The 2012 Bocas Lit Prize is now down to a shortlist of three, each winners in the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry categories. This year's poetry category was an all-woman affair, and the winner (now on the shortlist) is Loretta Collins Klobah for her collection titled The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman. In this third post honoring the five women on this year's Bocas Lit Prize lists, I've selected three poems from Klobah's collection which I believe show her style and range, and which I personally liked best. Once again, I've chosen to focus on the poets the way I feel most comfortable talking about poetry: by showing my appreciation.
Probably because I’m such a fan of Edwidge Danticat’s work, one of my favorites in The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman is “Reading Krik? Krak! in Puerto Rico.” In it, the speaker tells of his/her students’ reactions (they are in Puerto Rico) to four of the stories in Krik? Krak! The stories are set in Haiti and are poignant tales of a boat of would-be migrants lost at sea, of women imprisoned and abused for practicing "witchcraft," of a woman who earns a living by entertaining "suitors" at night, while her son sleeps in an adjoining room, and of a woman who makes a quilt for her mother who she fears has been killed. The lines I’ve selected show the beginning images of the poem, in which a “somnolent splendour” dominates. Those are followed by lines which show a sort of awakening taking place once the students have read the stories. They are inspired by the disturbing images in the stories (particularly of the women) to create their own symbolic, artistic representations of what they’ve read, drawing on similarities, differences, and their realization that they had been so ignorant of the lives of people so close to them. The poem’s tones and images are formal, somber, and ceremonial, perhaps befitting its serious messages about making connections between histories and between people who share a certain geography.
From "Reading Krik? Krak! in Puerto Rico"
Under the vaulted ceilings of la torre,
the grand Seville clock tower, where sun
paints the archways in brilliant light
and warmth on marble floors, students
usually sleep or read, or sleep and read.
Sometimes the Conjunto de Clarinetes plays,
weak reeds gathering the heat and dust
of the tower into a somnolent splendour.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Four women friends
breathlessly told me it wouldn’t leave them alone,
an enormous black butterfly that battered one woman’s face
and would not be deterred while they read Danticat’s story
under the clock tower. They batted it away and ran from it,
but it stayed on course, trying to alight in Laurita’s hair.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jorge doodled in his art pad during class that day,
inking-in veined leaves and insets of a woman’s nude back,
a pose between repose and labour, as if she were simultaneously
resting from a beating and rising up again.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Students talked about tennis shoes washed ashore, dehydrated groups
of Dominicanos and Haitians routinely hunted down
by La Guardia Costera, drowned in Mona Passage,
hailed at sea, or corralled on shore
and deported from Puerto Rico.They admitted how little
they knew, though living just next door, as islands go.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
After reading “1937”, one woman brought a cantaloupe to class.
She said that her mother, a devotee of espiritismo, had her own
annual ceremony at the sea. In Danticat’s story, she said,
Haitian women needed to remember the baptisms of blood
their mothers received in the massacre at the river.
In Puerto Rico, we remember our massacres, too,
but we try, too often, to forget . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Once a year, my mother writes her bitterness
into a message, and inserts it into a melon, the student said.
She prays and throws the melon into the sea. It carries
her sorrows away. In a college classroom, where wobbling
ceiling fans stirred the heat, we each wrote our messages
for the cantaloupe, according to her instructions: a memory
from Danticat’s writing, a phrase, an image, an allusion,
an action, a person impossible to forget. Students
chose the crow-women of the jail and hair that sprouted
from makeshift graves, but I chose the quilt stitched
in “The Missing Peace”, a royal-purple, unravelling weft.
This semester, the students readKrik? Krak! as closely
as they always do here, but this time they also responded
as artists and spiritualists with their own memories to craft.
Will they forget?. . .
Another of my favorites from The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman is "Going Up, Going Down"--a title suggesting fluctuating movement, highs and lows, even hesitancy, all of which we get in the poem's treatment of censorship and homosexuality. But the speaker's hesitance or reluctance to delve into the subject is a thin disguise for the poem's overall brash and accusing informal language and tones.
From "Going Up, Going Down"
This is a poem that can’t get published -- in the Caribbean --
-- in Puerto Rico, in St. Croix, in Barbados, in Jamaica,
in St. Lucia
I just bet you three lotto tickets that it can’t.
This is a poem that has to roam, has to scavenge,
has to live in its car, has to live on air,
has to wander the back alleys, has to curl up
on the steps of your padlocked front door,
has to snatch your straw purse to get a little room
to crawl into, to breathe in --
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the elevator, the man’s hand brushes
against a man’s jacket.
The red lights of radio towers stub out like cigarettes.
The men drive through the privacy
of darkness, humming to Ricky Martin.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A night clerk reads the zodiacs.
A poui-scented receptionist -- Carmen --
books the suite.
All the way
to the penthouse,
the man’s hand grazes
the jacket.
It’s raining, creating a mood of operatic awareness
of bravery, fever, post-love aloofness.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The receptionist casts a seaside gaze --
she thinks
it’s a spectacle, two men carrying
their love for each other
like a shield -- something to tell Papi
about later in bed. The patos in room 216.
She wasn’t raised well.
How did these ramblings turn
homoerotic in the tight space of the elevator, where
I have put two men [brushing] accidentally against each other,
and where I am meditating on their carnal destinations?
You can’t do that, poem! Get back, Jack, back.
to where you belong, poem.
Homos don’t exist in the Caribbean, poem.
And get off the beach, poem.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This poem is not a lying poem.
This poem is an eye-witness.
That’s why this poem has to be clandestine.
This poem is in danger of being stoned --
Nuh fling rockstone.
Listen --
they’re in the elevator, trapped between floors.
They have not yet escaped to the other vignette,
the freewheeling car or
the seaside tryst.
Would you like to ask these men anything?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What would you talk about
if you were stuck in time? Stuck in an elevator
especially designed for patos like you?
For batty bwoys like you?
About the International Monetary Fund?
Do these men brag like Tom Arnold
yukking it up
at the Harley Davidson Cafe, “I’ve had more
pum-pum than ex-President Clinton!
(and that’s
a lot of pussy!)?”
No, they are better men than that. Sensitive.
It doesn’t matter. They are just men
trying to love each other.
Would somebody please get the censor in here?
We need to censor this poem, right now!
Let the elevator rest on its proper floor
and the door slide wide.
Let these men be themselves, to invite love in the way
that they can.
Even under the fluorescent glare
of the elevator, the kiss
is one of the sweetest they’ve ever known.
Or perhaps not.
Why should they satisfy my predilections,
utopic pleasure, safety, respect, and a Caribbean lullaby?
A lullaby of One Love?
Nice try, poem.
Now get off the beach. Go on, git.
And don’t come back, poem,
until someone, somewhere --
anywhere --
in the Caribbean is brave enough
to publish this poem.
The speaker in the collection's title poem is also quite brash and informal. She strikes a defiant, taunting, elevated pose as she addresses someone who has hurt her. The lines are full of the feeling of reclaiming something--culture, self--and of new-found strength. There is also a song-like quality in the repeated phrase "Felt like" throughout the poem, which makes it seem a celebration of sorts.
From "The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman on Top of Maria's Exotik Pleasure Palace Speaks of Papayas, Hurricanes, and Wakes"
Look, with that scaffold up my back,
I was feeling Christ-like, like the stone Xavior
on the rock pinnacles of Rio de Janeiro.
Felt like conducting the bloody symphony
of carnaval in Rio’s Sambodrome, or stalking
through the streets like Oya, orisha of whirlwinds
and cemeteries. Felt like flying to Guadeloupe,
Point-á-Pitre, where Kreyol rap booms through
the graveyards. Felt like landing on the black and white
checkerboard crypts of Morne-á-L’Eau.
Felt like it would free me from mourning you.
Felt like tasting of salt, and reggae, and rude boys.
Felt like sunning myself on the walls of the Fortaleza.
Felt like stretching my electric legs.
Felt like having daughters, big round brown
ones, who dance bomba in green skirts
and splash away from the crystalline jellyfish
and darting diamond angels of Aguadilla and Luquillo.
Felt like never cooking again, especially for you.
Felt like eating salty alcapurias con yucca y guineo.
Felt like banishing the tired crone in me, the one
begging Obatala for healing, patience, and wisdom.
Felt like riding a Shango train song all the way home,
letting the blues of it, and the R&B of it, and the funk
of it, and the beguine of it, and the mento of it,
and the quadrille of it rattle my hip bones to heaven.
Felt like starting a fire. Felt like starting a really big
conflagration to burn the urban plantation.
Felt like dressing in jumbie beads and silver.
Felt like tracking hurricanes, felt like drinking
tea of anise and lime peels. Felt like taking a bush bath
to cure the you in me. Felt like playing the cuatro
at a wake. Felt the Chupacabra in me rising --
Puerto Rican, blood-sucking soucriant.
Check it out. Nine thousand websites
have reported sightings of me, a creature
who terrifies Paso Finos in the field, drains
The blood of fowls, ram goats, and pigs without
tearing flesh. The spines ridging my back
are raised. See the warning?
So I got down from the scaffold, baby,
and I switched off my neon tits, blink, blink. . .
When you call, I’m not home. I’m listening
to Stevie Wonder. I’m listening to my daughter
listen to Sister Carol who chats, singjay stylee,
about the natural jacuzzi I have in my rainforest backyard.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Why did I let you bring me down, Papi?
Mamma and daddy only taught me how to sing
the blues; you taught me how to write them.
My only tears are for history, now.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Felt like writing
my son and daughter all my love songs --
each one ending with the words Fyah burn.
_____________
If you would like to read more of Loretta Collins Klobah's The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, be the first to say so in the comments below, or by email: signifyinguyana[at]gmail.com, and I'll send you a free copy.
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