Giving her tongue

A professor once told me I should write poems and I don't think it was really because she thought I showed some promise for good writing in that form. I had written well in her literature class, but in retrospect, I think it was how I expressed myself (or didn't) that made her think I had some poetic skill.

Something from several lives ago...

I tended to be rather terse, preferring short, brisk paragraphs, rather than the lengthy, expressive responses my American classmates gave. Most of them seemed to have no trouble "spelling it out" when asked a question. I always tried to keep my answers succinct so no one would spend more time than needed looking at me and my writing.

Some might say I've come a long way from that. But if I were indeed poetically-bent, I'd express it as Grace Nichols does (I would have said it first, of course):

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old one
a new one has sprung

Nichols, whose work has been the subject of two posts here already, just had her first collection of poems--I Is A Long Memoried Woman (published in 1983, and made into a documentary in 1990 by Frances-Anne Solomon)--make it to the prestigious Festival International de Film Panafricain in Cannes, France this year. The documentary has received several notable awards and mentions to date: the Gold Award for Television Performing Arts, at the New York International Film & Television Festival, 1991; the BBC radio version won Best Feature Documentary, at the Sony Radio Awards, 1991; and, nominated for a Prix Futura for most Innovative Radio Feature.

But amidst all the hurray and hoopla about Nichols's work was one reviewer, who made the following comments about her appearance in the video:

The Video is less articulate with its use of interview clips with Nichols. Her speech is halting, bound to earth in contrast to the soaring performance of the actresses and dancers. 

While I can surely think of more obnoxious ways an artist can get in the way of his or her work, I'm tempted to think maybe the reviewer's comments point at how the new sprung tongue can continue to compete (somewhat clumsily maybe) with the old one for expression, or that the transition from one tongue to another is never a smooth one.

Whether or not she halts when she speaks, the female speakers in Nichols's poems clearly communicate their circumstances, their trials, and their triumphs...

Such as the woman in "Holding My Beads," who declares:

Unforgiving as the course of justice
Inerasable as my scars and fate
I am here
a woman . . . with all my lives
strung out like beads
before me

And another woman in "Loveact" (a woman in slavery), who...

…is the fuel
that keep them all going

He/his mistresswife/and his
children who take to her breasts
like leeches

. . . .

But time pass/es

Her sorcery cut them
like a whip

She hide her triumph
and slowly stir the hate
of poison in

Nichols continues to produce articulate speakers who tell the stories of women’s lives— particularly their commonalities where and whenever they live(d)--in her latest work, titled Picasso, I Want My Face Back(Bloodaxe Books, Ltd, 2009). I’ll say more on it later, but for now I’ll leave you with a bit from “Weeping Woman,” which is borrowed from Picasso’s iconic painting of the same title. The painting was based on the face of Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s muse and mistress for some 10 years, and who reportedly suffered a mental breakdown when he left her. Nichols’s poem attempts to give Maar’s face a voice—to give her a tongue that will make sense to many contemporary viewers:

They say that instead of a brush
he used a knife on me --
a savage geometry.
But I say, look again,
this is the closest
anyone has got to the pain.

. . . .

My twisted mouth
and gnashing teeth,
my fingers fat and clumsy
as if they were still wearing
those gloves --
the bloodstained ones you keep.

What has happened
to the pupils
of my eyes, Picasso?

Why do I deserve
such deformity?

What am I now,
if not a cross between
a clown and a broken
piece of crockery?

. . . .

Picasso, I want my face back
the unbroken photography of it

Once I lived to be stroked
by the fingers of your brushes

Now I see I was more an accomplice
to my own unrooting

Watching the pundits gaze
open-mouthed at your masterpieces

While I hovered like a battered muse
my private grief made public