This is Part 4 of series on Indian Arrival Month, May 2008, in the Caribbean.
Other Parts can be accessed here:
http://deosaranbisnath.blogspot.com
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Down hut big like Bata shoe-box,
Beat clothes, weed yard, chop wood, feed fowl
For this body and that body and every blasted body
Fetch water, all day water like if the
Whole slow-flowing Canje river God create
Just for she one bucket.
And curse swarm from she mouth like red ants
And she cough blood on the ground but mash it in:
Because Jasmattie heart hard, she mind set hard.
Because one-one dutty make dam cross the Canje
And she son Harrilal got to go school in Georgetown
Must wear clean starch pants, or they go laugh at he,
Strap leather on he foot, and he must read book,
Learn talk proper, take exam, go to England university,
Not turn out like he rum-sucker chamar dadee.
But do not expect to find it
where its seeds were sown
In its Motherland
the curry-scented sub-continent
It was created
on an island
by its children
yearning for the homeland.
August 2007, Peepal Press
by Dr. Raymond Ramcharitar.
On these ululating plains, the rain is fate,
Draining the Indian’s ashes from the lips
Of the patient Caroni, to incarnate
Into the canestalks’ tasseled, sky-turned tips—
Arrows to the India of the mind.
While below, in patchworks of glistening strips
Of razor grass and dirt, board houses on stilts
Enclose the brown, work-knotted bodies,
Still-sitting, folded at the hip and knee
As primal eyes grope along the endless chains
Of the rain seeking escape, samadhi,
Inside the dank Chaguanas cinema
Where the pink, rose-lipped maidens pout and dance
In streams and around trees—a panorama
Of sublimated lust, which spreads outward
Through the roads outside the towns, the chance
Settlements along old sugar cart-routes
where, now and then, resilient mud-spattered shards
Of humanity still walk through the downpours
Of fingers which reach under rough cotton
Like the coolie farmer’s trembling hand explores
His daughter’s taut, brown flesh to the strum
Of small bullets on the raw galvanise, to come,
Hesitantly, to a stop, as the final memory
Of the mother dissolves under the glare
Of the unforgiving sun whose gaze clears
Ruthlessly the dewy fields and glassy paths,
Silencing the rain’s many-armed history.
of crowds, waves of Indian Ocean
roaring in the stands. Once Aja
stood on docks nearby, boarding
for Indies Cristobal, the Baptist
Navigator, christened this land.
from THE GREEN FACE MAN
I am the green face man
coming down, coming down
all over de town
Sugar in my blood, sugar
I plant the cane
weed the cane
cut the cane,
I grind the cane to sweeten my tea.
Sugar in my blood
I tief the cane
suck the cane,
make me faint
all that sugar not good for me.
My eyes going blind
my foot swell up
sores on my skin
my hands tremble when
I take out the cutlass
sharpen it on a stone
cut my veins
let the sugar out
I plant the cane
weed the cane
cut the cane,
I grind the cane to sweeten my tea.
Sugar in my blood
I tief the cane
suck the cane,
make me faint
all that sugar not good for me.
My eyes going blind
my foot swell up
sores on my skin
my hands tremble when
I take out the cutlass
sharpen it on a stone
cut my veins
let the sugar out
my foot swell up
sores on my skin
my hands tremble when
I take out the cutlass
sharpen it on a stone
cut my veins
let the sugar out
I see blood flowing
more dirty than Caroni
more sacrifice than Ganges
I see splatters
from the highway to the back trace
accidents happen every day,
a whole family clean-up
trap in burglar proof
a little child hold down
two brothers break they neck
a taxi turn over
a truck run off the road
land up in somebody bedroom
I put kajar in my eye, I don’t see so good…..
Brechin Castle
more dirty than Caroni
more sacrifice than Ganges
I see splatters
from the highway to the back trace
accidents happen every day,
a whole family clean-up
trap in burglar proof
a little child hold down
two brothers break they neck
a taxi turn over
a truck run off the road
land up in somebody bedroom
I put kajar in my eye, I don’t see so good…..
Brechin Castle
by Madeline Coopsammy
(Trinidad , 2005)
For Yolande Nunez
Friend of My Youth
“ Brechin Castle to Shut Down”
This name of an unequalled music
heralding visions of the rugged Scottish landscape
of Walter Scott and Lorna Doone
of murderous feuding Clans
and the glories of an Empire
on which the sun would never set
was the misnomer for a sugar-cane plantation
in the backwaters of Central Trinidad
its coolies once fettered by
Indentureship, inheriting a legacy
more bitter than the fruit they harvested
One warm and lovely breezy island night
you and I, searching out a fete
on a casual invitation
as we were wont to do
were bound for
a sacred fortress
the Plantation House
of Brechin Castle
leaving well-worn paths behind
our familiar haunts of
Woodbrook, St. James,
Cascade and Belmont
we drove through miles of darkened canes
and approached the Castle grounds
meeting no impediment neither moat
nor armoured Knights
only a sentry at a Gate
who cheerfully waved us on
for we had a password, a Manager’s name
and your Father’s car,
an imported American Rambler
the Mercedes in our third world economy
Independence had not yet come
but you with your mulatto confidence
the long history of your European ancestors
your Portuguese name
never feared to venture anywhere
you took me once on Carnival Day
into the Queen’s Park Hotel where the black waiters
viewed us with disdain, laughing in our faces
you never noticed, too busy enjoying the music and the jump up
while I was left alone to feel their scorn
for we were the only coloured people there
and since you always drove the car
I had no choice but to follow where you led
and thus we found ourselves
in Brechin Castle
which symbolized to me
the servitude of sugar
white colonial overseers
and sweating coolies cutting cane
but the fete was non-existent
someone had failed to extend the invitations
or perhaps the house was subject to a boycott
for the elegant spacious ballroom was deserted
peopled only by
an inebriated Englishman
his wife consorting with the black
yard boy
in South Africa in the days of Apartheid
white women were incarcerated in Insane Asylums
for just such indiscretions
but our hostess welcomed us
with warmth and kindliness
and to my surprise
in excessive courtesy
graced us with a curtsey fine and practised
while I puzzled over
this outmoded custom
which, once habitual in Victorian times
was surely now confined to
visits to the Queen.
but rendering such regard to us
one a coolie woman
the other of indeterminate race
left me wordless with wonderment
but as the years moved on
and the world mad e room for us
that surreal night coming sharply into focus
afforded me the realization that it was already
the dying days of Empire
and our misguided hostess
an Englishwoman of a newer breed
who knew no better.
That was more than forty years ago
now cane will soon be gone from Brechin Castle
the plantation houses stand stately and morose
eerie clones of those on Indian tea estates
we drive between still lovely avenues shaded by Royal Palms
a gentle wistful breeze
fans the rolling landscape
what tales the land could tell
what bitter-sweet memories remain upon
the Castle grounds, the fields
of shimmering waving canes
in the noonday sun
what fate now lies in store for them
since sugar will make way for
housing, development, malls?
I shudder to return.
Poems by Mahadai Das
Mahadai Das was born in Eccles, East Bank Demerara, Guyana in 1954. She
wrote poetry from her early school days at Bishops High School, Georgetown. She
did her first degree at the University of Guyana and received her MA at Columbia
University, New York, and then began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the
University of Chicago. Das became ill and never completed the programme.
My shoes stand on a waste land
While your twisting toes squeeze in a frenzy of squelching mud
Which bears you life:
Your bleeding hands grasp roots of rice
In my fields,
and the seed of life you delved into the earth
has sprung up to mock me.
(Excerpt from Bleeding Hands by Mahadai Das)
BEAST
In Gibraltar Straits,
pirates in search of El Dorado
masked and machete-bearing
kidnapped me.
Holding me to ransom,
they took my jewels and my secrets
and dismembered me.
Mahadai Das was born in Eccles, East Bank Demerara, Guyana in 1954. She
wrote poetry from her early school days at Bishops High School, Georgetown. She
did her first degree at the University of Guyana and received her MA at Columbia
University, New York, and then began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the
University of Chicago. Das became ill and never completed the programme.
While your twisting toes squeeze in a frenzy of squelching mud
Which bears you life:
Your bleeding hands grasp roots of rice
In my fields,
and the seed of life you delved into the earth
has sprung up to mock me.
pirates in search of El Dorado
masked and machete-bearing
kidnapped me.
Holding me to ransom,
they took my jewels and my secrets
and dismembered me.