Award-winning poet circles back to Tobago legacy

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