Grace Nichols 1950 Grace Nichols today British Guyana

Grace Nichols (1950 – )

Grace Nichols today

British Guyana

Edward Kamau Brathwaite Speaks from the very ‘biological-sensual-genitalnigger’

Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Mask The Wretched of the Earth

Kamau Brathwaite I am a fuckin’ negro, man, hole in my head, brains in my belly; black skin red eyes broad back bug you know what: not very quick to take offence but once offended, watch that house you livin; in an’ watch that litle sister. (From Folkways)

From Dabydeen’s collection Slave Song Is so when yu dun dream she pink tit, Totempole she puss, Leff yu teetmark like a tattoo in she troat! – David Dabydeen

‘One Continent/to Another’ Child of the Middle Passage womb push daughter of a vengeful Chi she came into the new world birth aching her pain from one continent/to another

Postmemory ‘Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated. ’ [Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge Mass; Harvard University Press, 1997), 22]

Post-memory is not an act of identification so much as a structure of ‘intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma. ’ [Hirsch]

Memory/History ‘Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. ’ [Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History, 9]

‘. . . until you confront it, until you live through it, [it] keeps coming back in other forms. The shapes redesign themselves into other constellations, until you get a chance to play it over again. ’ – Toni Morrison [Monsters and Revolutions: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) 14]

Nichols She finds a way of transforming ‘bleeding memories [‘One Continent’] the ‘voices pushed in by the sea breeze/darting like pains in my head/cadances like the living/parables of the dead’ [Eulogy] to ‘hold fast to dreams’ against ‘the destruction that /threatened to choke within. . . ‘ [‘Days that Fell’]

Nichols ‘. . . inspired by a dream I had one night of this young African girl swimming to the Caribbean from Africa. She had a garland of flowers around her. So when I woke up, I interpreted this to mean that she was trying to actually cleanse the ocean of the pain and suffering she knew her ancestors had gone through. . . I feel very multicultural as a writer, though Africa has always been the strongest spiritual strand for me’

French feminist critics -- Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray. They argue that women write through the body.

Nichols on Language ‘I care about language, and maybe that is another reason why I write. It’s the battle with language that I love, that striving to be true to the inner language of my voice, the challenge of trying to create something new. I like working in both Standard English and Creole. I tend to want to fuse the two tongues because I come from a background where the two worlds were constantly interacting, though Creole was regarded, obviously, as the inferior by the colonial powers when I was growing up. ’

Bakhtin Heteroglossia: a term derived by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher of language, from the Greek words for different/other (hetero) and language (glossia). It refers to the co-existence of different ‘languages’ in one text or one speech community: social dialects or discourses specific to generational, kin, work or social groups, etc. These different ‘languages’ carry with them different, everyday associations and therefore imply the co-presence of different social perspectives. Heteroglossia is sometimes connected to the blended language and hybrid ideologies of displaced Africans, a kind of “double consciousness”, but also applied by many literary critics (post-colonial/postmodern) in analyses of literary texts, especially the novel. [Rabelais and His World]

Kamau Brathwaite on language We in the Caribbean have a. . . kind of plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish. We also have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in. . Nation Language. . . largely ignores the pentameter [it] is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and timber, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words, as your hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree.

. ‘the tensions is always there and maybe it’s a good thing. And it’s not only the tension of physical difference between Guyana and England, it’s also in terms of language. . . Creole versus Standard English. . . I find it exciting actually, using that tension especially in terms of language, between Creole and Standard English. I like slipping back and forth from one to the other. ’

• ‘Language. . . is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history’ [Ngugi was Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind]

‘Out of Africa’ Out of Africa of the suckling Out of Africa of the tired woman in earrings Out of Africa of the black-foot leap Our of Africa of the baobab, the suck-teeth Out of Africa of the dry maw of hunger Out of Africa of the first rains, the first mother. Into the Caribbean of the staggeringly blue sea-eye Into the Caribbean of the baleful tourist glare Into the Caribbean of the hurricane Into the Caribbean of the flame tree, the palm tree, The achee, the high smelling saltfish And the happy creole so-called mentality. Into England of the frost and the tea Into England of the budgie and the strawberry Into England of the trampled autumn tongues Into England of the meagre funerals Into England of the hand of the old woman ]And the gent running behind someone Who’s forgotten their umbrella, crying out, ‘I say. . . I say-ay’.

Creole works with dactyls rather than iambs. Dactyl – one long accented syllable followed by two short or unaccented ones. e. g. /--/--/ (dactyls) Iambic pentameter (a five footed line) e. g. -/ -/ -/

Nichols ‘an inner need in me to recreate and celebrate all that is mine and that means the Caribbean and British culture. Because people put you into little boxes and at times they almost want you to make a choice. . . I suppose I am a writer across two worlds, I just can’t forget my Caribbean culture and past, so there’s this constant interaction between the two worlds: Britain and the Caribbean ‘] [Sarah Welsh, Grace Nichols, p 12]

‘Wherever I Hang’ Now, after all this time I get accustom to de English life But I still miss back-home side To tell you de truth I don’t know really where I belaang Yes, divided to de ocean Divided to de bone Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home. [24 ff]

‘Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath’ Steatopygous sky Steatopygous sea Steatopygous waves Steatopygous me 0 how I long to place my foot on the head of anthropology to swig my breasts in the face of history to scrub my back with the dogma of theology to put my soap in the slimming industry’s profitsome spoke Steatopygous sky Steatopygous sea Steatopygous waves Steatopygous me – Grace Nichols

Caption reads ‘from Hottentot Venus to the White House’ Amazing!!!!

‘Beauty’ Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Beauty is a fat black woman riding the waves drifting in happy oblivion while the sea turns back to hug her shape.

Aunt Jemima

Love Act • • • She enter into his Great House her see-far looking eyes unassuming He fix her with his glassy stare and feel the thin fire in his blood awakening He/his mistresswife/and his children who take to her breasts like leeches he want to tower above her want her to raise her ebony haunches and when she does he think she can be trusted and drinks her in And his mistresswife spending her days in rings of vacant smiling is glad to be rid of the loveact But time pass/es Her sorcery cut them like a whip • • She hide her triumph and slowly stir the hate of poison in

From ‘Love Act’ And his mistresswife spending her days in rings of vacant smiling is glad to be rid of the loveact

‘I coming back’ I coming back ‘Massa’ I coming back mistress of the underworld I coming back colour and shape of all that is evil I coming back dog howling outside yuh window I coming back ball-a-fire and skinless higue I coming back bone in yuy throat and laugh in yuh skull I coming back ‘Massa’ I coming back.

Epilogue I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung

Swedish Cultural Minister dissecting a Hottentot cake April 2012 – Art or Outrage?