IRA MATHUR
Desirée Seebaran is a rising star among T&T’s writers and poets, one to watch in 2023. The poet won the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writers Prize (poetry) in 2019 and, while working and raising a young family, nabbed the hugely prestigious Johnson & Amoy Achong Caribbean Writer’s Prize (2021-administered by Arvon and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest).
Seebaran, who began writing stories when she was a child, says she’s “compelled by words–both reading and writing them,” and remembers “devouring” her father’s impressive collection of Reader’s Digests and reading To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) and Minty Alley (CLR James) at nine. Finally, Seeberan “fell in love with poetry” at the University of The West Indies, thanks to some “brilliant professors.”
Of the impulse to write, Seebaran says, “These post-colonial places are the bedrock of everything I write; I can’t leave T&T (or Guyana, my mother’s birthplace) behind even if I tried. Not even Naipaul could. But I’d be lying if I said I was flourishing here. I’ve had much support from The Bocas Lit Fest, but it’s hard to afford to be a writer unless you’re being supported by someone else’s wealth. That’s true for writers everywhere. Yet the compulsion to write has never left me, and I can’t imagine it ever will.”
Guardian Media’s WE magazine reproduces two of Seebaran’s poems with permission from the writer and publications where they first appeared.
Picong
You are 30 and too late: picong blisters
the wrong side of your skin: black & ugly.
Like iron screwed to ship’s hull,
the timber
twisting cold metal into sin,
black & ugly.
Your face is a mask: eyes shuttered,
calabash cheeks and dark skin—
black & ugly.
The chorus leaps to your lips like prayer,
a torrent of tongues that sing,
“Black & ugly.”
These words are spiky,
acid spells that slit the skin, black & ugly.
They burn like cotton wicks
in wax turned to sooty film, black & ugly.
Maybe the words hit your cheek, wet, flying from
another woman’s grin: Yuh black & ugly!
Some tantie may have held you, consolingly,
“Doh cry, sweet ting. You’ll just get more black & ugly.”
How these words tied you is trivial. What matters are
their hooks, spreading black & ugly keloids
down your spine, forcing flesh to flower
to survive: torn & swollen, black & ugly.
And rage is frothing gently under lung
as you smooth yourself into black & ugly panties.
Paint your lips, Desirée, see if that floral perfume
hides the bite of your skin, black & ugly.
You smile, speak, simmer. Then catch a glimpse
of yourself in some mirrored surface—black & ugly ...
This poem won the poetry section of the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writers’ Prize.
Bone
I’ve never touched a dead body.
But one night, Pearl left her grave
to find me,
screaming across the fence
that her lipstick and wig were uglier
than death (they were),
and when had I ever seen her wear a dress
with no structure?
When I woke up, the arm that I used to
wipe tears in my dream was stony
at the elbow.
Tendon and ligament turned cold.
And then I stopped viewing corpses
for fear of what they would accuse me of in my sleep.
For instance, my grandmother,
despite her rigour at the time,
may have been annoyed that my father
and his brothers declined
to wear white to her funeral.
She only nagged them about it for 20 years.
Each glimpse of her dark skin and closed eyes
on satin caused my fingers’ fibrous muscle to calcify
Or my neighbour, who withered under
a blitzkrieg of tumours, may have had
words to say about holding his wife’s hand
while dying in bed.
He did not die alone
but if he saw anything beyond his pain
he must have realised that she would
never recover. At the church
I could not avoid the coffin:
the flowers at his chest brushed my hip
locking it into an ossified bruise,
like his widow’s lips.
And my great-aunt may have
briefly objected to how long
her third stroke took to kill her.
I could be wrong - she was acquainted with rictus
years before I was born,
with her stiffened arm and leg
and calm conversations with a man who
denied their child. She’s died,
but one photo, her wide mouth
that would make a wry joke,
this photo slipped into the pile,
and I felt my left eye become dense
heavy as salt. I make no exceptions now.
The dead begin a boil in me,
fingers clenching deep
and I fly awake,
forcing air into stiffening lungs.
Friends stopped asking me to sit shiva
because my silence is not traditional.
You can’t speak when bone infests your tongue.
Interviewing the Caribbean–Spring 2019 issue.
Desirée Seebaran is an alum of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Writers (2010) and the inaugural Moko Magazine Poetry Masterclass (2018). Seebaran’s work was shortlisted for the 2014 Small Axe literary competition and Frontier Poetry’s Award for New Poets Contest 2017. The poet’s work has been published in several journals, including Cordite Poetry Review 81, Moko Magazine and Interviewing the Caribbean.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.
