Since roughly the 1970s, the Caribbean mother has been a prominent figure in the Afro-Caribbean literary imagination. Rather than a deceptively benign metropolitan “mother country” or a wistful or essentialized “mother Africa,” writers have invoked a localized motherhood, in keeping with their efforts to claim ownership of and autonomy on their home islands. As Caroline Rody maintains, the invention of the Caribbean mother-island “should be seen as one of the defining marks of the last quarter of the twentieth century in Caribbean literature” (112), since it embodies a significant shift in writers’ professional self-understanding. For instance, in a 1988 interview, the Jamaican poet and short story writer Olive Senior applauds contemporary innovations made “to the topic of the Caribbean mother—one of our great literary preoccupations” (485). This comment is framed by observations that “to be a writer is probably for the first time being acknowledged as a legitimate field of endeavor” and that “I suppose I and the whole concept of writing in Jamaica have matured together” (481). The invigoration of “our great literary preoccupation” with motherhood, as Senior presents it, exemplifies how writers exercise their talents and creativity as professional opportunities grow within the Caribbean. The Caribbean mother thrives in a literature whose production no longer entails the writer’s exile as it did in the mid-century and earlier—a literature increasingly furnished with a located sense of vocation.Footnote 1
In this essay, I explore how this located sense of vocation translates into the poetic figuring of the Caribbean mother. In doing so, I depart from the dominant approaches to matrifocal themes in Caribbean literature. First, I shift from the frequent topic of the vexed mother-daughter relationship to the symbolic, rhetorical, and textual figuration of motherhood. Instead of deliberating on matrilineage in terms of biological birth or on the domestic drama of parenting, I stress how maternal figuration allows writers to thematize their creative practices and articulate their artistic concerns.Footnote 2 Focusing on the self-reflexive dimension of the Caribbean mother trope, I also look beyond a gender-focused approach that risks polarizing male and female writers’ maternal representations. In her introduction to Motherlands, an essay collection devoted to postcolonial women’s writings, Susheila Nasta maintains that, vis-à-vis male authors’ mythologization and silencing of women, woman writers “subvert and demythologise indigenous male writings and traditions which seek to label her” (xv). This emphasis on women’s subversive difference undergirds much of the literary criticism about Caribbean motherhood and often sparks negative assessments of motherhood as symbolic of locatedness, but it tends to obscure how Caribbean literature capitalizes on this symbolism and nurtures it through a foregrounded textuality or meta-artistic reflection.Footnote 3 Male and female poets indeed often approach the Caribbean mother differently, but these differences should not overshadow the commonalities in how their self-reflexive maternal figurations conceive the Caribbeanness of Caribbean literature.
This essay focuses on two major Anglo-Afro-Caribbean poets: Kamau Brathwaite and Lorna Goodison. Bringing together their matrifocal poems may recall a well-told tale about how Brathwaite’s Mother Poem, in Lee Jenkins’s words, “perpetuate[s] in the gendered discourse of nationalism an androcentric typology,” while Goodison deconstructs and feminizes Brathwaite’s “male-authored archetypes” (111, 126). Nevertheless, I want to reconsider the relation between these two poets in terms of Caribbean poetry’s artistic and locational self-awareness. Their mother poems embody not simply their differing representations of women but evolving poetic conditions and demands for articulating the localism the Caribbean mother trope designates. If they adopt different approaches to motherhood, those approaches complement each other as the two poets tap into “[Caribbean] culture’s deeply maternal consciousness” (Rody 113) to vindicate the primacy of local traditions and expressions.
The two poets’ matrifocal poetics fledge through practices of revision. While poetic revision has been an important topic in Anglo-American textual scholarship, I advance a broad idea of revision that riffs on the conception of extravagant repetition that features prominently in Caribbean discourses.Footnote 4 Theorists such as Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Edouard Glissant have described Caribbean cultural dynamics in terms of a repetition that proliferates with necessary difference and gains by its own excess.Footnote 5 I use revision to designate the concrete aesthetic manifestations of this repetition—obsessive rewriting, recurrent reinvention, persistent return. While Benítez-Rojo and Glissant envision a Caribbean on extraterritorial routes across cultures and places, revisionary impulses multiply no less around the Caribbean mother figure that suggests territorial roots. For Brathwaite, revision involves verbal torsions, textual rearrangements, and the production of multiple versions of his mother-centered poems. For Goodison, revision does not so much entail textual re-production as inform the very figuration of the mother, which is a leitmotif that recurs in various forms throughout her work. In The Fluid Text, John Bryant refutes the common conception that revision is “a mode of aesthetic improvement and the fulfillment of an author’s previously inchoate but now realized intentions” and highlights the “essentially multivalent” changes it brings about (5). Indeed, Brathwaite’s and Goodison’s revisionary engagements with the mother trope do not aim for improvement but sustain change in repetition, attesting to a necessary continuity that foregrounds poetry’s preoccupation with its own textual performances and artistic imports alongside its local identity. Brathwaite’s revisions do not clarify so much as circle back, enacting a repeated return to the mother-centered poems as ultimately a textual performance of locatedness. Goodison’s revisions keep iterating and magnifying the mother’s role in cultivating art, thereby affirming the brilliance of local arts that will in turn dignify the Caribbean locality. For all their differences, Brathwaite’s and Goodison’s uses of the Caribbean mother trope constitute an ongoing localist project; they evince how poetry, with its textual, formal, and artistic self-awareness, elaborates an ecology of revision to claim local soil for Caribbean literature.
In tracing their “revision-ing” of the Caribbean mother, I also treat as revision Goodison’s inheritance and progression from Brathwaite and, more broadly, reframe what revision means to Caribbean literature, among other postcolonial literatures. To speak of revision in the Caribbean context has often been to dwell on the resistance and parody typical of a Bhabhan mimicry; it has been to elaborate how writers remake Western classics, how they borrow from or wrestle with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the Brontës, T. S. Eliot, and so on, in ways that exemplify a volatile and vital créolité.Footnote 6 But revision happens not only cross-culturally but also internally; it is what Caribbean writers practice in relation to their own works and to each other’s works. The mother trope’s continuities and variations that I trace through Brathwaite and Goodison will, I hope, invite further comparisons among Derek Walcott, M. NourbeSe Philip, Grace Nichols, Kei Miller, and many others. These poets’ works on Caribbean motherhood inflect or extend what appears in Brathwaite and Goodison, instantiating how Caribbean poetry, as Edward J. Chamberlin maintains, “shap[es] a new literary inheritance—and a new vision of home” (152). The Caribbean mother’s pervasive and disparate presences, I venture, offer a glimpse of the field of Caribbean poetry that revises itself—a field gleaming with a self-referential, self-revisionary, and hence self-grounding intertextuality.
To rethink revision in this way, then, is to sound the possibilities for valorizing a tradition of Caribbean localism that exemplifies the undiminished significance of the local as a parameter of literary culture. Given its densely mixed histories and cultures, to define Caribbeanness is very often to enumerate its migratory links with other parts of the world. Yet this should not eclipse how, as Edward Baugh notes, Caribbean literature expresses a prominent “sense of place” and a “desire” for a Caribbean home (8, 11). To valorize a self-revising Caribbean poetry by examining its reenactments of the mother trope is to identify a distinctive aesthetic enterprise for the persistence and permutations of that localist sentiment. While localism is commonly associated with the fixture of boundaries as opposed to the instabilities of translocal encounters, Brathwaite’s and Goodison’s revisions suggest that, apart from its geocultural fluidity, the Caribbean locality remains unfixed insofar as it perpetuates acts of self-claiming and reclaiming. What the two poets instantiate through their matrifocal poetics, I maintain, is a revision-driven Caribbean localism that values the local as a discrete, pivotal category whose long-lasting appeal animates repeating yet shifting expressions. Neither yielding to nor contradicting translocal tendencies, this localism accents what Glissant calls “the need not to disappear from the world scene” vis-à-vis the world’s diversity (99) and showcases the diverse forms this need entails as it persists.
By highlighting revision’s affordances for a localist imaginary, my reading of Brathwaite and Goodison ultimately illuminates the symbiosis of local commitment—as a key illustration of what Edward Said calls “the primacy of the geographical element” in reckoning with the consequences of imperialism (225)—and a postcolonial cultivation of literariness. Recent decades have witnessed a growing discontent with postcolonial studies’ insufficient attention to the literary, and attempts to promote a postcolonial aesthetics or poetics usually seize on literature’s expressive ambiguity or the contingency of the reader-writer exchange (see, e.g., Boehmer; Sorensen; Crowley and Hiddleston). I address here instead how postcolonial literary works foreground their compositional practices or reflect on their own literary or artistic being. Brathwaite’s and Goodison’s revisionary matrifocal poetics, I hope, will show metapoetic engagements to be crucial for appreciating postcolonial literature’s aesthetic value, as well as how this value proves inseverable from the claiming and fashioning of a local identity. To witness how Brathwaite and Goodison invoke and reinvoke the Caribbean mother is, I contend, to contemplate how a located literariness—or literature’s self-reflexive theatrics of locatedness—comes alive through Caribbean poetry’s reckoning with its own acts of poiesis.
Brathwaite’s Text-Circle: Mother-Island-Poem
With a prefatory reference to “my mother, Barbados,” Brathwaite’s Mother Poem locates motherhood on the Caribbean island and sets out to claim local roots for Caribbean culture. A milestone in the invention of the Caribbean mother-island trope, the poetry volume is known for the tapestry of communal lives it weaves around maternal figures as well as for its word-breaking, word-torquing insistence on the mother’s symbolic correlation with the landscape. What remains underexamined is the relationship between this strong local focus and the revisions Brathwaite performs on his mother poems.Footnote 7 If, as Elaine Savory claims, Brathwaite’s poetry makes readers consider “what the form is for what we want to say before we try to say it” (“Questions” 149), I demonstrate how revision—a most self-reflexive textual practice—may constitute a proper form for the mother-island coalition as well as for articulating an ideal locatedness. Brathwaite builds revision into his matrifocal poetics, foregrounding a textual practice whose self-consciousness and recursiveness perform acts of rooting, grounding, or locating.
“[M]y mother, Barbados” refracts a key related concept of motherhood in Brathwaite’s thinking—“the submerged mother.” Brathwaite speaks of “the existing submerged mother of the creole system, Africa,” making the mother figure designate the African cultural continuum underlying Caribbean folk expressions and local experiences (Contradictory Omens 6). He also associates the submerged mother with Sycorax, “the most important person/element” in the Shakespearean drama of Prospero versus Caliban that allegorizes colonial imposition and resistance (Barabajan Poems 317). As Gordon Rohlehr observes, Brathwaite develops the figure of Sycorax—Caliban’s mother—into “a principle or a complex of qualities and attributes buried deep in the subsoil of Caribbean consciousness” (279). Mother Poem localizes the submerged mother, overtly situating her on the Caribbean island. The volume begins with imagery of “ancient watercourses of my island” (3), tying its maternal theme to an exploration of how African heritage has survived Atlantic crossings and subsisted in the New World. Sycorax is directly invoked as “Black Sycorax, my mother,” but only after an elaboration of her symbiosis with the Bajan landscape (45–47). Mother Poem thus highlights Brathwaite’s consistent localism underlying his apparent Africanism. Brathwaite stresses African heritage not to construct an African identity—“we certainly are not Africans”—but to acknowledge a cultural dimension that is “part of us historically” yet chronically neglected and undervalued under a colonial regime (Contradictory Omens 57). Brathwaite’s Africanism is a step toward a holistic conception of Caribbeanness; in Mother Poem, the submerged mother is emphatically a located, Caribbean mother.
The cultivation of a local Caribbean identity requires a reconnection with the submerged mother. For Brathwaite, mothers are at the center of Afro-diasporic communities (“Submerged Mothers” 48); they are avatars of “tradition” and “protectors of nam,” Brathwaite’s term for the buried, subconscious cultural essence that would enable the construction of a distinctive Caribbean language and expression (Barabajan Poems 135).Footnote 8 In striving for autonomy vis-à-vis Prospero’s tyranny, Brathwaite claims, Caliban needs to “hack his way back to the language of the forgotten, the submerged mother, Sycorax” (“Interview” 16). It is by “relocating” and “rediscovering” the submerged mother (16), by “connect[ing] back” with her (17), that Caliban can take root on and claim sovereignty over the Caribbean island.
Much of Brathwaite’s poetry can be read as what he calls “literature of reconnection” (Roots 254), and, in preserving the image of the submerged mother, Mother Poem illustrates what is at stake in performing reconnection to claim rootedness. The sense of submergence is introduced with the opening invocation of “my mother” as a “pool” (Mother Poem 3), a watery base from underground. While the pool image fits with Brathwaite’s conception of mothers as preservers of culture and tradition, it also indexes Brathwaite’s dialectical take on submergence. By depicting mothers’ resilient housekeeping and breadwinning (“Pig Morning,” “Moth Air”), their teaching of the children (“Nametrack”), their outcry against exploitation (“Bell,” “Hex”), and their guiding roles in possession rituals (“Angel/Engine”), Mother Poem clearly illuminates and animates the cultural resources Brathwaite perceives in Caribbean motherhood. But the volume ends with the mother’s receding into the landscape: “her silent gutters of word-fall” “past the glimmering downward of gully and pebble and fountain” (117). After uncovering her voices and experiences from the pool, Mother Poem seems to return the mother to the pool. If, as Maureen Warner-Lewis writes, the pool “represents both the subconscious and the unconscious presence of [the] mother in the personal and ethnic psyche” (57), to reconnect with her is not simply to unsubmerge her but somehow to maintain her submerged presence as a nourishing ground that preexists and outlasts every single effort of recovery. Brathwaite’s figuring of the Caribbean mother involves a circular imaginary in which a disclosure of cultural roots gives way to a return to the very rootedness of roots. His poetry does not accomplish a definitive reconnection with the mother but, in maintaining the mother’s submergence, sets out to renew the act of reconnecting.
The circular imaginary Mother Poem enacts in relation to the submerged mother echoes Brathwaite’s understanding of Afro-Caribbean folk culture, where individual expressions at once arise from and return to the folk base. In describing the improvisation that features in calypso as much as in jazz, Brathwaite highlights the oneness of the individual and the group: “Each performance is different in some way because of its improvisational character; and each successful improvisation is a true creation and is an expression not only of the individual artist or artists, but of the group of which the artists are part” (Roots 57). Improvisation is always already “group-individual improvisation.” Each performance involves a back-and-forth, growing out of a preexisting folk base and affirming the base’s eternal presence by merging back into it. This back-and-forth underlies Brathwaite’s revisionary approach to the Caribbean mother trope as well as his making and remaking of Mother Poem; it characterizes his poiesis of a circular textuality in pursuit of—and as a demonstration of—the locatedness of Caribbean culture.
Mother Poem foregrounds such a textuality with its centerpiece, “Nametrack.” An exemplar of Brathwaite’s experimentation with creole orality to build a “nation language” against “the tyranny of the pentameter” (History 13, 32), this poem’s word-breaking feat also dramatizes his assertion of groundedness in the mother-island.Footnote 9 The poem features a Calibanist speaker caught up in a verbal stick fight between Sycorax and O’Grady, a colonizer figure adapted from the children’s verbal game O’Grady Says. Sycorax is associated with “mud,” “manure,” and “grounn” (Mother Poem 56, 56, 61), and she teaches Caliban to speak against O’Grady and claim his own ground. The reconnection with the mother is thus animated through words, and yet the revelation of the mother’s teaching is incomplete and results in recursion and repetition. Words consistently progress toward revealing Caliban’s African lineage: “say man / say manding / say mandingo” (57). Yet, words also rewind themselves and reverse the order of the revelation:
If Mandingo is Caliban’s real name, to arrive at that name one must read “nam” backward; it is the first three letters of Mandingo in reverse. If “nam” signals for Brathwaite the cultural essence the mother preserves, uncovering it also requires a reversal of the “man” in Mandingo. These words or word pieces, together with the rhapsodic morphing between “main,” “am,” “mane,” “ame,” “an,” “nan,” present Sycorax’s teaching as a self-enfolding circle that sustains its distinctive verbal genesis. Rohlehr spotlights these lines as “Sycorax’s most complex speech” with “a shift and shimmer of sounds and meanings” (287), which dramatizes an imperative to repeatedly revisit and remobilize the mother’s unexhausted word trove. This verbal circularity also features in the poem’s direct reference to the mother’s correlation with land, as “mud” preludes “mudda” (Brathwaite, Mother Poem 59, 61), and yet “muddah” also curves back to “mud” (56). For Caliban, to maintain his ground on the Caribbean island is to enact a perpetual circle of rising from and returning to “mud”—his mother’s eternal, submerged presence that sustains the cultural and linguistic essence. Perhaps, as Nathaniel Mackey suggests, there is a “Sisyphean strain” in Mother Poem (739), but that strain also engenders a textual pattern that demonstrates Brathwaite’s aspiration toward a located Caribbean culture.
Brathwaite’s circular word swing echoes his remaking of poems. It is well known that Brathwaite often rewrites his poems and rearranges them in new volumes, but this practice does not exhibit the anxiety Lawrence Lipking identifies among Anglo-American poets about “refreshing and deepening [their] work, instead of being content to write the same poem over and over” (viii). Or rather, Brathwaite revels in writing “the same poem over and over,” the very repetition affirming the inexhaustibility of folk resources:
I rewrite things all the time. My impression is that the poetry I’ve been writing since Rights of Passages is some kind of continuum and the continuum can be reshuffled. I can select certain themes out of the threads and that is what Middle Passages did. It’s like the oral tradition: it can be changed, but it has the same basic source. It’s like a river and you can dip into it and take different glasses of water. (qtd. in Rigby 710)
Like the word-circle that perpetuates Caliban’s recourse to Sycorax’s teaching, the rewriting cements an attachment to “the same basic source.” If Brathwaite’s “revisioning of the same piece of work from collection to collection” “challenge[s] us to see serious revision as an art form in itself” (Savory, “Questions” 146), that form first of all affirms and enacts a necessary return to the folk tradition—to the local, communal life—from which his poetry springs.
Revision as return informs Brathwaite’s invention of Sycorax Video Style, the signature typographic style in which he often rearranges his earlier work. Brathwaite describes his invention by placing himself in Caliban’s position—“Sycorax comes to me in a dream and she dreams me a Macintosh computer” (“Kamau Brathwaite” 37)—and, by changing the font sizes, typefaces, spacing, and stanzaic forms of his poems on the computer, he claims to have “discovered a whole new way of SEEING things I was SAYING” (Barabajan Poems 378). While apparently constituting a new stage in his construction of nation language, his revisions in Sycorax Video Style do not signal progress so much as a textual practice of return. It is of course tempting to believe that readers “hear” Sycorax in the “transformative medium by which Caliban finally is reunited with his cultural source” (Savory, “Returning” 223), but one cannot but feel the arbitrariness of the changes and doubt, as Charles Pollard does, whether the style really conveys “nation language as a common speech of the region” (129). “Nametrack,” for instance, has been restylized at least twice, in the 1994 autobiographical Barabajan Poems (248–65) and then in the 2001 collection Ancestors (86–95), which combines and reinvents his second trilogy, Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self. The three versions differ greatly in formatting: each has a particular typeface, the latter two incorporate various font sizes, all justify or center the stanzas differently, and so on. Brathwaite’s intentions behind these changes, however, are ultimately obscure to the reader. What is the point, for instance, of placing O’Grady’s edicts in two columns in the first edition of Mother Poem (58, 60), centering them in a single column in Barabajan Poems (248–55), and bifurcating them again in Ancestors (87–89)? Any proposed answer to such questions will be conjectural and ultimately as arbitrary as the changes themselves. Sycorax Video Style does not really work to reveal or upgrade; rather, it occasions and animates a repeated act of landing on the same spot, suggesting that the resources for writing the poem remain attractive and unexhausted. Just as “Nametrack” does not complete a reconnection with the submerged mother but creates a word-circle that perpetuates a return to the mother in her submergence, so the poem’s revisions do not so much refine its expression as enact the very reaching toward the cultural core that Sycorax preserves and Brathwaite the Calibanist poet craves for locating poetry in folk cadences.Footnote 10
In “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” alternatively titled “Letter to Sycorax,” Brathwaite thematizes his Video Style revisions, and Sycorax the submerged mother is Sycorax the patron of revision.Footnote 11 Describing to Sycorax his composition on the computer, the Calibanist speaker says that he can neither “flat floot // pun de key / boars like / charlie chap- // lin dance” nor “tapp / in in full / flight like // chalk / stick” (Ancestors 447); rather, “yu hear/in me mwa? // but i / mwangles!” (448). Unlike stiff (“chalk stick”) moves in funny dances (“flat floot” recalling “Flat Floot Floogie”), Video Style revisions consist in “mwangling” the text—messing up, distorting, and capriciously recomposing it.Footnote 12 “[M]wangle” contains “mwa,” as if this self-indulgent textual practice were a way to reconnect with the mother. In some sense, Sycorax Video Style demonstrates how Brathwaite nourishes an ecology of revision to vivify the symbolism of Caribbean motherhood. If the submerged mother, by preserving the essence of Caribbean folk tradition, proffers a standing invitation to take root and feel located on the mother-island, the Video Style revisions, by idiosyncratically revisiting and remaking previous poems, enact an urgent and recursive dynamic of locating through the poetic text itself.
The revisions of “X/Self’s Xth Letters” itself offer an example of such a performance. The poem exists in at least three versions: the original in X/Self (1987), its Video Style reinvention in Middle Passages (1993), and another Video Style version in Ancestors (2001). Reflecting on the changes across these versions, Kelly Baker Josephs maintains that they may seem “capricious and serve as ‘impediment’ to the reader” but nonetheless “mak[e] the ‘old’ poems new again” (10). The novelty consists not in improving the conveyance of a message but in refurbishing the same poem with mere differences. The creation of these differences mirrors what the speaker describes as a continual process of writing, which takes place through both “rumbellin / dung” and “walk / back / up” (Brathwaite, Ancestors 451, 452). The composition and recomposition of the poem thus enacts a circular motion, which manifests itself, among other things, in how Brathwaite adds and deletes content across different versions. For example, in the two revisions, Brathwaite includes a list of global cultural-political issues impinging on his composition, and the Middle Passages version refers to
The Ancestors version omits the reference to “nigerian tigritude” (Wole Soyinka’s precept for African cinema) and changes the rest into “… in libraria / all dem bababan gida brooks of the dead” (Ancestors 454). This change hardly illuminates Brathwaite’s understanding of Soyinka’s concept; rather, it exemplifies the arbitrary selection and omission of materials in his revision practice. This arbitrariness may also signal an assurance, indicating that the references and phrases are in his hands and can be used at his will. What gets added or deleted, in other words, all belongs to a “word pool” Brathwaite taps into and claims ownership of with his caprices of revision. If Mother Poem invokes the submerged mother as a “pool” that, as “Nametrack” illustrates most emphatically, engenders a self-grounding word-circle, the revisions of “Letters” showcase a correlative text-circle that enacts a pattern of locatedness through the poem’s own whimsical yet continuous re-production.
In the same spirit, “Letters” vocalizes an effort to reconnect with the mother as a means toward a grounded state. As it elaborates on Brathwaite’s computerized style, the poem repeatedly circles back to Sycorax, apostrophizing her from the beginning (“Dear mumma” [Ancestors 444]) to the end (“& / mumma” [456]). The apostrophes usually occur at moments of doubt (for example, “& / mumma // uh fine / a cyaan get nutten // write” [450]), as if the composition—the Video Style revisions—could not go on but for the mother’s sustaining presence. “[M]umma” is what the poem keeps returning to in trying to compose “fe we / fe a-we” (449); the mother is the support for a continual writing and rewriting for the Caribbean folk. The speaker is eventually “sittin dung here in front a dis stone / face” to create an “art / nouveau” (455), and this sense of groundedness reiterates a recourse to “& mumma” (456).Footnote 13 “[M]umma” persists as the warp and woof of the circular text of the poem abiding in a revisionary text-circle.
Can the revisionary text take on the role of the submerged mother? Can it not only tap into the “pool” but also be that pool? Brathwaite’s Video Style remaking of Mother Poem in Ancestors seems to boldly answer yes. The most conspicuous change in this later version is the inclusion of two sections—“Pixie” and “Heartbreak Hotel”—that use “found materials” to document Barbadian women’s lives (Jenkins 112). Composed largely in prose and formatted like newspaper clippings in various font sizes and styles, the two sections recount an anecdote of a stray child: a girl named Stephanie or Pixie runs away from home, her mother publishes a missing-child notice and calls the police for help, they fail to find Pixie but Pixie eventually returns home by herself, and she then tells a radio host that she ran away because her mother does not love her and that she seeks love from sexual adventures and eventually gets hurt and dismissed by her lovers (Brathwaite, Ancestors 60–71). Digressive and heavy-handed against the surrounding verse, the new sections seem no less self-indulgent and idiosyncratic than the revisions mentioned above. Nonetheless, these sections make clear the locating function of Brathwaite’s revisions by placing Mother Poem more firmly in the fabric of Caribbean local life, and this strengthened local commitment entails a reciprocity between the poem and its source materials. “Heartbreak Hotel,” which consists of Pixie’s confession to the radio host, is described as “transcribe[d] by the poem from a real Bajan radio programme of this name” (68), but the newspaper reportage of her family situation is characterized as “verbatime adaptations from the poem” (65; emphasis added). The poem is both the yield and the ground of local life; it does not simply record life in a Caribbean locality but also seems to be a locality from which life springs. In the revisionary textuality that Brathwaite builds by reworking his matrifocal motifs, poem and local life ultimately circle into each other. With the two new sections, he aspires to invent a self-generating poem that is its own pool of resources for articulating local experiences—a poem that is, one might say, its own mother. If the return to and revision of Mother Poem again perform the continual act of reaching toward the local ground preserved and nourished by the submerged mother—an act enshrined by the original version of Mother Poem as much as by the deployment of Sycorax Video Style—the revision itself ultimately claims to be that ground. In the added sections, Brathwaite alludes to William Butler Yeats: “how can you tell the dancer from the dance?” (63). His revisionary work also seems to ask, How can you tell the mother-island from the mother-island poem?
By foregrounding processes of poiesis through revision, Brathwaite’s matrifocal poetics aspires to a textual embodiment of a located Caribbean culture. For Brathwaite, locatedness requires and materializes through a self-reflexivity that consists in the text’s act of locating itself in itself. His mother poems sustain and renew that act, cultivating a self-referential, self-perpetuating ecology of revision around the symbolic mother-island alignment. Goodison also nourishes such an ecology with her rendering of Caribbean motherhood. While it is tempting to dwell on how Goodison approaches the mother-island differently from Brathwaite, her mother poems echo his insofar as she keeps revisiting the mother figure and rewriting her into a patron saint of local Caribbean arts at home and abroad.
Goodison: Motherhood and the Flourishing of Local Arts
To discuss how Goodison revises her own maternal figuration is also to reflect on how she revises Brathwaite’s mother trope. The latter revision can be explained in terms of the two poets’ different representations of women. Instead of summoning a mythical Sycorax as a female archetype for the island’s loam and waters, Goodison writes about mothers who are individual, real-life women—her mother, Doris; her grandmother, Hannah; her great-grandmother, Leanna; Nanny of the Maroons; Sister Mary Ignatius at the Alpha School for Boys in Jamaica; and so on. Instead of theorizing a submerged mother as the perennial protector of cultural essences, Goodison envisions the mother’s unsubmergence and resurrection, calling for “Great-grandmother’s turn” (Collected Poems 87) and the “rise” of “women like” Nanny (91). Brathwaite renders the mother into an island symbol in keeping with how male poets, as Mary DeShazer argues, conjure up passive female muses as symbols of poetic inspiration (2), whereas Goodison honors mothers’ individual lives and their active, heroic roles in shaping local communities. But this distinction may not be so neat. Brathwaite does attend to concrete aspects of Caribbean women’s lives; he says that Mother Poem is “the grounding” of his archetypal imaginary of the Caribbean “into person” (“Interview” 14). Symbolic investment is also strong in Goodison’s matrifocal poetics, her mother and her great-grandmother bearing no less archetypal significance.Footnote 14 Nor does Goodison reject the idea of the muse—indeed, she titles her 2021 collection Mother Muse. The ready-to-hand lens of gender is useful for conceptualizing Goodison’s differences from Brathwaite, but it risks obfuscating the kinship and continuity equally crucial to her revision of his matrifocal poetics.Footnote 15
I propose a rethinking of Goodison’s revision of Brathwaite through the two poets’ practices of localism. Brathwaite and Goodison represent two generations of Caribbean writers, and, as Chamberlin well observes, Goodison “has inherited” from Brathwaite “a confidence in the possibilities of West Indian poetry” and exhibited “an imaginative assurance” that Brathwaite has never had (155). Goodison also overtly acknowledges Brathwaite’s pioneering role: “people like you have laid a very strong foundation for a lot of us” (“Caribbean Writers” 00:24:11). In some sense, what Goodison inherits from Brathwaite is the “locatedness” of Caribbean literature. Brathwaite uses poetry to carve out a space for imagining and valorizing Caribbean folk culture, and Goodison’s poetry inhabits that space. For Goodison, locatedness is less the end goal than the ambience of art; it is less what she works for than what she works with. “I always felt that we were enough,” Goodison says in an interview: “What we had was enough… . I never took to the idea that we needed to always be attached to some greater power in order to make ourselves into something” (“Interview” 17). Her task, then, is to make “something” out of local folk lives that would evince the Caribbean’s self-sufficiency. It is often through the feats of poetry and its kindred arts that Goodison comes to highlight local identity, and her local commitments ultimately go hand in hand with lauding these arts’ wider circulation in the world. If Brathwaite’s self-returning, revisionary poiesis images an act of locating in the Caribbean, Goodison thematizes how poetry and art stem from the Caribbean locality and honor it in turn.
Goodison refracts Brathwaite’s mother-island coalition through the prism of art. Throughout her oeuvre, punctuated by matrifocal poems, there is a growing tendency to accentuate the mother’s role as poetic or artistic impetus. If Brathwaite effects a self-referential textuality for reconnecting with the submerged mother, Goodison’s maternal figuration serves to sustain poetry’s self-conscious aspiration toward artistic distinction, charting a path by which artists venerate the craft of their local predecessors and build on that inheritance. Goodison summons and follows mother-artists or art-mothers whose cultivation of art will serve to honor the Caribbean locality. To Brathwaite’s circular ecology of revision, Goodison’s mother poems add a forward-looking strain. Spanning her creative career of over four decades, these poems beat a continual tempo for the emergence and growth of Caribbean art and celebrate its vibrant prospects in and for the region.
Two early poems, “For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)” and “I Am Becoming My Mother,” illustrate how Goodison writes a poet’s self-awareness into the mother figure. “For My Mother” presents an anecdotal account of her mother’s marriage, her sewing talents and culinary feats, her caring for the family, and her sorrow and resilience facing her husband’s (Goodison’s father’s) death. The poem pays tribute to “the unqualified truth” of the mother’s life and devotes itself to concrete details (Chamberlin 198). One detail, though, flickers with Goodison’s reflection on her poet self: “I knew her / as the figure who sat at the first thing I learned to read: ‘SINGER’” (Collected Poems 4). By associating the brand name of her mother’s sewing machine with the initiation of reading, Goodison suggests that it is from her mother’s domestic craft that her poetic journey takes off. Indeed, in “I Am Becoming My Mother,” Goodison performs a kind of singing that correlates mother and poem. More condensed and more abstract, this later poem creates a sonic form for the “becoming” its title invokes.Footnote 16 The poem has been read as enacting a mother-daughter identification through the circular movement by which its beginning is repeated almost verbatim at the end (Jenkins 154), but the identification is not only between mother and daughter but also between mother and poem. The poem crafts a music as it registers the mother’s birthing and housekeeping:
The first line establishes a grounding tune of r, which flows into “waters” in the second line. The w sound chimes through “waters” and “with” and gets repeated in the third line, which merges the two consonantal currents. Just as the mother’s “birth waters sang,” so the poem sings in emulation. That “my mother is now me” not only designates a daughter’s becoming but also suggests the poet’s becoming. In characterizing Goodison’s creative trajectory, Denise Narain points out a shift “from a more reproductive/woman-centered delivery of the word to a more asexual/spiritual notion of deliverance via the word” (“Delivering” 347), and yet, as this early instance of her revisiting the mother figure suggests, there is a kindred shift toward highlighting the being and construction of poetry and embracing the poet’s role. The grace of motherhood calls for a graceful poetic craft, and to develop this craft is to acknowledge maternal largesse in poetic terms, to invoke the mother as a singer who chants with the singing poet.
In “My Mother’s Sea Chanty,” one of two elegies for the poet’s mother that appear in tandem—the other is “After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down”—Goodison reemploys the theme of the daughter-poet’s “becoming” her mother and gives it a regional tinge.Footnote 17 The poem unfolds the poet-daughter’s dream-vision of the deceased mother and delivers her prayer for the mother. The prayer—a speech act the daughter performs at the end of the poem—is preceded by the mother’s singing and speaking. The mother “sings slow,” and the alliterative melody is amplified in her “speaking sea-speak” that strikes up a choral strain with repeated sounds (Collected Poems 215). The sea chanty is indeed the mother’s as she chants with the phonemes in the word sea, and the daughter chants similarly in her prayer:
The last line, where the daughter crystallizes her wishes into the gleaming image of the horse, tunes up a “speaking sea-speak”-like lilt with the interwoven alliteration and assonance of “rides a wild white.” In praying for the mother’s freedom and comfort, the daughter also emulates the mother’s speech act and becomes a singer like her. If this emulation reflects the daughter’s wish to bring the mother back, Goodison also invokes the mother as someone who sets an example for her verbal craft, someone whom she longs to follow as a poet. More explicitly than in “I Am Becoming My Mother,” the mother’s singing-speaking gift coincides with her local “residence.” Her sea chanty not only graces the daughter’s poetic craft but also bestows blessings of a wider range:
The shift to the first-person plural implies a regional claim. If the mother is honored as the poet’s paragon, her artistry, as it were, is simultaneously a beneficence for “our” regional community by the sea. In “After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down,” Goodison ritualistically imagines the mother’s merging with the earth and waters of the Caribbean island (214), and “Sea Chanty” sustains the regional imaginary and fuses it with an emulative poetics that commemorates the mother as mother-artist.
Goodison frames local identity in terms of poetic excellence by revising mothers into mother-artists. The figure of Great-grandmother, for instance, appears frequently in Goodison’s poetic cosmos. She initially appears in “Guinea Woman,” a poem that details her arrival and survival in Jamaica and presents her as a semimythical ancestress whose African lineage subsists across generations. However, in later poems such as “To Mr. William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland,” “Remember Us in Motherland,” and “Crossover Griot,” Great-grandmother is hailed as a gifted songstress or poet: she “wrote her lyrical ballads on air / and scripted them with her tongue” (246); she “would not stop chanting” “even with her tongue / pressed down by iron” (507); she would “ululate by the bay” and “turn poet” (339, 340). These poems set Great-grandmother against someone from a different place or of a different race, thereby creating occasions for conceptualizing Caribbeanness through her distinctive poetic voice. “Crossover Griot” juxtaposes her singing with that of her Irish sailor husband (339–40), “Remember Us in Motherland” invokes her in an ambivalent response to an African’s questions about Afro-Caribbean life (507), and “To Mr. William Wordsworth” calls on William Wordsworth to recognize her poetic talents (246–47). If these poems’ cross-cultural contexts prompt reflections on local Caribbean identity, the reinvention of Great-grandmother as a poet figure suggests that those reflections are inseparable from defending and broadcasting a brilliant Caribbean poetry. The maternal lineage Great-grandmother embodies for the Caribbean people, Goodison suggests, is quintessentially a poetic lineage, and to conceive Caribbean identity is not only to memorialize the mother’s arrival and subsistence on the island but also to claim the mother-island through the mother’s art.
If Brathwaite’s recursive revision of his matrifocal poems has made locatedness a textual category, Goodison’s reinvention of the mother figure makes locatedness an artistic category. Valorizing mothers’ accomplishments in various art fields, Goodison highlights poetry’s artistic status and entwines regionality with art. The would-be sonnet “So Who Was the Mother of Jamaican Art?” is a poetic manifesto of artistic motherhood. The poem commemorates an enslaved woman’s sculptures of her “sold away” children as an origin of Jamaican art (369). The deprivation of the right to nurture her children is repaired by her art, which simulates motherly care and love in creating the wooden figurines: “She carve them of heartwood,” “Her spit cleaned face and limbs,” “When the woodworms / bored into their bellies, she warmed castor oil; / they purged.” Invoking her as “the first nameless woman who created” her children’s images and diligently tracing her creative acts, the poem places itself firmly in the enslaved woman’s lineage. Honoring her as “the mother of Jamaican art,” the poem stresses the inextricability of artistic motherhood and regional identity. If the mother-artist is “nameless,” the poem, in acknowledging her art, grants her the name of the Caribbean island. And, in her name, the poem associates the Caribbean island with art and suggests how Jamaicanness might be reconceptualized in terms of the mother-artist’s feats.
Goodison further revises her portrayal of a region-specific artistic motherhood in Mother Muse. Published after her Collected Poems and after her tenure as Jamaica’s poet laureate, Mother Muse signals a new turn in her poetic career. Goodison once spoke about rereading her early work when composing this volume, suggesting a revisionary approach to some early motifs (“Lorna Goodison” 00:40:53).Footnote 18 Indeed, the artistic strain in her maternal figuring is significantly amplified, and she is more vocal about the brilliance of Jamaican arts that deserve global recognition. The mothers in Mother Muse are not necessarily biological mothers; they are first of all art-mothers who devote care and generosity to artists and facilitate the growth of Jamaican arts. For instance, the volume pays homage to Sister Mary Ignatius of the Alpha Boys School, a nun who acts as a mother to wayward Jamaican boys and brings them up as musicians, including the world-famous ska trombonist Don Drummond. The valorization of artistic motherhood is especially clear in a poem that features Sister Iggy’s inner conversation with the divine spirit:
The boys’ artistic achievement shows they are “doing well” and well cared for, and the mother’s maintenance of “our home” consists in her cultivation of local art. Goodison highlights music’s representativeness of its locale by crafting the musicality of her verse. The enjambment of “home / grown” lays rhyming stress on “grown” and “known,” suggesting that “home” is to be “known” across the world through the music’s growth—a growth made possible by the largesse of Sister Iggy’s artistic motherhood. The figure of Sister Iggy embodies Goodison’s reinvention of the mother-island coalition and its localist implications. Motherhood as a symbol of the Caribbean island gets fused with the artistic exaltation of the island, and a local consciousness is ignited as local art—music in this case, but also poetry suffused with music—wins worldwide fame for its locale.
In a way, to valorize local arts, to accentuate the locatedness of art, is also to acknowledge art’s circulation beyond the locale. This outward vision exists in Brathwaite’s localism: the reconnection with the Caribbean folk prepares the way for a culture that will “represent us to the outside world to the best advantage” (Contradictory Omens 57). If, with a circular textuality enacted through revision, Brathwaite’s mother poems arguably stop short of imagining such a voyage out, Goodison’s Mother Muse inscribes visions of this voyage into its refiguring of artistic motherhood. Just as Sister Iggy mothers a “home / grown” music that becomes known worldwide, so Anita “Margarita” Mahfouz, a rumba dancer and Don Drummond’s lover from whom he snatches away their children (36), wins the Rastafarians a chance to perform on stage and “open[s] the way” for them to announce their aesthetic revolution meant to lead the world (39):
The “roots fashion and style” is perhaps also what Goodison claims by resummoning her mother as a guide for her poetic craft. “Old Photographs from Mother” records her mother’s housekeeping and caring graces, such as when she “dispatches / you on urgent errand, orders you send barrel not to, but from, Jamaica // to school children in a cold storage” (55). Mother’s alms are “cornmeal porridge words,” and the words in this poem somehow continue the charity errand “not to, but from, Jamaica” (55). Mother has shown the way for the daughter-poet, who acknowledges the mother’s “honing [her daughter’s] craft” and intends to “leave these for you”—leave her photo memories of the mother’s gifts for the reader as poetic offerings that sail from the Caribbean island (56). Mother Muse reimagines the mother as the patron saint of art, under whose auspices Caribbean arts will travel far and wide with a shining local seal.
“Mother Muse” and Brathwaite
Shortly after Mother Muse came out, Goodison published a tribute to Brathwaite, who passed in 2020. There she says, “[O]ne of the many gifts he has bequeathed to Caribbean writers, artists, and scholars, is the freedom to be, indeed even to revel in, our not-usualness” (“Not a Usual Man” 108). Mother Muse rings a similar note of gratitude:
Brathwaite, like the art-mothers Goodison celebrates in Mother Muse, blazes trails for Caribbean arts. If by consistently tightening an umbilical cord between mother and art, Goodison invests in her poetry a self-reflexive aspiration toward artistic brilliance that will come to honor the Caribbean locality, this aspiration also shines forth as she pays homage to Brathwaite as her predecessor. “The freedom to be” projects continuation. Just as mother-artists set examples for the daughter-poet, just as art-mothers cultivate homegrown, world-known arts, so Brathwaite opens a path for Caribbean writers and artists to be not-usual, to assert and articulate their local folk culture and develop a located literariness in their distinctive locality. This pathway takes on a concrete form in Brathwaite’s revision of his mother poems that performs acts of returning, locating, or grounding, and Goodison follows this path in constantly refiguring mothers to highlight thriving local arts. In revising and remembering Brathwaite, Goodison claims and sustains a revisionary ecology of continuation for Caribbean poetry and art.
Goodison concludes “Mother Muse,” an elegy for her mother that begins Mother Muse, with the mother’s benediction to the poet-daughter: “Go long you said, I’ll be muse, you be yourself” (1). The mother is entreated to “keep doing the island’s housekeeping” so that a garbage-clogged river may flow on and resemble what is suggested by a Jamaican place name, Constant Spring; indeed, the daughter “reach[es]” Constant Spring before receiving Mother Muse’s blessing of “go long” (1). “Go long” echoes how Goodison interprets Brathwaite’s teaching: “He exhorted us to go far out and to go deep and bring up the drowned and buried evidence of our people’s story” (“Not a Usual Man” 109; emphasis added). For Goodison, honoring Brathwaite would ultimately chime with honoring a muse-like mother, and the Caribbean mother trope seems like a constant spring that wells sonorously in Brathwaite’s textual revisioning of the mother-island and flows onward through Goodison’s recurring and evolving attempts to dignify the island with art. The two poets’ individual yet consonant matrifocal poetics deliver an impassioned hymn to how Caribbean poetry, in contemplating its poeticity in tandem with its Caribbeanness, goes long, far, and deep.
