Lehman
Weichselbaum reviews On The Borders of Belonging by Althea Romeo Mark. Kelsay
Books, 2023. $17
In On the Borders of Belonging, Althea Romeo Mark rides migrations of family and other representative figures (fictional or real not specified) from a variety of generations and home ports to the ambiguous havens of the West Indies and elsewhere in the hemisphere (“Parents left play-mamas to hold the fort at home/while they went off to Santo Domingo, Cuba,/Panama, Venezuela, Georgia and Florida,/to toil in fields and on roads,/to become builders of other nations.”) In presenting her deeply felt tales of trying, intermittently successful adaptation to a New World, Mark always keeps her breath and her cool.
She tells her wanderers’ stories in the epic aggregate (“They go where their bare feet take them,” “They stand before us/like potential
of buyers/of freshly caught fish,” “We travel on whims, belief in God,”) or
distinctively etched individual vignettes: an uncomfortable shopper at
second-hand stores, a schoolgirl at odds with classmates, a street sweeper
relishing his recently acquired freedom, a
fugitive from a racist mob.
Balancing prose and poetry in pleading her case for a dispossessed
people, Mark often allows the expository to get ahead of the lyrical.
Nevertheless, she demonstrates that she knows how to deliver the incandescent image where needed.
Refugees march like soldiers
retreating from a war,
salvaging what is precious,
their loves, their lives.
Refugees are hermit crabs
washed up on unfamiliar shores.
They search for new shells to occupy.
Their shells must fit like new skin.
(“Home Hunters”)
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Born in Antigua, West Indies, Althea Romeo-Mark is an educator and writer who grew up in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, USA, Liberia(West Africa), England and Switzerland since 1991. Althea Romeo Mark, who writes poetry, short stories, and personal essays, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Nakedness of New and If Only the Dust Would Settle, (English-German), and four chapbooks On the Borders of Belonging (2023), Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer, Two Faces, Two Phases, Palaver, and Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit.
The short story, “Saving Papa Rojas from the Deathbed Flirt,” was published in The
Caribbean Writer in December 2023, Volume 37; several poems were
published in POUI Cavehill Journal of creative writing, University of the West
Indies at Cave Hill, December 2023; Poem “A Thief Stealing Peace”, published
in Antologia Letteeraria, Multilingue, Pax Toto Orbe Terrarum, Edizioni
Universum, Italy, 2023, “Three poems and a short story published in Musings
In A Tea Shop, anthology, Trinidad and Tobago, 2023, poem,
“Checkpoint,” published in Persimmon Tree, Summer edition featuring
international poetry, https://persimmontree.org/summer-2023/international-poetry/
“The Waterfronts Women and Men”, published in Bookends,
Jamaica Sunday Observer; The Memory Thread, A poetry collection in
English and Chinese that features poets Vasiliki Dragouni, William Marr and
Althea Romeo Mark: several poems published in Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry. Edited by
Dr Patricia Wesley, the 302-page anthology of poetry is the first
comprehensive collection of works of literature from the 1800s to the present. University of Nebraska Press, 2023; “Malaria Misery,” Nano Poems for Africa, The Silk Road Anthology, Egypt, 2023;
She's been a fascinating raconteur!
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