The World's Literature in Europe discussion

The cover illustration of Lorna Goodison's Supplying Salt and Light is her own water color 'Mothers of Revival' . Goodison painted before she wrote poetry according to Ellen Rolfes in "Poet Lorna Goodison reads ‘To Make Various Sorts of Black’", and that poem, the first in Goodison's collection, draws on Cennino Cennini's Chapter XXXVII of The Craftsman's Handbook: "Il Libro dell' Arte" .

The next poem "Reporting Back to Queen Isabella" reprinted here is narrated by Jamaica's 'land'. The historical character is Christopher Columbus. A review in Quill and Quire says that this poetry collection "reconstructs the Caribbean colonial quest undertaken by 16th-century Spanish explorers driven by appetites of empire."

Goodison's poems 'Praise to the Limping Angel' and 'Hope Gardens' are discussed by Vladimir Lucien, author of Sounding Ground, in Poetry International here. In 'Praise', a city girl on a meal break from cashiering is aided by a guardian angel when she takes a short cut going back to work. In 'Hope', a woman recalls the spiritual disjunct between her carefree childhood excitement in weekly outings to Hope Gardens and her baffling realization in a college class about 'heinous' conspiracies by the conquerors of Jamaica, the developers of the public botanical garden.

Asma wrote: "The cover illustration of Lorna Goodison's Supplying Salt and Light is her own water color 'Mothers of Revival' [bookcover:Supplying..."

I didn't know that, thanks for the info! I absolutely love the cover picture.
Unfortunately, for the poems, they didn't manage to grab my attention as the previous one we read here. I can't really say why, since I can see that they were well written. I suppose they were less of my sensibility. Or maybe because I found them less "straighforward" than those of Miller, which made it more difficult for me to get into them.

Melaslithos wrote: "for the poems, they didn't manage to grab my attention as the previous one we read here..."

Yes, possibly. I'm reading one right now "At Lunch in Les Deux Magots". That's a very famous cafe in Paris which attracted writers, in this instance James Baldwin and Richard Wright. The poem isn't too difficult. It contrasts a contemporary instance of love there with the historical one of Baldwin and Wright there, and Goodison utilizes the emotional tone of words ("register") to convey meaning.

Miller is fun to read with his zany character Pearline Portious and his theme of Jamaica's difference from Britain as Jamaicans experience contact and diaspora. Cezair-Thompson delves the sociopolitical and historical backgrounds of Jamaica which have the grave potential to cloud the lives of a mother and her daughters. So far, Goodison in this poetry collection, which is Oracabessa without that book's last chapter, is set in both Jamaica and international countries, as noted in the publisher's description. I find that these poems are unambiguous as far as poetry is concerned. It will be interesting to find out what nuggets are here.

Goodison's poem "At Lunch in Les Deux Magots" is elucidated here by the British poet, writer, and translator Carol Rumens. It's springtime in Paris, and there's a juxtaposition of a modern couple in love and of the love-turned-betrayal between Richard Wright and a younger James Baldwin of a prior generation of cafe patrons.

The backstory is that after receiving Wright's assistance, Baldwin criticized Wright's novel. Wikipedia mentions the apparent faux pas:

"Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright's novel Native Son. In Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended."

Though it's not referred to in Goodison's poem, Baldwin afterwards said that he hadn't meant it the way it sounded:

"Interviewed by Julius Lester,[...] Baldwin explained, "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself."

Besides that bit of literary history, another note of interest in Rumen's article is Goodison's way with words. Various "registers' of emotional tone through word choice come to the fore to construe her meaning.

In the chapter Hope Gardens of Supplying Salt and Light, a pair of poems focuses on the imaginative delights carried in the 'belly' of a bookmobile, "our brave new world caravel on wheels". The viewpoints are from the custodian of the bookmobile.

In the first, “Días del Bibliobús”/"Bookmobile Days"), s/he sketches the imaginative experiences of several children reading stories from the traveling library. In particular is the last child "wide-eyed and greedy / for what was carried in the hold", wearing her Sunday best on an ordinary day and asking for 'fairy tales'.

In the other poem "Tagore on the Bookmobile", the spent driver, "on your journey / all of a hundred miles in a day to far outposts", finds a copy of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali or Song Offerings. S/he is similar to the children of the previous poem, being beguiled by the transformative experience of reading

"lyrics that shivered
your head top off.
//
Pitiless force
able to gouge unhealable gash in the heart; like mined-out
bauxite quarries the machine heaved past.
//
Flesh could not sustain such feelings as the poet spawned;
//
you would feel yourself stream out toward Him;
and all because of Tagore of Bengal.

That latter poem contains reference to a quote from Tagore, appropriate for the person on the road:

"Thou art the solitary wayfarer in this deserted street. Oh my only friend, my best beloved, the gates are open in my house-do not pass by like a dream."

Tagore's context is here.

In the chapter The Blue Boarding House, another pair of poems caught my eye. Intense memories of youth are told of in "Dance Card" and "Otis Ode".

In "Dance", she and four friends hoof it every 'Saturday night' without letup to the excitement of dance music, singers, and lyrics, going via a Morris mini-minor:

"Hers was egg white; mine a pat of yellow;
neat cube-shaped little loaf cakes
they were, those sweet cars."

photo: Mark Brown, Hampton, New Brunswick, Canada (1959 Morris Mini-Minor #1)

They motor

"down the hill into Glass Bucket
or swashbuckle through
the Bucaneer lounge

where [...]
this expat cockney band
called the Pearly Kings banged on."

They hear

"[...] the mellow
of soulful Richard Ace and his trio"

and the

"loud warbling along to Sparrow's
slack calypso lyrics."

also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_...

The adjacent poem "Otis Ode" begins on a dance floor, Otis Redding's crooning rousing girls to say "Yes" more likely to the boys' taking chances on a request for a dance. The girls envisage Redding in their arms:

"girl shuts

eyes tight and projects her ripe self to rub up close
against hunky hard body of handsome Otis Redding."

The poem segues to popular manifestations of his fame and notable incidences of his life. Finally the concluding couplet,

"Old school, I was in the crowd hailing you then, hail
you now. Otis Redding, advocate of all love's beggars."

Mentioned in the poem is "These Arms of Mine", which is sung here.

Also in Goodison's chapter Hope Gardens is the poem "Quest", which alludes to T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" through substance and quote. In "Quest", a schoolgirl of a dozen years is yearning for the outdoors when a schoolteacher reads aloud the British poet's portrayal of an expedition which destabilizes the conception of their world. The girl, unaware of the travelers' aims, lets go her imagination to reshape and personalize Eliot's words. Jahan Ramazani's essay Modernist Inflections, Postcolonial Directions (A History of Modernist Poetry, pp 463-67) gives an explanation of how

"Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ played a pivotal role in a Caribbean schoolgirl’s awakening to adulthood and to poetry".

In Goodison's poem, not only the youth's personalized understanding of "Magi" arises, and her being evermore "disoriented" by it, according to Ramazani, there is the looming Jamaican independence from Britain around the corner. I feel grateful for spotting on the internet the essayist's elucidation about "Quest".

The last chapter of Supplying Salt and Light is titled Bye, Boonoonoonoos. In Jamaican patois, that B-word means "special friend". The voice for that same title poem is a reverie for a once cozy Jamaican life, which inspired poems, prior to a move to a very cold climate. In the next poem "One in A Long Line", she hints why she sought to leave. Subsequent poems hark back to her memories and her visits; other ones communicate experiences with people, places, history, and nature, sometimes with sacred words. And, when change brings insecurity, she reaches inward,

"go home
go home via
silence inroads
to heartcave.
There you
dwell safe."

The final poem here, "Canto I", is for Derek Walcott .

"Sir, you are the most gifted of our poets and playwrights
in the name of my most faithful study of your books
my love for you and your love of excellence, help me please."

The scene set is a character attempting the spiritual heights of a mountaintop. A leopardess and a she-wolf impede the climber. An adviser materializes to be a guide by an oblique way through life's sufferers until "the great one, who'll [...] / feed us on love and wisdom, comes." Goodison's "Canto" is similar to Dante Alighieri's Canto I of Inferno . SparkNotes synopsizes Dante's.

I enjoyed the Supplying Salt and Light, but I made the mistake of reading it when it came into the library a couple months ago and now I can't remember many of the specific poems, and my review of it wasn't very detailed.

I've just finished the other two and liked them quite a bit. I'll put down my reviews first as is my habit and then comment more as other people start posting.
==================================
From Harvey River

The current read for the World Literature Group on Goodreads, Lorna Goodison represents the "middle generation" between Claude McKay (whom she read in school as a "classic") and the more recent Jamaican writers we have been reading for the group (such as Kei Miller and Margaret Cezair-Thompson); she is a poet and story writer who now teaches in Ann-Arbor (unless she has retired in the last ten years). To make a more personal connection, she was born about midway between my parents and myself, and her mother was almost exactly contemporary with my maternal grandmother. I read one of her poetry collections earlier, and will be reading a collection of her short stories next. The subtitle is somewhat misleading, as the book deals with her entire family, and is almost more about her grandmother Margaret and her many aunts and uncles than about her own parents (her mother was one of eight children, and the author has eight siblings of her own). This is a Jamaica which is poor but less violent than the Jamaica of Cezair-Thompson and Marlon James, perhaps because much of the book takes place in Harvey River, a rural area where the Harveys (her mother's family) are the original founders, although the later chapters move to Kingston; perhaps because she moved to the continent (New York, Michigan and Toronto) about a decade before the violent period described by those authors. As with her poetry, it is less political and more personal than the other Jamaican writers I have read. The book is largely about people, and she brings them to life, not only the family members but even those neighbors and others who only feature in one or two paragraphs; the style is more like fiction than I expected in a memoir (and she admits to have adjusted some details, especially of chronology, for the sake of the narrative.)
=============================
By Love Possessed
This is a collection of mostly previously published stories by the author of Supplying Salt and Light and From Harvey River. The tone is similar; the stories are focused on characters in their personal relationships with husbands, wives, lovers, parents and other relatives, without emphasizing larger social issues, although they are present in the background. Goodison somewhat reminds me of Alice Munro in her choice of subjects, although the treatment is different. Some of the stories have a tragic outcome, while others are rather upbeat or even humorous. It was an enjoyable read but probably not a book I will remember as much as the books by Miller, Cezaire-Thompson, and James that we are reading in the same group.

Thank you, James, for your comment. I've started "From Harvey River", though I read it for the first time earlier this year. I agree with you that Goodison's writing is personal, even lyrical in its enthusiasm and passion. She fills out the narrative about bygone days, as if she were dwelling alongside her ancestors.

Some good news for Lorna Goodison. She's taking the post of Jamaican Poet Laureate up. From whom and for how long is below in #2:

#1. Shara McCallum makes many thought-provoking statements in her review of "From Harvey River", so I've shared it. Be cautious of the paragraph beginning "Two of the more memorable characters" in which there's a misprint with character names :)

#2. From Tanya Batson-Savage: Lorna Goodison will step into Jamaican Poet Laureate Mervyn Morris's shoes on May 17, 2017. Extended coverage at Jamaica Observer.

#3. Gary Geddes introduces Goodison for British Columbia 's National Award for Canadian Non=Fiction for her From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island.

I enjoyed reading this review about "From Harvey River".

Aisha Kamilah Goodison is Lorna Goodison's niece through brother Vaughn ("Bunny"). Similar to her aunt, Aisha set forth a family tree with her siblings, parents, grandparents, and so forth. On her page also is this map of Jamaica with the location Harvey River circled,

as well as photos of her mother. In "From Harvey River", Lorna's mother plays a central part, too.

The poem titled "42" in the poetry collection White Egrets by Derek Walcott is inscribed to Lorna Goodison, in particular, to her book "From Harvey River". The entire verse is descriptive of the Jamaican place in images of terrain, nature, climate, 'girlhood' and 'dressmaker', religion, and possibly other associations. The Adam Roberts Project, also, recognizes her memoir in there,

"It's dedicated to Lorna Goodison, and the prose praised is that of her From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (the Jamaican town of Harvey River is namechecked there in line 13, there),

as well as allowing for "42" to be Walcott's archetypal imagery of Jamaica as well. Bartosz Wojcik might agree with Adam Roberts's Jamaican symbolism when Wojcik writes that "42" is

"a poetic farewell to Jamaica and a poem dedicated to Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison, the white heron is transformed into the John crow, a local lexical equivalent of the Turkey vulture".

By the way, the title "42" initially felt disconcerting because it has 21 lines. The poem can be read with a pause in each line to produce 42 discrete segments. Another clarification is that Walcott titled the poems in "White Egrets" according to page number as is shown in the Table of Contents and on the top right of this page.

From which seed did "From Harvey River" grow into a memoir? How did visiting rural Harvey River affect Goodison when she visited the family 'homestead' in youth? What is unique about Jamaicans' family histories? If tourists see Jamaica as an eden, then what motivates Jamaicans to migrate?

Those are some questions considered in Marco Werman's and Lorna Goodison's podcast interview about her memoir "From Harvey River". The links below illustrate specific poems and points from their conversation.

•Origin of her memoir:

"Prologue" of "From Harvey River";

Especially, her poem "I Am Becoming My Mother" from the collection I Am Becoming My Mother .

•Goodison's quote from Derek Walcott's character, the sailor Shabine, "either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation":

"The Schooner Flight, part 1, stanza 2".

•Resettling home in her poem "Making Life", Controlling the Silver :

Commentary about Goodison's "Making Life" in Amanda Labelle, "Mapping the Self, pp 39-41 -- "making – this is not a passive acceptance of life the way it is, or the way one is told that it is, but an active engagement with creating one’s own life, however one determines it should be."

LG reading from "From Harvey River", beginning of part one. Her final spoken words are cut short; that part missing is:

"Besides, Dorice, pronounced "Do-reese," conjured up images of a woman who was not ordinary; and to be ordinary, according to my mother's oldest sister, Cleodine, was just about the worst thing that a member of the Harvey family could be."

In the passage read, Goodison narrates her mother Doris's birth. Margaret and David were Doris's parents and Lorna's grandparents:

"Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech."

Between Doris's mother and father there springs up a difference of opinion about naming the baby. What comes next about Doris's name is humorous.

Asma wrote: "Aisha Kamilah Goodison is Lorna Goodison's niece through brother Vaughn ("Bunny"). Similar to her aunt, Aisha set forth a family tree with her siblings, parents, grandparents, and so forth. On her ..."

Thank you so much for this. It's amazing how Lorna and her niece Aisha are able to trace their family's history. I just finished From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island, my first introduction to Lorna Goodison, a poet and writer I wasn't familiar with before. I really enjoyed that memoir. It has a calm and nostalgic feeling. The relationship between Lorna's parents was a true love story. I loved the scene where her parents sing the Leadbelly song "Goodnight Irene" to each other. My review of the memoir can be found here.

...they never failed to look up in wonder at the Lucea Clock Tower, which held a red clock that looked like a high-domed helmet worn by German royal guards. Everyone in the town knew that the clock in the tower was brought to Lucea by mistake, that it had been destined for the island of St. Lucia, and that the captain of the ship which was transporting it had mistaken the Port of Lucea for the island of St. Lucia, and delivered it there in 1817.

I had to check up a photo of the Lucea Clock Tower when I read this story. I find it fascinating that a German clock tower ended up in a Jamaican parish bearing the name Hanover! What a coincidence! Below is a map of Hanover Parish and you can see Dolphin Head Mountain below the bold Hanover writing.

With the imposing Dolphin Head Mountains rising as high as two thousand feet, and an abundance of cabbage palms and tall coconut trees forming a lush backdrop to the azure harbour, the town of Lucea was a small but steady source of light.

Missy J wrote: "...The relationship between Lorna's parents was a true love story. I loved the scene where her parents sing the Leadbelly song "Goodnight Irene"..."

Very fitting choice for the recording of "Irene", Missy J. I considered a few, and I entirely agree with your choice.

That passage about the song "Irene" attracted me, too. The bittersweet moment occurs when friends are gathered for a farewell evening on the eve before Doris, Marcus, and their children (before Lorna's birth) move their home from countrified Malvern to crowded Kingston. As Marcus is nearly going to pieces at the beginning of the song to entertain guests, Doris is silently urging him to buck up. The passage at approx pp156-57, considerably trimmed here, tells how the couple usually listened to "Irene":

"Marcus would say, "Wait, wait, the nice part coming now." This was how they liked to wait for Leadbelly to reach that part in the chorus when he sings, "Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene, I'll get you in my dreams," for when he reached that part, they would both turn and face each other at the same time and laugh out loud. Every time, they laughed together as if they were hearing Leadbelly's lascivious tone for the first time, "I'll get you in my dreams." They'd laugh till she caught herself laughing at Leadbelly's slackness, and she'd stop and say, "Marcus, you are too out of order," as if she had not become a little out of order herself, now that she was a married woman."

The urban neighborhood children called Doris 'Mama Goodie' because she taught them letters, shared the family's food, and generally welcomed them.

Missy J wrote: "...a German clock tower ended up in a Jamaican parish bearing the name Hanover! What a coincidence!..."

As far as I see from internet sources, Hanover Parish began in 1723. The village of Harvey River and Harvey River of Goodison's ancestors is located there. The Harvey's home was 'five miles' from the parish's capital, Lucea*, the port with the protected U-shape harbor in Message 20.

Further, the name Hanover derives from the personal history of George I of Great Britain, King of Great Britain and Ireland, whose birth in 1660 of the Holy Roman Empire is linked to the Hanoverian dynasty of the German territories. George I also is the inheritor of the British crown after Queen Ann of the House of Stuart. George I is the first British monarch of the House of Hanover.


*In listening to video clips of Goodison, I hear her pronunciation as 'Loo-see'.

The video clip "Words Aloud 10" is a likable performance by Lorna Goodison, opening with with a poem about her great-grandmother Leanna Sinclair. The memoir says that Leanna was

"a woman of African descent who became the Guinea Woman in the poems and stories I would come to write."

Then there's the reading of the Prologue, also Part I at the beginning, and the vignette about the Don't Care Girl, her mother's 'cautionary tale' for aunt Ann, approx pp 128-31.

Excerpts from the poetry collection "Supplying Salt and Light" concludes the program, poems about Spain and Portugal from the section 'To Make Various Sorts of Black' and a couple others, including "The Bear", which she personalizes with an account. Some of what she reads here is otherwise accessible only with the print book.

Maureen Warner-Lewis's review of From Harvey River accentuates several aspects of that memoir. For example, her review compares the Prologue and the Epilogue as "two dream visions". In the former, Goodison is recounting the result of visiting her seamstress mother's heavenly, 'palatial' accommodations.

"But as I was leaving the celestial workroom, she handed me a book. This is that book."

In the latter dream, Goodison is dreaming in Hanover, Germany, of being a 'mermaid' in the Harvey River of Hanover Parish, Jamaica, swimming through crowds of her forebears. Further, Warner-Lewis continues the thread of 'dreamed narratives' -- the prophetic women of each generation from great-grandmother Leanna to Lorna. Those dream episodes are one of the insights in this no fee Jstor article: Maureen Warner-Lewis. "Review: From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island by Lorna Goodison". Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, pp. 83–86.

By Love Possessed is a collection of short stories by Lorna Goodison. The first story in it, 'The Helpweight', is somewhat of a romance. Somewhat to the extent that life doesn't always turn out as our hearts might prefer. What do you do when your high school steady goes abroad to university, returns with a bride of IRA connections, yet needs your help in his life? And how much help? The main character of this story, who has a successful career, finds that her former sweetheart Nathan needs her, wheedling her to care for his mother, then arrange the woman's funeral, and be a shopping consultant for his wife, and more. So how is she to handle Nathan's ardent, flattering pursuit of her especially while her budding romance with another doesn't bring her flowers?

The second story "Jamaica Hope" features an expert carpenter Alphanso and a genial woman skilled in homemaking crafts Lilla. The couple regularly enlarges and improves their house and have some children. After a decade of life together, Lilla has no gold ring on her finger and Alphanso prefers to keep their current arrangement. The portrayal of language, community, domesticity, and culture here feels warm. In a good-natured way, Goodison answers why men shy away from marriage and reaches a favorable conclusion to the narrative.

The short story "Henry" tells the life of a young Kingston flower seller, which mostly takes place on a safe corner across from the Governor's House. It opens with his ardent wish that one of these days a lady will invite him inside the car beside her to give him a nice home in exchange for his taking care of the rose garden. How the boy came to his hungry situation takes the tale back to events surrounding his relationship with parents and grandparents. The odors of dozens of red and pink roses are differentiated by the small boy and the attentive care he takes in maintaining the flowers sharply contrast with his stark shelter, with his lack of daily food as well as with the privileged lives of those who buy roses from him.

A review by Charmaine Valere looks at some stories in By Love Possessed from a feminist viewpoint. An example of that perspective is female characters making a male character the focus of their narrative lives until an abrupt awakening happens. In other stories here, Valere views some male protagonists, for example, as acting through the influence of cultural mores. Also, Valere mentions the topic of 'the Caribbean short story', which shows the headway the West Indies is making as literature of consequence.

A story in By Love Possessed, "Bella Makes Life", is the narrative of Bella and Joseph. Bella announces her intention to visit New York City while Joseph stays in Jamaica with the children. While Joseph is satisfied with a peaceful Jamaican way of life, Bella, 'the Material Girl', says that NYC taught her to go after what you want, buying loud-patterned clothing with money from her nightclub job to resell back home and enjoying herself on outings with newfound friends. Bella and Joseph's letters to each other continue with regularity until Bella temporarily comes home at Christmastime, returns to Brooklyn, and comes home again this time shocking Joseph when she applies Jheri curl to their son Devon's hair. Bella's new life changes her outlook in ways which disturb Joseph's serenity. The story's title about 'making life' breaks in half. Joseph is satisfied with the continuing improvements to their living situation and with the time for contentment and relaxation at night which his taxi man's income provides, while Bella is attracted to ambition and to hustle and bustle. When a neighbor woman Miss Blossom returns from Fort Lauderdale in lace-trimmed black attire, his instinct tells him that, like Bella, she's no longer the sympathetic friend she used to be. There is plenty of patois and humor inserted into this short story.

"By Love Possessed" is also the eponymous short story of the collection. The protagonists, fastidious Dottie and handsome Frenchie, come up against events which shatter their unquestionable suppositions. Their pleasurable fantasies about movies and movie stars add to the fragile security of their thinking. They meet and bond at a triple feature with Ricardo Montalban and Dolores del Río -- perhaps the film version of Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn based on Howard Fast's The Last Frontier . They share their excitement about the movies. Later in the relationship, Dottie imagines herself being in the film By Love Possessed, starring Lana Turner, that adapted James Gould Cozzens's novel of the same title; while Frenchie, an anecdotalist of 'world affairs', is dramatizing a movie to Mr. Percy's bar crowd when at a high point a stranger interjects offensive remarks. Lengthy laughter sets in, and the story moves toward the catastrophic ending.

After the short story "By Love Possessed" is "Don't Sit on the Beauty Seat". I wasn't aware of what the beauty seat is until this narrative --
the beauty seat being the seat for disabled or elderly people on the Jolly Joseph bus (Jamaica Omnibus Service) -- a front-of-the-bus seat taken by pretty girls seeking to be admired. As a slice of Jamaican culture, there's a reggae(?) song "Jolly Joseph" by Jacob Miller. A feature of the JJ bus is its rhyming couplets of bus-riding suggestions, pointed out in “The Rhymes of Jolly Joseph” / Las Rimas de José “El Jovial” by Bruce Patrick. Ownership and management of the company became a politically controversial issue over the years.

The telling of this story starts with an incident on the JJ that is told by the voice of another rider, an observer who uses the current incident between a lady and a skateboarder to revive her memories of late adolescence. Her portrait of a youth's Kingstonian life perhaps around 1960s unfolds among friends in her pre-university years and after graduation. The connecting threads running through the tale fit well together.

The setting on the Jolly Joseph prompts the narrator's memory about a previous experience on Jamaican transportation.

In the short story "God's Help", a couple, Sylvie and George, choose to take a step sideways in their lives (a move to the city) to afford a more desirable, future life with a farm in the countryside. Such is regarded as 'making life', the necessity of breaking with the present situation for a desirable dream. What the couple doesn't expect are random, future events, unexpected interferences which can upset their plan.

The disruption is a mass arrest of bystanders when police are looking for a suspected person. Without due process of law in Jamaica, there's no expectation of George's imminent release from the 'lockup'. Sylvie's advanced stage of pregnancy is making work hard for her to do.

Sylvie must make an ethical choice. Her cousin Gatta suggests that she 'join a church' in return for food and goods. Though Gatta's reasoning goes against Sylvie's purpose for churchgoing, she reluctantly visits the Hallelujah Temple. Her memory of grandmother's wisdom bolsters up Sylvie:

"Sylvie, you must follow your mind, woman especially must follow them mind."

The reverend's sermon encompasses incompatible views. The political one says that the poor ought not bank on charity; the religious one that the reverend ought to 'give to the needy'. The churchman describes his own poverty-stricken, hungry boyhood to the listening congregation, thus empathizing with their difficult situation. "What makes people want to help others" is drawn from studies, which show that who we choose to help depends on the extent of our social inclusiveness, such as the reverend's notion about the attendees.

Does acceptance of the food and parcels obligate the receivers? Reverend Sam

"was asking the needy not to leave directly after they received their food and clothes parcels, but that they should stay behind to confess their sins and receive counseling on how to gain God's favour."

There is an obligation in his gift. Suppose someone like Sylvie refuses any help, then there is no favor for her to repay. In a quote from "Obligations to People We Don't Know":

"it is easy enough to imagine a person who is willing to forgo the assistance of others and as such can consistently refuse to accept obligations to others. So, for example, a person might be willing to starve rather than accept assistance from other people. While such people might seem a bit crazy, if they are sincere then they cannot be accused of inconsistency."

This story is more profound than a less thoughtful reading would suggest.

In the short story "House Colour", the phrases 'she slipped out of herself' and 'time to go back into herself' describe interludes when the main character, a female, begins and ends daydreaming. However, Virginia Slana on p52 of "Trickster-hero and rite of passage" assumes that the 'heroine' actually does those actions while temporarily slipping away as if no one would notice her absence -- getting on to the roof of the moving car as its male driver is relating a long story and, later, ambling around and delighting in a pregnant cat and an azalea border as he is talking to the workmen of his acreage. Maybe, Goodison wanted to make those dreamy, solo passages of the 'heroine' slipping away to be indefinite -- reality with a suggestion of fantasy -- as the dreamer slips back in at the precise moment when he returns his attention to her.

In the short story "Wedding in Roxbury", the two protagonists (writers) and the son of one of them, on a day outing, pause with the neighborhood crowd to observe the participants in a fancy, church wedding -- men in formal attire and women in luminous taffeta 'frou-frous' -- step out of sleek limos to pose and to be sized up by onlookers. The local event not only attracts the narrators to stop awhile but brings outside the surrounding neighbors as well. There's local color: the groom's family owns a bakery which 'make them Jamaican patties, and blaring music wafts into the streets.

It's that music that transitions from a Roxbury (Boston) setting to a separate, harmonious story -- a romance and wedding between a West Indies ('Windies') cricketer and a beautiful, 'really nice' Jamaican woman. The transformation from the local wedding to the other one in London swivels on a shared song, the Temptations's "My Girl". As the Boston wedding party emerges from the church, the tune brings back the protagonist's recollection of another noteworthy union. As reported by news, the Temptations's song is sung by a celebrated singer for the 'star batsman' and the glamorous bride.

The sports couple meet, quite out of the ordinary, during a match at Kingston's Sabina Park Cricket Grounds. The text bristles there with further culture in evidence: the sport of West Indies cricket at a high point with the singing of the 1950 commemorative "Victory Calypso" "Cricket, lovely cricket, at Lords where I saw it" and the achievement of cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers as well as the couple's civil marriage at the registry of Claxton Hall, London, (probably a substitution for the former registry at Caxton Hall, Westminster). Those doings are sandwiched midway in the colorful sketch of the Boston couple and their attendants.



"Playtime at Trench Town Comprehensive School, Kingston, Jamaica" (1965)

Asma wrote: "By Love Possessed is a collection of short stories by Lorna Goodison. The first story in it, 'The Helpweight', is somewhat of a romance. Somew..."

The situation here reminded me of Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah, with the first love, now married, trying to rekindle a relationship; except in that novel the woman is responsible for abandoning the relationship in the first place.

Asma wrote: "After the short story "By Love Possessed" is "Don't Sit on the Beauty Seat". I wasn't aware of what the beauty seat is until this narrative --
the beauty seat being the seat for disabled or elderly..."

I found this story confusing at first. I think I ended up with a different reading than you did -- I think the later bus trip is actually in North America, and it reminds her of the earlier incident in Jamaica.

James wrote: "...I think the later bus trip is actually in North America..."

You're right, James. The story opens in 'West Vancouver', Canada, specifically, on the bus route to the 'Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal' there. The story opens and closes in the present day there. Aboard a bus, an incident occurs between two riders, a woman and a skateboarder, because of his agitation about her lack of courtesy at boarding. She subsequently endures embarrassment.

The conflict between the two of them prompts the observer to remember another untoward moment between two riders, a Communist and a woman, on the Jolly Joseph bus in Kingston, Jamaica. During this conflict on a bus, a woman loudly asks a rumpled young man at the rear of the bus a provoking question about his Communism. His angry response is disdainful in an outpouring of heated words. Similar to the present-day Vancouver woman's experience, this Caribbean woman responds to the man's anger with discomfiture.

Then, a flashback within the flashback happens. It turns out that the narrator/observer had been an acquaintance of the Communist during his brash schooldays, but now she hadn't wanted him to recognize her on the bus. She recalls the details about their former friendship.

The story then returns to the present day on the bus where the narrator observed the woman in the beauty seat and the skateboarder.

James wrote: "The situation here reminded me of Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah..."

I read the couple of novels preceding Americanah. Currently, I'm midway into "We Should All Be Feminists", her TED talk on youtube, which subsequently was printed as a book.

The protagonist of Goodison's "Helpweight" is a successful, single, career woman. Even so, at the end of that story, she still struggles with the remnants of Nathan among her material possessions and memories: things, places, &c. It's amazing how he rooted himself in her life, and she allowed him to do so even after his absence and his marriage to Deidra. The last scene is one in which she is emancipating herself from him.

Deidra isn't a feminist. Her activities center around Nathan ever since she took care of him in sickness during his London university days. As his wife in Jamaica, she precisely irons his shirtsleeves as his mother taught her to do, cooks his meals with some Irish fare, &c. To an observer, she is a helpmate. Nathan takes her help for granted, attempts to cheat on her, and dislikes her low-key way of dressing. Her biracial marriage to Nathan turns her out from her family in Ireland. Unlike the main character, Deidra will unlikely emancipate herself.

Lorna Goodison's short story "The Big Shot" is another story which belies a deep-seated psychological issue: why a low-born Jamaican youth who attained a professional career in England has a persistant dream about the past.

"He was now way past those circumstances and those people, but the dream wouldn’t leave him. Even as a child he hated the poverty and looked down on the poor people around him. He was going to get out as soon as he could. He always knew this. He was bright, so much more intelligent than all the other children at his school."

The main character Albert is a person of emotional control and ambition, until the mother of their illegimate son one day comes to pay him a surprise visit at his office.

Having returned to Jamaica married to a nurse, Albert is still emotionally cold in encounters with former acquaintances; depite that he anticipates career advancements in the legal profession. When Delzie, with whom he'd had an adolescent romance, turns up at his office about their son, he has nowhere to escape from his past life. He shouts, threatens, reverts to patois -- until the argument draws censure from other employees.

There's another example of bigotry about money in "The Big Shot" in the response of a wealthy English girl to his marriage proposal. Her parents would feel 'shame' were a marriage to Albert take place. Albert carries his own unfriendliness for people of his poverty-stricken youth. Until Delzie steps into his office and touches a nerve, Albert is placid and adaptable on the outside; the persistent dream and the showdown with Delzie about the son show that Albert hasn't come to terms with his past.

"Pinky's Fall" relates to a family of Chinese-Jamaican grocers, Miss Chin and Mr Chin, with a daughter Pinky, "a symbol of purity and goodness" especially by contrast with other parents' children. Customers, who are in arrears with their grocery account, are likely to be apprised of Pinky's studiousness in her upstairs room and of other youths' unruliness. That apparently is the case...

The history of Chinese immigration in Jamaica is a subject of Patricia Powell's fiction The Pagoda . In Goodison's short story and in Powell's novel, a character(s) harbors a secret for the time being.

In "The Dolly Funeral", Bev Lyons and neighborhood children and the narrator plan and carry out the funeral of Bev's deceased doll. The narrator describes Bev as possessing "all sorts of lovely toys and games to play with, but mostly she had a wonderful talent for organizing great events." She's also ahead of her time, some boys being miffed by her appointment as a female parson during the event.

In writing a Guardian review about Kate Hamer's "fairytale" novel The Doll Funeral , Melanie McGrath says that Hamer's

"title is metaphorical, a stand-in both for the end of childhood and for the limitations of second-wave feminism.

Indeed. Along with Bev's assertion about her due for the parson's role, she takes her leave of childish things a couple weeks later when she attracts a boyfriend and dismisses her narrator friend.

Asma wrote: ""Pinky's Fall" relates to a family of Chinese-Jamaican grocers, Miss Chin and Mr Chin, with a daughter Pinky, "a symbol of purity and goodness" especially by contrast with other parents' children. ..."

Another book about the Chinese immigration in Jamaica is Pao by Kerry Young. I have downloaded the book on my Kindle, but haven't started reading it yet.

Also, I remember reading this lovely article last year, about a Chinese-Jamaican family that traveled to Hong Kong to look for relatives of their Chinese side. Many photos included.
How a Chinese-Jamaican’s family history quest led her to Hong Kong (South China Morning Post, 28 July 2016)

I am currently reading Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn, a book about women trapped in a Jamaican society and economy who are making their way the best they can. Great Grandma says nothing but listens to all, having toiled through children and backbreaking work most of her life. Grandma was done wrong by Grandpa and has had to raise her two girls and take care of her mother by selling trinkets at a tourist stop. Margot works at a hotel and sells what she can to make money to support her mother and sister. She dreams of her lover and of running away. Thandi, the hope of her sister and mother, goes to school. They dream of her becoming a doctor and ending their travails; she dreams, though, of having a boyfriend and creating art.

"Fool-Fool Rose and Labour-in-Vain Savannah"

This short story resembles the eponymous title for Goodison's 2005 collection Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah .

As I recall, the author has previously pulled two seemingly different stories together in the ending and has shown their similarities. Again, a reader finds realistic wisdom in Goodison's fiction, and this one ends on a high note. Here, the girl Rose is the other children's 'fool-fool' (similar to the patois adjective 'foofool' and both unflattering). In school, she is considered 'uneducable' (all those teachers trying to teach her but in vain). At her nadir, it's discovered that she possesses the properties of what can be called a dog whisperer, her talent for revealing herself being turned to a positive value in the medical healing dogs and the popular blessing of them.

Woven into Rose's story is the one about an abused, married woman, in which her sordid pieces of information are spurred on by the narrator's sister-in-law, a gossip who rakes the victim's disclosures in without offering her any encouragement or succor, not even a cup of tea. As in Rose's story, a fortunate encounter with a supportive figure, on this occasion the narrator, strengthens the woman to change her beleaguered situation thus to shed the ilk of a fool.

As for the location of 'Labour-in-Vain Savannah', Jamaica, it was described in 1774 by Edward Long in his Volume 2 of The History of Jamaica: Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island, with Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government (pp 185, 189). Long mentions the splendid panorama there as well as its unyielding, unfruitful terrain. The 'Thompson' reference might be "Rev. Francis Thompson, vicar of Brough in Westmoreland, NW England, who died in 1735" (Wikipedia, "William Thompson"); nevertheless confusing as a late nineteenth-century poet Mr. Francis Thompson refers to a 'Pegasus' but his dates are after the eighteenth-century publication of Long's volume. The letter ſ with the incomplete crossbar at the beginning and middle of words is interpreted as a "long s" .

Very scenic but not good for growing produce.

Kkraemer wrote: "I am currently reading Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Ben ..."

It might be fun to read it Here Comes the Sun . How do you like it so far? Is it enjoyable?

It's hard to read of people with such limited options and such a difficult life. They are not saintly, and I mourn over the things that they say and do to each other. Sex is such a powerful tool that's used by all of the women in this book to belittle and exploit each other (only 2 are, possibly, able to provide the sustenance that most believe can come from love). I'm learning and thinking a lot, but it's certainly no romp in the jungle.

Missy J wrote: "Another book about the Chinese immigration in Jamaica is Pao...this lovely article...How a Chinese-Jamaican’s family history quest led her to Hong Kong...

A few months ago, I began reading Pao. Something interfered so I've set it aside for now.

Perhaps, it's your link to Gaia Goffe's article about a Chinese-Jamaican family's finding their ancestry in Hong Kong. That city is mentioned at the beginning of "Pinky's Fall" as Mr Chin's being from there.

There are linked biographies in the "family history quest" story you provided. I'll be going through those. I thought the main article was honest in its depiction of immigrants, Others from somewhere else -- arousing pique because of enviable success or being met with unfriendliness.

The title of Goodison's short story Angelita and Golden Days names the couple whose fortunes rise and fall as they find a mutual understanding in their dreams and a falling-out in the means of bringing them about.

Angelita's signature is thinking with mental pictures. In the chaotic scene at the overtuned fish market, she imagines 'the sea', women and men as various, tumbling fish. Another image is the lavender flower, which appears in her mind when she's doing the right thing.

The man's talent is his outstanding voice. His signature song is that of tenor Mario Lanza. Lanza's tune, which is Golden Eye's trademark in name and deed, was lip-synced by Edmund Purdom in the film "The Student Prince".

The two penurious characters find love and happiness. When the success of their dreams comes, they diverge on means to achieve and sustain it.

In 2012, the "loveaxe" blog, written by Geoffrey Philp, Kelly Baker Josephs, and Stephen Narain, read Caribbean fiction, one of its book selections being Goodison's collection By Love Possessed, about which they posted reviews of particular stories. One of those was Josephs' piece about "Shilling" which is here.

The story is a series of vignettes surrounding the life of one girl. It's on the themes of adolescent hopes versus experiences and of how characters are viewed by other characters. There's an acknowledgement of secrecy in the number 7 outcome to the girl's game about the future, in the boy's absence from the dance after his falling-out with his girlfriend, in what leads up to scenes which spring up and seem to alter the courses of personal history, and in the girl who becomes the subject of rumors while in the process of forging her identity. Goodison paints a faithful portrait of adolescent psychology.

Talola's Husband is a series of incidents around the title character, a Mr. Harrington.

Talola herself is a distant cousin of a proper family. Her choice of a husband is grudgingly tolerated among most of its members, excluding the exceedingly kindhearted mother. They judge what Talola does not do, i.e., recognizing Harrington's 'skullduggery'. The series of incidents portraying his thievery ties the ultimately lighthearted 'incidents' of trickery together. There are strong oppositions between Talola's and do-gooders' optimistic views of Harrington and the upright family and authorities who see his sleight of hand.

It's an entertaining story with the trickster Harrington.