I have been fortunate to have poems and essays
published in several journals in 2014. They included Poems for the Hazara: An Anthology and Collaborative Poem that
features 125 poets from 68 countries, WomanSpeak:
A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women (2013-14), Kistrech: Poetry and essays from guest poets,
Kistrech Poetry Festival, Kenya 2014, The
Antigua and Barbuda review of Books, The
Caribbean Writer, Writer’s Works Bern: Prose and Poetry, Tongues of the Ocean special issue
featuring Antigua and Barbuda Writers and Artists (www.tonguesoftheocean.org),
and Moko Magazine (www.mokomagazine.org).
You can read my book review of Joanne Hillhouse's novel Oh Gad! in a previous blogpost. This book also features book reviews on Jamaica Kincaid's recent novel, See Now Then. It is a novel which I am also looking forward to reading. I have ordered my copy. It is waiting for me to caress its pages.
This wonderful collaboration of 125 poets in support
of the Hazara people was done to draw attention to their persecution. The Hazara are a people of distinctions - set apart
from fellow Afghans by religion, mixed ethnicity and an independent nature -
and they have suffered for them. Persecution has shaped and defined the Hazara,
particularly over the last 200 years. They face discrimination as Shi'ite
Muslims, a minority among Afghanistan's dominant Sunni Muslims, as well as for
ethnic bias. Read more about them in the blog below and at the following website. http://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/12076/AF
This collection of art and prose and
poetry brings together 30 Caribbean women under the theme “Voices of Dissent:
Writing and art to transform the culture.
“This issue is not a movement but it is proof that one can happen.”
Read more about my contribution in the blog below.
http://aromaproductions.blogspot.ch/2013/11/several-poems-and-essay-published-in.html
I gladly shared my
stories of immigrants in this first edition of Kistrech.
We Do
Not Cry For Meat
Yesterday we ate rice and palm oil.
Today we are eating rice and palm oil.
Tomorrow we will eat rice and palm oil.
We eye our bloated bellies
in the shadow of the kitchen fire,
and though not old enough
pretend we are with child,
pretend our fallen teeth will grow,
pretend our limbs are fat
can bear our large tummies
but we wobble when we walk
and do not cry for meat
for the dry land has snatched
our cattle and left us only bones.
© 29.03.10 Althea Mark-Romeo
From dirtcakes (www.dirtcakes.org)
My essay, "A story of Immigrants", published in The Caribbean Writer, follows up on this theme. Below is an excerpt from my essay.
A Story of Immigrants
This is the story of immigrants. It is
the story of immigration, re-immigration and of continuing immigration. It is a story which expands to three
continents, lasts over a hundred years and, in fact never stops. It is the story of my family.
My grandmother, Sarah
Finch, immigrated from Antigua, British West Indies, to the Dominican Republic
in the early 1900s together with her brother, Robert Finch, to seek a better
life. Robert Finch started a family
there and made the Dominican Republic his home, while my grandmother returned
to Antigua with a son-- my father, Gilbert Romeo. My grandmother and her
brother were among many British West Indians who immigrated to the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica to seek work at the beginning
of the 1900s. Many settled in these countries.
Decades later, a rapidly developing tourist industry in
the US Virgin Islands (USVI) demanded an increased labor force. The islands (St.
Croix, St. Thomas and St. John) unable to supply the needed labor themselves,
therefore opened the floodgates to immigrants.
My immediate family,
the Romeos, was part of this next big wave of immigration. We left English
Harbour, Antigua in the 1950s. Back then English Harbour supplemented the
export of cotton and fishing and farming by smuggling rum from ships. By that
time my father had married my mother and they were witnesses to a generation of
young men falling victim to alcoholism. My mother, concerned for her son, supported
my father’s immigration. He departed ahead of us for St. Thomas, USVI. My
mother, my older brother, younger sister and I, followed in 1956. That began
the story of our houses and how they became our home.
This effort by Writers' Work Bern is a collection of prose and poetry by a group of thirteen writers who live in Switzerland. Writers' Works Bern which has existed since 1992 consists of members who come from Switzerland, England, Scotland, Barbados, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, US Virgin Islands-Antigua & Barbuda and the USA.
My poems "Ugly Stories," and "Morning Break" can be found in this collection.
From Ugly Stories
VII
Because I Am A Woman
They
fear us
bearers
of the human race.
We
are all Delilah in their eyes.
Our
youth, our beauty, beguiling,
our
smells alluring,
our
voices, cotton candy.
Raped
because
I am a woman,
my
outcry provoked
a
hail of stones,
sparked
a deadly crush.
Silenced
because
I am a woman.
"Neighbors Sanderson" can be found in Moko Magazine.
Neighbors Sanderson
Warm summer
night.
Windows flung
open,
are dressed
in curtains of light.
Old Mr.
Sanderson across the way,
kneads his
wife’s plump arms,
rubs her
hands and swollen feet.
The scent
of eucalyptus,
wafting into
the air,
subdues the
smells
of frying
oils and salsa,
and settles
in our noses.
The
fragrant ointment
glistens on
Mrs. Sanderson’s
thick, veined
hands
and fleshy
fudge-brown arms.
Her face,
tense with the
hurdles of
aging, slackens.
Evening
ritual done,
Mr.
Sanderson nestles
next to her
and reads
from a
well-read book
she had
dedicated to him.
and made
famous long ago.
It is then
we shut out distractions,
shush those
in mid sentences,
strain our
ears to hear elegiac words
that speak
and sing for a
voice now
stilled by stroke.
In
baritone, Mr. Sanderson reads
about seductive
flesh and
love in
spring shifting into summer.
There is no
autumn or winter.
It is a
love superior.
© Althea Romeo-Mark, 10.06.2014
And "Small Island Deprivations" can be found in Tongues of the Ocean.
Small Island Deprivations
When God
was dispensing rivers
were my
tiny island-homes not yet born?
Were they
late in arriving?
Were they still
buried
in the
depths of the Atlantic Ocean?
Were they
just tiny appendages
of a
continent waiting to be shaken off
after a
rattling quake?
Deprived of
rivers and lakes,
tiny
islands were handed ponds,
creeks, streams
and gullies and
posted on peaks
of volcanoes
jutting out
of the ocean.
Buffered by
the Atlantic Ocean
and the
Caribbean Sea.
they are
subjected to the whims
of storms
racing from Africa.
Small
islands are barely noticed
from distant
planes,
and no
large body of water
patterns
their surfaces.
They thrive
on the beauty
of small
things.
I write because I am compelled to. The stories of immigrants, their suffering and survival are a
major inspiration for me This is a dominant theme in my last poetry collection, If
Only the Dust Would Settle, 2009. It is also an inspiration for my next poetry collection, The Nakedness of New.
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