Demerara

Gerdastevenson

How appropriate that Gerda Stevenson’s new collection of poetry, Quines: Poems in Tribute to the Women of Scotland (Luath Press, £9.99) is being launched on International Women’s Day (8 March, 6:30pm) with a special free event at the Scottish Poetry Library. Singers, politicians, a fish-gutter, queens, a dancer, a marine engineer, a salt seller, sportswomen, scientists and many more – Quines celebrates and explores the rich and diverse contribution women have made to Scottish history and society. ‘Demerara’ is about Eliza Junor, born Demerara, who was born in 1804, the daughter of a slave owner from the Black Isle, and an unknown mother, probably a slave.

I’ve learned my letters well – my copperplate masts and sails flow across the page, like the ship that carried us here, my brother and me, to our father’s land, the Black Isle of white people, where I’m glad no cane grows; my mother always said I had a way with words – Demerara – River of the Letterwood, its banks of trees with bark like hieroglyphics, a whisper in my ear from birth: Demerara, Demerara… I wish she’d lived to see my prize for penmanship, that I could tell her we are well, and freed, that we don’t heed the taunts of half-breed, octoroon, mulatto, quadroon; the dominie’s wife says tawnie – told me she’d seen some in Cromarty too, had heard rumours there were others come to Inverness and Tain; and, saving present company, wasn’t it a shame that Scotsmen didn’t refrain from relations with slaves? She was pouring tea, and her spine stiffened in her corset when I declined the sugar. ‘But it’s Demerara,’ she crooned, ‘It’ll make you feel at home,’ and spooned it into my cup; I watched the gold beads – ‘hybrid jewels’, my father calls them – melt in the peat-brown pool.