IRA MATHUR
This week WE feature writer and poet Jannine Horsford, winner of the 2022 Bocas Emerging Writers’ Fellowship for Poetry is on the cusp of being another breakthrough poet out of T&T. Horsford is a fellow of the inaugural Moko Magazine Poetry Masterclass 2018, the 2016 Callaloo Writers’ Workshop, and the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Workshop 2014. In 2016, Jannine Horsford was shortlisted for the Small Axe Poetry Prize.
Horsford says writing and life co-exist for her in “the same green and necessary place”, complicated by the ways “this country inspires yet stifles its artists”. Yet, Horsford says she continues to write because she feels “compelled” to write just as people are across artforms.
“I am not alone in this. A friend of mine, a seamstress and designer by profession, has often spoken of the state in which she is assailed by the desire to bring to life the richness that exists in the subconscious: a need which disrespects and disrupts her sleep - a call that must be answered. Whether we refer to it as duende or ‘bassman from hell’, it is tremendous.”
Tobagonian-born Horsford says the “tradition of storytelling is strong” within her: “My ancestors baked and decorated cakes, transformed flour bags into pillowcases and embroidered them, made grass mats, crocheted doilies, gifted their relatives corn husks and cloth dolls they had made and played various musical instruments.”
This “engagement and investment” in the creative life and culture of Trinidad and especially Tobago, Horsford says, is a tradition maintained on both sides of her family.
“To this day, my parents recount their childhood experiences in descriptive detail, with artful switching between the standard and the Creole, and with much irony and humour.”
When Horsford writes, she says, subconsciously, her work concentrates on “keeping tradition” even when she departs from it. At 50, the poet says she is conscious that her “departure” from tradition “may not be as radical” as she once thought.
Speaking as she writes, mingling philosophy with poetry, Horsford ruminates that “much has been said about the writer functions as observer, chronicler and interpreter.” From a distance. Now she has arrived at a different truth, a coming home to a Caribbean space, concluding that “insufficient emphasis has been placed on the writer’s art as tradition and legacy and ways in which the writer is in community and conversation with those who beat pan, who carve gourds, who mould clay.”
All poems are reproduced with the express permission of the copyright holder and author, Jannine Horsford
On Survival I
Here, no mangoes
save for those hard-skinned desecrations
on the shelves in Tesco – placed there
by someone galvanized by the great idea.
(I suppose – all over the world
people are finding
in the mouth, other people’s epiphanies
are the taste of rust.)
In this case, sour in the flesh
while a lime-like acridness
strikes the teeth
as they near the seed.
What to do when longing ferments
into thirst and sickness?
For that dense flesh. For that sweetness
tinged with tart.
But into this lack comes
a stunning discovery:
the lush flesh of overripe
nectarines.
So Saturdays
I brave the bus-driver
who spits my “Good Morning”
as if I have laced it with aloe
to go to Brownhills Market
straight to the sellers
of those fat nectarines, asking
not if they are ripe, but as they say here:
ready. A reddish-orange bruisable
ten of them
jostling each other
in the plastic bag.
Each day in rural Britain I pray
for protection –
I raise a single eye to a trinity
of hills
even as I step into my prayer’s
fevered circle
invested less in its words than
its numinous energy –
Look, what I want
is strength enough to obeah
whatever swivels its prayerless head
in my direction.
Still, mornings on this soil, I press
a hat on my head, slip this body
into some imprisoning coat, place a clenched fist
deep into a pocket’s calm
and stride.
Because hesitation allows only
a Back in Port-of-Spain dyspepsia
a Me wudda never…in Kingston!
belly-cramping
so instead I am quiet and brisk
eating the length of cold pavements
as I devour the Cornish pasty I grab for lunch –
inhaling it
since this is Britain
and we should not have journeyed
this distance
if what we wanted was an aloo pie
its slit middle, studded
with channa, with tang of sweet sauce
with cooling sprinkle
of cucumber chutney.
Jannine Horsford’s poetry has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Caribbean Quarterly, The Manchester Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Moko Magazine, Magma, and others. In December 2020, Horsford was awarded an artist’s grant from CATAPULT: A Caribbean Arts Grant. In 2021 Horsford was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers’ Prize.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.
