All posts by Opal Palmer Adisa

Opal Palmer Adisa is an exceptional writer/theatre director/photographer/gender advocate, nurtured on cane-sap and the oceanic breeze of Jamaica. Writer of poetry and professor, educator and cultural activist, Adisa has lectured and read her work throughout the United States, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Germany, England and Prague, and has performed in Italy and Bosnia. An award-winning poet and prose writer Adisa has twenty four titles to her credit. Most recents are: Pretty Like Jamaica; The Storyteller's Return; Portia Dreams and 100 + Voices for Miss Lou. Other titles include the novel, It Begins With Tears (1997), which Rick Ayers proclaimed as one of the most motivational works for young adults. Love's Promise; 4-Headed Woman; Look a Moko Jumbie; Dance Quadrille and Play Quelbe; Painting Away Regrets; Until Judgement Comes;
Daily Musings

Imagining a Future Beyond Doom

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Everywhere I look, the future seems filled with disaster. In movies, novels, television series, and even public discourse, we are constantly presented with images of collapse: environmental catastrophe, technological domination, endless wars, social breakdown, and human suffering. The future has become a place of fear. Many of our writers have accepted dystopia as the future and publish realms.

I often wonder why, and as a result have withdrawn from certain things to nurture my spirit.  I no longer listen to the news, read the newspaper or those magazines/journals that scandalize and promote discord.  I am very content staying home, tending to my plants and protecting my spirit from the constant harassment  and negativity of what is mostly doom. Yes, you can say I am living in my own bubble.

However, I invite you to interrogate why so many of our stories assume that humanity is destined for destruction? Why do we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a world that is healthy, balanced, and peaceful?

I believe part of the answer lies in the worldview we have inherited. Much of contemporary thinking about the future comes from a Western model shaped by conquest, competition, and accumulation. For centuries, European powers colonized vast regions of the world, extracting resources, enslaving people, and imposing systems that prioritized profit over human well-being. That history has left a deep imprint on how many of us think about progress, power, and even survival. This is not a universal worldview.

The dominant story tells us that there is never enough. Someone must win and someone must lose. Resources must be controlled. Wealth must be accumulated. Nature exists to be exploited. Monsters and gigantic creatures or aliens are coming to destroy our world and wipe us out. Within such a framework, it is not surprising that the future appears bleak.

But this is not the only way human beings have understood the world. Across Africa, among Indigenous peoples, and within many traditional societies, there have long existed philosophies rooted in community, reciprocity, and respect for the natural world. These traditions remind us that human beings are interconnected, that the health of one depends on the health of all, and that the earth is not merely a commodity but a living source of sustenance and wisdom. Many will say I am a foolish optimist, that a harmonious future is naïve. But I beg to differ.

What would happen if we allowed these ideas to guide our imagination and our actions? What if we did not allow the crooks and the greedy to rule? What if we were to adjust and accept and implement a different paradigm?

What if we envisioned a future where communities shared resources rather than hoarded them? What if we imagined cities designed around human well-being instead of endless consumption? What if we taught our children that cooperation is as valuable as competition? What if we honoured rivers, forests, oceans, and animals as partners in our survival rather than obstacles to profit?

I am not suggesting that such a future would be perfect. Human beings will always face challenges. There will always be disagreements, uncertainties, and difficult choices. But difficulty does not have to lead to destruction. Conflict does not have to result in domination.

The future can be something other than doom.  What if the future is not something to survive, but something to heal?  What if our stories prepared us not for collapse, but for cooperation? What if writers became architects of possibility rather than prophets of doom?

As writers, artists, educators, and thinkers, we have a responsibility to expand the boundaries of possibility. The stories we tell shape the worlds we create. If we continually imagine catastrophe, we may unconsciously and consciously  move toward it. But if we dare to imagine balance, justice, healing, and collective flourishing, we begin to create a blueprint for another way of living. Radical Hope must be our Creative Practice.

I believe such a future is possible. In January after Hurricane Mellisa decimated the banana/plantain and other crops, I decided to play twenty plantain suckers.  Now they are way taller than me, in the space of six month, and will yield plantains in another three to four months. I didn’t just imagined, I acted.

The question is whether we are willing to imagine a more uplifting future, and work towards ensuring its possibility. I am, and I invite you to join me… to breathe in and honour the vast beauty that surrounds us and let that be our focus.

Daily Musings

Want To See More of the Ordinary Me in Media

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I’m Black. I love being Black. I love my skin, my features, my history, my ancestors.

Let me say from the outset, I have absolutely nothing against white people or anyone else telling their stories. Every people should tell their stories.

What I’m tired of is that white stories are still the default from Hollywood, the largest film industry located in a multi-cultural and diverse USA

.

I’m tired of turning on the television or going to the movies and, more often than not, watching white people, and especially white men, occupy the center of the universe. Their lives are presented as universal. Their joys, their heartbreaks, their coming-of-age stories, their romances, their family dramas—all of it is assumed to represent humanity.

But after a while, as a Black woman, it becomes exhausting.

I just want to see me. Not a caricature of me. Not another story about drugs, gangs, violence, prostitution, or poverty. Those stories  and lives exist, yes, but they are not the totality of Black existence; they are not even the majority of Black existence.

Where are the stories about the Black teacher? The Black writer? The grandmother raising her grandchildren? The nurse who goes to work every day? The farmer. The artist. The scientist. The woman who falls in love at sixty. The ordinary Jamaican/Caribbean family working hard to make ends meet, to instil strong family-values and life principles. The ordinary Nigerian family. The ordinary South African family. The ordinary Black family anywhere in the world.

Most of us get up every morning, go to work, love our families, struggle, laugh, cry, dream, and survive with dignity. Why aren’t those stories considered cinematic enough?

Why is ordinary Black life still treated as though it is somehow less universal than ordinary white life?

And yes, perhaps it is our responsibility as Black filmmakers, producers, writers, governments, and investors to tell these stories. I accept that. But I also think we have inherited a colonial imagination that still determines what is considered beautiful, marketable, and worthy of being seen.

One of the things that saddens me about many contemporary Nigerian and South African films is that too often they seem to be creating African versions of Hollywood instead of drawing from the extraordinary richness of their own cultures.

Africa has thousands of years of philosophy, mythology, spiritual traditions, languages, music, aesthetics, and ways of seeing the world. Yet so often what I see are stories modeled after American television dramas, populated by the same aspirations, the same beauty standards, and often the same stereotypes.

Even more troubling is the colorism.  The leading women are so often light-skinned, sometimes obviously bleached. The beauty ideal remains astonishingly colonial. The men can be dark, rugged, handsome, and powerful, but the women are expected to be lighter, with long wigs, weaves, or straightened hair, conforming to a European standard of femininity.

Where are the women with tightly coiled natural hair? Where are the indigenous hairstyles worn proudly? Where are the broad noses, the full lips, the deep brown and blue-black complexions celebrated simply because they are beautiful? Why are we still teaching young girls that beauty must resemble Europe?

And this isn’t only happening in Africa.  I see it in Indian cinema. I see it in Asian cinema.

The men may come in every shade imaginable, but the women must so often be fair-skinned, delicate, and possess long flowing hair. It sends a message, not only to Black girls but to dark-skinned Indian girls, Asian girls, Indigenous girls, that somehow their natural selves are not enough.

That is the quiet violence of colonialism. It teaches us to reject ourselves without anyone having to say a word.  Sadly, a similar thing is happening spiritually.

Why does everyone have to become the same kind of Christian to be respectable? Why aren’t African spiritual traditions explored with the same seriousness and dignity afforded to European religions? Why are indigenous belief systems still so often portrayed as primitive, sinister, or superstitious?

Our ancestors created sophisticated systems of knowledge, ethics, healing, and spirituality long before Europe declared them illegitimate.  Why aren’t those stories being told?

It feels as though instead of becoming more inclusive, more expansive, more curious about who we are, we’re becoming narrower. This is the ideal beauty. This what success looks like.

This is respectability. This is God.

Everything else is pushed aside.  We’re reducing ourselves instead of enlarging ourselves.

Cinema should enlarge us. It should remind us of the infinite possibilities of being human.

I don’t want fewer stories about white people. Those stories have every right to exist.

I want more stories about everybody else. I want balance. I want to see ordinary Black people living ordinary lives that are every bit as worthy of the screen as anyone else’s. I want to see our humor, our tenderness, our intelligence, our spirituality, our families, our contradictions, our aging, our joy because our lives are not an anomaly.

In fact, our reality is closer to the experience of most of the world’s people than the reality that has been presented to us for generations as universal. This isn’t about exclusion. It’s about inclusion.

It’s about dismantling the visual legacy of white supremacy and colonialism that has taught us whose lives matter, whose faces are beautiful, whose stories deserve to be told, and whose humanity counts.

I want a world where little Black girls see themselves and know they are beautiful exactly as they are. I want little boys to know that strength comes in kindness as much as conquest.

I want young people in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous communities to understand that their cultures are not footnotes to Europe, but rather they are civilizations in their own right.

I simply want to see us. Not as symbols.  Not as problems.  Not as stereotypes. But as fully human.

That is not too much to ask.

Daily Musings

Running Duppy

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Jamaicans’ relationship with duppies aka ghosts, and spirits is a strange one, but perhaps strange is not the right word: it is contradictory, layered and deeply complex.

As a child, I remember sitting at the breakfast table one morning when my mother simply announced that her father had dreamed her. Her father had been dead for years. I knew this because I had stood at grandfather’s graveside. Yet there was nothing unusual in the way she said it. It was a statement of fact; she wasn’t trying to convince anyone; she wasn’t frightened. She was simply stating a fact, as ordinary as saying rain had fallen in the night.

I never questioned it or even doubted that a dead person could dream a living person, meaning appeared to them in a dream.

My mother maintained a relationship with her father beyond death. He would dream her, she said, and warn her about things. In our house, that wasn’t supernatural. It wasn’t magical realism or folklore or whatever labels academics like to attach to Black and Caribbean cosmology, belief system. It was simply part of living, and it was not limited to my mother or some of our other family to have this ancestral connection.

Then there were the stories. People bucked up on duppies all the time—good duppies, bad duppies, restless duppies. We inherited an entire pantheon of spirits. When I visited my great-grand-aunt Zilla in St. James, she would tell us about Rolling Calf, supposedly the duppy of a man who was a butcher, now condemned to roam with chains dragging behind him and fire shooting from his eyes. Only a left-handed person could send him away.

There was Hog-n-Sow, the woman who died in childbirth and wandered searching for the baby she never got to raise. There was Three-foot Horse and countless others. Louise Bennett and folklorists have documented them, but long before they reached the page, they lived in our conversations, our warnings, our jokes, our common sense.

Even today, someone seeing your shirt inside out might ask, “What? You running duppy?”

It happened to me at the gym. My top was on the wrong side out, and immediately someone laughed that I was running duppy. The old belief says that turning your clothes inside out confuses spirits and sends them away.

I have been thinking about that.

The woman in the story I am writing wears all her clothes wrong side out after her husband dies. People told her to wear red panties so his spirit couldn’t trouble her. She wears double red panties. Yet every night she still feels him in the bedroom. Eventually she turns every garment inside out—not because she fears him, but because she is done with him. She loved him once, when they first married. But that love wore thin. He was never physically abusive, perhaps only emotionally so, lacking vigor, lacking curiosity, lacking the willingness to meet her how she wanted to live. So she dresses wrong side out as her own declaration: Gwane yu way and lef me.

Maybe that’s what running duppy has always been, saying no to what no longer serves you.

Daily Musings

Where Is My Mango?: Evidence of Our Jamaica’s Spirit.

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On Wednesday, I was coming in from Linstead, and just after we got off the Mandela Highway, there was traffic heading onto the boulevard. As we crawled along, I noticed two cars pull very close together. Hands stretched out of the windows, and in one hand was a bag of mangoes. The other car drove up alongside, and the other hand grabbed mangoes, waved and the window rolled up again.

I was directly behind the two cars and I thought, How wonderful. They must know each other, I said to myself.

Traffic moved on, and then, by chance, I found myself parallel to the driver who had given away the mangoes. On impulse, I rolled down my window, blew my horn and, when the window of the other car rolled down, I jokingly, asked, “Where is my mango?” I smiled, then laughed.  Traffic began to move so I drove on.

After all, I had just watched her give two mangoes to another car.

Traffic moved again and then tightened up once more. A few moments later, I heard a horn beside me. Lo and behold, the same woman rolled down her window and handed me a plastic bag containing two mangoes. Our cars were close enough for her to reach across, and I gladly accepted them.

I thanked her profusely, and I thought: Only in Jamaica, in the middle of traffic, would people exchange mangoes on the road.

That gesture reminded me of something we often forget. We talk about our crime and violence numbers, and those things are real. But there is another Jamaica that is just as real, the Jamaica of generosity, kindness, and spontaneous giving.

This woman embodied that spirit. I had only said, “Where is my mango?” in jest. Yet she obviously had more mangoes in her car, put two in a bag, and reached out her hand to share them with me, a stranger.

To me, that moment epitomized the best of Jamaica.  I love us.

I want to say respect and thanks to that woman. I want to Big Up those Jamaicans who still carry the Jamaican spirit of sharing, giving, and simple generosity.

Thank you. It was a wonderful manifestation of our Jamaican spirit and a reminder that sometimes a joke can become food.

I want the woman, whose name I do not know, to know that I enjoyed the mangoes, and am grateful. More importantly, I am grateful for her generosity because for that brief moment on a crowded road, she reminded me of the Jamaica I love.

I was happy and light throughout the remainder of the day and shared that story with others. I invite my fellow Jamaicans to daily, consciously celebrate that aspect of our immutable culture.

Daily Musings

Shara McCallum’s Behold

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Shara has a new book that she is sharing below, but her aspiration remains :

“To keep writing and growing as a writer, in formal measures and emotional veracity.””

“Behold engages with questions of how we see and are seen. Its formal framework is ekphrastic and, as such, it includes poems in response to specific artworks as well as poems and brief autobiographical prose meditations that reflect on the history of visual art and my relationship to that history. The book also returns to themes that have followed me &/or I have followed over the past thirty years: memory, identity, myth, the self, migration, loss, the desire for & impossibility of return.

“Like many poets, I’ve written ekphrastic poems over the years. I began thinking about the form more intently and expansively around 2022. From July 2023-April 2025, I visited museums in the US, Jamaica, and the UK with the explicit purpose of putting myself in front of works of art created by Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Women artists.

Regarding the title, Shara says: “I don’t honestly recall, but early on it felt like the right word to capture the collection’s interest in trying to see what is in front of us and, too, with matters of the spirit.”

And she rightly notes, “Books of poetry tend to appeal to other poets. Beyond that, I hope the book might speak to art critics & curators as well as anyone who loves to make and look at art, which I hope is many of us.:

One such  poem from the collection invites us in:

                                    How Often Do You Return

Whenever I eat porridge or drink tea.

Whenever the refrain poor me Israelites sounds

and somehow calls up castor oil, gentian violet,

iodine, mercurochrome—all the remedies for all

that could possibly ail you my mother knew.

Anytime I meet someone whose ha-low

are the two syllables it takes for me to suss out

they too are every day returning, who like me

says fi true and yeah man yet keeps marvelling—

Yu really from Kingston? Everywhere I go

where I see a mountain, even lickle hill rising,

am nearish a river or semblance of sea.

Predictable, kinda pathetic. I get it. But true.

Just as when night plays the fool

and a half-way-sorta-warmish breeze sends

late-summer’s flowers climbing ladders of air.

Is so my mind trellises. Is so

trickery abounds, when our one heart

is ragged, and the other runs roughshod over it.

“And whereas the poem might be referencing a specific piece of art, it also  speaks to some of the movements of the time such as the recent Covid 19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The moment I am living through in the US is both inside and outside the frame of the book but always present. As I say in one the end notes I provide on the artworks I reference in the book, I’m struck by how fortunate I was to be able to very easily see so many of the exhibits and art I saw in those two years of my travelling to museums while working toward Behold. In the time since Trump took office for a second term, countless art organisations have been defunded. Exhibits featuring artists like those I saw have come under incredible attack and many have been cancelled due to lost funding or curators fearful of retribution. Behold, in some ways, is a poetic gallery of what has been (temporarily, I trust) lost to our view.

Shara is well into her next project:

“I began an 18-month fellowship at the University of Leeds in late March and was in residence there for a month. I’ll return for a couple additional extended visits before the fellowship ends in August 2027. On my first visit, I spent time with the Peepal Tree Press Archives held at the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library. I hope to write something—perhaps prose or a hybrid of poetry and prose—that comes out of my experience sitting with materials in those archives.

“I read far more than I write and often go months with just reading and taking notes, without the desire to finish a poem. I use a notebook still and write early drafts of poems by hand. After some time, I shape some of those drafts and other scribblings in my notebook into the poems I publish. The same process more or less holds for the essays I also write.

 Central to who I am as a writer-person, SHARA MCCALLUM states, “I need no persuasion to sing and dance, my early forays into art as a practice and enduring loves.”

                  A History of Colour

American Lawn, Alex Callender

Once leeched from lapis lazuli, now

chemically-derived, named ultramarine

blue, the most beautiful colour

is the one that doesn’t exist. The painter’s

pigments, her selection of synthetic tints hint

at the roots of cobalt, cerulean, and azurite—

opulent, lushly expressed in larger-than-life

asters and big blue stem and marsh cord grasses

overgrowing the field filling-up this canvas.

Close-ups of purple-blue flowers showcase

their black centres, massing a galaxy of stars.

Here and there, cyan blossoms erupt

into flame. The sky above all this modifies,

darkening the palette while hueing it mauve,

with dash-like strokes that conjure a meteor

raining down. Everywhere, there are

intimations of danger and grandeur,

an abundance of nature that feels utterly

unnatural. On an indigo river running

through this lurid lawn, colonial relics bob:

pages torn from an 18th century book

of botanic drawings, chipped teacups,

a submerged, disembodied plaster head.

All are phantom presences, haunting

the surreal landscape of history’s graveyard.

289292 (if cropped more)293300329 (if cropped more)330 (if cropped more)333347378418I am thinking close-ups are better, so lean toward the first, indoor shots, but maybe that’s because I can’t imagine what the others might look like if cropped so that they are more of a head shot.So if I’m picking just one non-smiling, I guess I’d say 300. And for a smiling (if cropped) then I’d go with 329. Let me know your thoughts too.
Daily Musings

Demystifying Masculinities Through Art and Scholarship

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On Wednesday, April 1, 2026, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies Regional Coordinating Office, The UWI, hosted the official launch of Caribbean Men in the Art Demystifying Masculinities with Essays, Interviews, Poetry and Stories, co-edited by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa and Dr. Keino Senior. The event drew a packed and engaged audience, signaling the urgency and relevance of its theme.

This impressive collection features 39 contributors from across the Caribbean and its diaspora, bringing together essays, interviews, poetry, and short fiction. It stands as both a scholarly intervention and a creative exploration of how masculinities are constructed, performed, and reimagined in the region.

The launch itself embodied this blend of scholarship and lived experience. Remarks on the significance of the editors’ work were delivered by Professor Amar Wahab, Director of the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Greetings were also brought by Sharon Coburn Robinson, Principal Director of the Bureau of Gender Affairs, on behalf of the Honorable Olivia Grange, Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport.

Dr. Senior, in his editorial response, stated that the book is a critical work challenging dominant Caribbean masculinities. Using a theatre metaphor, it explores how gender roles are performed and controlled, arguing for multiple, fluid masculinities. It calls on artists and scholars to reimagine, challenge, and create more inclusive, equitable expressions of manhood.

The evening was enriched by artistic performances, including a stirring musical presentation by Miss Sashekia Brown accompanied by Mr. Stephen Shaw-Naar of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Guest speaker Mr. Marlon Simms, Dean of the School of Dance at the same institution, offered a deeply personal reflection on masculinity, crediting a nurturing stepfather who allowed him emotional freedom and play, conditions that made his dance journey possible.

Additional presentations by contributors such as Mr. Amilcar Sanatan, Dr. Jahlani Niaah, and Miss Wendy Ann Brissett and Professor Opal Palmer Adisa underscored the range and depth of the collection.

At a time when Caribbean societies continue to confront high levels of gender-based violence, Caribbean Men in the Arts offers a critical and necessary intervention. It challenges narrow and often harmful constructions of masculinity that equate manhood with dominance, emotional suppression, and violence.

Instead, the book opens space for imagining multiple masculinities: ones that embrace vulnerability, creativity, care, and self-awareness. As such, it is an invaluable resource for tertiary institutions, secondary schools, and anyone committed to reshaping gender relations in the Caribbean.

The launch concluded with the symbolic presentation of copies to the University of the West Indies library, ensuring that this important work will be accessible to future generations of scholars and students.

Prepared by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa & Dr. Keino Senior

Daily Musings

The Great Delusion, a play by Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon

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The play, The Great Delusion, is a dramatic autopsy of white supremacy. I’m tired of the “trauma porn,” the stories of poverty, and the “White Savior” tropes that Hollywood loves to force on Black characters. I created a theory called Inversionism to flip that script. In The Great Delusion, Black intellectual life is returned to being the center of the universe, while the arrogance of white supremacy is reduced to an object of criticism and, frankly, ridicule. It’s a chronicle of Blacks moving from just surviving history to consciously reasserting their foundational roles in global civilization.

It came from the realization that white supremacy isn’t some grand, immutable truth, but a fragile, global hallucination. The “Great Delusion” is the lie that African history is a void or that our identity only exists as a reaction to racist aggression. I wanted a title that signaled a total psychological exit from that lie.

I worked on the play over several years. There were moments when it felt exciting and alive, and other moments when it completely exhausted me. One of the hardest parts was trying to hold together history, spirituality, politics, and human emotion without allowing the play to become preachy. Upon completion, it felt like finally laying down something heavy I had carried for a long time.

I believe this story is important because our storytelling needs a radical paradigm shift. I didn’t want to write another story about suffering. So I wrote this for the Black reader who is done being a victim and is ready to reclaim a heritage of ancestral glory. I wrote this for the African diaspora and anyone who is sick of exhausted narratives and wants to see Black dignity as the default setting. I wrote this for Black children who have for so long been denied examples of inventors, pioneers (true heroes) that look like them.

The last few years have been a pressure cooker. Living through the pandemic and the BLM movement laid bare how fragile Western systems really are. However it was the return of Donald Trump to the presidency that solidified the urgency of The Great Delusion. In the play, the character Deep, the white supremacist patriarch, is a metaphor of the arrogant, historical erasure that defines the current U.S. administration.

Trump’s presidency has been a masterclass in disinformation and the defacing of history. Seeing that play out on the world stage pushed me to focus on memory—specifically, who gets to control it and how we use it to render this entire supremacist paradigm culturally obsolete.

I am currently immersed in rigorous research of pre-colonial Africa. I want to write about our Golden Era, when we ruled and when Greek scholars traveled to our continent to learn at our feet. My goal is to remind the Black world of exactly who we were so that knowledge can inspire us to build a better tomorrow.

I’ve heard many writers say they start by plotting their story. I start with an argument. I spend weeks researching and walking, literally arguing aloud with my characters to stress-test their ideas. If a piece of dialogue can’t survive a real-world verbal confrontation, it doesn’t make it onto the page.

I want to contribute my part to the restoration of African intellectual and artistic confidence. I’m not interested in chasing trends. I want to build works that outlive me and uphold a permanent reclamation of Black moral dignity.

My creative process is deeply intertwined with my relationship with Ifá. I view my desk as an extension of the shrine and my writing as a form of divination. Before a character speaks or a plot unfolds, I am in constant consultation with the wisdom of the Odù, ensuring that every word I commit to the page aligns with ancestral truth. If you see me pacing or whispering to the air, I am not just “brainstorming”. I am listening to the guidance of the Orishas to ensure my work serves a purpose higher than mere entertainment.

Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon

Author, The Great Delusion

WhatsApp/Call: +234 (0) 9139208624

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Daily Musings

MISSING PRE AND TEEN GIRLS IN JAMAICA

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My head is pounding, my body stiffens as I stand in the line at the Company Office, and on the monitor see the listing of the number of girls who are missing in Jamaica. This is déjà vu, I think. This is not new just  a worldwide threat wearing a new name. We have changed the language from slavery to trafficking, but the machinery feels the same, the greedy exploitation feels the same, the taking feels the same.

I am pulled back to the end of 1979 when I moved to California to pursue graduate studies, and the children in Atlanta were disappearing. Twenty-nine of them stolen and murdered.  Gone!  Most were never found or bodies recovered. Mothers wailed  and pleaded into the night, while the city held its breath to suffocating. Everyone was riled up across the nation, and then Wayne Bertram Williams was arrested. The powers that be said the killings stopped, that it was over. But Toni Cade Bambara, the African American writer ,12-year research that resulted in her book, Those Bones Are Not My Child, 1999, and who was living in Atlanta saying no, the killings did not stop. What stopped was the pressure building in the community, the uprising that was about to demand more than a single answer for a collective wound. Something was quieted, not solved. Shift blame and attention and we go on, pretend there was justice, but knew deep down it was just another cover up.

So many poems I wrote about those missing children, chapbooks and even a one act play…Where now to find those testimonies?

Now here I am 40 plus years later, standing in a line in Jamaica, looking at a screen listing children, girls—12, 13,14, 15, as young as 10—missing. Missing like it is an ordinary word, like it is a misplacement, like they will turn up behind someone’s yard, or down a lane. Missing as if they are not being taken, as if they are not being moved through channels we refuse to name.

Why are we not being more mindful? Why isn’t  this being spoken about on the radio, on the television, in the spaces where we gather and listen? Do we understand the scale of what is happening, how our children are being stolen from us, not in darkness alone but in plain sight?

I hear the easy talk, the dismissal and denial : Is run dem run away.  Dem fast. Dem want big life. Dem hard ears and disobedient. The blame shifts, loudly, condemningly onto the child. Not to the home that may be fractured, away from the systems that fail, away from the networks that prey. We soften the truth so we can sleep at night.

But my heart is constricted. I am bereaved and bereft, and I cannot soften it. This keeps happening, in different forms, across time, across borders, but it is the same thing. The same greed. The same taking. The same exploitation.

I remember standing at rallies in California in 1980 and 1981, reading poems, calling for attention, for protection, for urgency. And now, here again, I am asking: what do I do? What do we do? How do we make people see what is already before us?

Wake up, Jamaica. Wake up, Haiti. Wake up, Trinidad. Wake up, America. Wake up, Africa. Look carefully. Look honestly. Do not dismiss it as children wandering off into their own undoing.

This is real. This is systematic. And what we refuse to confront will not disappear. It will return, it will widen, and it will haunt us all.

Daily Musings

Kwame Dawes: “Turn to the alchemy of dub.”

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Preamble:

“Love Affair with literature,” is an annually event hosted by the department of literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus. The department  invites a prominent writer to read works that speak to the topic, whichever way the writer interprets the theme. The invited writer this year was none other than Kwame Dawes, with laudable accolades, which anyone can get from  the internet. I was asked to introduce him, and therefore, thought it would be a disservice to just read his biography since anyone could.  Instead, I decided  to personalize the introduction as I have known Kwame for  over 20 years.  Although not close, we have been engaging each other  in one capacity or another. Also, I wanted to  use his poems/word to introduce him; so here is my introduction of Kwame Dawes

“Turn to the alchemy of dub,” is, for me, an unforgettable line from Kwame Dawes’ poem Faith. Just that phrase alone tells us something essential about the poet we welcometonight.

To speak of dub as alchemy is to understand something profound about this Caribbean region we call home, and specially Jamaica. Dub music, born out of rhythm and experimentation, is indeed a kind of alchemy as it takes fragments such as sound, memory, slices of history, bass, and voice and transforms them into something larger, more grounding than their parts and that sits in the base of your stomach, well at least mine.  Transformative.

When Dawes names dub alchemy, he shows us something about his own poetic imagination: a deep respect and understanding for Jamaican creativity, for Caribbean ingenuity, for what our people have made out of centuries of movement, struggle, invention, and survival.

The first time I met Kwame Dawes was when I was invited to Calabash International Literary Festival, after my collection Caribbean Passion, 2004 had been published by Peepal Tree Press. I remember a brief encounter  a moment before my reading. One of the poems in the collection, “Bumbu Clat,” is about the cloth women used  to use when they had their menses before pads.  The title of the poem is said to be the worse Jamaican bad word, and just a few week before my reading, an artist was arrested for shouting the word out on stage. (Absurd, but colonial ideology still rules and bumbu clat and other such words were still on the legal books, and punishable). Nonetheless I was determined to read the poem and I did. However, I remember asking Kwame just before I went on stage, if I could be arrested for reading the poem, hence cursing a Jamaican bad word at a public event. Needless to say I didn’t get arrested.

But that was not my first contact with Dawes, I remember getting an email from him, requesting an interview for his anthology Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets, which was published in 2000. I remember him calling me to make plans for the interview.

Since then, I have watched his career unfold; a career that stretches across continents and institutions, across poetry and teaching, across publishing and cultural leadership.

His tag line is “the busiest man in literature,” which makes him my twin in this regard as I regard myself as the busiest woman in literature. We are both hard workers.  Perhaps you don’t know that Kwame is the day name for a boy born on a Saturday in  Ghana where almost every child has a day name.  My day name is Ama. The nursery rhyme about children born on specific days says “ Saturday’s child works hard for his living, so Kwame’s success must be measured against his hard work.

But busyness alone does not define Kwame Dawes, who is a man with a clear mission to create space for others and to build platforms.

Dawes’s objective is  to ensure that poetry does not live quietly on a shelf but circulates through communities and across borders.

In another of his poems, Stray Paths, Dawes writes:

“This is the desire I carry
the moment of being announced
followed by the golden silence
of my presence.”

I believe that those lines aptly describe Kwame Dawes who is both public and private at the same time. A man whose work travels everywhere, whose presence is felt across the literary world and yet who carries within himself that quiet interior space where the poet lives.

The place where ideas are constantly turning and where imagination never rests.

If there is one thing you should know about Kwame Dawes, it is this: He is always thinking, always imagining the next possibility for poetry.

And through that restless imagination he has created something remarkable, and  has forged a path for himself and for others.

We see that mission in the co-founding of Calabash International Literary Festival, which has become one of the most important literary gatherings in the region.

We see it in the African Poetry Book Fund, which has opened doors for poets across Africa.

And we hope to see it continue to unfold through the Caribbean Poetry Book Series that bring Caribbean poetry more fully into the world’s literary conversation.

Because poetry, as Kwame understands it, must not only be written; it must be sustained, supported and given a platform to breathe.

Kwame Dawes shows us that poetry can be organized, nurtured, and even , dare I say it, monetized to build ecosystems where poetry can live and grow.

There is a stanza from Dawes’ poem, “Marked” that seems appropriate to conclude this introduction. Dawes says:

 “The poet must weep
when he returns, his linen
garments brown with the blood
of promise, his feet sticky
with the spilled blood of despair.
A soh it go.”

“The poet must weep when he returns.”

Perhaps that is where we recognize ourselves most deeply.

Because to be a poet in this time  and in this world is to carry both vision and grief.

As a poet, I weep every day for my island. I weep for my people. I weep for the world. I weep for a future where there will be less inequality, less gender-based violence, less child abuse.

But maybe, just maybe,  “a soh it go,” will be said not as a throw away but as an affirmation.

Because poetry reminds us that another way of imagining the world is always possible, including supporting our cousins and nearest neighbours, Cuba

And that is why the work of poets matters. That is why the work of Kwame Dawes matters.  He continues to turn again and again to the alchemy of dub, to the transformative power of language, rhythm, and imagination.

To launch his Poet laureateship this year he has continued and expanded the Edward Baugh Prize for adult writers from Portland, St. Thomas, Kingston and St Andrew; the Louise Bennett-Coverley Prize for adult writers from St. Catherine, Clarendon, Manchester, Trelawny, St. Ann and St. Mary; and the Michael Cooke Prize for adult writers from Hanover, St. James, Westmoreland and St. Elizabeth.

Kwame Dawes says, “For me as a poet and as the Poet Laureate, I see it as an opportunity to see what people are thinking, what they’re feeling, and how they’re writing those feelings. It is a way to promote part of our culture, the construction of a way of seeing the world through this creative mechanism.”

Brothers and Sisters, let’s welcome Kwame Dawes, Jamaica’s current Poet Laureate.

Daily Musings

The Fornicating Lizards

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Excuse the preamble, but context is everything.

I live in rural Jamaica, where the air is alive, the soil is generous, and the house, my home, is apparently open to free accommodations by all manner of creatures. I love plants, and because I love plants, I have plants in every room,  including the bathroom. Admittedly, my home is a lush and welcoming environment, a sanctuary, a botanical embrace especially for the myriad species in the environment.

It is also, I have come to understand, a lizard/Anole resort. No negotiating.  No advance schedule notice or invitation.

There are many lizards. Anoles, mostly, quiet, watchful, generally well-behaved tenants, if one ignores their calling cards, those tiny black droppings that appear as if signed, sealed, and deliberately placed to test my patience. They live behind my art work on the walls, and I have many pictures, so naturally, they have many apartments.

We coexist.  But coexistence requires boundaries. And I have made my boundaries clear. Repeatedly.

I speak to them. Yes, I do. I am in constant conversation with all living things. I have told the lizards, calmly and with authority: Stay out of my bedroom. Especially the croaking ones; I cannot abide that incessant, rubbery sound at night. And stay out of my kitchen. ost importantly: Stay off my table.

This is not unreasonable.

So imagine! Really, truly, truly imagine my consternation when I entered my kitchen and found not one, but two lizards engaged in full, unapologetic, midday fornication on my table.

On. My. Table.

At first, I saw only the male. A big brown fellow, rather bold, with little dots on his head, as if he had dressed up for the occasion. He was animated. Committed. I moved to shoo him away, already offended by his presence, when I realized… Oh no. This was not loitering. This was an event.

Beneath him, the female, small, half his size, likely minding her own business until he decided that my table was the appropriate venue for romance or a quickie!

Now, let me be clear: I do not object to their frolicking. Nature must and do propagate. The dogs do it in the yard, in the road, with an enthusiasm that borders on civic performance. Privacy is not a universal value.

But my table is not a public square.  My table is not a nightclub.  My table is not a lizard love motel.

I had to act.

I raised my voice, invoking my authority. I brought my full ancestral displeasure into the room. I told them firmly that this was unacceptable behavior. That they had violated sacred space. That they were out of line. Grossly. Spectacularly out of line.

Then I intervened physically.  I brushed them apart. They scattered, skittered, scrambled up the wall in what I can only describe as a very undignified retreat, and escaped outside.

But I was not finished.  I addressed them as they fled,  issued a warning, a final notice.

I informed them that while I had shown mercy this time, I would not be so kind again. That I possessed a bottle with a formidable concoction of lavender and vinegar, originally designed to deal with flies (and let me tell you, with seven chicken farms in the vicinity, the flies are legion), but one that could very easily be repurposed.

I made it plain: Do not test me.

Now, I do not know if it was the male who instigated the situation, but I have my suspicions. There was a certain audacity about him. A brazenness. A disregard for protocol.

So I find myself still asking: what kind of creature enters someone else’s home, surveys the environment, and decides, “Yes. Here. On this table. This is where I will express my desires/lust/urges”?

The answer is: a lizard.

So we continue, the lizards and I, in this uneasy coexistence. They behind the pictures. I at my table. Boundaries drawn. Terms stated.

But should they forget themselves again, should passion overtake judgment and lead them once more onto my table…Well!!!

The lavender and vinegar will be waiting.