Stitching Together Memories: An Interview with Poet Grace Nichols

see something in a fresh new light, like Derek Walcott’s “nail holes of stars in the sky roof” (Schooner Flight) or Sylvia Platt’s wind, “slapping its phantom laundry in my face” (Blackberrying). The images that you refer to in the above quotes weren’t derived from looking at paintings but from my own way of writing and use of imagery.

After poetry, my next big love is in fact visual art. I love visiting art galleries and viewing paintings. I was poet-inresidence at the Tate Gallery London 1999-2000,which resulted in my book of poems Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The idea was to come up with poems inspired by paintings. Among the paintings that inspired me was Picasso’s iconic ‘Weeping Woman’ based on the face of his young muse and mistress at the time, a woman called Dora Maar. She had suffered a mental breakdown when their relationship ended, and I wrote a long poem in her voice which sees her reclaiming her fractured cubistic face.

Of course now that I’m older, I realise that it wasn’t just the imagery I loved in poetry but also the music that a poem makes, which I took for granted as inherent qualities in any poem/poet. What is also important to me now is the resonance a poem leaves long after you’ve lifted your eyes from the page.

Another theme that stands out for me in your work is the references to needlework throughout:

a blanket woven by your own hands rich with embroidery

In another poem a mother uses a crochet needle to pry a pea out of her child’s nostril, while in the introduction to the collection Sunris you reference “a joyous patchwork quilt”. Penelope at work shows up as well as a pretty stunning poem about the sea:

in a turquoise dress

Constantly stitched and re-stitched by the bright seamstresses of flying fish

I wonder if you could think through why needlework is a motif in your work?

I can’t say that I was particularly conscious of this but there is a weaving together, especially in my collection, Startling The Flying Fish. I had a review in the Guardian newspaper on that book some time ago in which the headline referred to me as ‘Seamstress of the Caribbean’, so you might have a point there. My mother, who had seven children, often made our clothes herself on her Singer sewing machine and I myself, believe it or not, made some simple dresses for myself as a teenager, all in the same style, armless with a round neck. I won’t know where to begin sewing a dress now.

At a wider level, I think what we try to do as poets is a kind of stitching together of our memories, feelings, images, thoughts and bring them out in an imaginative wholeness into the world. The fact that I tend to write from a female perspective might have something to do with me using sewing as an unconscious metaphor.

There is a stunning eroticism to some of your works, particularly so in the poem “Winter Thoughts” where the narrator is reduced “to the throbbing fruit/ within me”. I wondered if you faced any pushback in writing such openly erotic poems? And were you personally aware of breaking boundaries in writing erotic poetry?

Most of my erotically charged poems like those you mentioned were written in the heady feminist heyday when as young poets, we were discovering our voices and celebrating our sexuality and womanhood and having a lot of fun reading those poems in public. As women we were hungry to hear each other’s voices which throughout history were mainly silent. There was an element of joyous rebellion in this as well as a desire to shock I guess. In the eighties and nineties in Britain I read with poets like Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and Adrienne Rich who were invited over from the USA, as well as British poets like Jackie Kay, Michelle Roberts, Carol Ann Duffy, and others. I remember an older black poet friend of mine saying that the poem, “My Black Triangle” always made him blush whenever I read it in public. I still included it in my selected poems I Have Crossed An Ocean, as a testament to that early period.

Nostalgia and exile are prominent themes for you, as are questions of belonging and “home”. At times home is Guyana and other times it is England. Even more fascinating is the fact that your work straddles both Latin American and Caribbean identities. There are both Latin American and Caribbean folktales and deities evoked in your poetry. So where do you place yourself? Where is home for you?

A sense of place has always been important to me as a poet. Coming from Guyana with its Atlantic coastline and its deep interior spirit of rivers and rainforest has made me into the kind of writer I am. I tend to keep an eye on landscape and like the elements to move in my work. I don’t think that would ever change.

But I’ve been living in the south of England for many years now and that landscape of rolling down and chalky cliffs is also part of me. So my two homescapes, so to speak, are Guyana/caribbean as well as England where I’ve brought up my two daughters. My work does straddle both places.

As you get older your sense of identity seems to shift and change. Though

Guyana, the country of my birth, will always be a special place to me, I tend to describe myself as a Caribbean person because for me the Caribbean is like a microcosm of the world. It embraces all the different races and cultures — native Amerindian, African, Asian, European

— so when you describe yourself as Caribbean, you’re in fact saying that you’re a citizen of the world. I personally feel very multicultural and am happy with the description on my birth certificate that says ‘Mixed native of Guyana’. Guyana is on the tip of the South American continent so it has one foot in the Caribbean islands and the other in Latin America, which is also part of my heritage.

Perhaps now is a good time to ask you to tell us about your childhood in Guyana …

I spent the first eight years of my childhood in a small country village along the east coast of Guyana, about 30 miles from the capital. We called it Highdam, an ironic name, since it was below sea level (the official name was Stanleyville). I believe I owe the fact that I write at all to that village where I spent my smallgirl days stealing down to the shore with my brother and sisters to catch crabs, catching fish in old baskets in our own

back yard whenever there was a flood.

The symbol of the fish has a lot of significance for me. As a writer, I think you have to be able to fish in your inner sea, that whole shadowy area of your memories, emotions, dreams, etc. My father was a head-teacher so I attended the Methodist school where he taught before going on to primary and secondary schools in the city, Georgetown.

Why did you leave Guyana for England, and what was your early life there like? When did you realise you were a writer? What, if any, mentoring did you receive in becoming a writer, and what was the process of getting published like?

If I hadn’t met my poet-partner (now husband) John Agard, I doubt very much I would have ended up in England. We were both journalists working for one of our national newspapers, The Chronicle, in Guyana, so we were already engaged in the writing process. I loved writing feature articles and would often come up with my own topics. John’s dad had already settled in England and we both had hopes of becoming full-time professional writers. Guyana had no publishing house apart from a small Government-owned press.

I arrived in England with John in 1977 (with my four-year old daughter from my first marriage). I’d already written nearly half of my (one and only novel) Whole of a Morning Sky, and a couple of poems. Back in Guyana, John had a small selfpublished collection of poems. Perhaps it was the emotional separation from Guyana that made me turn more and more to poetry which was a deep love of mine from childhood when I would dip into my father’s poetry books. I come from a big family of five sisters and one brother and didn’t expect to miss home as much as I did. Neither John nor I had received any mentoring or attended any workshops when it came to poetry. Everything I’ve learnt about poetry came from widely reading books of poetry, my love of language and the music and imagery of words, as well as my own perception of what constitutes a poem.

I think we were lucky coming to England when we did, as it was the beginning of both a multicultural awareness and the feminist era when publishing houses were open to more of a cultural diversity. Even so, when I approached Oxford University Press with my first book of poems, I is a long-memoried Woman, I was told that even though they ‘admired’ it, they felt that Kamau Brathwaite, the Barbadian poet, in his trilogy, had already covered that diasporic journey from Africa to the Caribbean.

The poem “Two old black men on a Leicester Square Park Bench”, written years ago, indeed does make me think of the Windrush scandal and generations of early immigrants from the Caribbean being denied citizenship in England these days. What are your thoughts on this present situation?

As far as I know, it originated from the fact that some Caribbean people who had been living and working in Britain for decades, and who had arrived from the Caribbean as children on their parents’ passports, had never applied for citizenship in their own right, presuming they were already British. They got caught up in the more recent drive by the British Government to tighten up on immigration in the face of more and more migrants from eastern Europe and also refugees seeking asylum. But we were all outraged by the shameful way some were treated. One man found, for example, that he was suddenly being denied medical treatment for cancer by the National Health Service as they couldn’t prove how long he’d been living in Britain. In fact, some of those affected were entitled to compensation. People often think of Caribbean migration beginning with the arrival of the Windrush ship in 1948, but the black presence goes back to Roman times and many Commonweath soldiers gave their lives fighting for Britain in the First and Second world wars.

This is so interesting, because you were kind enough to take me to certain places in London, and one of the things you said to me on one of our ventures that startled me, but really shouldn’t have, was, “But Jacqueline, this too is very much part of your heritage, of who you are. This belongs to you too.” Can you develop this idea further for me?

What I meant by that, Jacqueline, is that coming as you do from one of the former British colonies, namely Jamaica, the English language for starters is part of your linguistic DNA, and all that goes with it. We in the English-speaking Caribbean, like India and parts of Africa, have all contributed to the wealth of Britain as depicted in its architecture, art galleries, culture, etc. It is also part of our heritage. What makes Shakespeare so great is that he’s always drawn from the well of many cultures for his work, and I think as poets and writers, we should allow ourselves the same freedom.

In your introduction to your collection Sunris, you detailed your thoughts on calypso and Carnival’s importance to understanding not only your work but vernacular Guyanese culture. This introduction is written to that long and remarkable poem “Sunris”, which is also a love song to your mother. This introduction made me wonder what your writing process is like. For example, do you get an idea for your collection of poems, and explore that idea through several poems? Or do you write several poems and see where you have arrived at, or is it some other process altogether?

You yourself know, as a poet, that poetry isn’t a logical activity. Many of my poems begin as shadowy ideas that disappear and, if they’re strong enough, return again. I might begin a poem on a single theme, then suddenly see its potential to develop into a cycle. I love writing in cycles, as in The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, Sunris, ‘Weeping Woman’ from my book Picasso, I Want My Face Back. Cycles offer me more imaginative scope for exploring a subject or character although I’d written many individual poems. There are no hardand-fast rules. Most of the time you’re following your own instinct and intuition when it comes to writing a poem. You know what will remain a single poem or what you’ll develop into a sequence or whole book.

There is a character/persona Cariwoma who shows up in several of your poems. Who would you say she is? Why do you think she keeps recurring?

Cariwoma is found specifically in my book Startling The Flying Fish. I gave her that name, which is a fusion of Caribbean and woman, so she is Cariwoma, a quintessential Caribbean woman who embraces all her different racial strands and incarnates the spirit of the land and sea. She can likewise be seen in

Sunris who also sets out on a journey of transformation and reclamation to embrace all of herself. I think this is important to me subconsciously because history and colonialism have divided us up when our salvation lies in being one spiritual family.

Another character who keeps recurring in your work is Eve, though she certainly changes over time until in your most recent collection in the poem “Adam and Eve”, when the fruit she is handing over is a mango and not an apple. Why do you think you have this fascination with Eve?

I don’t think the fascination is just with Eve, though. There are, too, Oya, Yemanja, Cassandra, Kali, Penelope, etc. I guess

I’ve been engaged in my own mythmaking without even being conscious of it, especially from a female perspective, though male mythic figures like Anansi and Shango also feature in my work. I’ve always felt that as modern poets, we should also be engaged in creating and using our own ‘indigenous mythology’ as Andrew Salkey’s does in his wonderful and inventive Anancy’s Score.

Fairy tales and Caribbean and Latin American folktales and legends hold a similar fascination, particularly the women in these tales and legends. Why is this?

This is all part of my fascination with myths and legends. From childhood I was excited to hear and read all kinds of stories, fairy tales, the adventures of Odysseus. My father was a head-teacher, so our home always had these books. I think myth, fairy tales and folktales have always had an influence on the imagination of poets. It has a strange way of infiltrating your brain and surfacing in all kinds of ways. I don’t know why this should be as distinct from the real everyday stories that you hear. I think, for example, of Walcott’s “Omeros”, which takes on Homer’s “Illiad” but is filtered through a Caribbean lens. These mythic stories and fairy tales belong to humankind, not just the culture from which they emerge, and poets love that — the fact that they can be reinterpreted and reinvented.

In The Insomnia Poems I noticed that there are a lot more literary references than in your earlier collections, and wondered why that might be so? I also found myself wondering how autobiographical these poems were. In other words, I am trying to faas in your business, Ms Nichols, as we Jamaicans say, and ask if you struggle with insomnia as I have from time to time?

Yes, I’ve had a problem with sleeping for many years now. In fact, ever since the birth of my first daughter. But one of my sisters and my brother also have the same problem so perhaps it’s genetic. There are quite a few literary references in the book. I began by writing the odd poem about not sleeping, but felt it would have been limiting both for me and the reader to have poems simply about not sleeping. So I widen out the book to include the mythic associations of night and darkness. I found myself reading the myths and stories and fairy tales associated with sleep like Sleeping Beauty and Rip Van Wrinkle, for example.

How did you come to write the harrowing poem “A Brief Odyssey”? What is this poem about, and why did you feel it important to write it at this time?

That poem came about as a result of a TV news footage of a small Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose body was shown washed up on the shore. He and his family were trying to escape the terrible war in Syria and boarded an overcrowded dinghy which capsized. Only his father managed to survive. He, his brother and mother were washed away. What was particularly moving was the clip they’d also showed of him jumping around in a home movie, all excited to be going to a new home. It was such a sad image, this small, fully clad figure curled on the beach as if he was sleeping. Of course, when you’re lying in bed these images come back to haunt you. I called the poem, “A Brief Odyssey” because his journey at sea was so brief compared to the Odysseus’ lengthy 20-year battle at sea.

One of the things perhaps not widely known about you is that, along with your husband John Agard, you run a theatre group. How did this group come about, what kind of works has it produced? Also, what it is like for two such notable poets and creatives to live and work together? Do you, for example, constantly switch ideas back and forth about poetry and theatre and discuss each other’s work?

John and I, together with director Mark Hewitt, co-founded Crosspath Theatre in 2010. Its focus is more on verse drama with the aim of bridging poetry and theatre. I’ve always been interested in how different art