“I thought, yes, that’s what I’d like to be, someone whose artistry makes people dance like a wave of the sea.” And if, as she says, she forgot for a time this desire “to make people feel as if they were part of the cosmic dance, in tune with life’s rhythm like a wave of the sea,” this reader is grateful that in Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures, Jamaican-Canadian writer Lorna Goodison retrieves, through her reminiscences of more than seventy years, the experiences that led her to realize her alluring aspirations.
While seeking out nothing more exotic than Bath buns with her friend in a Marylebone tea shop in 1972, a serendipitous encounter between Goodison and a trio of young Irishmen launches both an impromptu conference of colonized peoples and Goodison’s protracted yet lighthearted contemplation of the impacts of her colonial education. She queries the saturation by largely British writers – island dwellers in their own right – which imbued her early experiences of literature with a distinctly insular sensibility, but not with the feeling of her own island of Jamaica. In spite of feeling a certain suffocation at the recollection of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” she makes her peace with Wordsworth and the other poets who formed her love of words and metre, recognizing their impact on her development as a writer. The absence of Jamaican and Black voices in her formative years left her with a keen and urgent need to find that representation in the voices of Caribbean, African, and American writers.
Though Goodison had been employed in a number of careers that were engaging, they were ultimately unsatisfying, leading to her realization that “The time had come to really search for spiritual nourishment. She needed to read living words that would nourish her… maybe she’d even have to write them herself.” After embracing her own intelligence and ability as a writer, she persevered as recounted in her inspiring essays “Bush Your Yard,” “A Meditation on Friendships Past,” and “The Waterman.”
On the road to becoming an accomplished author, Goodison faced her share of challenges. Her experiences of racism are a recurring theme, and she apprises her readers of both the overt and the subtle racism that defines the quotidian experience of people of colour. Her patience and perseverance pay off in the face of adversity and her experiences make for affecting and often humorous tales, as in her essay “Femme de la Martinique,” when Goodison, who is in Paris and in desperate need of hairstyling relates through comic irony that the woman who can do Black hair seems to be “perpetually on her day off from hair salons all over the Western world.”
In her essay “People I’d Like to Meet,” Goodison recounts the personal impact of the many influential people she has met, including Winnie Mandela and Maya Angelou. Throughout her essays, she revisits her desire not just to find representative voices but to be one of those voices herself. As the Jamaican poet laureate from 2017-2020, a winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Charles Taylor Prize, she achieves this feat in her self-reflective, honest, and endearing collection of essays, memoirs, and poetry.
Lorna Goodison was Jamaica’s Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2020 and was the recipient of The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. She is the author of numerous books of poetry and short fiction. Her acclaimed memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize and the Trillium Award and won the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her Collected Poems appeared in 2017. Her most recent book of poetry, Mother Muse, was nominated for the Derek Walcott Prize in 2021. She lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.
- Publisher : Vehicule Press (March 1 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 205 pages
- ISBN-10 : 155065621X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1550656213
Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
