Rajandaye was a legendary figure from Naparima College and all the bright boys wanted to be like her. My older brother spoke about her with wonder. When I met the legend she was as simple as water. She had the innocence and receptivity of a child. She was serene, almost above this troubled world. But you could feel the swell of energy behind her brow.
I want to sing my thanks for her life and work by reading from three of her poems. The first poem she ever sent me was 'Memories of a Grasscutter' a poem about her father, her father's father and his father also. This was really a poem about work, about joy, and about the capacity to rise above oppressive circumstance. She describes parents and ancestors doing what they had to do, but the poet's eye sees the exhilaration and euphoria and poetry of earthly spirits.
...cutlassing with the dance of twigs
to the music of the wind,
and beneath the open sky they lay counting its jewels for their wealth
At the end of the poem, she recognises her dependence upon them (I lean on the crookstick) and she calls them "the figurehead of my toil"–they are figures she has carved in verse on the bow of her ship to guide and protect her on her voyage as woman and poet. Raj's poems help us to understand the meaning of India for Trinidadians, and the dilemmas faced by Indian women in a world still seeking a balance between the traditional and the new. The poems also offer us the privilege of tracing the formation of an extraordinary person. We have to trace it because like all those who have a strong self, Raj was self-effacing in her poetry: never directly about "I" but her thoughts and fears and feelings are distributed in the people and places and activities in the poems. It is part of her extraordinariness that piety towards parent and ancestor can be seen not only in the 'Indian' poems but also in the poems that came to her around the death of her mother-in-law Iris Chen:
The terrors of the lone hut
the looming jungle close
the owl's grenade of hoots
mosquitoes like stinging dust
in Cedros-
she recounts them all as she counts
on extended thumbs
her blessings in her offspring
The second poem I want to read from is called 'Stretching the Light', written for her husband Wilfred G Chen. In no storybook will you find devotion like the devotion of Wilfred to Raj. He saw the gifted child, the bright spirit and the poet. He took care of her. He took delight in her work. He was her literary agent and public relations officer. But look at how she sees him on the golf course:
A dark cloud sweeps the sky with a wing of night.
Here and there are little twilight dusts.
The golfing green rolls on
In quiet solitariness, where still
He practices his drives his putts
You can think about 'Stretching the Light' as a poem in which Raj recognises how much Wilfred helped her to hold off the dark that all artists know and fear and write to dispel. The golfer in the poem is a man subject to the falling of darkness, and the remorseless passing of time (The golfing green rolls on/ In quiet solitariness), a man who does not panic but puts his head down, practising his drives, his putts. He is all action as the darkness falls and the machinery of the world threatens (He matches the swish of the clubs/with the refinery's rumbling rush). And it ends with the poet's awe at the courage and persistence of the golfer who, the reader and the poet recognise, is just like the lonely and fixated poet:
Tonight he stretches the light: the
Lone golfer with red cap turning
Keeps swinging and swinging
The poem with which this celebration of the person and the poet Rajandaye Ramkissoon Chen ends is 'A Glimpse of Mother Teresa on Television 1995'. It comes from the section called 'Spiritual Journeys' in the collection Ancestry. The journeys include actual journeys to holy places, reflections on death, and evocations of spiritual experiences. As we read them we understand that Raj was a spiritual person who understood spirituality and recognised it in different religious forms. Hindu, Muslim, Presbyterian. Raj, Zalayhar, Anna. Ever since schooldays.
She was as tolerant and non-judgmental about religions as she was about the people she met. Mother Teresa said, "If you judge people, you have no time to love them." Raj's inner promptings took her further: "When you pass judgment, you leave no room for love." The particular poem is about Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun who spent most of her life in India taking care of the sick and the poor.
She once said: "By blood I am Albanian. By citizenship an Indian. By faith I am a Catholic nun." Raj notices at the beginning of the poem the way in which Mother Teresa can be Indian and Catholic without compromising either condition:
A clean
light from her white sari flows
in metres. She is all nun
Without a nun's habit. Her cross
is half-hidden, a holding shoulder pin.
The stripes of her sari-border
swaddle her with the blue
of the Immaculata.
Those who know Raj as a physician giving hope to women and easing the passage of children into the world will not be surprised that the poem endorses Mother Teresa's capacity for giving the love without which such work is not possible:
Her skin is parchment.
On each line of wrinkle is written
the letters of her service.
Love is the 'fruit of faith'
her heart's pacemaker
that circulates its peace
What I find remarkable, finally, is that in the final stanza of the poem, it is as if in 1995, Raj is bidding her own farewell and writing her own epitaph. What she says of Mother Teresa as the television screen darkens is what one might say of her:
Her words are truths
repetitive and simple like her smiles.
She clasps her hands and bows
farewell, in the reverential
Bengali pranaam. In it she inserts
the serenity of her Rosary.
