Caribbean Vignettes: Past and Present, I

By: aromaproductions on 3:00 PM

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This is the first of several blogs that will feature poems that reflect my Caribbean culture, past and present. 

The past is always with us and cannot be shaken. It is our personal jumbi* following us around but in a good way. Or in a more positive light, it is an ancestor hanging out with us. It does not let us forget from where and from whom we came. We cannot shrug it off.

So follow me to the Caribbean. I hope you enjoy your visit.

 

Small Island Hopping

 

This is what you do

when you live on tiny islands

where flights are never direct and

passengers must be dropped off

on islands nations

some hilly, some flat,

some independent

some still flying the flags

of European nations

fulfilling their manifest destinies.

 

 We go up in tiny planes

      and soon go down again.

        through not-so-distant clouds.

 

The aqua sea becomes cobalt blue

a foamy spread of deep water

 dotted with atolls and islets

 

Emerald green or drought-stricken hills emerge

as the plane seeks safe landing

on often too short runways.

 

We land,

remain in the belly

of our silver, mechanical bird

until passengers disembark,

and seats fill up again

and accents heard-

Antiguan, Kittisian,

Anguillian, St. Thomian, Tortolian …

are similar yet different singing voices

 rising and falling.

 

Fan sputters and starts

and the bird is soon in the air—

Antigua, St. Kitts, St Martin, St. Thomas.

 

If you are lucky,

there is no breakdown,

no waiting for hours for

mechanical problems to be fixed

or for a new plane to be sent

 to pick up the stranded.

 

There are no updates with

discouraging news

that leaves some passengers cussing

 because their destination will not

be reached tonight.

Nobody will be put in a hotel.

The airline did not live up to its

dreaded reputation.

 

All is clear, the clouds are clear, too.

 

 

Caribbean Newly Wedded

 

After marriage, sunny-walled bliss

is cracked by customs, traditions,

religion, region and taste,

the man deferring to the woman,

the woman giving in to the man.

 

The Caribbean being no different,

a difference in region can

quickly blight blue-skyed happiness.

 

The fungi too hard; too soft.

The plantain too salty; not salted.

Saltfish you once loved

cooked three days in a row with achee*

is now revolting.

 

She the minimalist, he the collector.

He tolerates her eye-rollin,’ eye-cutting,

and digging comments when

he brings home something new

without consultation.

A woman’s opinion isn’t worth its salt.

After all, he is king of the house.

 

So the oversized rattan chair

remains in the wrong corner—

and feelings flare up, faces rumple.

Hard words crash-land on egos.

 

But Sunday service might be healing.

He, Catholic, she protestant.

They compromise on christening.

No child of theirs would go to hell.

She bends to his will.

 

Achee is a tropical fruit that is edible only when perfectly ripe – and even the. ... The achee (ackee/akee) tree is found on most islands in the Caribbean and originated in West Africa.

 

Things That Transpire Under A House 

I. The House

 

Unlike a house on thin wooden stilts

rising out of a swamp,

this house stands on concrete columns,

on a hill looking over a lagoon.

Steel buried in the core,

the columns have defied fierce quakes.

 

II. Wearing the Same Paws 

I commiserate with my dog in our haven.

We sit side by side, sad-eyed

after I wrestle him away from Father,

spare him from further whippings.

We shudder at his punishment

as we deem it unfitting the offense.

Dogs must dig. It is their nature

to unearth and bury things.

 

Those who plant flowers

deplore the dog’s desecration

of their sacred grounds.

Seeds long nurtured, now blooming,

display a gardener’s love of nature.

 

III. Explorations 

Curious about the workings

of our body, we stumble upon our feelings,

discover the sensations of “forbidden fruit.”

  

IV. Cast-outs 

Stuff, too big and heavy to drag down the hill

and heave into dumpsters,

have become hideouts to insects

that lay eggs in the safety of the discarded.

 

They shelter secrets.

Small insects, spared the sun’s glare,

play in dusty earth.

They wiggle, hop in and out

of burrowed homes,

keep busy with banal chores.

Some, we call “pee-pee cluck-cluck.”

They make way for lizards,

a stray iguana, a millipede on a detour.

 

V.  Riding Fat White Clouds

 

Under the house,

we hang heads in clouds,

contemplate the road ahead.

Future puts its brakes on

at the coming summer.

Anything beyond is unfathomable.

  

VI.  Unwanted Visitors 

Under the house,

our sanctuary against adult tyranny

is infested by shrouded ancestors.

They hover and flutter in dark corners,

and eavesdrop when the sun drags

its blanket over the island.

 

We flee before jumbies*

make their wishes clear.

Fearing the sound of

their unearthly voices,

we do not wait to communicate.

*jumbies-spirit of the dead

 

 

Caribbean Beauty Shop 1950s

 

The beauty shop was down the road,

in someone’s yard, in someone’s home.

It was where you went

to wash and press your hair,

subject it to the curling iron.

 

It was easily found.

You followed your nose to

the smell of singeing hair.

Coal pots were filled with charcoal

in various stages of heat--dying white ash,

volcano hot, shimmering,

or jet-black, when the coal pots

were newly replenished

to keep the metal combs going

for hair straightening,

to keep metal prongs ready

to shape Shirley Temple curls.

 

Customers sat on low stools, benches, chairs,

heads of hair thick, thin, long or short,

their hands holding ears forward

to prevent an accidental searing

when an animated hairdresser

was distracted by gossip.

 

The satisfied admired their “dos,”

held up mirrors in the midst of smoke.

 

But do not let it rain after.

All would have been in vain.

The Cinderella hair story

ready to be told—

the hair turning back

to a frayed, frizzy bush.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Carbon Copy

 

Noni’s green eyes,

witness to mixed ancestry

are set in a mahogany-brown face.

They speak of stealth panthers.

 

Men are drawn to her “cat’s eyes”

until she roars at perceived betrayals.

She flings her whip of words,

and leaves bruises on their hearts.

 

Noni and her siblings grew up untamed

in a narrow fenced-in yard,

where the smoke of coal heaps

sucked and choked the air.

 

Mother and father had no time to nurture.

When not earning their living, battles they fought,

escaped the confines of their “matchbox” quarters.

 

Neighbors could not agree on the winner or loser,

as both, wearing the bloody badges,

of the rounds they went, were still worn.

 

Noni “de dark one,” the reject

of her mother’s spawn, was the carbon-copy

of a father who spoke with fists

and threw words sharper a gleaming cutlass.

 

 

 

 

Cockfight Sunday

 

The roar reaches the hilltop.

The saintly pray for the sinful souls

gathered at Aqui Me Quedo bar below.

 

Pitched in battle

El Diablo and El Gato.

Gamblers inspect

the razor-sharp claws

of fowls in wire-mesh prisons,

slap dollar bills on a table.

 

Shouts of the rum-revved crowd

drown out nearby holly rollers pleas

to their Heavenly Father

as wound-up El Gato

flies cackling at El Diablo

at the other side of the pit.

 

El Gato gores El Diablo’s eye and side.

El Gato loses a wing and balance.

They stumble flapping and feeble.

 

Angry spectators

demand their money back

as feathers, white, brown and red,

rain down on dying cocks.

 

Round two.

One-eyed Henry v/s Three-Toed Billy Bob 

 

 

Fishermen’s Catch

 We hear the blowing of conch shells,

see fishermen pulling boats to shore.

 

Anglers and boats reek of salt,

seaweed and fresh fish.

 

Soprano, alto, baritone voices

sings the day’s haul.

“Yellow-tail, bonita, snapper,

jacks, old wife, grouper.”

 

Customers flock around,

poke flesh, inspect fish eyes,

while fishermen swat flies, slap sand flies.

 

The anglers scrape and scales fly.

They slice and gut the gaping

glassy-eyed catch.

 

Buyers dream of fish--

braised, baked, fried,

steamed, grilled, poached,

smothered in pepper sauce,

 

and dream of

cooked green bananas,

fungi and okra, rice and beans

plantain and yams,

 

and sucking out eyes

fried or boiled,

crunching bones and

chewing fish heads.

 

Fungi-cornmeal cooked with okra. 

  

 

 

 

Coal Maker 

Old Spitter hums the magic words

that brought him to the woods

to choose the branches he chops and piles

and covers with twigs and dirt, then sets alight,

and leaves to smother and smolder.

 

Days later, he sings the magic song

as he douses his coal heap.

stuffs charcoal in sacks.

 

Spitter straddles his donkey,

prods its side, drives it on,

as he strips sugar-cane

with sparse brown teeth.

 

Donkey, large-eyed, docile,

rump weighed down with coal bags,

brays and plods once again

along the river bank.

 

Its hooves tattoo the melting asphalt.

Cane peels trail them to the market.

 

 

Red Ant 

The name stings.

I am mulatto,

almost white

when I escape

the sun’s glare.

 

My freckles

are sesame seeds

on a barely baked bun.

Cheeks flush red.

 

“Red Ant”

The name they tarred

and feathered me with

when we disagreed.

 

This ant,

child of British and

Scottish colonists

who sought

West Indian women

to cure their loneliness.

 

One of many red ants

among black ants.

 

I am drawn to other red ants

and ants neither black nor red.

 

 

 

       

The Last Island Griot 

Come sunshine,

the big bum boy we call Anti-man

carries dark, shriveled Miss Lizzie

down Mango Hill

from her ancient, matchbox house.

 

He sets in a chair at that junction

under the shack-shack tree

where vendors hawk fruit

and old women sell newspapers

to people in passing cars.

 

It has to be this place, this tree,

as if her navel string was buried there,

as if she came to the world

the same time its seed was planted.

 

She sings, spins tales—

her gesturing, gnarled fingers,

rooting back to histories

long forgotten.

 

The village remembers,

Lizzie always sat there

stuffing snuff between her gum and lips,

grinding out ancient tales in an English laced

with African words.

 

Lizzie speaks like jumb*i talking—

her voice coming and going

in a frequency of its own.

Her chants crack, fade into a whisper,

routes the voice of ancestors

generations removed.

 

The message shifts time and place.

She, unaware, loses us in the straying.

We don’t take time to listen. 

 

*Jumbi- spirit of the dead

Griot – (Of West African origin) storyteller, singer, musician, and oral historian. The griot kept unwritten records of births, marriages, and deaths that were passed down from one generation to the next.

 

 

 

Mango Fetish 

We sit hunched over on boulders

washing mangoes to eat under a shady tree.

Round and oblong, we pile them

in small heaps on burlap bags.

 

Some are green. We shake them off

or knock them down with stones

or long sticks.  They are hard and sour

and we clap our tongues to the roof

of our mouths to carry the taste down.

 

Some are yellow, ripe and sweet.

We pluck them from low branches.

Others are orange-red and full, fleshy.

We reach them by climbing or pick

them up from the ground where

they fell overnight while

wrestling with the wind.

 

We slice hard ones with knives,

tear soft skins with hands and

bite the heads to make a hole,

press the skin to squeeze out yellow juice.

 

Teeth scrape against the stringy fiber as we

suck them dry like Sukanah* ravenous for blood.

They become yellow straw on bare seeds.

 

We wear sappy golden mustaches and beards.

Flaxen strands protrude from teeth.

We lick our lips, wipe our mouths

only to indulge ourselves again.

 

They were named long ago by texture and fiber.

Mango Julie, mango Thomas, mango Beth,

mango Marian, mango belly-full.

 

“When mango season comes,

the housewife puts down her pot.”

We cannot resist. We indulge ourselves

in the gorging of yellow pulp.

 

 

*West Indian saying – “When mango season comes, the housewife puts down her pot.

*Sukanah- also known as soucouyant is a shapeshifting Caribbean folklore character who appears as a reclusive old woman by day. By night, she strips off her wrinkled skin and puts it in a mortar. In her true form, like a fireball, she flies across the dark sky in search of a victim. The soucouyant can enter the home of her victim through any sized hole like cracks, crevices, and keyholes.

 

 

 

 

 

Departure/Arrival 

I          Departure

We are driven away from English Harbour,

watch the village flee into distance:

its sea-splashed coves,

its tiny island houses, some thatched,

some wearing sun-glinted, galvanized roofs,

its brown men on cane-stacked donkeys,

pickers plucking cotton and the smells of

callaloo, pepper-pot and dukanah

teasing the sweltering air.

It is the beginning of losing part of ourselves.

 

 

II         Arrival

 

Father makes a heroic figure

guiding the landed plane on the runway.

We watch as its swirling fans settle into standstill.

Valises in hands, we disembark to new landscapes.

 

Our old island home is transformed into an idyllic realm.

Its scenes become locked-away treasures taken out

with a flourish and shared at special gatherings.

Our hands dance in the valleys and hills of loud recalling.

  

*English Harbour- a natural harbor and settlement on the island of Antigua.

Callaloo, pepper-pot and dukanah- food specialties of the Caribbean

 

© Althea Romeo-Mark  May 2022

Brief Bio and Recent publications

Althea Romeo Mark is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Nakedness of New, If Only the Dust Would Settle, (English-German), three chapbooks, Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer (chapbook), Two Faces, Two Phases (chapbook), and Palaver (chapbook) and a poetry collaboration, Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit. This anthology includes poems by Althea Romeo-Mark and prose and poetry from participants in a Black Writers’ workshop conducted at Kent State University.

Recent publications include: Poem, “Back in Your Arms Again,” KENYA Through A Foreign Lens Anthology, vol.1, ed. C. Okemwa, 2022; “Short Story,” Easter Sunday,” published The Sunday Observer, Jamaica, 24.04 2022, www.jamaicaobserver.com

Poems, “She,” and “ Scalded Dreams” published in Shakti: The Feminine Principle, Energy & Lifeforce, an international anthology of poetry, KKPC Publishing, India, 2022

Short story “Wimmelskafts’ Hill,” published in Bookends, The Sunday Observer, Jamaica, 30.01.22, www.jamaicaobserver.com