A romp into gender–and love
Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On
Dorothea Smartt
Peepal Tree Press, 2014
In Dorothea Smartt's new chapbook, gender identity isn't an easy place to hang your hat: it's at the marrow of how the people in these poems live, love and survive the world's frequent upbraidings.
A London-based writer of Barbadian heritage, Smartt's previous collections include Connecting Medium (2001) and Ship Shape (2009), both from Peepal Tree Press.
The Caribbean diaspora converges with Barbados and Jamaica in Smartt's poems, displaying a sensitivity towards the interlocking segments of Caribbean identity, wherever it's found and however it's experienced. The subjects of Smartt's poems, including the frequently-used first person narrator, traverse landmine territories of sexual desire in uncertain political climates. They are bold, courageous agents of their own autonomy, but they do not live without fear, or free from society's iniquities.
Smartt's writing cleaves closely to images replete with sexual abandon, such as those within the dalliance described in Muriel, a poem that begins and ends with "damp sheets on wet brown bodies."
Through the narrator's lush and energetic depiction of Muriel, the poet explores a carnal encounter as a bridge to one's own proud assertion of erotic freedoms, and the places in which this kind of self-exploration is possible without censure.
It is censure that marks the Caribbean's prevailing politics around expressions of queer desire. Smartt makes this plain in the titular poem of the chapbook, which describes a clandestine marriage of convenience held on Barbadian soil.
The wedding is a photo-worthy, champagne-glass-clinking farce, the poem's narrator explains, telling the reader plainly that "my best man? His lover, gave me away, was wedding planner, witness, and his wedding night delight, man enough to cover every detail of our act. [...] For this was a political act: I was the life-boat, love-boat."
Reader, I Married Him is a full-spirited romp in territory that the poet knows cannot be completely sanguine. Smartt's chapbook engages with queer concerns without apology, and also with the very spirit of love that obeys no ordinances of outdated Caribbean legislature's last bids for respectability.
The dead and their domains
Houses of the Dead
Fawzia Kane
Thamesis Publications, 2014
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Fawzia Kane's pamphlet is a small house containing elaborate machinery, proof that something miniature in poetry can accommodate a series of startling constructs. Kane's first collection of poems, Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press) was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
In Houses of the Dead, the physical tenements of those now interred in the earth contain their own secret language. Each poem prises some truth about the relationships between the human departed and the architectural ruins they left behind, in both pristine emptiness and various states of disrepair.
Accompanying the dead and their domains are a series of black and white photographs, artfully presented without captioning and interspersed throughout the text. In the carefulness of their angles, they evoke strong comments on chiaroscuro, serving to also summon up comparisons between structural stability and its fundamental opposite.
The name of each poem is an invitation that beckons the reader into a self contained world of its construction.
In the poem House of the Woman of the Hammam, the possessions that survive the length of a human life become reliquaries and abandoned curiosities: "Some of her objects remain: a dressing table, mirror covered with cobwebs, mother of pearl combs, a necklace of gold threads formed into a cord."
The richness of a complexly striated personal life is suggested in House of the Woman who could taste The History of Words. Within her dwelling, Kane writes, "all surfaces are covered in patterns. [...] When viewed in solitude, the true shade of the walls becomes apparent. It is a crimson, mottled, like dried blood."
These houses have their own archivist, a nameless Surveyor whose voice precedes the five separate groupings of poems that make up the pamphlet. The Surveyor speaks in ornately dislocated prose poem format. The things He or She discerns about each abode are simultaneously revelatory and indistinct, above all coloured by the weight of dizzying memory that the Surveyor cannot escape.
There is an invitation implicit in the Surveyor's lines: Kane suggests that we might all stake claim to curating the inhabitable spaces of the world, those that are in danger of sinking deeper into their own oblivion.