In “Wordplanting”, the title poem of Kendel Hippolyte’s latest collection, we read: “this poem will soon end / and its true usefulness begin / After its last word, resolve, to place, with care, / a seed, a bulb, a branch / into a clay pot, old jug, / whatever holds handfuls of dirt / for onion, kale, aloe, / any small green fountaining / of nourishing or healing” (P. 51). And Hippolyte goes on to exhort us, “you will not listen to / not read again, this / – or any other – poem / till your finger and thumb/ flick from themselves / their last soft rubbings of soil / in a fine gratitude / back, as we all must, into earth” (Ibid).
If the last line, read superficially, seems to refer to the finality of death and perhaps oblivion, I suggest that when one reflects on lines 8 – 10 the poet seems to be concerned with the new life that springs from this planting of seed, branch or bulb and the healing that proceeds therefrom. It is a living and healing experience that “fountains” from a reclaiming of our ground, albeit the handfuls of dirt that this clay pot of our Caribbean might represent.
The imperative of such a reclaiming for a people who are losing their ground, unmistakably if not stridently, infuses this work, even in the seemingly innocuous reminiscences of Kendel’s “Domesticities” series (P. 20). In Domesticities – 1: Tea the gentle ritual of his mother’s cooling of hot tea allows him to raise to “[his] lips / the tea – kannèl, Red Rose, lowanjèt “ and to make it just right for “a child learning to sip, absorb the way of the family, of neighbourhood, of town, of country” (ibid l. 12-14). A ritual of acculturation that has been lost, and leaves him two generations later, wondering when precisely this became unnecessary. This lost grounding in the ways of family and neighbourhood, this severing from the familiar ways, the Caribbean- ness of his growing up, leads to the search for the Caribbean which he so vividly describes in “Avocado” (P. 16).
The imagery of Avocado has a spontaneity, a lush profusion of sight and sound that is typical of Hippolyte’s work. If in the work of some poets the sound and rhythm appear forced, with him it comes easily and naturally. And this unforced rhythm is replicated throughout the collection, Wordplanting – throughout this search for the rediscovery of self, of the Caribbean, and the assertion of our place in our story.
This search however is not simply a nostalgic hankering after the old familiar ways. It is a search that accentuates the finding of ourselves in the face of a cultural erasure that we thought we had conquered with the unraveling of colonialism. He wakes to find the Caribbean gone, a going that was almost imperceptible: “I woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone. / She definitely had been there the night before, I’d heard her / singing in the crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of the morning rain. / A childhood song. I slept down into childhood.” His incredulity at the apparent “going” of the Caribbean is aptly imaged in the lines: “And though the finches, doves, banana quits, tremblers, grackles, mocking birds / sang to each other still, the music ended when their singing ended. / Not like the day before when what they sang were motifs in an overture.” (P. 16). What the poet means, when he says though the birds sang to each other still the music ended when they stopped singing, seems unclear. When he contrasts this with their singing the day before however, saying their music was no longer “motifs in an overture”, his thinking becomes that much more comprehensible.
No longer motifs in an overture: but what themes were being lost in this prologue of birdsong that he wakes to? It becomes clear when he goes searching – searching for an identity that he believes must still be there despite his inability to find it just yet. She – the Caribbean – is gone but not irretrievable. In his efforts to find her he traces the beach footprints of her children back to the tracks of our forebears. He is confounded, she remains elusive, but “at the beach, the barricades of deck chairs, ramparts of pastel walls, / blocked any wandering. A non-pastel guard, though, told me he had glimpsed her/ walking off between clipped hedges that closed after her into a maze / tatters of madras hanging where there used to be hibiscus” (P. 16). The theme here is the forced estrangement from our origins, our history and patrimony as we are excluded from them by the barricades and ramparts of Capital.
“There had been rumours of hotel managers trying to buy the sunlight, / contract the hurricane into a breeze for gently fluttering brochures / draw columns of strict profit margins permanently in the sand” (Pp.16-17). The recent acquisition of coastal lands of historical and archaeological significance in the north-east of his island of Saint Lucia so that the corporate world profits “without guilt” (Walcott, the Acacia Trees) stands out in bold relief – emblematic of what is occurring in the Caribbean, and indeed in the rest of the post-colonial world, where neo-colonialism is reinventing itself to ensure its continued economic and geopolitical domination. The trampling on of our identity as the spaces which define us are acquired and desecrated comes over very clearly as well. Do the now-silenced “motifs in an overture” that Hippolyte describes take away from the gravity of what are truly existential questions? The poet engages with the real issues of our being, as Caribbean peoples, reimagining, not just reclaiming, our spaces in the world.
In Hippolyte’s Avocado, the international travel industry, those who own the new plantations by the sea (Walcott, White Egrets), representative of corporate capital’s replacement of the old colonial order, have forced the Caribbean to withdraw: “And the Caribbean, sensing the intimidation of quick crab-like hands crawling / to get underneath the white broderie anglaise of her skirt, withdrew herself / the way the sea clenching herself into a tidal wave, withdraws” (P. 17). The image here is that of the sexual exploitation that is so often one of the symbols of the ruthless subjugation of a people – the commodification of a civilisation’s womenfolk. Is it too much to read into this that there is an impending tsunami, an uprising through which we may yet reclaim our Caribbean? But not just yet. Not until one fully comprehends the import of the market vendor’s gifting of the green orb of an avocado; not until “the unslaved remembering of hands held out with no calculating fingers, offering / the graciousness that grows out of a ground knowing: existence in grace. / Grace eliding into graciousness, eliding into gift. The first fruits of Civilisation”. And even then with a returning to the sources of what has defined us as the ground that will anchor the reassertion of our history, the task remains elusive (P. 19).
If Aimé Césaire (Cahiers d’un Retour Au Pays Natal), CLR James (Black Jacobins) as well as many other Caribbean writers of the early to mid-20th century grappled with the challenges of a colonial Caribbean trying to break free, trying to assert itself as a people that would not continue to admit of colonial domination (a project older than the Haitian revolution), and if literary luminaries like Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite have seen the gains of the era of the national liberation movement as coming under existential threat, those of Hippolyte’s generation have found themselves in the throes of defending a Caribbean-ness that seems to be slipping away to the creeping, “crabbing” fingers of those who seek to get beneath the broderie anglaise, and to leave the madras in tatters.
Kendel, in this new collection, comes over in the voice of an elder, a griot visioning that which might ultimately help us find the Caribbean, find ourselves and reassert ourselves in the making of our history. In this regard, the images of Harp are stark, and perhaps dark. Dark, because while he visions the way out of what he likens elsewhere to a maze, those to whom he brings the message do not seem to understand and the way out of the maze becomes that much more frustrating – perhaps the reason why the poem begins with the poet hanging up his harp.
In Harp the music that will “let water ripple / from a new musical uprising, undermind, let truth flow, / loose the foundation, sunder the blocks of gold, stone after stone, / until the whole unholy God-forsaking kingdom fall” (P. 10) is not the music that brought down the walls of Jericho. It is not the revolutionary, pulsing vibe of “ram’s horns blasting, / reggae guitar chopping…/ bass bucking like a battering ram ‘gainst gates of oppression / and Gideon boots trodding the rhythm seven times round / and make the weak-heart walls tremble and crash down”. The water that ripples is surely not the angry tide of a Tsunami, the unleashed fury of the clenched fist of a Caribbean that has withdrawn itself. So is the poet sending mixed signals? Is he undecided as to whether it should be the angry vengeance of a tidal wave or the steady, almost imperceptibly rising flood of rippling water (occasioned by the music of the harp) that must undermine the God-forsaking system of oppression on which the international corporate order is built?
And so the harpist’s people do not understand his music or his voice. His appears to be the voice of one crying in a wilderness. They do not understand the music of the harp “…Oy! Stop it! / Nuh budda bring no lamentations round bout ya. / You ever hear a harp play dancehall? Even reggae? / Is how you a-go strum militant ‘pon something so / wah’ play so sweet? So sad? Yo! Elder! Res’ it up.” (P. 9). The syntax is effective, the nation language is powerful and graphic. This makes the poem especially relevant and situates it firmly in our time and space. It also, in the fluidity and measured rhythm of its lines, suggests a visionary tending towards the measured and deliberate undermining of the walls of oppression. At the same time it raises the pertinent questions about the way out of the oppression that this poem limns so well. And of finding ourselves and making our History.
And though the music of the harp is not the militant music and battering of the ram’s horns of Jericho, the Elder visions a rippling that ultimately overflows, a “cup of raging sorrow to run over / to break banks, break Babel Tower, break Babylon crooked edifices / break …the cold gleaming walls between us down ” (P 10).
The skill of the poet as he weaves intricate and many-layered metaphors is evident in this poem as in many others in this collection. The rising, rippling then raging water breaching the banks of a river, is also a mirroring of the possibility of breaking the stranglehold of the financial institutions (banks) of a globalised economic order. The cold gleaming walls of the corporate world represent at the same time, the divisive stratagems and corruption employed to maintain the Caribbean’s subjugation. So how is the stranglehold broken? Is it through the music of the harp or of the militant ram’s horn?
As referenced earlier, the poem begins with the poet hanging up his harp because his people do not understand: “where the rivers of Babylon clog into vomit, / curdling in the high, blind-white, concrete gully / behind the salvaged wood and galvanize-sheet tenement, / i hang my harp upon a half-burnt post lean-out over a zinc fence corner / and leave it there – to dry-rot, crack, split, “(P. 9). Then towards the middle of the poem: “So the same harp i did lay down, i take up again”. And at the end, he hangs it up again and leaves it there. Is this indecision, befuddlement, uncertainty about the way to bring down the walls of Jericho?
Running through the Wordplanting collection is the clear theme of the need to ground ourselves in the sensibilities of our Caribbean-ness, to reclaim ourselves, to reclaim the Caribbean and assert ourselves unequivocally into the making of our history. If there is uncertainty and indecision, there is not hopelessness. In the sighting of the rare blue heron: “the rare blue unbelievability of it – / a blue heron in the moment of flight, tilted against time and the surrounding space / standing in the flow of water, gripping the soft, shifting earth,, wings flexing air / then a blue flare exploding silently, a brief blink of sky just over water, / and in the oblique space left – light” (P. 47).
It is a light that is revelation as well as beauty. This brief glimpse of a blue heron that points to the possibilities we have lost sight of, just as that glimpse of the lost Caribbean at the interstice when the fingers of the poet and the market vendor both encompass the avocado. It is such a moment that takes the poet to the heights of the Sierra Maestra (A Birthday Reflection In Verse For Fidel), seeing our Caribbean through the eyes of El Commandante, reflecting on a journey that began “as a young man’s fierce questing track / through the unending campesino poverty and Habana’s corrupt streets and palaces where / Uncle Sam’s Mafia nephews gambled for Cuba with goons and profiteers” (P. 14). Here the image of the groping hands of Capital recurs – not now under the broderie anglaise of a vulnerable Caribbean, but in brothels and gambling houses of Havana.
The poet imagines Fidel surveying the social gains of the revolution “Green fields of school children; muralled workplaces; the shared gains of progress; / a peasant unbending upward, exclamation mark from his own question” (Ibid). The image of the peasant reaching up, upright, unbending from degradation is potent. It is a people rising up from the degradation of colonial oppression. And then there is the young woman at the mirror trembling with unmade decisions. That daughter whom “Uncle” and “Madam” still try to inveigle “with golden anklets and white powdery persuasions”.
The poet is under no illusions that the neocolonial enterprise is ever present, “waiting in the car outside” – the defeated master who wants his slave mistress back, as they all want, whether the star-spangled emperors or Napoleon (Ibid). So now the forces of economic domination and cultural imperialism seek to inveigle some from among the “green fields of school children”. The poet reminds himself however that El Commandante has raised the young woman well and that she knows how to keep her eyes open. Therein lies his hope not only for Cuba, but for the Caribbean: “She’ll show a way for her scattered archipelago family who have kept hope in / her, in Caribbean civilization” (P. 15). We will yet find that Caribbean that seems to be elusive, and reassert ourselves into the making of our history.
This collection is sometimes reflective and measured in rhythm, sometimes intense and almost prophetic in vision. Its images and metaphors, rooted as they are in Caribbean flora, fauna and culture connect with us and with the sensibilities of those who continue to search.