Carrying Both the Sea & River Inside Me: An Interview with Poet Monica Minott
In recognition of International Women’s History Month, Bookends presents its annual month-long series of conversations between the writer and scholar Jacqueline Bishop and women writers from the region and diaspora. Today’s featured writer is Jamaican poet Monica Minott.
Monica Minott, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you, based on your two collection of poems, Kumina Queen and Zion Roses, both from Peepal Tree Press (UK). One of the things that stand out immediately in your work is your dedication to the folklore and cultural practices of African Jamaicans. Why is this an area of fascination for you?
My interest in cultural preservation has grown over time from a subconscious one to the conscious need to reclaim lost history and making more accurate our history as Caribbean people through retelling. As Caribbean people we should document events through poems, novels, and stories; in so doing the world will be afforded new perspectives. Some systems are designed to perpetuate power for the few, enabling groups to dominate and control the narratives and the lives of many through linguistic power, economic power, and weapons of war. This needs to be resisted.
Kumina looms large in your work. Can you tell the reader what Kumina is and discuss your personal relationship to the practice?
Kumina travelled from the Congo region of Africa to Jamaica via African indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery, during British colonial rule of the island. Kumina, for me, is all about the dance. I met the famed dancer Barry Moncrieffe when I was about 15 years and he was a dance tutor at the Cultural Training Centre, later named Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Barry was a great instructor who always made me laugh. However, in my early twenties I was pulled away by responsibilities as a mother while continuing my professional studies; it was impossible to find space for dance anymore. Because I am a frustrated dancer, I get my kicks writing about dance instead of stepping. The name of my first collection Kumina Queen was inspired by a dance choreographed by the late Professor Rex Nettleford, titled Kumina. The title poem plays on ‘steps’ that traditions passed on, “My step is your step, / that the movement in me is not /one to keep, but to pass on…” In this poem, I hear ancestors once silenced, calling out for writers to record the lives they lived. Research undertaken by my sister Genevieve unearthed names of Kumina dancers, one dancer was Mama Minott described as the reigning Kumina Queen of that era. It was easy for me to claim the Kumina dancer (Mama Minott) as a great-great grandmother.
Particular themes that turn up in your work are fishes, fishermen, the sea, and of course River Mumma. Why are these themes of importance?
My first memory of the sea was as a little girl, standing on my Grandma Ethel’s porch at the back of the small house, gazing out at the horizon. My grandmother was born a stone’s throw away from the sea in Oracabessa and the sea is an integral part of family stories, always beckoning to draw near, but I have a healthy respect for its tempestuousness and the danger. I am not like the women I write about in my poems, Mama Ignota or Sista P, who would swim miles at Little Bay or who would chuck off the big rock in Oracabessa. Instead, I’d sit at the feet of my elders listening to stories about my great-grandmother (GG Katie) a Taino woman; how she would row a canoe to catch fish to feed her children. I have romanticised her life somewhat, still she worked hard — a little farming, a little fishing, and sewing — to make ends meet. My dad was born in rain-washed Portland, and he would eventually follow the river down to St Mary where he’d meet my mother. I carry both the river and the sea inside me, and the sea speaks eloquently to who we are and what we have lost as Caribbean peoples; it acts as a separator; a storehouse of bones of our ancestors along with bitter memories of the trafficking. Yet the sea also offers a journey forward, a rekindling of hope, wave after wave of telling, and retelling. Perhaps to refashion Nina Simone’s words: “The sea has put a spell on me.”
The books do a wonderful job of rewriting the classics, indigenising such characters as Penelope and Calypso. Why do you rework the classics and what is to be gained by doing so?
I am walking in a Caribbean tradition of taking from multiple histories that have been made available to us. In the Caribbean we have been displaced and our rich African blood mixed many times over with spattering of European bloodlines, often not voluntarily, allowing us to operate in an “in-between space”. Stories I read in prep/primary school(s) include classic fables: Jason and The Golden Fleece; Troy and the Wooden Horse; and Cyclops the One-Eyed Giant. While in high school I read a version of The Odyssey. I also met several bits and pieces of the classics in the poetry of Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Shara McCallum, and others. These are all foundations which I pull on from time to time to complicate an idea; infusing mythology adds depth, plurality of meanings, and it hopefully challenges readers. I stand in agreement with Dionne Brand that the plurality of meanings proffered by poems often provoke tangential responses capable of incrementally changing conversations from prescribed narratives. The indigenisation of Greek or Roman characters allows for easy entry into an old world in my work. It also provides an opportunity to explore cultural connectivity while collapsing time as I invite readers to step into multiple and simultaneous worlds.
They are several poems in both collections that have dedications. Did the dedications influence the writing of these poems?
Poems with dedication are often inspired by a life lived. I call these praise poems. I may also choose to offer a tribute to the writer of a great poem because they wrote a great poem. “Easter Sunday Morning” for Professor Rex Nettleford came to me as a tribute poem, honouring Nettleford for his style, superb talent, and love of movement. Yet, this poem is seen by many as more elegiac, written a few months before his death, first published immediately after his death. The dedication accompanying the poem “Jemima’s Wait” was made having witnessed a young man’s strength that enabled him to survive hardship and overcome much adversity. My River Mumma poem was a response and tribute to Lorna Goodison’s poem “The River Wanted Out”.
“River Mumma’s Fate”, your tribute poem to Lorna Goodison, made me wonder a few things. Firstly, who have you studied with as a writer, and whose work as a poet do you admire? In the conclusion of the poem, the River Mumma states “… what bothering me / is mi don’t quite remember the reason for so much tears /”. Can you talk us through why me and mi were used here when using one of both would suffice?
Some 20 years after leaving high school, I sought to determine whether the poems I wrote were any good. Professor Mervyn Morris was my first point of contact with academia as it relates to poetry. Morris graciously met with me, looked at a few poems, and loaned me The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, saying, “If you wish to become a poet read this collection, and when you are through come back and let us talk.” I rebelled against Frost for many months, but with the encouragement of a friend and budding poet, also named Robert, we read Frost. A short time after reading these collected poems, I met Professor Edward Baugh at a poetry reading, and later sent a few of my poems for his comments. He said the poems showed promise; he also said there was evidence of talent, but I had much to learn. Another poet later told me, “A good poet must have skill and talent, you can teach skill, but you can’t teach talent.” I am about learning the skill. I must thank Edward Baugh and Mervyn Morris heartily for their willingness and patience with me and my writing. Poets I have worked with and whose poems significantly impacted mine include Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Major Jackson, Gregory Pardlo, Robert Hass, and Sharon Olds. Poets whose work I have studied and whose poems continue to impact my poetry include Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Shara McCallum, Dionne Brand, Nourbese Philip, Evie Shockley, Velma Pollard, and Amy Gerstler.
In the poem “River Mumma…” writing “me” and “mi” in one sentence highlights the assimilation of African words/meanings in the everyday language of the man in the street in Jamaica. The root of “mi” can be traced to languages spoken on the West African Coast while “mi” also appears in the Niger-Congo region. In both Yoruba and Fula “mi” represents “I” in a conversation. This is consistent with Julie Pern’s referencing of creole spoken in Jamaica having “the strong residuum of African grammatical constructs, concepts, and vocabulary, [as] …a central vehicle of resistance.” Joseph Opalla also underscores that creole languages are essentially hybrids, blending linguistic influences.
Now would be a good time to learn a bit about where you were born, grew up, schools you attended.
I like to say I was born “under the clock” in Kingston as I was born at St Joseph’s Hospital in Vineyard Town and grew up within walking distance from my place of birth. I spent my first 21 years living at home with my parents in Vineyard Town. With three of my four sisters, I attended Excelsior High School. Thereafter I attended CAST, now the University of Technology, majoring in company law and accounting. I later attended The University of the West Indies, where I earned an MSc in Accounting. I have since practised as a company secretary and as an accountant.
After many years of practising as an accountant/company secretary, and after winning the Small Axe Prize for poetry, it dawned on me that maybe poetry was indeed a God-given talent and I decided to challenge myself. I would eventually receive an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College in Vermont. I have had the good fortune of working with some of the best poets/critics from the Caribbean and I also benefited from working with some of the best poets in North America. To work with gifted writers was both exciting and challenging. After Bennington, I felt that I had been engrafted into the tree of literature.
There is a character, Mama Ignota, who makes several appearances in Zion Roses. Who is this character and what is her importance?
Ignota Elouise Minott was the mother of six children. I am the last-born. She was the daughter of Ethel Campbell and Cecil Campbell. Ethel was the daughter of Catherine Henry, a Taino woman, and George Fredrick Edwards the son of a plantation owner. Mother was an innovative, hard-working woman and the owner of a dress shop. Her father Cecil signed up for naval duty during the war. Mama said, “Papa took sick during the Spanish Flu of 1918.” He died a few years later from complications affecting his lungs when Mama was six years old. As a young woman in her twenties, she suffered a head injury in a bus crash in Highgate when she was on her way home from work. The bus tumbled over a high cliff; we thank God she survived that crash. She died at 96 years. Mama’s famous words were, “Yes, you can do it.” Mama Ignota embodies the spirit of overcoming and her wisdom stories appear in many of my poems.
Visual art and artists are a primary influence in Zion Roses. Can you talk us through why Basquiat remains an object of fascination? Which, if any, Jamaican visual artists’ work do you admire and why?
Jean Michel Basquiat gives me permission to leap out of my comfort zone and tackle institutional violence and other disenfranchisements; his works are like potent calypso songs. I feel a oneness with Basquiat, especially with his spontaneity. His paintings provoke in me a subversive response to the manufactured world we live in, the calling out of what is wrong, including the lingering effects of colonial occupation evident today. Basquiat’s signature crowns and ladders speak of hope for a future beyond the temporal. My Basquiat poems often seek to rationalise what I perceive to be our shared interests in dealing with issues of disenfranchisement. I have written several poems inspired by Jamaican artists to be included in future collections: A poem titled “Chillum Pipe” inspired by Karl Parboosingh’s Ras Smoke I; A tribute poem to Kapo, titled “Revivalist Going to Heaven’. Recently, I have been researching the works of Ebony Patterson, and the poem “The Colours Of Dancehall” came out of that research.
Finally, Monica, what are you working on these days?
I have put together my third collection Sea Route To Zion which features the happenings on 10 slave ships that plied triangular trade routes. In these poems I utilised paintings or images of these ships that are held in museums. There is section of the collection entitled “Ships that Scattered Us.” This new collection also has a section dedicated to a reimagining of Nanny of The Maroons as a spirit travelling across many regions and centuries. Nanny is represented therein as an embodiment of the overcoming-ness which I associate with women, especially Jamaican women, over successive centuries. Paintings by Jean Michel Basquiat takes on an even more intense political tone in this collection than in the previous collection. Basquiat as muse led the way for me to be a poet from the Caribbean and my embrace of ekphrasis which forms the backbone of the upcoming third collection.
I am a far way into my fourth collection, Land of Green Parakeets. This collection begins in my garden, but centres on mankind’s relationships with the natural world. This project is about 80 per cent complete. Poems in the first segment evolved from my questioning the relevance of sonnets today and producing subversive sonnets; poems in the third segment were inspired by paintings by Jamaican artists. The long poem which ends this collection drifts back to a growing need to experiment with form. I have also produced a critical monograph titled “How Caribbean Female Writers Give Voice to the Condition of Exile.”