Guyanese poet finds home with Caribbean poets
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 stretching 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 woodworn 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.