GOODISON, Lorna (Gaye)

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Nationality: Jamaican. Born: Kingston, 1 August 1947. Education: St. Hugh's High School, Kingston, 1959–66; Jamaica School of Art, Kingston, 1967–68; School of the Art Students League, New York, 1968–69. Family: Divorced; one son. Career: Art teacher, Jamaica College, 1969–70; copy chief, McCann Erickson advertising, Jamaica, 1970–72; assistant creative director, LNCK Advertising, Jamaica, 1972–74; creative director, Don Miller Advertising, Jamaica, 1974–76; public relations officer, Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, 1976; creative consultant, CARIFESTA '76, Jamaica, 1976. Since 1977 freelance writer and painter. Writer-in-residence, University of the West Indies, Kingston; 1973; Fellow, Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986–87; visiting professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1992, 1993, 1995. Editor, CARIFESTA 76 magazine, 1976. Awards: Institute of Jamaica Centenary Medal, 1981, and Musgrave Medal, 1987; Commonwealth Poetry prize, 1986. Agent: New Beacon Books, 76 Stroud Green Road, London N4 3EN, England. Address: 8 Marley Close, Kingston 6, Jamaica.

Publications

Poetry

Poems. Privately printed, 1974.

Tamarind Season. Kingston, Institute of Jamaica Press, 1980.

I Am Becoming My Mother. London, New Beacon, 1986.

Heartease. London, New Beacon, 1988.

Lorna Goodison. New York, Research Institute for the Study of Man, 1989.

To Us All Flowers Are Roses. London, New Beacon, 1990; Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Selected Poems. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Turn Thanks: Poems. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Play

Pepper, with Trevor Rhone and Sonia Mills (produced 1989).

Short Stories

Baby Mother and the King of Swords. London, Longman, 1990.

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Critical Studies: "Wooing with Words: Some Comments on the Poetry of Lorna Goodison" by Pamela Mordecai, in Jamaica Journal (Kingston), 45, 1981; "Goodison on the Road to Heartease" and "On Becoming One's Mother: Goodison in the Context of Feminist Criticism," both by Edward Baugh, in Journal of West Indian Literature, 1(1), October 1986, and 4(1), 1990; "Overlapping Systems: Language in the Poetry of Lorna Goodison" by Velma Pollard, in Carib, 5, 1989; "Pilgrimage out of Dispossession" by Christine Pagnoulle, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 17(1), autumn 1994; "Lorna Goodison: Heartease" by Frank Birbalsingh, in his Frontiers of Caribbean Literatures in English, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1996; Apocrypha of Nanny's Secrets: The Rhetoric of Recovery in Africaribbean Women's Poetry (dissertation) by Dannabang Kuwabong, McMaster University, 1997; "Language and Identity: The Use of Different Codes in Jamaican Poetry" by Velma Pollard, in Winds of Change: The Transforming Voice of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, edited by Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek, New York, Peter Lang, 1998; "Gender and Hybridity in Contemporary Caribbean Poetry" by Jana Gohrisch, in Anglistentag 1997 Giessen, edited by Raimund Bormeier and others, Trier, Germany, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998.

Lorna Goodison comments:

(1984) I have spent a great deal of time trying to avoid writing poetry because, really, I would like to live a less difficult life. But it (poetry) keeps intruding on everything. It comes in dreams, in the middle of ordinary conversations, while trying to talk to God, when I am cooking or going about woman's business. So I surrendered. It is more powerful than all the other less difficult things I would rather be doing.

(1990) I now feel very blessed to be called poet.

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Lorna Goodison is among the most vibrant and original poets to emerge from the Caribbean. While demonstrating tremendous sympathy for the oppressed, she neither patronizes nor sentimentalizes her subjects, and she writes with an easy, colloquial style that wears its truths lightly.

Her first published collection, Tamarind Season, is her most overtly political. Although it encompasses tributes to the writer Jean Rhys and the musician Miles Davis as well as poems about Toronto and New York, its major preoccupations are with race and class. "England Seen," written, as many of her poems are, in an effective combination of Creole patois and educated English, describes the disillusionment of the chief hair presser of Catherine Commonwealth Hairdressers:

   … Icylyn's accents embrace all of Great Britain
   and she does not like England.
   "I tell them white people that England is
   nowhere, at least I can't starve at home
   if is even a breadfruit tree I can stone."

More subtle are the poems describing characters who deny their own heritage. In "My Late Friend" the speaker explains, "… She's fled the tropics / because the sun darkens her / my friend wants to be one with the snow …" "Ocho Rios" cleverly reveals layers of compromise as the poet modulates her language in a local market:

   … "how much for the curry goat?"
   "Three dolla"
   "Fi wan curry goat"
   "A four dolla fi tourist sista."
 
 
   I beat her down to a dollar fifty,
   she says I am clearly roots.
   I tell her the curry goat irie …

The poem's message is neatly underlined in the final stanzas:

   The sign in the square says "Tourism, not socialism"
   and though I eat this curry sitting on a feed bag from
      Florida …
   which Colonizer is winning in Ocho Rios?

Goodison writes with a strong sense of community. Indeed some of her most effective poems, like "Bridge Views," draw on her own family:

   … My mother did not forget to tell us
   we did not really belong there.
   Her family gave their name to rivers
   her children should not play in gullies
   we were always on our way back to where
   she originally petite bourgeoisie came from …

Moving to "concrete suburbia / acquiring the first weapons for / committing class suicide," the boys slowly succumb to "the schizoid waters," becoming thieves, alcoholics, and hit men: "… and what is now a curfew zone / was then just, Home."

Goodison's second collection, I Am Becoming My Mother, moves increasingly from the political to the personal. The poems in this volume are wonderfully lyrical and assured. Many of them celebrate women's lives, as does the title poem ("Yellow / brown woman / fingers always smelling of onions …") or "For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)," which begins,

   My mother loved my father
   I write this as an absolute
   in this my thirtieth year
   the year to discard absolutes…

Describing her mother's acceptance of her father's infidelity, the poem ends,

   When he died, she sewed dark dresses for the
     women among us
   and she summoned that walk, straight-backed, that she
     gave to us
   and buried him dry-eyed…
 
 
   and she fell down a note to the realization that she did
   not have to be brave, just this once
   and she cried.
 
 
   For her hands grown coarse with raising nine children
   for her body for twenty years permanently fat
   for the time she pawned her machine for my sister's
   Senior Cambridge fees
   and for the pain she bore with the eyes of a queen
 
 
   and she cried also because she loved him.

In this prizewinning volume Goodison writes mostly about relationships, though politics appears in "For Rosa Parks," written to the woman who unwittingly started America's civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person: "And how was this soft-voiced woman to know / that this 'No' / in answer to the command to rise / would signal the beginning / of the time for walking? …" Another political poem is the delightful "Bedspread," based on a real incident in which the South African police raided Winnie Mandela's home and arrested a bedspread in the colors of the African National Congress: "… It was woven by women with slender / capable hands / accustomed to binding wounds / hands that closed the eyes of / dead children, / that fought for the right to / speak in their own tongues … They wove the bedspread / and knotted notes of hope / in each strand / and selvedged the edges with / ancient blessings / older than any white man's coming …" As always in Goodison's work the potential anger is tempered by wisdom and hope.

Goodison's third collection, Heartease, seems to be searching for a new direction. Though the rhythms of reggae are still found, hymns and incantations prevail. In many of the poems the vivid language, memorable personalities, and wry politics of her earlier work seem to have been sacrificed to a vague spirituality. "A Rosary of Your Names (II)," for example, is merely an uninspiring catalog: "The Merciful / The Peace / The Source / The Hidden / The All Strivings Cease …" But in poems like "Blue Peace Incantation" Goodison's lyricism and rich visual descriptions are still evident: "Within blue of peace, / the azure of calm, / beat soft now bright heart, / beat soft, sound calm …" This volume suggests a period of transition in the work of a poet whose enduring quality is optimism.

—Katie Campbell