essayists-from-jamaica

"Lorna Goodison's new collection is a triumph of fusions: of the naive wide-eyed delight of her younger poems with their claiming pride of naming everything that is melodiously Jamaican, to a tougher nostalgia that now looks at those things with a benign, unboastful authority. This is what the young Goodison fought for - the confidence of claiming the familiar, of trans-figuring it by the fury of her humility. And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvelous poems restore? Joy."

"I think a lot of my poems have been trying to make these gestures, you know, to say 'I'm a human being, and I have some control ... very limited, but some control over myself as a human being.' (2007)"

"When all of this is over, I want to have done something that I really think means something to people: something that feeds them in some way, and I'm trying to feed the work in the hope that it can nourish people. (2007)"

"You know, the Emily Dickinson litmus test: if I read a poem and I feel so cold as if no fire will ever warm me, or if I feel physically as if I'm losing the top of my head? Most poems can't pass that test, but you read something like 'Ode to a Nightingale', and you do lose the top of your head! Nowadays people seem to want this absolute control over poetry, a kind of domination. I'm not interested in that kind of poetry. I appreciate artistry and virtuosity, but I love it when you just back away from a poem, and think, 'Jesus! Where did that come from?' When you have to admit you have no idea how it got in there. (2007)"

"I see myself in a tradition of praise singers. (2004, in Writing across worlds)"

"I love words, I really love the pleasure and consolation you get from words. Words can be nourishing or medicinal or at their worst, poisonous."

"It's terrific that there are these women writers, Caribbean writers, emerging. They're emerging the same way that the men emerged. It's just their time, nobody can stop it. They are the ones that have to tell the half that has never been told, and they will tell it."

"I believe I started to write because I wanted to read what I was writing. When I was growing up there were no images of me in the literature I read. I didn't see myself or people like me in any of the literature of my youth."

"People should realize that there is not a finite amount of opportunities for writers or for artists, you know. I think if you're good, you're good. I myself have always had the attitude that I just do my work, and I do what I'm doing, and if I am recognized, good. But I'm perfectly willing to just go about my life and if some big things happen, that's wonderful, and if they don't, I am still going to be Lorna Goodison. I will continue to just be myself."

"I just love what's happening now; it's like there's a big tapestry and everybody has a corner because everybody has a story to tell."

"...I never anywhere saw my own point of view. Although it wasn't a conscious effort, I think in the end I needed to read those poems; that's why I wrote them. So, Tamarind Season was just a need to cry out about a lot of things about myself, about other women, about Jamaica, about the world in my own small way."

"...I didn't think you should approach what your vocation is in any faint-hearted way... or as Rasta would say 'with a weak heart'. So, I wanted to write strong poems as good as the men, but about women's business."

"I think that's what real poetry is...there are all these levels...you can write about what you really feel...You get borrowed and it doesn't have very much to do with you. That's why I think real poetry or the inspiration to write real poetry is a divine thing; it is completely out of your hands. You just happen to be standing there and it passes through you."

"She is solidly located in the trinity of Caribbean writing. It is now, officially, Walcott, Braithwaite and Goodison."

"Lorna Goodison is an artist as well as a poet. The keeps of her observation, her certain demarcation of shapes, her canny sense of physical and sociological textures are undoubtedly related to that.... The sensibility in Tamarind Season is a woman's...this is the important other half, the perspicacity missing from the current record of the Caribbean."

"Few writers are as attuned as Goodison to the heartache and triumphs of Jamaicans, especially Jamaican women. . . . Fewer writers still tell us so much about what it means to be human."

"The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech. "Her name is Doris," she said to her husband, David."

"my own memoir is a history of Jamaica; it’s my attempt to show that history happens to real people; how history affects ordinary people. (2013)"

"My particular role, as I see it, is to accurately represent my people. I have this real concern about how sometimes Jamaicans, and Caribbean people, are represented. And in my own writing, I want to tell their stories, but I want to do it in such a way that I think accurately portrays them. That’s the only ambition I really have. And if I do that, then I’ve fulfilled my job as a writer. (2013)"

"once I started reading, I was taken with the idea of what could happen to you once you read something. I don’t actually remember thinking that I wanted to be a writer, but I remember thinking I wanted to be a part of this world where people put down thoughts on paper, and when you read it back you could feel all of the emotions: you could be sad, you could be happy, you could be repulsed—all of those things. And I knew I wanted to be a part of that world. (2013)"

"Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being. (2013)"

"It was early morning. There were mists over the hills and valleys of Hebron. Down in the square, Aunt Kate sat on the cold earth beside the spring. She rocked to and fro and cradled her arms as she hummed a lullaby. The clear water murmured an accompaniment. She had dressed hurriedly, and her cotton frock was unfastened at the back, her headkerchief askew, like a crumpled hibiscus. A light wind lifted the loose strands of her grey hair. Her face was oval. Pouches of reddish-brown skin framed a beaked nose and black eyes as swift as bees. The sound of feet squelching on wet grass, of people greeting each other, carried towards her. She remained still and listened. Then she smiled and nodded. Her lips formed words that were propitiatory echoes. The part of her mind which was secret and cunning accepted that she would have to pretend to practise rites which the others used to assure a reality from which she had escaped. For the others were not without power. If they demanded her involvement in their conspiracy, she needed them in hers. (beginning of 1: The Vow)"

"In the silence that followed, the bubble of the morning's celebrations was shattered and the fragments went spinning away like the mist in the morning light. (from 1: The Vow)"

"The sun reared up over Hebron like a wild horse. It streamed across the sky, tangled with the naked branches of trees, brightened the hills, illuminated winding paths, glittered like incandescent dust on the heads and shoulders, the marching feet of the congregation; rimmed their flags and banners with light, and settled in the gleaming river of morning that flooded the land. (7: The Money-Box)"

"Ann sat in the back of the cart, and, as they drove off, she waved to Aunt Kate. The old woman did not wave back. The past had taken over in her mind once more. (7: The Money-Box)"

"In the square not even the ghost of a wind stirred the naked trees. Aware of the creeping death around them, the children no longer played by the spring. They remained at home, lingering by their mothers or sitting on the doorstep beside their fathers. And they wondered at the silences which had sprung up between their parents, between neighbour and neighbour. (6: The Star-Apple Tree )"

"[He] heard her singing and knew that she had forgotten him already, that in the morning, if she remembered him, it would be with the vagueness of an indistinct dream. And knew that, walking away from her, he was walking away from the land and the people whose reflected image of him had shaped his dreams, fashioned the self that he would now go in search of, to be swept away into the wide indifference of the sea. (19: The Rape)"

"...as he sat waiting, he took up a fragment of wood and carved idly, thinking of making a toy for the child. Then as he shaped the rough outlines of a doll, he began to concentrate. For the first time in his life he created consciously, trying to embody in his carving his new awareness of himself and of Hebron. When he had finished he put the doll in his pocket, and left Hebron as twilight settled into the hollow spaces between the hills. He took the short cut down the hill-side that by-passed the church. From time to time he touched the doll as if it were a fetish. For, in carving the doll, [he] had stumbled upon God. (20: The Return)"

"As he returned to the congregation he sought for words to share with them the long journey that he had taken. He sought for words to tell them of the world that he had entered where there were no far places and no strangers: only men, like themselves, who would one day inhabit together the same new continents of the spirit, the same planets of the imagination. (21: The Journey)"

"The cheap and easy radicalism does not address the underlying requirement for a total transformation—who are we as Black people, as Africans? The Marxists, and actually no party could give us that. Only we could do it! That is the easy way. The hard way is to reclaim our past, present and future selves, totally!"

"in this country we must begin to think about education as an initiation into a world full of symbols and descriptions about who we are. Thinking of it as initiation helps us to understand the importance of introducing something else into the lives and worlds of children. Initiation also gives an understanding of the symbolic significance of education, and how language and art structure the whole of our existence. We need to re-initiate ourselves, a symbolic life through death, and create ourselves anew!"

"The affliction of today is one concerned with who we are—and the need for a we. The question is, “What will be the cure?” That is where the Third Event becomes important you see, because it is a recognition that we are a species, but not in the manner we have been accustomed to, that we can narrate this problem in a different way."

"Where Africa as our ‘origin’ becomes important is in recognizing that if we are going to tell a different story of ourselves, we must grapple with the beginnings, in which Africa is not only important for Blacks but the key. They want us to think about Africa as a way to think about affliction but it is Africa that gives us so much of our language world, and gave us much of what has been transformed over time, and continues of course into the present. And so you see, we cannot have the Third Event without Africa right at the middle—because how do you tell the story differently if the beginning hasn’t been grappled with?"

"this is where the potential of Black studies was! Language is the way that we will carry ourselves out of these problems we have—that is what is important now to remember about Black studies during those early years, that it was one part of a bigger project of developing a transformation of knowledge and therefore the transformation of the whole of society, by using a different language to address these intellectual concerns."

"When you talk about women writers in the Caribbean, I would say she would be up on top, and second to nobody...An exceptional woman."

"Public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely use the acronym ‘N.H.I.’ to refer to any case that involved a breach of the rights of young Black males who belonged to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos. N.H.I. means ‘no humans involved.’"