IRA MATHUR
This Sunday’s Bookshelf choice is Maggie Harris, a Guyanese poet, prose writer, and visual artist. Harris, who has written ten books of poetry and prose, was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2000 and 2014 for her collections of poetry Limbolands and Sixty Years of Loving, respectively, received the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region in 2014 for Sending for Chantal. She is also a recipient of The Wales Poetry Award.
When I asked her why she writes, she thought the question should be why she “still” writes. For a passion that began 55 years ago, Harris’s reasons for writing have “fluctuated”, as every artist finds when their internal passion must negotiate the external world. She says “the powerful medium of language” has been her intuitive response to “emotions, enquiry and the quest for meaning” from the time she was a ten-year-old girl writing a diary, or to pen pals reading stories she loved and discovering it was called literature.
Writing, Harris says, “becomes a conversation” but one that can contain your secrets, “clothe them in metaphor, build on the framework of narratives that were given first as gifts, through oral storytelling.”
Harris credits her mother for her love of language sagas of “family dramas, tragedy, loss, humour and resilience on her mother’s knee told against a backdrop of dark nights, bats in the ceiling, jumbies and old hinges–more than enough stimulation for a child’s imagination!”
Losing one of her parents at age 15 and two years later, having to leave her homeland of Guyana had a huge impact on Harris’s spirit.
“The body can protect itself against the cold, the mind can learn and adjust, but the spirit is both a child and an elder; sometimes, it loses itself in new experiences; sometimes, it is wise. I was an alien tumbling about in a strange country and walked a thin line between definitions of myself–Black/White/Woman/Mother/Guyanese/Caribbean/South American. Many people I met didn’t even know where Guyana is ...”
Harris, soon to celebrate her 70th birthday, says she felt “compelled” to explore her history, which she did, doing her MA and BA at Kent University at the age of 39 as a mature student” where she finally felt a sense of home when she read Caribbean writers at university” “From Walcott to Brathwaite to Carter I felt my invisible country between borders, the tightrope across waterfalls.”
Harris, awarded the Kent University TS Eliot Poetry Prize and Kent Outstanding Adult Learner, says when she began writing, she replaced ‘housewife’ in her passport with ‘writer’.
The following extracts–three poems by Maggie Harris reproduced for the Sunday Guardian with her permission are from On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea (Cane Arrow Press) and Writing on Water (short stories) by Seren Books.
For Derek Walcott
When they said that nothing was created in the Caribbean
you stood up and counted us, one by one
and here we are now, shoals of minnows, flocks of swifts
skydivers, procrastinators
carving our flights across the seas and sky.
Our voices are singing across the world, our art stretch
ing the canvas from Seattle to Rome
the fastest man in the world is on the tongues
of every child and no hurricane can take away
the fact of our existence.
You came into my life late, my children needed me first
and now I thank you for more than the scratch of my pen
more than the gift of the podium to sing your words
more than my recognition of my inheritance my
blood-father blood-mother blood continents
more than understanding how you took the language and made it ours
more than my stumble into my country’s perishable beauty
like a stunned traveller just granted eyes.
If I believed in prophets there you stand on that celestial
High Altar, with the living and the dead-Marley, Smith
Kamau, the long-memoried women–
all those who fused music with light, words like jewelled
stars igniting our names across the
fathomless
mother–black
oceans.
Fairytales for the Colonials
Door to door he came
down the Dutch-laid streets
suit and tie like a Mormon
new-shine shoes over the wood-worn
bridges, trench-water running slow.
Up the front steps, hat off
fanning himself on the porch.
The books lay breathing in his case
jumped out, spread themselves
all over the mahogany floor.
...
With the tamarind tree scratching at the window
and our little heads like vines
pictures jumped out of the storybooks
Sleeping Beauty and her just-dead face
jungle creeping through the castle
Snow White, red apple on her stone
-white throat and Rumpelstiltskin,
ugly, wart-faced, spinning
straw to gold.
They stayed in our minds like shadows
wrestling on the walls
emerging at night like bats
slashing the mosquito netting.
Everyone beautiful was white
pure as mythical snow
straight blonde hair like Rapunzel
eyes as blue as cold.
No story ‘bout the dougla child, the coolie
child, the flat-nose child
the hag, the crone, the witch, the drone
malformed, bewitched, dark and old
so we looked ourselves in the mirror
and stayed out of the sun.
And waited for Time to come and
paint our stories brown.
Caribbean Soup, 1959
When the radio start playing Elvis, Mavis pounding the foo-foo
her arms powdered with flour from the fry fish and the bakes
dancing in the oil, sizzling in the karahi puff up like blowfish.
Yellow plantains waiting, vex to be a side dish
not the main where Mavis now tossing in the big guys
eddo and cassava, wild thyme and pimento
left hand sprinkling, right hand pounding, mouth
miming the words to Wooden Heart.
Behind her, the washing machine throttle charging up
ready for his ricketics, shaking the floor-boards
rattling the cooler, jangling the coffee and the Red Rose tea
to samba, jerk up the table where Mavis now balling up the foo-foo
ready to drop them one by one in the soup-come-to-boil
remembering the loving-up last Saturday, how the man spoil
she, call she ‘sweetmeat’, refusing to discuss his wife
and wondering why now they have to play that st
just when she getting the seasoning just right?
–End of Excerpt
Maggie Harris has been awarded Leverhulme Research Abroad Scholarship to UWI, Barbados. Her memoir, Kiskadee Girl, will be released in 2024, and a new collection of poetry, I Sing with the Greenhearts, will be published in 2025.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.
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