of resistance and outrage, I carry the voice of my response poem’s speaker through a journey they themselves have both experienced intimately, and experienced through the bone-and-blood memory of those who precede them. I let go of overthinking, offered myself to a yellow-themed envisioning of primordial survival, and allowed my spirit to lead me to the poem you read here.

To consciously write in the footfall of another: I’ve been wary of this, if not abjured it outright. Yet there’s no finer poem than Meditation on Yellow to follow. The truth is, the bonds between writers – as mentors, co-colluders, instigators, supporters – make this business liveable when it often feels more fraught than is humanly safe. Even if I shy away from the concept of a mentor, I am instinctively, and proudly, bonded to Olive Senior – her language, her legacy, her own transgressive poetic power – through our Caribbeanness, our placement in this space, separated by decades but brought closer in the work and practical industry of writing poems.

Olive’s poems do what poetry should do. An auditorium packed with inquisitive, engaged teenagers reminded me of this, years ago. More than this, or alongside, it, Olive’s poems remind me of why I am here, at all. I embrace those reminders every time I turn to one of or a book full of her poems. I sink with immeasurable gratitude into that truth, every time Meditation on Yellow wends its way into my life again. There is no living female poet I can recommend more than her, because there is no finer starting or sustaining place to
experience what it means to be Caribbean, what it means to be a Caribbean writer. I have said I wouldn’t recognize Caribbean literature without Olive Senior, and that is true. What is also true is that without her voice, world writing would be that much emptier, too.

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Shivanee Ramlochan (@novelniche) is a poet and essayist from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Her debut book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She’s working on her second poetry collection, Witch Hindu.

 

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From Magma 87, Islands

 

 

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