Unstitching Silence

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UNSTITCHING
SILENCE

Fiction and poetry by Caribbean writers on gender-based violence

—

Edited by Shivanee Ramlochan and Lucy Evans

Published by Peekash Press

Copyright © Bocas Lit Fest 2025

Copyright for individual texts rests with the authors

All rights reserved

First edition

ISBN 978-976-96854-4-4

Peekash Press

14 Alcazar Street,

St Clair, Port of Spain

Trinidad and Tobago

www.peekashpress.com

CONTENTS

Preface

Lucy Evans

Acknowledgements

Shivanee Ramlochan and Lucy Evans

Introduction

Shivanee Ramlochan

The Mermaid's Tail

Christine Barrow

The Boy from Church

Sara Bastian

Six Poems

Red Moon

The Missing

In Memory Of

Keepsake

Chapter Seven

Eyes of the Witness

Neala Luna Bhagwansingh

Four Poems

Oluwatoyin Salau, Missing Black Lives Matter Activist, Is Found Dead

not mine

r e f l e c t i o n

no one taught my ancestors how to love

kevanté ac cash

Four Poems

Shhh . . . Gunshot can pick padlock

Kibba Yuh Mouth

Joke Build Coffin

Snapper

Courtney Conrad

An Easy Marriage

Kevin Jared Hosein

Five Poems

Celeste

Ask the Sea

suffer the filthy children to come unto me

dear Audre Lorde *

tanka: God particle II

karen lee

Things They Say

Caroline Mackenzie

Five Poems

black pepper

Snake I

man like woman on ha knees

Snake Series II

Junkanoo Mornin

Tanicia Pratt

Guavina Death Frenzy

Dwight Thompson

Afterword

Cherie Jones

Endnotes

About the Contributors, Editors, and Cover Artist

* Note: dear Audre Lorde interrogates Divya Victor's "The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself"; particularly, What are the words you do not have yet? This reverse contrapuntal poem can be read at least nine ways: top to bottom, bottom to top, and across — two or three columns at a time. One can start anywhere. The non-linear details of childhood trauma become more detailed and more blurred, depending.

PREFACE

Lucy Evans

Presented by the World Health Organisation as a global public health crisis that affects nearly one in three women globally,¹ gender-based violence (GBV) is a critical issue in anglophone Caribbean countries, which have some of the highest rates of reported sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and femicide in the world.² GBV can be understood as any form of violence and abuse — physical, psychological, or emotional — which is rooted in gender norms and power dynamics. It can be inflicted on people of all genders in a variety of contexts. For decades, GBV has been a central concern in Caribbean feminist scholarship and activism, and in recent years Caribbean governments have launched programmes dedicated to combatting gender-based violence. Yet levels of GBV remain high, and the issue is all the more pressing following the global increase in the prevalence of GBV during the COVID-19 pandemic.³

GBV is a longstanding theme and concern in anglophone Caribbean literary writing, for example in the work of Shani Mootoo, Merle Hodge, Elizabeth Nunez, Edwidge Danticat, Austin Clarke, Lawrence Scott, Patricia Powell, Nalo Hopkinson, and Oonya Kempadoo. Caribbean writers continue to critically engage with the topic of GBV in innovative ways in their fiction and poetry, as can be seen in recently published work such as Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (2021), Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead (2021), Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2016), Jacob Ross’s The Bone Readers (2016) and Black Rain Falling (2020), Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017), Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes (2021), and Lorna Goodison’s Mother Muse (2021). Unstitching Silence extends this evolving conversation around GBV within Caribbean literary writing, bringing together the voices of established and emerging authors who have something to say on this issue.

Unstitching Silence follows and complements other anthologies of literary writing on the subject of GBV. For example, Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse (2022), edited by Ruth Carr and Natasha Cuddington, includes poetry, fiction, and drama, He(a)r Me: Poetry Anthology of Women Survivors (2020), edited by Adeolu Adebiyi, features poetry by Nigerian women, and Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence against Women (2017), edited by Melissa Hassard, Gabrielle Langley and Stacy Nigliazzo, offers an extensive collection of poems by writers from around the world. The exclusive focus of these anthologies on the work of women writers is in line with the emphasis in scholarly work and public discourse on violence against women (VAW), often either in the context of intimate-partner violence within heterosexual relationships, or sexual violence committed by men. This emphasis is appropriate given that women and girls are disproportionately affected by GBV. However, Unstitching Silence registers the current turn towards more expansive definitions of GBV as violence that can take many forms and can affect people of all genders. Written from a range of gender perspectives, each creative piece included here offers a unique insight into this complex and multifaceted phenomenon.

This anthology is also distinct from previously published anthologies of literary writing on GBV in its focus on fiction and poetry by Caribbean writers. In a context where the global discourse on GBV and GBV prevention is still dominated by scholarly and practice-based perspectives from the Global North, Unstitching Silence foregrounds the voices of Caribbean writers on this issue. GBV is a global phenomenon that manifests differently across cultures, countries and regions, and the anthology speaks to the specificities of GBV as it affects individuals and communities in the Caribbean. As editors, we circulated the call for submissions widely and aimed for a broad coverage as regards the geographical setting of the stories and the identities and backgrounds of the writers. That said, we were also aware that with a limit of ten contributions, the anthology could not be comprehensive, and we did not want authors to be burdened by a perception that their work was representative of a whole country or community.

GBV is a challenging subject to write about and to read about, and yet it is a subject which requires attention, reflection, and debate. The representation of GBV — whether in the news media, in popular culture, or in literary fiction and poetry — always raises ethical questions. In their 2006 study Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through Caribbean Discourse, Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef present “media and popular cultural expression” as a “causative factor” in rising rates of GBV in the region.⁴ More recent studies have offered a similar critique of the news media, contending that media discourse enacts gendered violence by reinforcing values and attitudes that justify and normalise GBV.⁵ Authors who depict GBV in their creative work run the risk of sensationalising GBV (particularly if there is a focus on the victimised female body), of reproducing the gender stereotypes that underpin GBV, or of re-traumatising readers who have experienced GBV. However, as Caroline Williamson Sinalo and Nicoletta Mandolini argue, “The representation of GBV [is] an always risky but necessary and urgent practice.”⁶ Literary writing on GBV can work against and disrupt harmful representational practices by, for example, challenging the gender roles and norms that are the root cause of GBV, illuminating the structural inequalities and institutional frameworks that enable GBV, and giving narrative voice and agency to survivors of GBV.

If writing about GBV carries a risk, so does not writing about it. In her introduction to Critical Caribbean Perspectives on Preventing Gender-Based Violence (2022), Ramona Biholar observes that despite extensive public debate on this issue, “GBV is fostered by a culture of silence and acceptance in the region.”⁷ In the afterword to How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (2021), entitled “An Introduction”, Cherie Jones similarly reflects on how ingrained “social attitudes to gender and power contribute to a culture of silence about domestic violence in the Caribbean.”⁸ As she sees it, her fiction offers her a means through which both to “help people to understand” and to “challenge the silence”.⁹ Fiction and poetry can enhance readers’ understanding of the many forms GBV can take, of its cultural, socioeconomic, and historical contexts, of its root causes and risk factors, and of its impact on individuals and societies. Writers can also creatively envisage change in a context where, as Tracy Robinson acknowledges, “Legal change is but a small part of preventing gender-based violence.”¹⁰ Literary writing — and creative practice more broadly — can play a role in GBV prevention by helping to raise awareness about GBV and its connection to gender inequality.

This anthology’s title, Unstitching Silence, evokes how the poems and stories within it both unpick the complexity of GBV and open up conversations around it. The creative pieces collected here speak to the concept of silence in different ways. For example, in karen lee’s poem “Ask the Sea”, the repeated couplet “You ask me to tell you about my family/I tell you I don’t talk about my family” highlights the unspoken trauma of GBV, and the poem reflects through its fragmented form the difficulty for survivors in speaking about their experiences. Sara Bastian’s story, “The Boy from Church”, addresses the role of the church in perpetuating a culture of silence around GBV. In Neala Luna Bhagwansingh’s poem “Red Moon”, the “silent, indifferent moon”, witness to domestic violence on “so many paydays”, reflects the silence of a community that allows it to happen. Finally, Dwight Thompson’s story “Guavina Death Frenzy” gives visibility to a form of GBV that is often unspoken in public debate on GBV both in the Caribbean and globally: physical and psychological violence towards transgender people within families and communities. In doing so, the story counters silences in legislative and policy discourse.

This anthology was produced as part of a larger project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council: Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean. I led this project in collaboration with Gabrielle Hosein (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine) and Sonjah Stanley Niaah (University of the West Indies, Mona). It ran from 2021 to 2024 and was a collaboration between the University of Leicester, the University of the West Indies, and partner organisations the Bocas Lit Fest, Tribe Sankofa, and ROOTS Foundation TT. The project involved researchers, writers, and performing-arts professionals in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the UK. It sought to critically analyse representations of GBV in literary writing, spoken-word poetry, and popular music, to generate new creative work on the theme of GBV, and to empower young people to take leadership in activism against GBV using literature and the performing arts. Project activities — alongside the creation of this anthology — included a spoken-word poetry and drama workshop series for youth groups in Trinidad, a performing-arts workshop series for secondary school students in Jamaica, and a symposium that brought together researchers, creative practitioners, and activists from across the Caribbean region.

International collaboration is a crucial element of my work as a British researcher, located in the UK, working in Caribbean literary studies. As co-editor of this anthology, I position myself and my work within this broader framework of collaboration across national boundaries, and across the divisions between academic research, activism, and creative practice. My work as co-editor has been driven by my belief in the capacity of literary writing and other forms of creative expression to effect social change, and more specifically in the important role that can be played by fiction and poetry in GBV intervention work. At the same time, I was motivated by my longstanding investment in supporting and promoting the work of Caribbean writers that dates back to the year I spent working as an editorial assistant for Peepal Tree Press in 2005–6, and has continued through nearly two decades of researching, writing about, and teaching Caribbean literature.

Leicester, UK

June, 2024

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shivanee Ramlochan and Lucy Evans

We, the co-editors of Unstitching Silence, are grateful to numerous individuals and organisations cumulatively making this work possible. Firstly, we express gratitude to the ten authors whose poems and short stories comprise this book. Christine Barrow, Sara Bastian, Neala Luna Bhagwansingh, kevanté ac cash, Courtney Conrad, Kevin Jared Hosein, karen lee, Caroline Mackenzie, Tanicia Pratt, Dwight Thompson: thank you for contributing your time, energy, and creative talent to this anthology, and for your patience when the process took longer than anticipated. This book would not be what it is without each of you.

We acknowledge the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, which provided funding that made this anthology possible, as part of a larger project, Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean [grant number AH/T006951/1]. We would also like to thank Nicholas Laughlin, Peekash Press, and the Bocas Lit Fest team for supporting this publication on its long journey from concept to finished book. We’re thankful to book designer Melanie Archer and copyeditor Judy Raymond for their work in bringing the anthology to its final form. Our particular thanks to Maria Tappin, who provided invaluable administrative assistance and was an efficient liaison between the authors and editorial team.

In closing, we reflect on the pleasure and privilege it has been to work alongside each other on this book. As co-editors, we entered the project with discrete strengths; it was a truly rewarding experience to combine those in service of Unstitching Silence, learning from each other.

We finally thank you, the reader of this anthology. May these powerful, necessary stories and poems addressing gender-based violence be valuable and catalytic to you, now and in the future.

INTRODUCTION

Shivanee Ramlochan

Andrea Bharatt. Shannon Banfield. Asami Nagakiya.

I have never lived a full day as a Caribbean woman and been unafraid of violence. I drink that fear, steeped in my tea. I read it in the faces of the women I see sitting across the maxi taxi from me, clutching their purses and handbags, their brightly-coloured bundles of shopping. Before I knew I would ever share a poem publicly, I wrote my fear into my girlhood diaries patterned with illustrations of English countryside cottages.

Naiee Singh. Ann Marie Joseph. Mukeisha Maynard.

The cutlass, an agrarian and domestic tool in many Indo-Caribbean households, never felt like a tool to fear when I was growing up. I was used to seeing my grandfather wield it capably on our farm. Now I’ve seen what a cutlass can do when it’s not used in service of the land. When it’s lifted against an upraised hand, fingers splayed in an impossible plea for help.

Calida Schamber. Carmelita De Leon. Marcia Henville.

Both traditional journalism and new digital-media coverage of women and girls brutalised by gender-based violence are ample and vivid. Headlines in red emblazon the front pages of national newspapers, while talk-show hosts assess scenes of crimes alongside forensic scientists, divided by police caution tape. Online forums choke with character studies of a victim or survivor’s goodness or lack thereof: how many children she had with how many men. Her marital status. Whether or not she feared God.

I have, above, named nine from the hundreds on public record in Trinidad and Tobago’s statistics of gender-based violence resulting in death. How many more exist outside the official ledgers?

Neither formulaic exposition nor moral posturing were the ambitions of Unstitching Silence. A telling of the untold, or the more difficult to articulate, was what Lucy Evans and I wanted to hear, to be shown: an answer to the question, “If you split the surface of this violence, this fear, what lies beneath, and how can it be written to reach us, now?” The ten contributors who make this anthology have responded. They have spoken into the silence of what often goes unsaid, unremarked, unreported, while simultaneously challenging the rote or expected formula of reporting on these crimes. The narratives they have produced are witnesses where no easy speech will do.

Christine Barrow’s short story “The Mermaid’s Tail” sluices through mythological and folkloric waters, while its currents ripple with scenes that feel utterly grounded. Barrow presents beauty surgically, in a setting where women pay pretty sums to have their features altered, while those doing the body-terraforming often wield unsound instruments. Madeline, a working woman with a mermaid tattoo inked on her brown breast, is at the centre of this story about redemption, revenge, and the sharpness of knowing yourself too well for comfort. The tug and pull of emotional currents between Barbados and Brighton are almost hypnotic in their effectiveness: the more the story is reread, the more it seems consummately natural for a mermaid seeking her own freedom to choose the most daring path between these shores. One set of waters is rendered warm and comforting, remembered chiefly through a grandfather’s affections. The other sea, though enticing, carries more latent hostilities, yet it is nonetheless able to be tamed through Madeline’s ferocious female reckoning. The tail of the protagonist’s mermaid is defiantly pointed upright, ready for action, even while the rest of the inked figure reclines in suggestive idyll. “The Mermaid’s Tail” suggests that the fighter, even when veiled, gloved, and confined, will yet find a way to wage her wars — particularly when they are rooted in the protection, or exultation, of herself.

Sara Bastian’s short story “The Boy from Church” affixes the reader in the immediacy of second-person present tense: you are essential to this telling, as rooted to it as if you were pressed into the pews of that story’s church, where mendacity and people-pleasing are practised in time to liturgy and catechism. Bastian foregrounds every moment of this interior world, where all our impressions of the speaker, and the speaker’s depiction of the progressively encroaching violence, filter to us with an unsparingly wry immediacy. Though the aggressions happen over a span of several years, everything also feels urgent, as though it were being committed right there, right now. The narrator of “The Boy from Church” is not interested in proselytising a false decency. Threaded through the gaps of what she says and does not say, the reader sees that in these Bahamas, as in the other countries of the Caribbean, there is rampant underage drinking, insidious sexual grooming within (and often tacitly endorsed by) religious bodies, victim-blaming, and scorning those who speak out against sexual assault. Again and again, the story makes looking away impossible, centring readers in the wellspring of each action, each unsolicited moment that no amount of gaslighting can erase.

Neala Luna Bhagwansingh’s poems hold witnessing as key to their investigations of gender-based violence in Trinidadian and Tobagonian society. The speakers of the poems feel active, rippling with both urgency and agency. Attuned to the land that shapes them for better or ill, the central figures herein grapple with intimations and indelible scars of violence against themselves, their loved ones, their communities. A strength of these poems lies in openness to experimentation, particularly in using erasure to uncover latent violences of colonialism, of the trampling boot of a militarised masculinity on a place and its people. The reader might not expect passages from either Robert Louis Stevenson or Patrick Leigh Fermor to reside at the heart of a contemporary Trinidad and Tobago writer’s poems, but Bhagwansingh performs sensitive excavations on extant pieces of their writing. Especially satisfying is her Leigh Fermor erasure from his Trinidad trip, as written in his 1950s anthropological journey through the Caribbean, The Traveller’s Tree. Under the poet’s erasure, Trinidad becomes her poem’s title, a land that balefully “overflows with caskets”.

kevanté ac cash’s poems do not go gently. They are hallmarked by a refusal to abdicate power to unjust systems, one of the most enduring resistances we are capable of making as living beings. They resist, unequivocally, forced realities of media misinformation, misogynoir, and mental-disability-shaming that accompany crimes of hate. Here, capacious room is made for the vastness of being gendered, of feeling oneself othered within the superstructure of conventional biological norms. Naming and namelessness feel vital to the underpinnings of the work, chiefly of its searing insistence on designations within and without Bahamian society, on the sanctity of a name chosen and protected from harm — perhaps when nothing else about that person can be made safe. Oluwatoyin Salau should never be forgotten, nor should those whose names we do not/may never know be forgotten: the poems make accommodation for those victims and survivors of gender-based violence whom we can witness publicly, as much as they do for those whose struggles, whose self-recriminations and private miseries, remain concealed.

Courtney Conrad’s poems are excavators. They peel back layers of accumulated societal shame, gossip, and sanctimony, asking for accountability in an arena often devoid of clear pathways to justice. Each poem is resonant in its density, and when absorbed as a unit, the emotional effects blister. A lack of apology also accompanies the work, an insistence on being heard alongside a firm rootedness in place: on childhood’s non-innocuous playgrounds; in riverine struggles for survival; on the neatly-swept verandahs that witness the aftermath of domestic traumas. Without tendentious moralising or hackneyed hand-wringing, the power in these poems is, too, in the questions they ask at their peripheries: who/what has conspired over generations to create and sustain these conditions for living? At whose doors should ultimate blame be placed, if any can be assigned? Synchronous modes of specificity — that which anchors a poem culturally, historically — and universality — that which connects us all to any poem, anywhere — work in convincing tandem throughout. Jamaica is writ everywhere in these poems, uncontestably, bristling with ire, simmering with crime, bursting with beauty — and the world resides here, too, in Conrad’s uneasy and implosive verse.

Kevin Jared Hosein’s “An Easy Marriage” carries a chilling sleight of hand in the undertow of its unassuming yet utterly tricky territory. A Trinidadian woman, Madhuri, is made available for marriage: this is the set-up into which the reader enters, and everything that follows in this short tale raises the hackles with ire, while flooding the senses with a slow-burning sense of disbelief. Hosein’s anti-fairytale functions so well because of its great capacity for subversion, the unsparing way it reaches into the mind of a consummately unreliable narrator who doesn’t think anything might be untoward about the way he views everything: the world, his place in it, and, tellingly, his rights to a good wife, a happy domestic transaction, the aforementioned “easy marriage”. Much of the story’s strength derives from the emotional freight of what’s left unsaid, and an almost karmic sense of fate’s dispensation hangs over the story’s framework like a ready noose. The reader learns that Madhuri herself ultimately accepts her prescribed fate, apart from one or two inner rebellions that feel even more miserable when the reader considers how calculably fruitless they are. Madhuri lives and dies without, perhaps, ever fully being known by another: a crippling lifelong violence in both obvious and far more surreptitious forms, meted out to her in ways that are most certainly gendered.

karen lee’s poems are daring, deliberate, inventive. Risk and experimentation are cornerstones of the poet’s endeavour. Lee’s speakers do not so much contemplate the barriers set against them as they catapult over them, troubling and dismantling those structures as they go. Even when the poems’ speakers are unable to generate the explicit freedoms they seek for themselves and others, they are explicit and polyvocal about the stations of their lives, under constriction, and railing against it. Profound are the activations of rage, shame, and reclamation that Lee summons in these voices. The private traumas of the household that become enshrined in the young survivor’s mind, well into her adulthood; the singular devastations wrought when religion becomes an agent of gender-based violence: the work illuminates these spaces about which so many find it impossible to speak. Inclusion and spiritual proliferation dance in these poems, which cross-map Jamaica with Canada, charting paths for women that often seem to take flight. There is an evocative sense that Earth might not be enough for those who reside in Lee’s poems, that indeed the salutation of stations far greater than ourselves become activating forces in keeping us alive and fight-ready, here in our Anthropocene.

Caroline Mackenzie’s short story “Things They Say” unerringly distils a subterranean element of certain corridors and enclaves of Trinidad and Tobago society. In a world stereotypically conveyed in bottomless mimosas, down-the-islands excursions and shopping sprees for the nation’s upper middle class and outright wealthy, Mackenzie’s storytelling chips fake gold from a cracked statue with an icepick, exposing a slow-blooming rot beneath. Yes, the story emphasises, a woman who can afford frequent faux-platinum dye jobs, whose youth was characterised by ballet lessons, wearing a Tiffany-cut diamond engagement ring, can be abused. She, too, is no more protected from it, for all the trappings of physical wealth and comfort: these luxuries, too, can be entrapments against her, hemming her in. While “white Trinidadianness” isn’t explicitly revealed (nor does it need to be), the implications of how gender-based violence abuts privilege, respectability politics, and status in a small-island society are masterfully wrought. The stakes, the pain, the pressure to conform are both specific in their ambit and gut-wrenchingly universal in their effects. “Things They Say” pokes intentional holes into the notion of male attractiveness: specifically, of what a woman is expected to endure, even like, because a man is sexually proficient, physically appealing, and carries himself with apex “masculinity”. The tut-tutting Greek chorus of aunties is a gratifying anchor to the story’s scenes of escalating harm, a coven of women themselves (it is implied) born of a certain type of privilege, unaware to a large extent of how they buttress the very frameworks of harm they finally — when it’s too late — repudiate.

Tanicia Pratt’s poems place emphasis on the dichotomy of beauty and violence inherent in the Bahamian landscape. Folklore and myth, invoking both the spectral and the carnivalesque, animate every silhouetted figure Pratt presents to the reader’s gaze, shaping them until they become emblematic of a specific Caribbeanness, while they also make potent gestures towards the far-ranging grasp of gender-based violence’s harms. The sinuous muscularity of the “Snake” poems, ordered as thick columns on the page, compresses memory and invective, girlhood and womanhood, until the resultant voices cry out for freedom, or otherwise restoration of things lost. “Junkanoo Mornin”, which resounds with intimations of both the festive and the foreboding, feels as active and alert a poem as any written on the constant negotiation between celebration and safeguarding, between keeping oneself alive and daring to bare oneself to moments of liberation. To live on the outside of oneself, a stranger to one’s body in the aftermath of an amalgamation of violences: this is where Pratt’s poems reside, facing the Self as child and adult, as embryonic in her possibilities and armoured against her present realities.

Jamaican Dwight Thompson’s short story “Guavina Death Frenzy” speaks heart-wrenchingly to the reader of layered betrayals: of a marrow-deep parental inability to accept a child on their own terms that kaleidoscopes into a sea of regret, rage, and thwarted repentance. Of particular resonance is the pressing insistence of environmental degradation — the threats of deforestation, the crisis of charcoal-burning, species loss, risk to the planet — that frames the agonies of Trevor and Grace, now consigned to live without their transgender child. Each of the three characters could be said to follow their own death frenzy, whether we witness it unfurling on the page or not, a state of temporal madness in which they either flounder, or fight to break themselves free. “Guavina Death Frenzy” is in microcosm a vivid, unsettling world: the relentless battle the characters do with themselves; the insistence of nature in flux, in its own kind of transition, ever present at the windowsill. It is in the raging storm of this tormented landscape that Thompson plants hard-won possibilities for personal freedom through trials — a redemption issued by the hand of Nature herself. The narrative strives for a sureness of self that no violence, no matter how treacherous, can truly erase: the estranged child’s transgender reality that becomes — that is, perhaps, from the very beginning — the most natural state in this disordered, deeply pained family tableau.

Taken as a collective, the ten writers who represent Unstitching Silence have made themselves implicit, confidently and forthrightly so, in a series of distinct unmaskings. Every name attending a publicised case of gender-based violence — the name of a woman murdered; a child brutalised; a family dislocated into incalculable ruptures — carries patterns of unreported violence beneath the surface of how it can be perceived. It is impossible, factually, to denote and classify every tendril of circumstance, every pernicious motivator, every ghost lurking in the framework of an act of gender-based violence in our Caribbean. These short fictions and poems work towards a wider and deeper reckoning with that framework. Deeply and richly satisfying, too, is that when the framework does not suit, when the superstructure of our language around gender-based violence feels insufficient, this writing rattles those pillars and posts, asking them for more, or to give way for greater understandings. Importantly, none of the writers suggests or inscribes a pedagogy of full understanding, creative or otherwise, in their work: none of the speakers or narrators, even at the heights of their hubris or weakness, claims to know definitively why a man or woman might turn monstrous, or how to stop it. There are no conclusive panaceas on display here. Instead, the works stand confidently in the apertures and safety nets they have created. They quarrel with, pay homage to, and reflect on the worlds of islands and those who live and die in them. They place words, stories, and ideas in the zones where speech is needed, where action and attention combine in creative writing to present that most elusive thing: the truth which, if not for the presence of the work, would not be spoken at all.

The names in the newspapers will continue to be printed, though we must believe in a future where such reporting will not be as necessary, will not be imperative, because a kind of expansive healing has taken place for all of us, from all our combined hands, our collaborative institutions, our gathered radicalisms. May the unstitching labour borne out in these ten offerings by Caribbean writers be part of that world.

Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago

June, 2024

THE MERMAID’S TAIL

Christine Barrow

In the Recovery Ward at the Princess Grace Centre for Reconstructive Surgery in Brighton, everything is white, shiny-hard white — floor tiles, walls, ceiling, and the faces of sixteen private patients laid out under starched sheets and under sedatives. The only sounds are soft snores and an occasional serene sigh as they dream of recovering the youthful beauty for which they have paid a fortune.

Madeline’s Grandpa’s voice echoes in her mind.

More the money, less the sense.

She returns to the desk and lifts the fob watch pinned to her navy-blue uniform — three o’clock, four hours to go until the end of her evening shift. She undoes the top two buttons to reveal the tattoo on her brown breast. It’s a mermaid reclining on a rock, hair in waves to her navel, but her tail is upright, ready for action.

Six months ago, at the age of twenty-five, Madeline was appointed Junior Sister, such a relief after arriving from Barbados to spend five long-long years training during the day and working at night. The Consultant Surgeon, BSc (Hons), MBBS, FRCS (Plast), Executive Director and Chairman of the Board of Management, had selected her from goodness knows how many applicants — a man who appreciated her qualifications, her experience, her competence.

She loved taking notes as he spent longer than the allotted hour for consultations explaining treatments to patients — clients, he called them. He leaned across the desk of his office, silvery hair flopping over his forehead, unblinking blue eyes holding theirs, smile radiating confidence as he opened the Care Quality Commission Report to reveal the “Outstanding” ranking. His hands, delicate, with clean, clipped nails, drew intricate patterns in the air, then displayed awesome split-screen images headed BEFORE and AFTER.

There was always a second appointment during which he repeated every procedure, reiterated reassurances on recovery and rejuvenation, listened — really listened — to their concerns and responded in detail to all their petty questions — Will it hurt? Will there be a scar? Will I have to come back for more?

“The risks are negligible,” he said and leapt to his feet — “Now, let me show you.” Standing behind them at the mirror, he laid those hands so lightly and with no hint of impropriety on their drooping jowls and sagging breasts, and stroked upward — lifting their flesh and their spirits.

At home later, Madeline opened the clinic’s website and read.

Breast reduction from 40H to 36D. Now I can look down and smile.

And run for the bus.

Bunions removed. Wearing high heels again.

My man-boobs were soooo embarrassing. All that aggro in the locker room after rugby. Now I’m a new man. Got my life back.

My new girlfriend hated my tattoo. RUBY in the centre of a heart on my right pec. Got it removed and proposed. She accepted.

Madeline smiled — how lucky she was to be working with him!

Her mobile pinged — Lunch at The Ivy Saturday 1 p.m. We haven’t seen you for soooo long — from her mother. She frowned — what now? Not another moan about bags under her eyes and what’s the latest treatment?

Madeline stood in the doorway of the restaurant, late, but by less than ten minutes. They were seated side by side at a table beneath an enormous mural of strangling vine in gaudy orange — mother, who should no longer be wearing pink, peering into a compact mirror, stretching the skin on her throat like a post-menopausal patient desperate to restore glamour — so, not bags under the eyes this time, more like sags on the neck; twin sister with the perfect name, Melody, focused on a smartphone with all the beauty bestowed upon her — the high-bridge nose while Madeline’s sprawled, the natural ringlets while her hair sprouted like sargassum seaweed, breasts like two perky ping-pong balls at the neckline of a neat yellow top and the clear skin, while hers was darker, with acne bumps underneath.

Madeline huffed — she had been ready to start her own transformation that Saturday, having downloaded the Weight Watchers App and booked a Coach Chat, attached her individualised meal-plan chart to the fridge door, stashed a week’s supply of low-calorie meals in the freezer and binned every crisp and salted peanut, cheesecake and chocolate — no more junk snacking. Right, she’d be strong, order a salad.

She sat opposite. “Yo, Muddah, how yuh going? That cerise shade really suiting yuh complexion.”

“Do speak properly, Madeline. And I keep telling you to call me Mother.”

“Maddy, do stop winding her up,” Melody muttered.

“Ma-de-line,” she hissed through her teeth, emphasising each syllable.

A waiter placed a bowl of moules in a white wine sauce before her mother — the most expensive thing on the menu. Madeline imagined her grandfather’s chuckle.

Yuh Mama got champagne taste and mauby pocket.

Melody picked at her smoked salmon with avocado and a blue cheese dressing and asked, “How are things at work?”

“Okay.” Madeline would not talk about the clinic in front of her mother. She had once considered organising a birthday appointment for her — how she’d love that and maybe love Madeline, just a little. But there’d be endless demands for more treatment — so, no way.

Her mother’s fingernail, potent with the scent of garlic and manicured to a point, prodded the straining-to-burst zip of Madeline’s sweat-suit top. “They may not keep you on, looking like this.” She reached under the table and pinched Madeline’s stomach. “Maybe a little nip and clip.”

Madeline pushed back her chair.

Melody gripped her arm. “Madeline, don’t go. Be nice.”

Nice, Melody’s favourite word with all its smiley charm; but she was sick of being nice, since it had always been Melody who’d got the nice back — the hugs and kisses, the compliments. She’d given up hope, long time, of her mother ever looking, really looking, and seeing something that pleased her — an eyebrow, front tooth, anything.

The waiter was hovering. Madeline ordered, “Fish and chips for me, please,” and waited for the reaction. There was silence, no eye-rolling, not even a blink, but the look that passed between them was grim. “Okay, so what’s up?”

“Well, actually,” her mother said, “we have something to tell you.” She put her hand over Madeline’s. “Grandfather, diabetes, in hospital, foot amputated.”

Madeline pulled out her hand. She couldn’t breathe. Sugar — all those treats he’d shared with her — the tamarind balls, guava cheese, comforts, snow cones, sugar cakes, jam turnovers and more. Her beloved Grandpa, all alone and far away in Barbados. When her mother had announced their move to England, he’d slapped his hands on the kitchen table, braps-braps. “I ent going nuh place. Le’ them carry muh outta here, foot firs’.”

“Which foot?” Madeline’s heart pounded, blocked her throat

They shrugged and looked down at their empty plates.

“How high?” she croaked.

Her mother lifted a leg and sliced the edge of her hand under the knee.

Madeline gripped the tabletop. “I must go, be with him.”

“No, I’ve already booked my flight,” her mother said, “and you might lose your job.”

“He’ll be fine,” her sister said. “Up and running in no time.”

For just a glimpse, it was as if her mother had understood Madeline’s shock, but there were no words of comfort. Instead, “He wasn’t looking after himself. Apparently, his toenails were long and horny, like enormous fish scales.”

Madeline stuffed her mouth with cold fish and chips.

As a child growing up in Barbados, Madeline’s Grandpa had been everything to her — guide and guard, solid as moon-rock. He spread honey on her thumb to stop the sucking, then on fingernails, replacing her mother’s pepper sauce, to cut out the biting; he dried her tears and made her giggle by wiggling his ears, cured bellyaches with snow cones of crushed ice oozing pink syrup, and, when her periods started, treated the cramps by adding a secret, even more sugary ingredient — tapping one of her canines and saying, “Sweet tooth, is me yuh get that from.” Scooping her up into his strong-strong arms, he threw her upsided down, so high her toes touched the stars, and caught her, never letting her fall — “I got yuh safe, muh little one.”

Only once had Madeline doubted her place in his heart. She was twelve on the night that jealousy cut into her sleep, made her tiptoe in the dark around her sister’s bed to the yellow party dress with puffed sleeves and a big bow at the back hanging on the closet door, stitched by her mother especially for the birthday party that only Melody had been invited to, made her bare hands rip the bodice and tear off a sleeve.

“Wickedness,” her mother screamed with hands raised to the heavens. “Yuh gran’fadda going kill yuh.”

There was shock in his eyes where there had always been pride — his words, “Shame, shame. And how old yuh is? Shoulda know better,” like a cuff in her belly.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, promising over and over to be nice, because what mattered most in the whole world was that she was still his favourite.

The Friday evening after the party dress rip-and-tear, he’d waited for her at the school’s back gate, while Melody was in the front playground. Holding her hand tight-tight, he led the way along the marl track to the sea, threw out his net for jacks, fried them on a piece of chicken wire strung over burning driftwood, held them up by the tailfins to cool, smelling so tasty her mouth hung open, dribbling until he popped them in, crunchy and yummy.

They sat on the soft sand, she in a magic heaven as he told fisherman stories of turtles finding their way home by the moon and stars to the same beach on which they were born, frigate birds floating free on air currents, sea snakes reborn after shedding their skins, jellyfish with tentacles like whips — one story after the next, as if they would never end.

“And the mermaid,” he said, his voice hoarse as if talking to himself, “like a angel, doan’ mind she come from deep-deep down under the sea, and rise up tru the wave wid she long hair flying, shining golden in the moonlight, and she green-green eye bright like firefly, and she breast . . . ”

Madeline faked a yawn and bowed her head.

“ . . . soft like ripe mango. And she drawing in men like fish trap in a net, and the same fella looking intuh she eye, bewitch, no way them could help theirself.”

Madeline peeked through the corner of her eye. His body shuddered; there were tears rolling down his beard.

“Grandpa?”

“Ha,” he chuckled, “and she got a tail like a manta ray own, leggo one lash in muh backside, stinging like Lord have mercy. And she song singing in muh ear, ‘Guh ’long home.’ Suh said, suh done — and I reach back safe.”

He put his hand on her shoulder — “Chile, is jus’ a story, like ol’ time foolishness.” Then he tweaked her chin between his thumb and finger, serious-like. “Doan’ mind yuh sister, mebbe she have the looks, but is you got the brain. Walk tall, sweet girl, yuh could be anyone, do anyt’ing yuh put yuh mind tuh.” And, as the sun set, a bright orange ball behind the wispy silhouettes of mile-tree fronds, he pushed himself to his feet. “Come, it getting late, le’ we guh fire one.”

At Betty’s Bar, he covered her with a towel to keep off the mosquitoes and curled her up on a bench in the corner with a tot of mauby, while he joined the tuk band with pipe, kettle drum and box-guitar — meking sport with plenty ol’ talk.

In his arms as they reached home, wrapped in his mix-up scent of fish and tobacco and rum, eyes closed as her mother berated, “What it is yuh doing at-all, at-all? After midnight, and the child still in she school uniform.” But her voice was easy.

He said nothing — no need for more words — just cleared his throat — his way of saying that there would be plenty more stories.

There was a debriefing meeting every Friday at six o’clock, just Madeline and the Consultant in his office. One evening he announced, “Your notes are quite detailed. Pretty accurate, too.”

Her heart flipped.

“There’s something I want you to see.”

It flipped again.

But he swivelled his chair to the screen behind him, to a BEFORE image of lips blistering red, cheeks grey and melting like a candle, no hair, no eyebrows, eyelids inside out. “Acid-attack victim, burnt beyond recognition, couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t even speak, just howl in agony.”

Madeline didn’t know what to say.

“Now, look again, my reconstruction.” He switched to the AFTER image and traced his finger across the forehead and along the nose, lingering on the lips.

Madeline exclaimed, “Wow, you’ve given her a new life.”

“Pioneering surgery with multiple skin grafts, silicone balloons under the scalp, saline injections, weeks of treatment, months and months of monitoring the transformation.”

“A miracle — even her hair has grown back,” Madeline said, but he was transfixed to the screen as if he hadn’t heard her.

She wanted to tell him how good it was of him to do so much for that one woman, but he was on about surgical techniques. And, before she could find the words, he spun back to the desk and struck it with both fists, one almighty bang.

Madeline nearly burst out of her own skin.

“Now, it’s bunions and warts, moles and cysts, varicose veins and wrinkles.” Sweat spouted onto his forehead, his hair stuck to it. “Facelifts, arm lifts, thigh lifts, plastic people coming back for more and more.” His voice rose to a shriek. “And split fucking earlobes! Not what I spent years training for.”

Madeline was silent — it was as if he’d forgotten she was there.

At seven o’clock one morning, less than a month after the lunch, her mother called. “Are you awake, sitting down?”

Madeline was still in bed and drowsy. “Why?”

“Grandfather passed away . . . ”

“Wha’?”

“ . . . heart attack, sudden and very quick, no suffering.”

Madeline slumped against the pillows, stared at the ceiling, but saw nothing. Early rays of sunshine dappled her naked breasts but there was no warmth. All feeling drained, like a grey duppy she dragged her body through the daily routine and into the debriefing meeting that evening, but could do no more than nod and scribble notes. The Consultant smiled, a special sensitive smile — “Maybe you’d better let me know what the problem is.”

So she did and couldn’t help sobbing like a little girl. He offered a box of tissues and asked, “How old was he?”

“Eighty-three.” And there was so much more she wanted to say about her Grandpa, how he was always so fit, how he’d have hated hobbling on a prosthesis, even using a stick, how he had chosen to stay at home, the sun hot and sea cool on his skin, and tree frogs after the rain singing him to sleep — no suffering.

But the Consultant read her through the five stages of grief from Denial to Acceptance. “Right,” he said with a spontaneous peck on her cheek, still a bit wet. “You must move on, my dear, can’t afford to lose my right-hand girl.”

Right-hand girl — she and he sharing expertise, combining talents, collaborating on real cases like melanomas, cleft palates, and serious burns.

Whoa, hold strain, yuh mus’ walk before yuh could run.

Her Grandpa — gone, yet his words still so close.

At six o’clock every morning, Madeline mounted her new exercise bicycle — state of the art, with ten pre-set programmes, feedback on RPM, distance, and calories, and a chest strap that monitored her heart. She pedalled, such hard work, but her Grandpa’s do anyt’ing yuh put yuh mind tuh pushed her from three miles to five to eight. After that, it was four-kilogramme dumbbell lifts, a shower and breakfast on gluten-free muesli with skimmed milk and blueberries, green tea with mint, sun salutations followed by fifteen minutes of lotus-position meditation. Her body pulsed with vitality like never before.

Madeline lay flat on her back on the black plastic couch. “My first mermaid,” the tattooist quipped and then, “Put your mind into a meditative state and focus on your breathing, slowly in for five, out for five.” She lowered the drill, only slightly larger than a pen, which is what she called it — “My super pen with the latest triple-coiled electromagnetic circuit controlling the five needles that insert the ink into your dermis.” Madeline flinched — five needles, and sounding like a gigantic bee. “Won’t hurt, just a little prick, like a cat scratch.” Madeline had never been scratched by a cat. “Raise your right hand if you need me to pause.”

The pen’s piercing was more the way she imagined a man o’ war jellyfish sting and sting, but she gritted her teeth, squeezed shut her watering eyes. There was a smell of burning flesh, or was that her imagination? She should have asked for before and after images — too late for that.

Madeline left the parlour with a bar of antibacterial soap, a tube of twice-a-day healing ointment and her breast wrapped and taped in clingfilm, inflamed and oozing. “I could highlight your nipple with a red dye,” the tattooist chirped, “or maybe add a beauty spot — your choice of colour.”

“Thank you,” she said. But no, all she required was the mermaid.

Three weeks later, Madeline applied the last of the ointment — the itching gone and red scabs dissolved into clear black lines. She would have to hide the mermaid from the Consultant — he’d see her as another mutilation.

Body rejuvenated and mind so alive, Madeline was ready for whatever lay ahead — including another ultimatum for lunch.

As the new Madeline strode into The Ivy in tight leggings and a matching sea-green top, her mother’s jaw dropped to a big O. “Lawd have mercy,” she said, but found her English voice. “Good gracious, what have you had done?”

Her sister’s mouth opened, too, but not as far — “Oh my God, you look, like, a-may-zing.”

Madeline shrugged, cool-cool like no-big-thing. She slid onto the seat between them, recited her low-calorie count, pedalling and lifting scores, and ordered hummus with a mixed green salad and organic, pure-pressed cranberry juice. “By the way, do you have a recipe for vegan quiche?” she asked her sister.

“Now then, listen,” her mother said, “overdoing the diet will age you. Believe me, I know.”

Madeline took a deep breath and put on her new smile, telling herself be nice, be nice — her mother had, after all, been to Barbados for the funeral and seemed tired, maybe a little sad, or was it that yellow scarf that had her looking so? “How did it go?”

“Good, big turnout, the church full, everyone telling me how he loved his music, how he used to tell stories . . . ”

Stories — her mother’s voice trailed away. She slid the funeral programme across the table towards Madeline. On the front was a black-and-white image of a young man, saga-boy style with a garish grin — nothing like her grandfather. “Old photo, the only one they could find,” her mother smiled. “Man about town, but he always came home to your grandmother. Loved only her until the day she died, and then some more.”

“You never spoke about him.”

Her mother’s eyes flashed, then softened. She dabbed Madeline’s bottom lip with the corner of her napkin — “You just have to ask.”

Madeline stared at the photo until his image swam through her tears and one eye winked at her.

One evening after surgery, during which the Consultant had conducted and expounded on his excision of eleven melanoma moles, he peered over his half-moon glasses as if he were seeing her for the first time. “My dear, you look marvellous — a metamorphosis!”

Madeline glowed.

“Though weight loss does have side effects.” He removed the surgical gloves as if he were peeling off a top skin and peered — “Maybe a little filler . . . ?” He stepped back and folded his arms — “We must discuss it over a drink.”

At home later, Madeline examined her face in the mirror — no change as far as she could see. No harm in a drink, though, and she let herself imagine what she might wear — her new slim-fit cream silk trousers and matching top with pearl buttons. But that was as far as she got.

More in the mortar than the pestle.

“Doan’ worry, Grandpa,” she whispered. “I could look after muhself.”

During the weeks that followed, consultations were cut short and there was hardly ever a second one. The new lights he ordered to be positioned alongside the mirror were so flattering that no one heard a word he said as he pressed his thumbs against their cheeks, like a massage therapist kneading shoulder muscles. Only Madeline noticed the tic in his eye, tremor in his hand, knee bobbing under the desk — other staff were behaving as if everything was normal.

He no longer even mentioned risk, and the pain was “just a little discomfort and numbness, like pins and needles”. His AFTER pictures were visions of rejuvenation that dazzled everyone into signing off on disclaimer forms with not a single question.

The higher the monkey climb the more he show he tail.

Madeline rechecked the online comments.

After a gastric bypass, I lost eight stone in eighteen months!

Liposuction and a tummy tuck, my husband loves my new figure!!

Since labiaplasty, there’s no stopping my partner!!!

More flattering than ever — was he posting them?

Had she been fooling herself with aspirations as fanciful as those of his patients? Had she, too, not seen the signs?

Trouble doan’ set up like rain.

She pulled up the AFTER image of the acid-burn patient — now like a wounded jellyfish squashed in clingfilm. And was that a wig?

Wha’ yuh do in the dark does come out in the light.

Or was she imagining things?

He just happened to walk in step behind her in the corridor, happened to enter the Recovery Ward at the end of her shift, happened to touch her knee during a debriefing meeting — though his eyes were on case notes, as if he didn’t know what his finger was doing, and it was the same finger that had so gently traced the outline of that AFTER image.

Maybe she should have moved, but it was just a tap on top of her uniform skirt — nothing more. She was getting it all wrong — this was England, people were informal, calling each other by their first names. And anyway, she was not his type — he’d go for his own kind.

Doan’ tek a six fuh a nine.

Madeline was excluded from consultations, especially those with younger women like the divorcee with cataracts who was persuaded to have a breast uplift and enlargement; the bride-to-be with a wart on her foot who had her nipples reconstructed. More and more surgeries were done in less and less time and the Recovery Ward was full every night. No longer clients, not even patients, they were victims — like pallid fowls lined up on a conveyor belt, ready to be plucked and stuffed, blissfully unaware of the throbbing agony and purple bruising ahead of them.

He whipped off his surgical mask and leered at Madeline as if he’d already sharpened his scalpel. No way, though, would she let herself become another of his stitched-up specimens.

Then there was the ashen facelift woman who bled behind her ear and had to be wheeled back into the theatre for more suturing, more anaesthetic, making her throw up so violently that her stitches burst.

The following morning, Madeline tapped on the Senior Sister’s office door. “Please may I have a word?”

The eyebrows lifted.

“About last night, the facelift client whose stitches . . . ”

The cheeks reddened. “These things happen, perfectly normal.”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“How long have you been with us?” The pink lips pursed.

“Nearly nine months, Sister.” 

“Ah, not long then. You’ll soon understand that each body reacts differently under surgery.”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do anything to prejudice our ‘Outstanding’ ranking.”

Madeline buttoned her uniform right up, wore lace-up shoes and black tights, pinned her hair back flat — no makeup, nothing but blank looks. She was no more than a passing phase — he’d soon give up.

But the finger crawled up her thigh, like a centipede.

Enough — Madeline would confront him with, “If you don’t back off, I’ll . . . ” She’d consult the Code of Conduct and draft a complaint to the Board. But the clinic was private, he the Chairman of the Board, the Senior Sister his Deputy — and no one would believe her.

She didn’t want to make a big thing of it — just make him stop the groping, bottom-pinching, sickening sucking noises that made her feel shoddy and stained. She couldn’t sleep, nothing worked — not meditation, counting sheep, fish, stars, counting backwards from one hundred in threes — ninety-seven, ninety-four, ninety-one . . . Her eyes wouldn’t stop tearing, her mind wouldn’t think, her body could do no more than put one foot in front of the other. Couldn’t swallow. She was losing so much weight her shoulders stuck out like a wire hanger. Her own breasts sagged, the mermaid slumped.

“Grandpa,” she wailed, bile rising to choke her. She clamped both hands over her mouth until her breath burst out as if she’d been held underwater.

In life, sometime yuh got tuh sink tuh the sea bottom so you could push down yuh foot and rise back up.

She surfaced, and slowly, very slowly, her mind began to focus.

Madeline slipped into a bath to which she added Dead Sea-salt crystals — soaking out the stress in her shoulders, her neck, her jaw, tightening her stomach muscles, then letting go and feeling all tension float away. She pressed her slender legs together, pointed her feet sideways and, with a flick of prehensile toes, turned on the hot-water tap to keep the bath warm and embracing. Twenty minutes of relaxation was followed by vigorous cleansing and exfoliating with green seaweed scrub. She shampooed and twirled her hair into dark waves, held up her hand mirror and flirted with her new image — turning her head from side to side, between her own BEFORE and AFTER. Lowering the mirror to her left breast, she stretched her skin to elongate the mermaid’s tail, sharp as the knife her grandfather used to gut flying fish.

Her plan was hazardous — she might be entangled and strangled by a net, mistaken for a shark and have her throat cut, trapped and imprisoned in an aquarium at Brighton’s Sea Life Centre to be jeered at by strangers forevermore. High-risk but exquisite — no more niceness.

Rehearsal time! On a glorious summer night, she drove from the clinic along the coast to Seaford. The sea was calm, rippling waves trimmed with white lacy froth — so inviting, so deceptive. She shed her uniform and slipped into a turquoise sequinned gown that clung like another skin. She kicked off shoes, peeled away stockings and trickled seawater onto her feet — flex-point, flex-point, turning them from brown to blue. More seawater transformed her legs into a tail so potent it could crack a human thighbone.

Perched on a large rock, she applied coral lipstick and green contact lenses that made her eyes sparkle like cut glass. Her long hair flowed in shades of indigo and electric blue in the light of the moon. She dabbed musk scent on the little gill-slits behind her ears and stretched the translucent webbing between her toes, like the fins of a silver fish.

She dived from the rock — a perfect arc slicing into the sea. Surging through the foam, she floated on her back, swaying to the rhythm of the waves, beguiling and bewitching — then flicked her tail like a whip, opened it into a fan that slapped hard against the surf.

With the speed and power of a torpedo, she zipped along the coastline and out into the Atlantic — searching for sailors, fishermen, pirates, surfers, swimmers who had ventured too far into treacherous waters, and the solo yachtsman, exhausted after battling the winds and waves on his way from Barbados. Mesmerised by her song of seduction, he was easy prey, as if on a cliff edge unable to resist looking down. As the bravest of men, having faced every peril of the sea, he’d have hurled himself into oblivion, casting away everyone he had ever loved, aching to be in her arms. One glance into her eyes and he would be doomed.

But she licked salt from her lips and kissed his blue cheeks, carried him to safety on the shore and breathed into his ears, “Go, go home to your own true-true love.”

It’s not him she’s after.

At ten minutes to seven, Madeline retraces her steps around the silent Recovery Ward for her final round — testing forehead temperatures, counting pulses, double-checking charts. She has given each patient extra sedative, just a drop or two — they must not wake and delay her departure. The room is gloomy grey under dim ceiling lights — there are brown stains on pillowcases, a crack across a floor tile, a yellow drip down the wall. A fly buzzes and spins on its back. She squashes it underfoot and flicks the splat of black and red under a bed.

Back at the desk, she rests her elbows on top, massages her forehead with her fingertips and undoes a third button of her uniform. The only sign of tension is the slight flickering behind her closed eyes. She presses her palms together, exhales as if she’s blowing out a candle — namaste. “Grandpa, like you said, I could be anyone.”

The mermaid’s tail twitches and quivers.

Seven o’clock, right on time, the door clicks open behind her and his shoes clack, clack on the tiles. He leans over her shoulder, his antiseptic pant on the back of her neck, his talons on her left breast — “Does this tattoo go all the way down?” He sniggers as if he’s the wit and she his dupe. “Ready for our drink, long overdue?”

More than ready, Madeline says, “I have a better idea. Follow me.” She turns — he has no choice but to look into her eyes. His glint and glaze over.

Madeline leads the way through the exit and into the car park. She drives, her hands steady on the steering wheel, his headlights trembling in her rear-view mirror.

The sea will be perfect, calm with a few ripples that hardly disturb the surface, yet hide the undertow. The moon is full, the air still and clear — it will carry her song. Like a fish hooked and helpless on a line, he will follow her all the way.

The sea ent got nuh back door.

THE BOY FROM CHURCH

Sara Bastian

YOU KNOW him from church. Everyone knows him. He’s the nice guy whose smile is constant and unabating. But you find him puzzling. Not because he tries to please everyone — everyone in church is looking to appease somebody, trying to follow in the benevolent way of the Lord. He appeared out of the blur of incense one day — near-white teeth gleaming through sanctified smoke — and was suddenly towering, towering. But you are used to watching buildings erect slowly, one concrete slab at a time.

Soon you learn to dismiss the peculiarity of his presence, because he’s a nice guy and you are only teenagers — graduation, college, and adulthood seem aeons away. Everyone in your confirmation class likes him, or no one dislikes him enough to talk about it. Not how the girls with press-on French tips whisper about Tisha’s hair: short and untouched by chemicals that discipline everyone else’s scalps. Besides, you are too young and naïve to name your apprehension.

He’s tall, taller than most of the other boys, and you think that his knees are too round and large for his legs. Whenever he wears khaki shorts — nearly every Saturday — you think of a full moon sliding down a telephone pole. You figure that you’re being an asshole, and you are, because no one is this judgmental about someone else’s knees.

On Friday evenings (youth group), Saturday afternoons (confirmation class), and Sunday mornings (Mass), he greets you as if your friendship has climbed mountains and swum oceans and come out on the other side of the world perfectly intact.

With two arms, he leans in to hug you. With the left side of your body, you reciprocate. He steps back, smiles at you, his hands on your shoulders now. “You early today. I surprised,” he says. “Father een even here yet.”

The church is nearly empty. A few of the press-on girls — the ones you haven’t yet figured out how to enjoy the company of — sit in the pews, eyes scanning something in Britney’s lap.

“My mummy had an appointment so she drop me off early.” You step backward, watching his hands fall to his side. You hate going to church on Saturdays. Hate the silence, the emptiness.

He’s talking now as you two walk up the altar, towards the occupied pews to the right. He’s telling you about his biology class. They dissected a conch. He asks if you’ll take biology next year when you’re in grade ten. You don’t know. You just wish he would shut up because now all you can hear is the ocean through an empty shell, and you can smell dead, fishy things.

Britney calls your name, asks if you’re going to that party tonight. You look at the boy and tell him you’ll finish the conversation later, that you have to talk to Britney about tonight, even though you aren’t going; your parents would never let you. He wanders over to the other boys who’re playing a handheld game.

You sit and imagine the boy from church pulling a conch from its shell, imagine the conch squirming in his hands. The girls ask if he told you the conch story; you nod and ask about the party.

He greets everyone this way: a smile, and a story if he has you long enough. Everyone is used to it; he’s just friendly. You met him at church and so you greet him just the same — or the best way you know how to be polite.

Other than school, church is the only place your parents allow you to socialise without concern, without what you think is irrational panic. Your mother does not ask, “Who will be there?” and then, “Who are you really meeting there?” the way she does when you ask to go to the movies with friends. She worries about you, about the secrets you might keep and how much time you might spend on the internet talking to boys she’s never met. She must have told your father, because he limits your Facebook and Skype usage to weekends only.

The two of them stand in front of you, schoolbooks open on your bed, and your father, all of a sudden, tells you that boys only want one thing. He doesn’t say what it is before he pats your head and leaves. Your mother, though, sits at the edge of your bed and asks if you remember about the conversation you two had years ago. It’s a nebulous question; you say no, dread spread across your face. She reminds you, a hand on your knee, about birds, bees, and the way children emerge from wombs as a blessing from God for husbands and wives — only husbands and wives. All the while you are fidgeting with your pen and insisting that you understand, that you don’t need to revisit the lesson. You assure her that you’ll remain a virgin until you’re married.

Most of the girls in your confirmation class that you speak to say he’s tried to flirt with them. Britney with the French tips said he kept pulling her towards him at a dance last weekend, kept trying to get her to wine on him. Liya with the screeching laugh said he put <3 beneath her new profile pic. India with the hazel eyes said he kept complimenting her, said her eyes were the most beautiful he’d seen. Everette said he sent her a link to a new Maroon 5 love song and then asked her to go to the movies with him and some friends from school. She went. They kissed during the boring parts but that was all. Even your younger cousin Gianna confessed that they kissed — just a peck — one day that summer when the youth group was putting on a play.

But isn’t that just what teenage boys do?

They want to impress girls, right? Charm them?

They want what you all do — to feel wanted.

And so, when he flirts with you on Facebook, tells you that your new picture is cute or that your hair looked nice on Sunday, you brush it off, do your best to insinuate that you’re not interested. To his <3, you :). To his :$, you lol. After all, it’s what he does with most of the girls; this isn’t special. You aren’t special to him and you don’t want to be. You spend your internet time waiting for a green dot to appear next to your emotionally unavailable crush’s name. To his ;), you :$. To his :*, you :* <3. On Fridays, you tell your mother that you’ll take the church bus home, so that you can sit next to him, in hopes that he’ll kiss you. And eventually he does, tongue roaming in your mouth, hands wandering across your jeans.

The boy from church doesn’t hold anything against you or anything; he’s too nice for that. He tries again every full blue moon, subtly.

After months of confirmation classes, you’re getting married to the Lord, to the Anglican church. You and the other girls wear white dresses and shoes with veils clipped into your freshly relaxed hair. The boys wear suits with red ties, their hairlines recently sharpened.

Parents and godparents huddle around you when you’re called to the altar as the bishop whispers a prayer over you. A gold goblet is tilted towards your lips and you sip the cloying blood of Christ. You swallow and remember that you’re no longer required to attend youth group after today.

You stop going because you prefer to spend Friday nights on Facebook talking to your real friends, not your church friends, or in bed, asleep. Your mother urges you to go, tells you that you’re too disconnected from the world and she won’t let you become an internet-addicted heathen. You negotiate, and eventually agree that you’ll go once a month. But you don’t see the point. The boy you like most — the one that kissed you in the back of the church bus despite the rule against boys and girls commingling — went off to college and no one else is as charmingly emotionally unavailable as him. Or as cute.

When the boy from church sends you messages on Facebook saying that he misses you or insists that you come to youth group the next Friday, you type, “lol imu2” and “maybe nxt fri”. You’re lying, but it’s better to lie than to hurt his feelings, you think, because he’s fond of you now. After all, you were welcomed to the church together, married to the Lord together.

One night, you fall asleep thinking of the emotionally unavailable boy, but you dream that you’re married to the boy from church. You have two children — two little boys — with kneecaps for faces and ears that take flight. Even though you cannot see their faces, you know that if they could, they would resemble their father. They would be smiling. But all they do is flutter their ears and whisk themselves into the sky. You look at the boy from church and suddenly he is a building. Your kneecap children are on his head, playing in the coils of his dark hair sprinkled too early with grey. All three of them scream down that they love you, but that you look so stupidly tiny down there. You think that Jesus and all of his disciples are fucking relentless.

Everything that was once a dream looms over you now, and my god, you are tiny.

Three years later, he’s still the same nice guy, striving to please everyone with his wide smile and full-moon kneecaps. You see each other at church — on Sundays you’re forced to go — and at parties that you must leave earlier than everyone else because your parents remain overprotective and untrusting despite your proximity to eighteen. “Of the world, not of you,” they say. You are eager to meet this world.

He staggers over to you from a group of friends, smiling — always smiling — and hugs you, buries your face into his striped polo that reeks of Kalik. He screams over the dancehall music erupting from the speakers. Like every friendship that is not a friendship, there is the suggestion of hanging out someday soon.

“Cyan even see you no more. We gotta link up soon.” His hand rests on your shoulder.

You nod and smile — your lips red, your teeth retained, not braced — and try not to wince at the heat of his breath and the volume of his voice. “Yeah, man. I ga hit you up soon,” you assure him.

“You look nice, yanno,” he adds. You pretend not to hear him and look around for Gianna, who’s at a corner of the yard, talking to one of her friends from school. You say that you have to go. His arm swings up, trying to catch the rhythm of the song playing.

“Hit me up next week,” he yells before you let the crowd engulf you. Your conversations are always brief now — this is one of the few things you thank God for — because he knows everyone and everyone knows him, and he has girls to hand drinks to.

He’s not a bartender.

He’s just nice. Right?

Back with Gianna, you point him out to her. She jokes about the ages of the girls with him — ages you both were when you met him — “Cure again,” she sings. You notice the girl he pulls into him; she’s his fourteen-year-old girlfriend whose face is plastered across his social media pages. Her round, short body is smacked against his thin frame as they both sing aloud, drinks wetting their lips, her waist moving shyly. Some of his friends appear and interrupt this moment that you want to look away from. He holds her waist near him, but smiles at his friends; the girlfriend looks quietly as they swarm around him.

Between dancing and yelling along to the music, Gianna says, “Wonder which of them next.”

He is so nice that the younger girls — the ones that joined youth group after you left — trusted him, leaned on him.

They called him brother.

They said he was always there when the tequila swayed beneath their skin and the rum coated their throats like layering in July. You noticed this, the way he welcomed them, clung to them, but you only laughed then. What could you have said to those girls, the ones whose names you don’t know because you became a heathen?

He was the life of the party; he handed them shots and shots and cups and cups of whatever was pouring. He drank with them, danced with them, let them know they weren’t alone. Should you have told them what your father told you? Should you have told them that the emotionally unavailable boy tried to slip his hand into your jeans that night on the bus? That his hands were firm around your neck years later in the back seat of his car? Should you have told them that boys with full-moon kneecaps will tower and quietly demand that you remain diminutive and pathetic even in your dreams?

He always made sure they were warm with liquor before he tried. Most of the girls who come forward say this: they were drunk.

He waited until they were somewhere comfortable, private:

The back of his car that you imagine smelled like pine and berries,

on a friend’s couch if the friend already passed out in their own bed,

on their own couch as he dropped them home — quick, a pitstop.

You wish their mothers would’ve picked them up from parties with headlights inspecting them as they emerged from someone’s backyard, the way yours did to you. You wish mothers did not trust smiling boys just because they know them from church. But you know wishing is pointless, and that few things can inhibit a man determined to tower over a beautiful girl.

He must have assured himself that they wanted a body to lean on in the dim of the night, the moon closing in on them, because that was what they wanted at the party. But they just wanted him to keep them safe, they said. They just wanted a friend, their friend from church.

They were too intoxicated to move, to fight off the heaviness of his body on theirs, they said.

Brother

It’s okay.

Brother?

. . .

Stop, brother.

You think about the priest who taught your confirmation class. The one that told you all that men are designed to be heads of households, destined to lead their wives and children to the Lord. You think he is an idiot, and that the only honest thing he taught you was about everything being done in darkness coming to light.

Somebody will wake up and recall the feeling of unwanted pressure on their body. Somebody will wake up and recall the feeling of their body weighed down by alcohol — unbearably still. They will recall the feeling of their eyes closing, their mouths begging and then silent, covered by a man — once a boy, once a friend—towering, towering.

Nobody in the church wants to believe that a nice guy would have violent unabating hands. The girls that he assaulted didn’t even want to believe it. Must have been a dream. Would have been better as a dream. He’s not meant to tower like that in real life. Not the boy — a man now, a man — who attends church every Sunday morning in polka-dot bow ties and boat shoes, with a faded hymnal beneath his arm. He doesn’t leave after communion, doesn’t sit on his phone during the service either. Not the guy with the wide smile. He wouldn’t do such things. He’s saved; the bishop blessed you both on the altar years ago. He is an Anglican man. He is God-fearing. But aren’t they all?

After all, those girls were drunk. Those girls were leaning on him, laughing with him, and they took too long to come forward. This is what people say, this is why they’re reluctant to believe them. They demand to know what the girls were drinking and how much — as if it matters, as if most Bahamian teenagers aren’t drinking slender cans of Four Loko and green bottles of Heineken before they’ve even thought about BGCSEs. People forget about the girls who were not at parties. They forget that he flashed his dick at Britney when they were the last two on the church bus. They forget that he forced his hands into Everette’s blouse at the movies. They forget he tried to slip his hands beneath skirts on quiet days in the library. “Well, they shoulda say something after it happen,” people insist.

Some of his friends say that they know nothing about it. You know some of them; you think they’re trying to protect their own reputations by remaining neutral. His other friends say he did nothing wrong, that he would never do anything so wrong. He says he never meant to hurt anyone. That he’s changed.

You wonder if the emotionally unavailable boy has changed. Wonder if his friends know. They must know. “Men know men,” your father said to you before your first date (that he knew of), and that’s why he’s so protective.

In a parking lot, the emotionally unavailable boy — pale from a semester in Vermont — pinned you down in the back seat. You’d already taken your shirt off, figured it would keep him busy for a while, keep him excited. You were newly eighteen. You felt light — like ocean breeze sweeping itself across your skin in October. His lips were soft on yours and his hands travelled across your body.

“Take off these pants,” he told you, tugging at your denim shorts. He fiddled with the button despite you saying no. He unlatched it finally.

You held on to the waist of the shorts, telling him to stop. You wondered why your half-naked body wasn’t enough. You imagined him with pale white girls, naked and shivering in elevated twin beds.

He was agitated. His hands moved towards your neck and gripped. Firm. His eyes were red. He must have been tired — you sneaked out late to see him.

You let go of the shorts, let him have what he wanted, figured he might finally ask you to be his girlfriend instead of fucking random girls in Vermont.

He kissed your aching neck and whispered, “I just wan’ feel you. Please.”

You pulled his face to yours in hopes of speeding up the process.

You believe the girls. You believe them without question even though you left the parties earlier than most, even though you don’t know them, even though you have only seen the boy from church tower in your dreams.

God is a forgiving God, the church people say. The church is accepting of all sinners. People forget. People forget everything and live by this, but you are still thinking of his unabating smile and his full-moon kneecaps. You are still dreaming of the children that flutter above his head, berating you.

You are still a heathen.

God is a vengeful God, you think. The ocean will swallow everyone eventually — no one can tower forever.

This is the one thing you believe.

SIX POEMS

Neala Luna Bhagwansingh

Red Moon

I

Curepe, 1996. Night.

She's a metronome

on an upside-down Carib crate,

elbows on purple knees, hands

clutching at her temples

while she cries

summoning me

to my second-floor window

every payday. Her body a bow

with each guttural gasp;

back arched with howls to

Jesus, to God, to Ma, to the silent,

indifferent moon.

II

San Fernando, 2021. Night.

Her purple face is floodlit

by the street corner's lamppost

as it makes a stage of another

neighbour's backyard.

I turn away

to watch a shadow

eclipse the month-end moon,

as all the sunsets and sunrises on Earth

floodlight their collective stain upon it —

a mirror for the crimson dye

of so many paydays.

The Missing

You know

that some mornings

something inside doesn't want to wake,

that some nights

something inside

does not want to rest,

so to the edges you turn instead.

You know

the sinking solace

of the hiding space

the creeping cold alertness

that holds on

to wait out the darkness

and you too

have been swallowed

by the anguish of solitude

that comes

when you're never found.

In Memory Of

It starts with a scent on the wind,

the timbre of a voice, its resonance too familiar,

a ripple of red fabric that catches the eye,

and a twisted memory is buried no longer:

The claim in his sweat that stung my eyes shut.

His vodka breath unwanted, intimate, hot.

The stickiness of his tongue staining my face.

The smell of rust on his skin that I'd scratched and scraped.

The acrid taste of fear that came up in my throat

choking on words that meant only NO!

And between my back and the earth

the stone I willed to act,

to pierce deeply

my skin

so that pain and that scar

would be the only things to recall

not him

not his hands on my wrists

not his weight

not the steel in his boots

as each rock of his hips shaped another me:

damaged and unworthy

beaten, left to rot

ashamed and forever unclean.

There, he said,

smoothing the dress he'd bunched at my waist.

No one ever has to know.

Keepsake

Without pardon

breaking the branches

crawling low through the garden

down we go.

Here, the mill hums

the village grows still

dim eyes, deaf ears

the moil of the ill.

Years go by for us

long after the boys are heroes

and soldiers. Still, we turn

and churn her to foam.

Our marble red

apparelled, here

we remember

the past.

Erasure poem created with "Keepsake Mill" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Chapter Seven

Trinidad overflows with caskets.

Girls go under, weeping alabaster.

Land purple, the ugly laid bare.

Dismal red appears

in servile imitation skin.

Street fares shot grey.

The men, the town, the posts.

Suburbs and blocks, in force:

street, picture and pavement.

The war on life, the bastion defence;

only the missing between them.

Erasure poem created with the first page of chapter 7 of The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

TTREDress Project exhibit in Palmiste Park, 2021: Photo by Neala Luna Bhagwansingh

Eyes of the Witness

For the sunset vigil we came together,

air still full from this morning's cutting

fragrant with the scent of grass in danger.

They breathed in the earth beneath our bare feet,

and we wove their stories onto red dresses,

offering blessings in the spaces held between.

We channelled the living and the dead,

named the chaos and the chaos fell like leaves,

disrobing the unseen and unheard of unwanted red.

Through the shadows we stood,

our paths emboldened, and side by side

reclaimed the night, unyielding and unbowed.

Into the tapestry of time, our stories were told,

a testament to resilience and might;

the eyes of the witness reshaping the world

As we turned to go, our prayers on pinpoints of light,

farewells ascending on spirals of burning incense,

a voice beyond the gate called out, Is it over?

Silver-haired in the moonlight, a young man her guide,

I am here, she said, her candle held high.

I am a survivor.

FOUR POEMS

kevanté ac cash

Oluwatoyin Salau, Missing Black Lives Matter Activist, Is Found Dead

(The New York Times, June 15, 2020)

on mornings like this I think ofthe Black-woman body

the cruelness it carries fromBlack    men

pressed into skulls with    rose-thorn crownstheir

wrath so vile and almightythat Toyin didn't even

get a chance to survive19 and life taken away

and    I    can    only    think    ofthe pain

in her pelvis she feltdrilled into suction by

some Black manthe prayersshe must've wailed

for him to stopbut when he didwho'd have

thought she'dnever see the light of dayagain that pain

now breathing intoother Black womenwho've

borne the same achenow they mustcarry hers

and theirsto grave

notmine

i was ninewhen he said

he liked the way

my legs looked under

my skirt

twelvewhen he joked

to suck the milk

dry from my

bumping chest

thirteenwhen he vowed

to break the seal

that kept me

a church saint

sixteenwhen it

actually

happened

eighteenwhen it

dimmed to

darkness

lying open

on the bathroom floor

nineteenwhen he

pulled me

into his car

twenty-oneendured the most

abusive relationship

of them all

twenty-twomy body

is not mine

twenty-threemy body

is not mine

twenty-four

twenty-five

twenty-six

when willmy body

ever

be mine?

r e f l e c t i o n

while grandmother wept from the living-room floor

i spied father

masking girlish

mannerisms

to be who grandfather wanted

while he

drank his soul unconscious

hiding feelings

he could not

process

while mother

nursed her wounds

loving father as she knew best

i spied

father's reflection

grew up hating

her masculinity

drowning her feelings

in messy men

chasing the high

of abusive men

nursing her wounds

to keep them

because she needed

wanted

a father

no one taught my ancestors how to love

only to fear

that fear

pouring out

+ over into

how i learned to love:

arms high

bended knees

turning the other cheek

i am still learning to forgive myself

for thinking

i should've

known     better

i am still learning to accept

it wasn't

alllllll

their fault

i am still learning to leave

past pains

in

the past

i want to love freely

fearlessly

give it

everything i've got

FOUR POEMS

Courtney Conrad

Shhh . . . Gunshot can pick padlock

for Isheka

Bony rastaman strings guitar

sings to his empress with yellow-corn

gapped teeth while she stirs ital stew. She forgets

to make his favourite homemade lemonade.

He ransacks home.

Aye gyal yuh know me?

He drags her body outside like a mic stand.

Whacks gun across her forehead and his

like drum skin. Her sunken collarbone

a washbowl collecting blood that drips

from her temple. His teeth sink into her shoulders.

Mute neighbours lurk behind pinched curtains.

He spotlights them, Unnu want a show, seh bet

mi shoot her. Neighbours return to washing

panties, hair and dishes. Free tour tickets slip

underneath their doors before the nightly news.

Tomorrow, neighbours will kekeke with him.

His empress will sweep their veranda

with a gentle hum, her smile will bleed

sunshine. When he's away, the elders

will hold her face in tenderness and whisper

If yuh nuh want to be pocketable for the sky,

when him start wid him foolishness

yuh fi boil di honey and pour it inna him work shoes,

crush laxatives like ginga and sprinkle it ova him ital stew,

mix di scotch bonnet pepper and lime juice and dash it inna him eye.

Kibba Yuh Mouth

My neighbours were the popular sibling duo in our complex;

fully stocked pantry, unlimited video games, and few rules.

I nicknamed the older brother "cutie".

He drank Ting from a glass bottle like it were Red Stripe,

played Grand Theft Auto and spoke to the TV like a major drug lord.

No respectable teen boy volunteered to babysit his little sister and her friend.

But he did, he was the traffic cop monitoring us

while we drove Barbie Jeeps.

Once, he pulled us over behind the dumpster.

She paid him for both of us. I witnessed his . . .

I was "sick" every playtime

watched her from my bedroom.

He sat on the veranda, shot air bullets at my window,

and mouthed, Informa fi dead.

Joke Build Coffin

By the river, tree stumps become nappy tables, babies suck

nectar from ixora shrubs. Hummingbirds jerk lignum vitae leaves.

Yutes play monkey in the middle with unripe mangoes.

Jungle ropes plop them into the water like dumplings,

their coconut heads bash confetti blossoms; the parched grass

sip from their splashes. The water is a dege dege six feet deep.

Yute spots a pretty brownin' in a bikini, sneaks up from behind

and throws her over his shoulder like a bag of BBQ charcoal

and flings her into the water. Her sinking frame pleads,

Mi cyah swim, help mi. She gulps debris that constricts her throat.

The current rips off her clothes for him. A whirlpool washes the life

out of her and delivers her to the bank like a fish, not even half a flap

but her friends pump her chest anyway. Yute's laughter

and bang belly rub slows then stops. A joke mi did a mek.

How dare she find it hard to live, can't she withstand a joke?

Water grows boy to man swiftly, the day watermarks his life forever.

Snapper

for Kemesha, Kimanda, Shara-Lee, Rafaella, and Kishawn

Father's Day reminds Kemesha of her daddy's brown-stew fish.

Gratitude rings his phone for the recipe.

He begins, All right, tell mi when yuh ready. Method:

1) Wash di fish wid lime and vinegar.

2) Rub dem dung wid salt and black pepper.

3) Dash in yuh scotch bonnet, garlic and bell pepper inna hot oil.

4) Chuck in di fish fi fry, den dash weh di oil.

5) Add likkle wata and browning, den put di pot fi simma fi ten minutes.

Two days later, Kemesha and her fifteen-, twelve-, five- and two-year-old

leak like half-open ketchup bottles. Outside, a hundred crow residents

sit on rooftops waiting for the white sheets and stretchers. Phones film.

Soldier boys weep into masks, setting barricade tape.

Half-empty parliament offers one-minute silence.

Friends egg each other on, Dat deh bwoy wicked. Him fi get mince up.

Her mother's joy burns, Di bwoy weh we feed, massacre

mi only daughter and grandchildren. Her father's reality

inedible, Yuh hear bout these things but never think —

Five gone. Mi wonda if she did cook di fish

fi di murda bwoy.

AN EASY MARRIAGE

Kevin Jared Hosein

A CO-WORKER had a daughter that he wanted to give away. She was getting to twenty-five now and he didn’t want her to become an old maid. He thought of me as a diligent man who could provide her with a stable life. His daughter’s name was Madhuri. He was upfront about not being able to afford a dowry. And that she had once lived with another man — but only for a month before returning. Or more accurately, being returned. Other than that, my co-worker assured me, Madhuri had barely ever left the house.

When the man brought her to me, I was pleased to see that she wasn’t unattractive. Gangly, flat, thin mouth, sunken eyes, ropy hair down to her belt, the posture of a scolded dog. She was a very plain woman overall. Plain, but not unattractive. After first setting my eyes on her, I immediately knew that she was right for me. I wasn’t unsociable but I never had the best luck with women. I’d had fears of marrying one who would put herself above her family. A woman who would place a higher value on herself than her union. I knew that Madhuri would be good for me and my house. The rest of my life had already been hard times, so I desired an easy marriage.

I didn’t want a big wedding, much less the Hindu nuptials that my mother wished for me, God rest her soul. I had no patience to sit through a dozen bhajans or to venture into the swamp to cut bamboo to build an arch. A Hindu wedding in Trinidad also meant paratha and mango chutney and sohari sizzled in ghee. I wasn’t a community man. I couldn’t rally together men to have their wives pay me that favour. And I don’t think Madhuri’s family would’ve been up for night-cooking either. I decided that the courthouse would be the best place to get married. Something small and civil.

I’d only ever worn my court clothes once before, when my father misspelt my name in the will, and I had to go in before a magistrate to clear it up after he passed away. Madhuri didn’t have any good clothes of her own, much less a presentable dress or pair of shoes, so I had to go looking for something affordable. That same week, as I was walking past the village mandir, I overheard the old pundit talking to the groundsman about a married couple living in Yankaran Trace. He had visited their house a day prior and helped smoke out a ghost, he said. He took with him wild sage, plantains, a dried coconut husk, and a framed picture of Shiva. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop so I took shade under a sapodilla tree, produced my pocketbook and pretended to write. The pundit went on to say that the woman of the house was a seamstress and that she had recently adjusted a dress for a woman who died before her wedding. The fiancé never returned for the dress and the seamstress felt guilty for pursuing him over the bill. A week had passed and she began having night terrors. She was having dreams that the bride’s ghost was in her house, rummaging through the rooms for the dress — and so had come to the pundit for help. He told the woman that the ghost may wish revenge if the dress were destroyed, and that it should be sold or given away.

The groundsman asked, Wouldn’t the spirit terrorise that person instead?

The pundit shook his head. He held up his finger to make a point. He said, Not if the dress is altered or re-purposed in a way that the spirit doesn’t recognise it.

I immediately went down to Yankaran Trace. A young man at a fruit parlour pointed me to the seamstress’s house, which was only a stone’s throw away. I knocked on the door and a stocky man answered. I told him that I’d heard about the dress and would buy it for no more than twenty dollars. The man went to fetch his wife. Her eyes were bloodshot and a filigree of veins ran down the back of her palm. We sat down and she made an offer of Hong Wing coffee, which I turned down. She led me into a room with fabrics and sewing buttons and spools of all colours. At the centre of the room was a reliable treadle machine partially swathed by a satin damask. The window was closed. The musty, grassy smell of burned sage and incense still lingered.

Draped over one of the chairs was the white wedding dress. The veil hung like a phantom from a wall hook. The seamstress was straight in saying that she had made some changes to the original dress. She had removed most of the embroidery and lace, and had reworked the jewel neckline into a bateau. The size of the dress had also been reduced, though I was afraid that its waist would’ve been much too small to accommodate Madhuri’s figure, though so meagre. In the same breath, she professed that she would not be making any further changes to the dress — I would have to hire another seamstress to do so, she said. It was a fair trade.

On the day before the wedding, Madhuri washed the dress and put it out to dry. She did not seem particularly taken by it. I wondered if she’d somehow caught word of the previous owner’s fate. However, her expression the past few days had been more of distracted bewilderment than anything. Every word she uttered was slurred; every smile staggered. It was as if she were in a fugue. This annoyed her father, who thought she should be happy to finally have a husband. When she tried it on, I could see that the dress was now too large for her, swallowing her small frame. She kept silent. I told her to wash the dress, as it smelled of smoke.

On the day of the wedding, Madhuri came to me and said that she could not find the veil. Her manner of speech was hesitant, sounding more like a timid waif than a flustered bride on her wedding day. I had to stop her father from slapping her when he discovered that she’d forgotten to take it down from the line the evening prior. With quivering lips, she told of two strange long-haired girls who were in the yard, pelting stones at the starch mango tree. She flung her slippers at them. She believed this to be the provocation that encouraged the hooligans to steal the veil. I shook the entire thing off and said that we’d deal with them if we ever saw them again. No time for that now.

We decided that the veil was ultimately expendable. Madhuri was not happy about that decision. Her mouth sagged as the clerk brought us to the registry. Her cheeks grew an unnatural pallor. She froze. I won’t deny — I was nervous as well. I then remembered my parents’ wishes. I was the last of my family. My father had no brothers or sisters. Neither did my mother. I was also an only child, so my name would die with me if I didn’t follow through. Madhuri’s hands became jittery and she dropped the pen twice when prompted to sign. I began to wonder if the dress did have some paranormal effect over her. Something was deeply off. Perhaps my disbelief in ghosts had been hasty. For a moment, I regretted not including some sort of religious ritual in the procedures.

I put my hand over hers and helped her sign. And all but she clapped.

I was quickly exposed to one of Madhuri’s habits — she was a chain-smoker. And I quickly realised that the cigarette smell I’d thought had come from the dress that day was indeed coming from her. When we got back to my house, still in her wedding dress, she locked herself in the bathroom and smoked half a pack of Du Maurier. The pallor in her cheek disappeared after that. I wasn’t offended, just surprised. She’d never done this before that day, though the time we had spent together was sparse and mostly in quiet. This persisted as the first month went by. A man usually doesn’t want a woman who smells like a man. The smoke smell was strong too — it clung to each piece of clothing she had and overpowered any scent of cilantro and dhal. She even smoked when she put up the sheets on the lines. Vinegar only worked to thin the stench from the pillowcases. I often went to work with my trousers smelling of ash.

I’d wondered if it had anything to do with what the pundit had said about the dress. Maybe the ghost had returned for it and was now having some kind of dark influence over Madhuri. I spoke to her father about this sudden chain-smoking habit, and he told me that she had been smoking since she was fourteen years old, but seldom did it in the house. There was a ravine where she would sit and wiggle her toes over the mullet fish and smoke an entire pack every Sunday after prayer. She wasn’t addicted to the cigarettes, he assured. It was just part of her day. He was surprised I didn’t know from before. His forehead suddenly crinkled as he gave me a look of concern. He asked if it would be a problem for me. I shook my head and told him I was just curious about the habit. To tell you the truth, the smoking gave her something that not many women had. Everything else about her was unremarkable but whenever she blew the smoke from her lips, that strangely did it for me. It made my blood flow. So I never protested.

And neither did she. She respected the schedule I set. She made sure dinner was served by six, made sure she was up before the roosters, made sure she was on her back every Saturday at 9 p.m. Of course, she was not the portrait of perfection but I tried my best to keep her well-dressed. I never coveted any other man’s wife. Madhuri barely ever spoke but she listened to all of my grievances. She was a good, reliable woman.

Madhuri became pregnant in our second year of marriage. She didn’t tell me at first. I only noticed when she started waking up vomiting. It made me wonder why she didn’t say anything. I was irritated but at the same time, I couldn’t be that way for long. I was going to be a father. But the pregnancy came as a great trial for Madhuri. The biggest one being that she had to surrender smoking.

This changed everything.

After that, it was like she gave up on life. Stopped cooking, cleaning, everything. She stayed in the toilet for hours, groaning in pain. But there was still something in the back of my mind telling me to hold on, just be patient. I told her to pray and that it will pass.

Then Madhuri woke me up in the middle of the night to say, Thank God it’s dead.

When I asked her the next day what she meant by those words, she said she couldn’t remember uttering them, seeming just as dumbfounded as I was. I slapped her and she finally came to her senses, afterwards telling me that she was bleeding thick and brown. The next day, I took her to the clinic to get it checked out. The doctor asked my permission to look, but I told him that her testimony should be enough. He checked for movement in the womb, which there was, to my relief. Then gave instruction to take her to the hospital for some scans as a precaution, and to make sure she had enough lentils and lemons to keep her folate intake up. In private, I told him about her stagnation and pain, how it was affecting the household, and he prescribed some tranquilisers.

The tranquilisers worked. It astounded me how she fast would go from doubled-over pain to sleeping like the dead. When the tranquilisers were finished, I made an appointment for another course. The doctor reminded me that they were not an antidote and urged me to get the scans done. When I called the hospital, they told me that the machine had broken down and recommended to me a private clinic that only a politician could afford. On top of that, I believed Madhuri had built up a tolerance for the tranquilisers. The pain had returned, and worse than before. For hours, she muttered constantly, I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

I couldn’t take it. I slept in another room.

The next morning, I let her father know of her condition. That evening, he came to my house with a bottle of brown capsules. The bottle itself was nondescript, with no label, no dosage instructions. He said he got them from a retired pharmacist who lived in the area — one of the best from his day. His own concoction. Though I didn’t want him to, I asked him if he wanted to see Madhuri. He hesitated, shook his head and left.

The capsules were nothing short of a miracle. It was as if they had smoked the sickness out of her and spirited it into the sky. She even laughed at how well they worked. When the morning came, she muttered in her sleep, I like being dead.

I went to work and got a call that Madhuri was at the hospital. They told me to hurry. An elder neighbour was there when I arrived. She said a scorpion had stung Madhuri while she was putting up the clothes. The neighbour had seen her limping beside the standpipe and had told her to go to the clinic, before offering to wake her husband to drive her there. Madhuri insisted that she would walk. She never showed up at the clinic. She went in the opposite direction to the riverbank and slumped against a peepal tree, a half-smoked cigarette in her lap and a smile on her face. There was no need to hurry to the hospital — she was already dead on arrival.

When they cut her open, they found that the baby had been implanted in her tubes instead of the womb. An ectopic pregnancy, it was called. A fatal situation for both mother and foetus. I asked the nurse how the hell this could’ve happened. She asked me if my wife smoked — and said that tobacco could be a contributing factor. Nicotine made the tubes narrower, she said, so the egg must’ve never made it out. I took comfort in the fact that Madhuri was on the tranquilisers and the capsules for most of the ordeal — I made the right call there.

I decided to bury her in the wedding dress. During the washing, her father, with a look of chagrin, brought the long-missing veil with him. He told me that he had found it stuffed into an old urn at the back of their house — about a year after the wedding. He didn’t say more than that, but I realised that it had never been stolen from the clothesline that morning. And that she had made up the story about those two girls who were pelting stones at the mango tree. Whether or not Madhuri put it there or it had been spirited there, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter now. I had reservations about attiring her body in the tarnished veil, especially since she had never worn it on the day itself. At the funeral, the few attendees had commented that she looked like a little girl in such an oversized dress and that I should have paid to have the dress adjusted for the cadaver. But what difference was it going to make? Soon, all would be ashes curling in the wind. I think she was happy in the little time we were together.

Curiously, I overheard my neighbour gossiping to another that Madhuri had been giggling and playing with the scorpion before it’d stung her.

Her father apologised to me at the cremation. He shaved his head. I didn’t — I knew it wouldn’t fully regrow if I did. That was the last time we spoke to each other about Madhuri. We began to acknowledge each other less and less at work until crossing paths did not even warrant a nod. About three months later, the supervisor informed me that he had suddenly transferred to another division. Some time after that, after several ignored warnings from Town and Country, half of his house had collapsed in a landslip in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, it was the half that housed the master bedroom.

A year after Madhuri’s death, I put out an ad in the personals asking for a humble woman looking for an easy marriage and a simple life. I was upfront about being a widower. Two women answered. I married one of them a year later. We have three children now, all boys. They don’t know their mother is my second wife. They don’t need to. I spent a month’s salary on her dress from Basara’s in Port of Spain. My father-in-law is a good man. When he comes over, he talks to me about cricket, though none of it holds interest for me. My wife invests a lot in time in our children and in her growing collection of ferns. She knits on Saturday mornings with the stereo on Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi. On Sundays we take drives up to Mount St. Benedict’s Abbey. She gives money to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and always buys from the lolly vendor when he pedals his cart into our street.

Every Monday she makes stewed chicken and eddoes for dinner and, at 9 p.m., we put on Silk Stalkings and make love. Sometimes twice. She has a red orhni that she likes to throw over her head while we do it. It’s curious but I never question it. And I realise when I had put out that personals ad, I should have added in “non-smoking”. Because after sex, she yearns for a cigarette. And it’s only Du Maurier for her, nothing else. I’ve begged her to stop, mostly saying it was bad for her health. But perhaps she will stop if I tell her it reminds me of Madhuri. She doesn’t like to hear about her — rightly so. But I realise that if it’s not the smell of cigarettes, then it’s a wedding dress, or it’s the rustle of leaves like those of the peepal tree she was found beside. I’ve come to accept that forgetting is futile. Besides, I suppose there is something good about looking back on those days I was with Madhuri. Because if I don’t remember her, who would?

FIVE POEMS

karen lee

Celeste

she fell

blaze

blasting faster than sound

past galaxies

sequins sprinkled across

sky   dressed in black satin for the occasion

when Celeste reached earth   her shawl

of cosmic gas slid off in Blue Mountains

stardust dazzled down   down   into open

mouth of country woman cooking provision

zinc-roof kitchen robed in sapphire plumes

Sister Mariam leaned her head back yawned

away day's hard wuk     yam   dumpling

& green banana plucked from her garden plot

bubbling big black pot

so fine   Celeste grains   Sister Mariam

failed to notice she inhaled silver crystals

til 10 months pass       planet crowned

between dust-spattered legs    covered

in blood the colour of fire

Celeste   sapped 12th planet

Sister Mariam would birth 16 before

she went outside while sky was crying

too  her lungs drowned   she slipped

away to find her five worlds

one planet   two sets of lost twins

helpmeet already left her & 16 planets

for Daisy   scoffed name flicked

off the tongue   a bitter seed

maybe Sister Mariam knew love

twin glass cups  sweet brass-coloured

mint tea sipped on cool verandah

laughter emptying sore lungs

creole within creole tongued to ruffled

lips winding her spine into S-shaped agony

this is possible

Celeste was born jinxed with familial pair

of hopeless lungs rumbling against

her portion

part water   part fire   shrouded in vapour

& smoke   she longed for her mother   map

-less ache echoing damp aural memory

she inherited not Sister Mariam's good

Indian hair but penchant for wandering

helpmeets with biblical names  husband's

meteoroids cratered her frail body

maybe Celeste enjoyed childhood abandon

first      mud puddles   palm-held frogs

racing barefoot wide emerald fields

hand-clap chants & in de ring

an a ru kum ku kum ku dash

an a ru kum ku kum kum dash

long before she learned to drown

out the inner rainfall

this too is possible

on this opaque Jamaican night

its heels staggering the high of kerosene

oil lamps   a galaxy of peeny wally beam their joy

Celeste bawn

Ask the Sea

I walk the way I sleep   float eggshells   afraid to noise   dream

I am choking too

Dad wakes me    Yuh madda sick

I call 911   Dad sleeps   Mom's lungs wheeze   vintage cars

Will she come home from the ER alive?

Why doesn't he die?

You ask me to tell you about my family

I tell you I don't talk about my family

snakes in my bed curl  uncurl   legs scissor wild   whimper

my turn to wake Dad now   he comes to my room again   tall

shadow grunts rough   Stop dih nize!  scares me to sleep

how can I?  long slithery sinting come in like snake inna di bedsheet

a frighten me   sleep is awake   I'm still learning how to sleep

You ask me to tell you about my family

I tell you I don't talk about my family

Brother and me pretend white electric man is the boogey-man

furniture store sign blinks night on   off    the biggest gum drop

in a black licorice sky   Boogey-man is magic   we dig out yellow

butter tub   spoon dark yellow like mild curry   eat

until oily slime clot up we belly   mek game outta no game

we don't ask why there is nothing else to snack on

I thought you were an only child

Mom cooks   fries red meat   thin pastel nightie   never asks

why di butta dig out so   no greeting   hug   kiss when di factory

hawk and spit Dad home   him nevah call mi madda name

to her face    only to other people    when him did drink di beer?

Start holla bout how she a cook di meat   beast    roars

locks elbow around sheep's neck from behind   pulls up   holds

long   sharp knife to her throat   she does not bleat   this knife

slices red meat   me run go dial 911   I'm five   gi di police

Aunt Dorinda name becaa dem ask fi a adult    Dad call her

Dor to her face and to odda people     by the time

Aunt Dorinda tru with the police   no arrest

no ambulance   nutten   a wha she say bout mi madda meat?

I don't remember eating   no one comforts   apologises

holds me    I do not speak the names of my feelings

I'm still learning how to eat   sleep

develop mental milestones

You ask me to tell you about my family

I tell you I don't talk about my family

we go to Jamaica every two years    visit messed-up parts

of our messed-up family   Mom thinks thick purple polyester

dress   white bobby socks black leather church shoes and plaits

are perfect   we dress to fly   disguise butter    knives

from dangerous strangers who share our blood and a beg

all skipping rope and bicycle

we whiz Molson factory   sail cotton candy clouds

Air Canada opens to furnace   polyester meets 33°C

bun mi yuh see?   I beg Dad a snow cone or ssssky juice

fi turn off di fiyah!!!   Mercy find me inna Kingston a slurp

pineapple sugar ice    juice of life    Dad puff out him chest

inna him church suit and tie   proud a him wicked self

country is kaleidoscope of ferocious black guard dawg scaling

the air for flying bwile dumpling   bloody headless chickens dancing

circles   lizards running   thin tails caught under brown juice

bottles in me and brother's hands    the same cooking smoke

weh tun Aunt Reba y'eye blue a dih same kinda smoke that blurs

my ten-year-old body pinned under her grown male son on a bed

in daylight view of everyone    I am spared    so is the cousin

machete   cutlass   maternal instinct    guard dawg    violent

uncle   violent Dad   outbwiled by big black pot of provision

Jamaica Sea    silver mirror dancing light   bounces teasing

supernatural blue waves     asks why I stare   invites me to

come in nuh?    She knows I can't leave the car     if I could

I would slide into her warm body    never come back     ever

again   we going back to di airport    back to Toronto

to another grown male cousin   but is just me one     trace

swirls of Sea   nuzzle my head in her fizzy palm   sweet

hand cups my stiff cheek    whispers   soothes

Sea sighs    my curious sad sleepless eyes shocked wide

You ask me to tell you about my family

I tell you I don't talk about my family

Blurt    orphan

I tell you this is my last earth life

You ask    Why?

I say     Ask the sea

dear Audre Lorde

love   is a word I should know by nowlove is lossis love freedom

back   grooves  lash  under blacklightmy body grievestaken when family was/n't looking &

on grade 8 graduation nightheart wound festers   shame gangrenesfirst fruits   mm  no   swish rotting jars

whip   buckle in my father's fistfrankincense acrid ache of bonewhat can numb this gutting?

strip gold medal   rip class speechrid love from dictionary of my skinpry grip on flowering  my   me    mine

after I say minethis gaunt bird decays alonemen hunt with bloodstained hands & teeth

the $50 prize isn't   after allin a bawl of green saltwaterI am starving

suffer the filthy children to come unto me

Ours was not the cult where the minister marries all the young women & teen girls & you can't tell the wives from the children in the congregation. In fact, I'm not sure he looked twice, with a wet eye on the second glance, at any woman other than his wife. Except when Sister Godfrey died — she died of sugar — pastor Godfrey married Sister Daley; an older widow. pastor Godfrey gets no points for keeping this holy house in order. The filth wasn't even shoved into corners with the backs of leather heels.

The filth purpled Sister Lewis right eye as she stood, both hands in the hands of her husband's, his still hot from the blow, as pastor godfrey renewed their unholy wedding vows.

The grime rode minister ricketts' leather belt as he whipped the choir of mostly children & teen girls. Right there on the pulpit during service, the story goes. I wasn't there that night. It never happened again but that's not the point.

minister ricketts' heels hit the floor. Hard footfalls on the long plastic runner; a percussive metre of brute power. He rushed to basement his son Daniel's neck in his left hand, as he whipped him with the leather belt in his right hand on the way down the aisle past the entire Sunday morning congregation. Again. Child screams curdled the air & the blood of Jesus from the basement   the crack of leather on severed skin  the roar of the minister's blame. Service sludged on as usual.

for I will receive them and fold them to my bosom

I'll be a Shepherd to those lambs, oh, drive them not away!

pastor godfrey, sister brady — a social worker who testified righteous that she wouldn't lie to protect children in the course of duty — all the women who could have damaged minister ricketts with their spike-heel shoes & the men who could have taken him down   silent. A shiny black rotary phone in pastor g's office gleamed   untouched.

Maybe this is what the flock thought Jesus meant when he said,

suffer the filthy children to come unto me.

tanka: God particle

cross Elder Brady

flicks lone dinner table crumb

callous guest upsets

tense axis risks mom's sickness

dad's rage my frayed child safety

THINGS THEY SAY

Caroline Mackenzie

Here’s how it happened to me. Firsts that led to forevers.

The first encounter

He was so goddamned fine. Tall, had that swagger, the beautiful hands that knew things — how to make your knees tremble and your eyes roll back in your head.

The first time I saw him, he’d already seen me, and he made sure I knew it. There’s a real skill to the Eye Fuck. When done right, it’s a bear trap.

He was charming, you know? Got me laughing. Had big ambitions, deep pockets, a dimple cut like an incision into his left cheek. A gentleman. Traditional: opening doors, paying the tab. “Put your money away, girl, the prince always treats the princess.” Did all the things they said a Real Man should.

When I told my mother, aunts, girlfriends’ moms about him, they said: Girl, he’s a catch. Big wuk, nice-looking. Do what you hadda do to keep that man, eh. And you not getting any younger. When you going to settle down, eh? I could practically hear your eggs sizzling up like they in a frying pan.

Keep. That. Man.

The first “I love you”

He said it after a few months. Around the time I’d noticed the minuscule freckle at the back of his ear, and the fact that his eyes had a honey-gold tinge if the sun hit the irises just right. Around the time he told me, “I don’t really want to go out and lime again. I rather stay home with you,” and I was weak with gratification. A man like this would rather stay home on the couch with me than go out with his boys. Naturally, the online ring-browsing had begun, the lace-and-champagne daydreams.

He told me he loved me just before he felt comfortable enough to admit, “I get really insecure when you go out without me. You looking for someone better or what?” To reassure him, I straddled his lap and kissed along his jaw, told him, “You mad or what? Who could be better than you?” I made an effort to stay home more. Why go out alone if it bothered him that much? Was it really worth hurting his feelings?

It wouldn’t be long then before the I-love-you. It came about the time I stopped seeing my friends so much, and then altogether, because soon he’d tell me they were too wild for him. “That’s not really my beat, babe.” He was my man, my potential life mate. Priorities, you know? My girls understood, they were caught up too. It happens, right? It’s called growing up.

They said: Chile, he right. What you doing gallivanting all over the place like you doh have a man? That kinda thing does only cause bacchanal. People like to talk too much. Best you keep yuh tail quiet. You lucky to ketch a man like that, you know. Ent you want to marry him? Well, keep yuh tail quiet.

The first outfit

He loved how I looked in pants, he said, choosing an outfit for me at an exclusive boutique I could never afford. Wide-legged trousers with a silk blouse. I crinkled my nose. “Pants? Since when?” I’d met him in a flesh-toned dress that fitted like an extra-snug condom. In fact, for most of our first dates I’d worn mini-dresses that were likely made from the same materials as your average Durex.

“He’s seeing you as wifey now,” my girls said when I told them about the demure outfit selection in WhatsApp group chats. “He wants to wife you up, woman! Soooo cute!”

I was getting older anyway. Late twenties. Come on. Enough miniskirts. And ditch the faux-platinum hair. Go natural. The false eyelashes a bit much, too. And the colourful nails. “It’s a kinda club-skank look you’re rocking,” he laughed. “Appealing, don’t get me wrong, but you’re not out in those clubs now anyway, with a set of man watching you, so why should you go around decked out like that any more?”

I packed up my club-skank gear and gave it to my single girlfriends, who squealed and said I was a fool. “But thanks for the free swag, bitch!” I was happy to hand it all over. He was right. I wasn’t clubbing any more. I was home, with him, building a life. Cuddling. Netflix bingeing. Tandem grocery-shopping. Living my #couplegoals life.

They said: He helping you mature, honey. No man looking to marry a loose girl. You never hear a man want a lady in the street and a whore in the sheets? Keep the tighty-tighty clothes for the bedroom. If he looking to dress you, is a good sign. He serious about you. That ring coming any day, sweetie-pie.

The first helping hand

“Your finances are kind of a mess,” he said, chuckling and ruffling my now dark-blonde hair. “Let me help you to get a handle on all of it.” And he had. The credit-card debt, the overdraft, the hand-to-mouth living. I was grateful to have a partner who was so savvy with money. We shared all of our passwords anyway: social media accounts, laptop, phone, email, Amazon. What difference did online banking make?

He kept a close eye, checked my statements daily, whipped my finances into shape. Told me when I was spending on crap, when to cut back.

“I’m taking over your cards, woman! You can’t be spending eight per cent of your earnings on Starbucks dates with your girls when you could just talk to them on the phone and drink your own coffee at home.” Honey-gold eyes crinkling at the corners as he grinned, shaking his head at this wild-child girlfriend of his, this crazy spender. I laughed and tossed him my wallet. “Please! Save me from myself!” He promised he would. He came up with a budget for my monthly spending, and to make sure I stuck to it, he’d give me the exact cash I needed every month, see to it that my credit-card bill was being paid on time, my phone bill too, my account never going into overdraft.

They said: That is exactly the kinda qualities you want in a man, chile. Assertive, take control, protective. That is how a man supposed to be: handle the family finances, make sure bread always on the table. Allyuh young girls like to feel you should be the ones making the money and doing everything, but that is allyuh biggest mistake. Because then you go end up doing every blasted thing in the house and making all the money, and the man feel like you doh need him again. Is emasculate him, take away his worth. Then he go do either one of two things: give up and let you mind him like a next chile, or he go find a next woman to make him feel like a real man.

The first death

His grandfather. They’d been close, weekly visits, monthly fishing trips, daily WhatsApps — one of those rare tech-savvy octogenarians. The stroke was a shock.

The morning of the funeral, fumbling with his tie, he said, “Granddad taught me how to tie a tie.” Honey-gold eyes wet and shining. A hard sniff, then he’d jutted out his jaw, steadied his hands and tied a perfect Windsor. I watched his Adam’s apple jumping, the wetness of his eyes. He’d only cried once since hearing the news, when the phone call came. He’d gone into the walk-in closet, pressed his palms into the wall, broad back hunched, and sobbed as I hugged him from behind.

In the church, he didn’t blink as he helped carry the gleaming coffin, though the clouds of incense must’ve been burning his eyes. His gaze seared into the altar at the head of the aisle. He was unshakeable and strong as a samaan, the epitome of dignified male suffering. When he came to stand beside me after, he squeezed my hand and only then did a single tear ease its way from the corner of one eye. I wouldn’t have even realised it had he not let go of my hand to brusquely brush it away.

Later, at the wake, among his brothers, uncles and father: “You woulda shame Gramps with all that boo-hooing at the Mass, boy.” An uncle jabbing him in the ribs. I hadn’t known, but he’d broken down just outside the church, before he and the other pallbearers had hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders, when he’d got his final glimpse of his waxy, now eerily unfamiliar grandfather. “Yeah, boy,” guffawed a cousin. “Like you wanted to bring Gramps back from the dead and give him a second stroke.” Good-natured jibing, imitations of girly melodramatic wails.

My face grew hot as I watched him trying to be a good sport, the colour rising in his cheeks. I went to his side, slipped an arm around him. “Actually,” I said. “It’s healthy to let out your emotions. If you keep in toxic negative emotions like sadness or anger, you’ll give yourself a tumour.” The men chuckled at my watery scolding and backed off. He stayed stiff beside me, staring into his glass, jaw muscles clenched.

At home that night, undressing, exhausted from the long, draining day, he approached me the way you would a man in a bar who’s just challenged you to a fight. I was startled, standing there half-dressed, as he stood inches from my face, nostrils flared, staring me down. “The next time you feel the urge to make me look like a complete pussy in front of everyone in my family, could you please control yourself?” It was an order, not a question. I blinked rapidly, flustered and confused.

“What? When did I make you —”

“You know exactly when. You don’t feel it was bad enough all of them seeing me cry like some batty man, then my girlfriend has to step in to stick up for me?”

We argued. He refused to concede his point. Furious, I went to bed and turned on my side, facing away from him. But just as I was dozing off, I felt his hand, rough and hungry for comfort, slide over my hip to cup between my legs.

They said: Well, you embarrass the man, of course he vex with you. What kind of hard-back man want a woman to step in and defend him, especially when he done embarrass himself bawling and carrying on at the church? You know what is the problem with allyuh generation? You feel man and woman is the same. Man and woman wired different — fact is fact! You shoulda leave the boy’s uncles and them to give him a little picong. What you want anyway, eh? A real man or some softy-softy who go cry every time he spill a drop of milk?

The first thing that broke

Not my collarbone, or my nose, or even my heart. Just a tiny figurine of a ballerina. My grandmother had given it to me for my sixteenth birthday, at the pinnacle of my ballet “career”, when all I could eat, breathe, and sleep was Tchaikovsky and pink satin ribbons, my toes forever bloodied and battered by pointe routines.

The ballerina was shattered one night after I’d gone for drinks at a friend’s house. They’d wanted to go out for dinner, then on to a club, but I’d persuaded them not to. “I’m trying to be good with money,” I said, because I couldn’t say he won’t give me money to go clubbing — even though it’s my money; I had no debt, I had savings, he wasn’t going to let me veer off my responsible track. Plus I had no clubbing gear, and I knew he’d never hand over my credit card to fund a shopping spree dedicated to bodycon and stilettos.

It was a great night, drinking wine and squealing over dick pics the still-single girls were getting, howling over details of the latest Tinder fail they’d ghosted, gossiping about who was waiting for a ring or about to move in together. I told them I was in love, so happy, that he was perfect, helping me to really grow up. I didn’t check my phone until midnight, when I saw all of his missed calls. I called back — no answer — and decided to call it a night.

When I got home, he gave me a once-over from where he sat on the couch, the flashing blue of the muted TV lighting up the taut, angry lines of his face. Immediately he pointed at my feet. “What’s that?”

I lifted my foot and looked. There was a wrapper stuck to the heel of my shoe. A square cellophane wrapper, torn from the top of a cigarette box. Except he said it could’ve been torn from the top of a condom box.

“Who was smoking there?” Holding it up to the light between his thumb and index figure. Exhibit A.

“Megan.” I felt cornered, panicking as though caught in a lie. Why? I hadn’t done anything wrong. A condom wrapper? Where would he even get that idea? “And Shanelle. I think maybe Anna too?”

“What brand of cigarette?”

“What? I don’t know! What’s the matter with you?”

And he’d smashed the ballerina.

Later: the apology. “I have a hard time trusting. An old girlfriend cheated on me once. She was a liar, and it made me insecure. Remember I told you I get insecure? You need to be mindful of that, babe. Don’t give me a reason to feel that way. You need to be careful with my feelings the same way I am with yours.”

And the make-up sex was so good, the apology so sincere, the vulnerability so endearing. “It’s okay, babe.” I’d soothed him. I’d made him feel better. I mean, it could’ve been a condom-box wrapper. It could look that way to anyone, especially someone who’d been traumatised by an ex.

I would be his safe space, he said. The woman he could trust. “The kind of woman I could marry.” Holding my left hand and kissing the ring finger.

They said: A man with a hot temper have plenty passion, that’s all. You know Trini men blood hot. And if he jealous, that only mean he love you bad and he don’t know how to handle that kinda big love. And ent he apologise about the ballerina? Ent he buy you back a next one?

The first time I was frightened

An old friend I hadn’t seen in years, Marc, came over to our table, where we were having our second-anniversary dinner. Marc and I had said effusive hellos and hugged before I made introductions. I kept standing while Marc and I chatted a while. He stayed sitting, swirling a Malbec in its glass.

Marc left. The mood had shifted. The air between us had a sour taste now. I tried to ignore it, to recapture the mood. “Wanna splurge on double-chocolate cheesecake and a Prosecco?” Biting my lip, fluttering my lashes, and squeezing his hand across the table. “It’s our anniversary, let’s go wild.”

“And who paying for that wildness?” 

I let go of his hand, crossed my arms over my chest. “Well, I’d like to if you’d give me my cards back for once.”

Mistake. He scraped his chair away from the table and left me there, the waitress’s eyes on me — everyone’s eyes on me after the tall handsome man made his dramatic exit, visibly enraged.

I had to chase after him, run along the promenade that led to the car park, calling for him to stop, we had to settle the bill. The waitress leaned out of the restaurant door, watching, shaking her head. She would’ve seen him reach into his pocket, pull out his wallet, and toss a fistful of hundreds over his shoulder, blue bills scattering across the promenade as I lunged and grabbed, scampering to gather them while passers-by pursed their lips with pity. A knot of passing boys hooted and laughed. “Yeah, boy, make she run for yuh money!”

In the car we didn’t speak, though I was quietly grateful he hadn’t left me there without a way home. I would be too embarrassed to call someone to come get me, to have to explain what had happened.

The two of us in his Porsche Cayenne, rigid in the supple cream leather. Silent, mutual simmering. Black wet tracks on my cheeks, snot on my upper lip. I didn’t know what to say. Anything would make it worse. Why bother?

“You stood there next to that prick like he was your man and I was some asshole third wheel. Like you had no respect for me whatsoever.”

“What are you talking about? Marc?” I even tried to laugh, it was that absurd. “I stood next to him for all of two minutes. He was telling us both about his new job.”

“Yeah, trying to score points while you stood there making fucking bedroom eyes at him, touching his arm every second, letting him get your panties wet for his big new finance gig. Prick.”

I slammed a hand against the dashboard. “I cannot believe you’re serious right now after that shit you just pulled with the money. You’re lucky I’m even in this car with you. And as for Marc, you’re being completely fucking paranoid.”

“Am I?” He reached across the seat and shoved his hand into the waistband of my pants.

“What are you doing?”

There was nowhere to go or squirm away. His long fingers, pianist’s fingers. Pushing into my underwear and driving themselves into me. He pulled his hand out, fingers glistening.

“You trying to tell me you weren’t fucking dripping over that prick?”

Later that night, after I’d showered and washed away the feeling that had been creeping over me, arachnid and nauseating, ever since he’d forced his hand into me, I installed myself on the couch and put on my show. Fuck him. Fuck season two of Narcos. Tonight it would be Emily in Paris. While Emily cavorted and stumbled over her French, I listened to the shower beating down hard, heard the shower curtain whipped back, then heavy footsteps on grey wood tile, Roomba darting out of the way. Skin jewelled with water droplets, towel around his waist, he grabbed me off the couch, shoved me into our bedroom, and locked me in. I hadn’t even known there was a key.

“Are you insane?” I hammered my fists against the door as his footsteps receded down the corridor. In the living room, I heard Emily’s chirpy chatter come to a halt. A beat and then the rapid-fire speech of Colombian drug lords, the rat-tat-tat of machine guns, the volume raised several notches. A thought arcing across my mind like a shooting star: Did he turn the volume up so no one will hear me screaming? Like that scene with the chainsaws in Scarface?

“Why are you doing this?” I yelled.

“It’s for your own fucking protection, trust me! And don’t ever put this gay Paris shit on my TV again, you hear me? If you want to live with some bullerman to watch that garbage with you, then get out my fucking apartment.”

He didn’t let me out till morning. The room stank of my piss in the wastepaper basket. He seemed not to notice the smell or the look on my face when he opened the door, offering a cup of coffee sprinkled with cinnamon, just how I like it.

They said: Oh Lawd, honey. These things happen. That eh nothing. I remember a time at a fête, Roger gone to the bar to get us drinks. When he come back, I was talking to my new boss at the office. Nice fella, married and thing. Well, Roger walk over, I introduce him, and Roger doh say a word: just drop the two drinks on my feet and gone. Shame I was shame! Broken glass all over my boss foot! A next time, he find the neighbour was only telling me “Good morning” too much. I tell him, “Rog, he does say it once a day — in the morning!” Well, Roger eh like that. “What a man going out of his way to tell my wife good morning for? He feel I doh tell you good morning?” The next time he hear that man telling me morning, he launch a empty Vat 19 over the wall and tell the man to keep his fucking good mornings. Fuss Caribbean man head hot! They eh easy, girl. And you done know a’ready your man have that jealous streak. And ent you say he a Scorpio? Lawd, worse yet. Have to tread careful. Doh take it on. It go blow over.

The first time I saw stars

There were other small firsts, of course, in addition to the “wetness checks” that became regular occurrences if he caught me looking at a man in a way he didn’t like.

The first time he grabbed my arm so tight it left marks.

The first time he pushed me away from him. Then pushed me into a wall, a table, the TV.

The first time he told me I was lucky to have a man like him tolerating me, that anyone else would toss me away like a used Kleenex for my slackness.

The first time he told me I was ugly.

The first time he cut my bank cards into little pieces.

The first time he told me how hard it had been to be with me at first, knowing that I was so notoriously slutty.

Too many little firsts to recount them all. But the first real blow? That’s a biggie. That one should be placed on record.

It was a Friday night and I didn’t want to have sex. I was tired. I just wanted to watch TV, then go to bed. He slid closer to me on the couch, pulled me onto his lap. I smiled, close-mouthed, knowing the signal of the hand moving hotly up the inside of my baggy T-shirt. The wet mouth on my earlobe, a hand tugging at my pyjama bottoms, slipping down to the cleft between my legs.

I let him kiss me. I tried to want it.

He could sense that I didn’t.

Jerking his head back, he scanned my face. I leaned in to kiss him again, not wanting the fight, preferring to just get through the sex, then get back to the show now on pause. But he pressed his palm into my cheek and pushed my face away, shoved me off him.

“Ay!” I glared. “What the hell?”

My eyes followed the back of him as he got up and strode away from the couch. The glistening gold chain at the nape of his thick neck, the muscled spread of his shoulders faintly lined with silver stretch marks from weight-lifting too young, so eager to grow into a big, hard, dangerous man, embarrassed at his classmates’ teasing that he was magga and weak like a little girl.

He went into the kitchen and I followed. I was angry. That’s what you don’t expect, you know: that you’re angry. Indignant. You still have your spunk. Maybe even a part of you wants the fight, because maybe this time you’ll win.

“You can’t just shove my face away like that. You’re my fiancé. You think that shit’s okay?”

Sounding spunky, sure, but worried now. The shoving, the grabbing, the wetness checks. These things weren’t normal. And now we were engaged. In fact, he’d proposed only days before, with a Tiffany-cut diamond, though I’d wanted an antique emerald. “You want people thinking I can’t afford to get you a proper diamond engagement ring? Like I’m some broke-ass loser?” I could’ve pointed out how little he obviously knew about gemstone pricing, but, as with that very night with the sex, and with so many other nights, the ensuing fight wouldn’t have been worth it. Let him think diamonds were always worth more than emeralds.

Oh yes, now that I was preparing to enter a legal contract binding me to him, the red flags were there, waving at me wildly like a frantic bullfighter trying to get my attention. But my brain kept latching onto the other things: the coffee he brought me in bed each morning. The way it felt to be spooned by his big, warm body at night. Every time he’d made me laugh. Every time he’d surprised me. Tickled me. Kissed me. Said he needed me. Loved me. Would always take care of me. The future we would have together.

Was I really going to start all over again after investing so much time? Was I going to let other women my age look at me with that pitying head tilt reserved for the un-betrothed?

I kept telling myself there was more good than bad. I was a strong woman. Educated! I just needed to put a stop to the bad. Assert myself more. Dominate. I wouldn’t be like my aunts and friends’ mothers who let that sort of shit slide, then laughed about it as though violence, cruelty, and humiliation were the usual ingredients for quirky anecdotes.

So I followed him into the kitchen, fists curled, chin lifted. Ready to take on the fight. “Well? You think you can just shove me off you like that?” I cut in front of him, pressing a hand to his chest to stop him in his tracks.

He sneered down at me. “I didn’t shove anything. Don’t be so fucking dramatic.”

He pushed a finger into my sternum so hard I stumbled backward, then he snatched at my left hand, holding it up to my eyeline, my fingers crushed together in his grip. “And you don’t find it’s a little strange for a woman who just got this on her finger to not want to fuck the man who put it there? Who spent a fucking fortune to put it there?”

I wrenched my reddened hand away, clutching it to my chest. “I’m just tired! What’s the big deal? We have sex almost every day. Most couples —”

“I’m not asking you about most couples.” He stepped closer to me, pulled me into him. “I want you every minute, every second. You don’t think it’s hurtful to me that the woman I want to be my wife isn’t attracted enough to me to want me the way I want her?”

He ran his hands over my body. My shoulders slumped with guilt. “It’s not that I don’t want you, babe. Of course I do. I just had a long day at work and . . .”

“And that’s why you’re quitting.” His mouth on my neck, nuzzling. “I want you cared for, provided for. You’re not marrying some pussy who needs you to pay his bills, you know. When you’re my wife, I provide.”

I felt the hardness of him, insistent against my lower belly. I fought the instinct to squirm. The job-quitting thing again. I didn’t want to quit my job and spend all day at home, cooking and cleaning, waiting to spread my legs after clearing up dinner. But it was the way his parents had done things: traditional. He wanted to follow his father’s example. I knew how much that meant to him. “Me and my brothers were raised to be the man of the house. You know how much it embarrasses my father that Leon doesn’t work at all? That he stays home minding those children like a little woman and lets Samantha go out in that big wuk every day? It was my father self who deleted Leon from the group chat with my brothers because he said is for the family men only.” How could I deny a man trying to care for me the only way he’d been taught? It would be insulting a whole way of life that he upheld as sacrosanct.

He was walking me back to the living room, toward the couch, his hands roving, tugging down my camisole straps.

Try, I told myself. You have to try. This man loves you, wants to marry you, take care of you. He’s a good man. He’s not like all the other scrubs your friends complain about and your aunts warn you about. You’re lucky you found someone to settle you when you were sleeping around and clubbing non-stop.

I let him undress me. I got to my knees, did exactly what he liked. But when he reached a hand down to touch me, well . . . there’s only so much well-intentioned faking a girl can do. When you’re not in the mood, you’re not in the mood.

His face, softened moments ago by fellatio, became ugly, hard. “So I’m forcing you, eh?”

“Babe, relax.” I straddled him on the couch, pushing my breasts up against him. “I just need a little time to get there. I want you.”

“So you some dry-up ole tantie now who takes ‘time to get there’, that’s what you telling me? Huh. That happen real quick between the day you get that ring and now.”

He pushed me off him and stood, then leaned over to plant a hand at either side of me on the couch. Lip curling, breath hot and animal. “Unless is some other man you saving your wet pussy for.”

“Jesus Christ.” I raked my hands through my hair. “Not this bullshit again.”

“Oh hor! Is bullshit, eh? Is bullshit?” His face was right up against mine, engorged with red blood. “So I’m a jackass. I’m just a stupid paranoid jackass. Funny, that’s the same thing Alicia said when she was taking a set of man wood on the side. That I was paranoid.”

“I am not Alicia,” I hissed. “Let it go. I love you, I would never do that to you. I wouldn’t take this ring from you and go sleep with some other man. I want to marry you.”

“So is only your dry-up pussy doh want to marry me, then.”

I slapped his face. Not the dramatic Hollywood slap-across-the-face. The messy, ineffectual slap of the uninitiated, of someone who’s never actually hit another person.

He slapped me back.

My first thought, dissociated consciousness sitting back and watching with emotionless, popcorn-crunching jaws: What you expect? You look for it. You slapped him first, he must slap you back.

No. That’s not right. A slap is with an open hand. He used a closed fist.

Before the pain and the taste of warm metal, I felt only one thing: wonder. I couldn’t believe that all those Looney Toons cartoons had been so accurate, when an anvil had been plonked on that unsuspecting coyote and he would sit there, dazed, stars swirling around his head. Whoever first drew that animation knew: when you get hit hard enough in the face, you do indeed see stars. Bright bursts across the blackness. Almost beautiful enough to make you forget how much it hurts.

The next morning: coffee in bed and an envelope with a freshly printed-out itinerary. “I know you love surprises,” he said, so gentle and apologetic, still not knowing what had come over him, because he’d never hit a woman before, and never would again. “You and me in Bonaire. What you think? Perfect honeymoon?”

They said: . . .

Nothing, because I didn’t tell anyone. I was engaged to this man. If I told anyone, I’d have to cancel the wedding. Everyone would ask why. Everyone would know. What would people think of me? I could fix this whole mess myself, anyway. Stand my ground. Set firm boundaries, like Google said.

No more firsts after that. Only seconds and thirds and forever-afters.

I never told but somehow they knew. That’s how it works in places like these. Small places stitched in on all sides by the sea, your space there made smaller by concentric circles of class, race, money, until you find yourself standing in that tiniest ring, only to discover it’s bordered by barbed wire.

They said: How she could let a man treat her so? Anyway, I not saying boo. What does go on between man and wife is their business. Is not for me or anybody else to push themself in people marriage. And they young, they head hot. Things go settle down. At least the man is a good provider. Ent she doh work again? Well, nothing free in this world, eh. Not that big diamond or that big house she livin’ in.

My mistake. There were still firsts to come. The first hospital visit, forms filled out claiming a tumble down the stairs. The first visit to the police station, the first time hearing: “Ma’am, you sure you want to make a report against the man who put that ring on your finger and have you driving around in that Benz? Sure you eh want to sleep on it?” The first blow in front of our first child. The first attempt to leave that came to nothing.

The firsts would go on forever.

They said: How that girl so stupid?

FIVE POEMS

Tanicia Pratt

black pepper

school day afternoon aan mummy is home early. takes off her jacket / turns on the kettle for some tea / opens the bedroom door only to witness your ripening. flat-chested aan pocking navel, you. wearing nothing but your round-collared blouse aan white daisy panties. she doesn’t notice the mischief of your plaid jumper / tossed in one corner of the room / only her six-year-old little girl. once angelic, now the souring fruit of Eve. your body, wriggling aan snake-like on your belly / as your fingers coil between your legs. dis da kinda nastiness you is be doin when ine here!? her shriek jolts you out of the sheets. the swing of her belt / whipping until what she feels are lust demons have been exorcised. beratement aan scripture muffled under the sound of lashes. come. get up! you cry as she yanks you into the kitchen. you wan be hot peppa? I gin show you what hot! she pulls out the McCormick / aan almost empty can of black pepper. get on the floor! you plead with her. clenching your thighs tightly as she works to pry them apart. this is what happens I guess. the pepper, a handed-down proverb to curb the fire your daughter will one day grow. for what is pleasure but a thing to be given aan taken in marriage. you plead with her, as you always do. the kettle a screaming gust of heat on the stove,

no, mummy please!

Ine gin do it again!

no! no please! please don’t!

Ine gin touch myself nomore!

I gin behave!

I promise, I gin be good . . .

Snake I

The man I once loved

called me a snake. I cooked

his breakfast clipped his nails.

Rubbed his feet caressed his

beard. Massaged his back

ironed his clothes an ocean

crisp. Saw his deeds stapled

my lips. Kept his secrets dear

despite implosion. It was a

warm night when he said this

it was a warm summer night.

The threat of doom above our

heads. It was a warm summer

night we sat across from each

other. Around others. Coiled

into himself watching me sip.

Venom on his tongue scolded

me thin. The man said he loved

me but didn’t really love me. If I

know of men well which I know

or, I think I know — the man

that I love or loved would not

call me out my name.

Snake. Biblical shame. Head

of Medusa. Cursed to slither

aan shed. Stoned and make

stone of. I am the cold slippery

thing gliding from garden to

garden. What then halts the

man I once loved from calling

me something else — folkloric

maybe. Like the gaulin or

banshee? What excuses him

from taking any mercies?

To release his grip from the

cutlass? From chapping me

down to a million pieces? It

was a warm summer night

as the man I once loved spat

those cold-blooded words in

my face. Fear, shame, anger all

dissolving in the evening dew.

man like woman on ha knees

after Tanya Shirley

the angle of it:

forehead, wide aan wet

protruding from pyramid

chin. cabbage-patched

eyes, alien aan pregnant

with need.

man like a hungry gal.

belly stay open. ravenous aan ready.

like vulture. gal who could clean

him better than leftover plate

on Boxing Day. always dreaming up

ways he could exist. anywhere

outside heself.

nuttin more he like

than a woman who know

her place. still. knows

she should be seen

aan never heard.

men like a thirsty bitch,

gals that doan talk

when they mouth full

love woman:

hands pinned

lips zipped

cock

stiff.

Snake Series II

Christmas Nassau 1999. The

carnival was what it no longer

is. R. M. Bailey Park. A seafoam

of red aan white tents floating

over a matted green shore. An

amalgam of lights in many

colours. Ferris wheel carousels

aan sugary apples on display. I

was with someone I was sure

I was not sure who I was with.

A crowded tent in front of me

parted its skin. I walked under

the yellowing light. A little

girl hiding behind trees of tall

limbs. They are all looking at

the woman. Snake-Woman.

Her tail for legs. Her gold eyes

aan riven tongue. Powdered aan

jewelled. Scales an iridescent

armour. They are all looking

at the woman. Abhorred wives

aan drunk men. Scared little

boys aan dazed little girls. A

man amongst the crowd jeers,

ay miss, you still have ya cunny?

I am unhomed in my skin.

The mirror reflects to me the

woman I thought I was the

woman I never was. Hand on

waist I pinch at the islets of dry

skin waiting for each patch to

fall. Scrubbing aan scrubbing

desperately sloughing away.

Junkanoo Mornin

get up

run.

get up gal!

gal, run!

is afta 5 [a.m.]

anytime, any circumstance

you een hear the alarm aye?

your body knows how

hurry.

hurry so we could catch da last leg

wait for no one

you een wan miss Valley and Saxons

to come and save you

is a good ting we live close (to Bay Street)

no neighbour. no official (in Parliament)

we could just

will rescue you. no one

get onta Bailou Hill road

will mind your business

parkin is be hard to find. is be so much people

amidst the heat of this climate. there is so much violence

don't iron no shirt!

when you scream

if we leave na, we gin still have time

they will think it’s a whistle

it still quiet so da big band een reach.

if you blow a whistle

when dey reach

aan she blows

all ya could hear is drum

aan we blow

drum

then

aan whistle.

it’s Junkanoo.

GUAVINA DEATH FRENZY

Dwight Thompson

I COVER the bust, lock up shop and leave, listening to tree frogs laughing at the twilight and nesting in the throat of the flaming torch’s bright pink leaves. Every time me slippers crush the wild mint it release a come-hither perfume from the footpath; but I’m anticipating the smell of Dettol later when I scrub me hands clean of your puke. You keep throwing up everything you eat since the last surgery. And you had that same Dettol smell when me first see you in the hospital ten months ago, that nauseating reek like a bitter aftertaste in me throat, an indissoluble memory: your torso and face wrapped in gleaming white, only your eyes peeping out. Now whenever I see those plaques and photos, those humanitarian commendations, I feel like tearing them down and burning the house. Meritorious service, for what? Where is the recognition for my dedication? Come back from the devil knows where in a medevac plane, with what’s left of you strapped in a stretcher. For what, I ask again — because you get up one morning hot hot and decide you want to save the world, after failing to save your own flesh and blood? Maybe you wanted to prove something to yourself, or to me. That life goes on. Well, seet deh. You get what you was looking for. I don’t have to say it. You see it every morning you wake up. These Maroons have a saying: Anansi web burn widout flame, so de werl neva see him sufferin. But who set the fire in the first place? One thing I know: I through suffering in silence.

You lying again in the dark room. But I swear I double-check the automatic light sensor before leaving this afternoon? The last time you try to flip the switch you drop and scratch your cornea, then get mad at me, like I should childproof the whole damn house. When I ignore your tantrum, yuh soil yourself on purpose, just to get even. But wait. Next time I go leave you in your own filth. Let’s see how you like it then. I open the back door and turn on the kitchen light; I see the room door ajar, gaping like a tomb, welcoming me back to a living death. I hear that low tapping you making on the headboard with your forehead. You must be hungry, poor thing. I hurry down the passage. “I’m coming, T. You hungry, love?” Switching on the lamp, I sit down on the bed. “Sorry, I lost track of time. I go make your supper now.” You gesture for the electrolarynx. I strap it to your neck.

“How the sculpture coming?”

“Good, T, I’m making headway bit by bit. Is a funny thing, I feel like it trying to speak to me, but I have to coax it.”

You watch me let me hair down, your eyes glinting, then speak again, your voice grating like a buzzsaw: “It’s good you have something.”

“Something, Trevor?”

“To take your mind off him.”

“That’s enough talking. Save your strength. You must be famished.” You think I ignoring you, but I ain’t strong enough for that discussion now, and you’re not going to force me to have it. The shockwave left you partly deaf. And you have no voice box left after the second surgery. But sometimes I still speak to you because you read lips well. And you say it soothe you to see me lips moving, to see me smiling again. I wrap you in the blue night robe and heave you up. “Lawks, Trevor, you ain’t eating much but you heavy like lead.” Your breath rank in me face. I forgot to brush your teeth after lunch.

Inside the kitchen, I prop you in the chair. “I pick some mint, see, I remember how much you like it before bed.”

“I hate mint tea. He or she was the one who like it.”

Even through the goddamn machine I hear your scratchy voice dripping with scorn. On the radio, Mighty Diamonds crooning — pleading like ill-starred angels, “I need a roof over my head . . .” Where was the roof for my child in this godforsaken world? Not even in him own house!

When I look in the mirror I see breasts there and I scream out and crumble with sobs, hands over me chest though nothing’s there.

“Marco! What’s wrong?”

“Mummy . . . look in the mirror, yuh see what I see?”

“See what, son . . . ?” She crying now.

“Yuh damn well know . . . yuh just as fucked up as me!”

“Grace!”

“Marco, why yuh keep sneaking to the window and trowing yuh food onto the roof? The cat and birds having a racket up there.”

“They dancing on me grave, Mummy.”

“Boy, why dis sudden eating problem?”

“Sudden? Sudden?” I ask her twice till she have to look away from me. I need a roof!

“Grace . . . ! Hello . . . you listening?”

“Oh . . . sorry, Trevor. Just got distracted. I go fix some Stamp and Go, ok. It too late for big cooking.”

You shove the table with your broad chest, your cheeks puffed out.

“Is what the problem now?”

“Stamp and Go again?”

I steups and scribble on the notepad I keep handy: “But you know heavy foods churn your stomach!” I try to touch you and you pull away. When I grip your chin and jerk your face around, I see tears in your eyes. “Man! How you go lose your temper over a trivial thing like this? Stop acting like a spoiled child!” I sit down to eat. Spoon by spoon I feed you. This is the part I can never get used to: his absence from the table. And seeing you like this. Your whole face so badly burned it look like a mass of putty. I have to look closely to recognise the man I marry. Your left ear entirely gone, those cauliflower ears you always so proud of, a wrestler’s mark of dignity. In all your misshapen face, only your two bright round eyes have unspoiled life, those stubborn eyes of yours. Just now they glaring at me. “You want to say something?”

You bring the words out slowly, all the veins bulging on your forehead, “Tired of me?”

I laugh and get up, clearing the dishes. “It’s late, Trevor. We’ll skip your bath tonight.”

“Grace, can’t we even —”

I click off the electrolarynx. You fuming like I steal your soul. “How does it feel now, eh? All those years you spent talking over us.” You start making a ruckus in the chair, as if you want to tip it over. I slam my hand on the counter. “Quiet! You ungrateful shit! Is what you trying to do, test me faith? Keep it up and see what you get tonight.” After the outburst you quiet, your eyes bright with aggression. But I staring back and not seeing you. For once, I looking at you and not seeing the ruins of what’s left but the creation of what’s to come. A surge of sympathy, cool like the smell of the wet season coming, wash over me, I dry me hands and hug and kiss you. “Trevor . . . I sorry.” You crying silently in me sleeve. I can feel the forearms you don’t have any more trying to embrace me. I feel the erection bulging ’gainst me. I smother your twisted mouth with kisses, can see the pleasure rising in the twisted smooth flesh of your face. You kiss me back with such passion you can barely breathe. I close me eyes to forget your ugliness. “Come, le’ we go to bed.” I suck you off and gently force you to finish in me mouth, then wait till you sleeping to steal away, ease open the lock and head back over the slope through fog pouring from the canopy, hungry for my own release.

“Did the Asofo colonel give yuh a reading?”

“He brought me into a tent, Mummy, and we sat over a calabash bowl fulla water. He spat in it and waited for the surface to settle. He said when he looked in the water he saw his enemy coming. A nature-killer. That’s why he walks everywhere with that obeah post for sacrifices, setting it up like a pedlar’s stall, waiting to make magic. To save his land, his people.”

“I saw him strap a hen to that enchanted pylon once and burn it alive . . . so cruel. I still can hear the squawks inside me head . . . smell the burning feathers . . . ugh!”

“You misunderstand, Mummy. The burning chicken was a renewal of life . . . from ashes. Sometimes I wonder . . . can one die without ceasing to exist?”

“What did you see in the water when you spat?”

“I saw Her . . . the real me. But I saw my enemy too. Him. Mums
. . . if Daddy didn’t want me, why did he marry you?”

“Marco, that’s not your place to question our marriage. I wish I’d never heard those words from you.”

“Sorry, Mums . . . that pole the Asofo colonel walks with . . . reminds me of you. Making new life outta wood. Trying to . . .”

What I really trying to create with this bust? I probably don’t want the answer yet because when it’s all over, what I have left? I don’t have a life without him. And all I have is misery waiting for me in that house. This block of wood seem to understand that. So it drawing out time too. I take up the mallet and chisel, find the direction of the grain and begin to carve again. I work till me arms ache and me fingers grow stiff. It’s three in the morning. I hear rain taking its time to find the forest, the first pellets hitting the windows like indignant pebbles. Heading back down the slope, I pass some of the old coal-burners already on their way to work. Sometimes on their way back midmorning, they stop by the house, so I always keep a pot of coffee warm on the stove. Something in the way their bodies so deformed from carrying coal sacks remind me of Marco. Is a funny thing, I feel alive more than ever, like I living his pain. But I can’t work any longer, I know when the body and mind close shop. Still I have this restlessness I don’t know how to spend, still full of this unquenched vigour.

I cross the passage, open the door and lie down. I can tell by your breathing you not sleeping, I know you keep track of how long I stay away from you. I don’t care. You wondering if I cheating? Maybe the thought has crossed your mind. You used to take so much pride in your manhood, and what it means to be a man. I reach my hand over your belly. You try to roll away. I jerk you back to me and reach for your cock. “Trevor, you can have me.” You groan and toss your head. I lean over and force my caresses on you. “What you goin’ to do, eh, deny your wife? Bawl for rape?” I see your eyes wide, scared, but I keep stirring your feelings, forcing you to feel something, anything towards me. I don’t care if it’s hate. “Why when I want it I can’t get it, hmm?” I pin your torso in place, still trying to quench that insatiable feeling. It’s only when you grunt into the pillow, I realise I hurting you. But I can’t stop. You owe it to me, Trevor, for all you put me through. Look at what you did to Marco! What you done gone and do to yourself — look at you! Which woman on god green earth would put up with this! Your eyes shut, as if fighting to hold back something from me. You think is pleasure I want from you? You think I enjoying this? You took everything from me! When I finish and look at you, your eyes wide open, gazing at the ceiling. I fall asleep to thunder steamrolling the roof. I see men in boats again, with sonar equipment, searching for something below Martha Brae’s moss-green depths. They haul a black bag ashore. “Christ!” I jump outta me sleep with a gasp. Three nights now I dream almost the same thing. One night I looking down a brown slippery length of wiss-wiss in me hands, tied to the half-submerged bag. But I can’t tell if I lowering or pulling it up. You lying still, staring at the same spot in the ceiling, taking no notice of me. I want to tell you sorry. With a shudder I ask myself: what exactly just happen? Is like I go through a death frenzy like a guavina. You remember whenever we catch them by Harmony Cove, we had to beat the life outta them, else it would upset Marco? And it always fill we with shame, and we would eat them in silence?

The last time we catch one, him tell you, “Daddy, is either you stun it or throw it back, please. I can’t stand to watch that death frenzy any more. It’s been asphyxiating almost an hour now.” He was such a caring child, so sensitive, had his heart set on being a conservationist, but he couldn’t tell you. I remember the arguments you would have in this same house.

“Deforestation? It would be good for us to start burning more,” you’d taunt, “and if there’s a market why not sell it abroad? It’s our land.”

“It’s utter carnage, Daddy, if we don’t stop we’ll be on the same trajectory as Haiti. Charcoal burning in this forest is just not sustainable any more. And what about the Wild Pine Sergeant, the Eyespot Pawli?”

But it was only another reason for you to hate him. You saw it as a betrayal of his people. I look at you intently, like a child looking at a bruck-up dolly. I know something dark running through your head. But all a man like you have left is his thoughts, nothing else. You should thank me I allow you to feel anything at all — even pain. Without my stimulation, you’re just a lump of flesh. The dark impulse swells in me chest. That woman’s tongue knocking ’gainst the windowpane again. I go have to call one of the coal mongers to cut it down.

Two servants bear the enchanted pylon while the Asofo colonel walks round — lips flattened under his nose, flapping his tongue, making guttural gobbles like a ram goat — deciding where to plant it. He stoops. A fly lands on his rheumy eyelid, stays there as if laying eggs in his tears. Finally he screams, “Cobwebs cover the god’s ears, blood blinds his eyes, the bird is upside down in the sky! Falling as if it’s forgot how to fly!” He burns me with his mind like he did the chicken. The gods finally answer. He stands — drives the obeah pole into dirt. From out the bush a dog runs backwards and lies at his feet, its ear dripping maggots. Everybody gasp. But the colonel waits, like an altar call preacher, for another sacrifice to heal the land.

When I start forward, Daddy grab me arm. “Don’t embarrass me!”

But how can I tell him that when the colonel drove his pylon into the ground I felt it in me womb, like penetrated soil? I pull free, walk backwards too, shedding me white clothes piece by piece like maggots, not minding Mummy’s shrieks or the Maroons’ ululations.

Smiling, the colonel stands me in the giant anthill and beats me in the head till I go down in it, then starts the fire. Smoke. Screams . . . Fire . . . Yelps. Help!

“Get him out! This is madness!” Mummy scream.

Daddy, yuh grab the Maroon plait on your head that you’ve never cut since you were a boy growing in this rainforest, slowly knotting it, twisting it round your finger. But I know yuh not recalling your upbringing, yuh wishing you were twisting me neck.

Ants and fire eating me alive in this dry river. I become earth’s wide open pulsing wound.

“— Not all clouds bring rain,” shouts the dancing colonel, “but all tears bring recognition!”

And I bawling, bwoy — but not for physical pain. I don’t even realise I’m naked in the anthill. Mummy trow herself on the ground, begging for my release, like she finally understanding my suffering. Daddy crying too, but more outta embarrassment, shame. Maroon men strong-arming him. He threatening to kill them — his brothers — to kill me, “Yuh fucking abomination! Get outta there, Marco!”

So the colonel lift me out, prematurely. I wobble like a deform calf. The colonel beat me shoulders with the cow-tail fetish: “Trees laugh at him, the earth dries up under his feet and takes his toes with it yet still he walks, guided by wind and dust. Eyes without bodies watch him. So do shadow and bees. Bees have eyes too. For watching. But they’re not watchdogs!”

Still feeling the anthill magic firing me blood, I hobble past yuh, Daddy — look through you. You’re confused. Words wash through your brain, images. I never die properly in the anthill. I keep seeing withered breasts without their body. The body that was to be mine. The body you’d deny me even if yuh have to kill me — cause I see murder in your eyes. “Untether me!” I bark. Spitting into Mummy’s eyes like I spat in the calabash. Like Jesus spitting in the blind man’s eyes.

In the morning, remembering how I manhandled you the night before, I apologise.

You reply: “Is not me you want to hurt, Grace. I can’t give you what you looking for. No matter how much you abuse me it won’t bring him back.” I ignore you. The way you use words these days, it make it hard to answer with anything less than self-assessment. But am I afraid to look deep inside? Maybe that’s why I’m so committed to this sculpture. After lunch, I ask you if you want to come to the studio, instead of being cooped up in the house. You say no. I kiss your head.

“Promise you won’t do anything crazy while I’m gone?”

You half-smile: “Why don’t you strap me in headgear, coach?”

I open my mouth to tell you ’bout the latest dream but can’t find the words. “Bye, Trevor.”

Outside the rain has stopped, and smoke rising from distant zinc-covered coal pits to smudge the green mountains white. Inside the studio, I decide to talk. And if it feel like it, maybe it can talk back. But I won’t force it. I palm the gouge and resume shaping the straining, rippling muscles of the forearms, the heaving chest. You’d never say it, Trevor, yet I feel your jealousy with every strike of the mallet. I sense that with every detail I carve — the dilated pupils, the flaring nostrils, the curled fingers — I’m replenishing your hate towards whatever pulling my attention away from you. But I just can’t stand the heavy absence in that house. I run my hand over the rough exterior — I can feel it trying to speak now, to scream, but no sound coming out of its throat. I felt the same way too when the doctor turn up the white sheet and said, “Now, Mrs Williams, try to be brave.” I tried clasping my husband’s hands — but could find no arms. Then discover that his legs were also missing. I lost my voice. I was looking at a mummy, not a man. I couldn’t even speak to him, or look him in the eye. It was only after the nurses led me to another room that I collapsed in a chair and bawled till me tear-cups dry. “It was a real miracle,” the doctor said. “And he’s a true champ — a battler. Of course it’s also down to emergency surgery he had over there and what we did for him.” But when I heard the word “miracle” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could anyone take professional pride in paring down another human being to a plaster bust, so him can’t bear to look at himself in the mirror any more? Dead inside. Cold like this block of wood. That thing I brought home from the hospital is not my husband. I know it the minute I lay down beside him and felt him struggling to pull away from me. I could only come here for company, while everybody hanging encouragement round me neck. But yes yes neva carry man ova mountain. So I carving truth into you. Maybe now yuh understand how it feel, Trevor. After all, what them doctors did to you ain’t that much different from what you did to Marco.

The drumming of a gumbe break me thoughts. Through the window I see Maroon men, wrapped in green vines, singing in Kromanti, “Suma waka wid yu kom ya.” And the Asofo colonel, wearing a vine necklace of five bredda bush, sprinkle the abeng with white rum before blowing it, signalling the start of a Dead March. The music has a disturbing emotional undertone that reeks of home, home and mirrors the demons in my head. “Serenity”, that was the word you used when we decided to buy this second property, away from Montego Bay. You said this could be our sanctuary. You liked to watch me sculpting by the window, said you liked the beauty of my concentration. We would go for long walks to find the perfect piece of wood, and you told me stories of how areas of the rainforest got named: Quick Step; Barbecue Bottom Road; the Land of Look Behind. But it wasn’t enough. The therapist say your decision is called avoidance, a PTSD symptom. That you trying to avoid anything that reminds you of the trauma of losing Marco. But so far, Trevor? Yes, maybe we needed distance. But I felt like you running to somewhere you didn’t belong, taking up a cause too late to compensate for never saving your own child. As I close the window, I see women wail and scramble towards the coffin, rattling teeth bracelets and dancing myal to the freshly prepared grave. You ever wonder why him chose to hang himself naked? Maybe to force you to see him as him truly was: no more or less of a Maroon or human than you are, even if you would never accept him.

I get home bone-tired. When I hear you tapping in the house, it turn me stomach. I don’t even care that the light sensor malfunctioning again. I don’t even care that you didn’t eat. A part of me wish you would starve to death. When I roll you over, the smell of stale urine fill the room. I open the screen door to let in the woodsmoke-scented breeze and high-pitched chatter of women cooking outdoors and mongrels barking. The whole time I washing your hair yuh quiet, brooding like a wounded mutt. You think I fraida your hurt pride? You think that’s what the silence between us is about? I mouth the words slowly so you can read me lips. “There’s a ghost in this house, Trevor. The ghost of your dead child. You think you could escape it by flying all the way to Southeast Asia with your fancy NGO? Sweeping old war zones for landmines? The ghost took your arms and legs, so you can’t run away any more, forcing you to look in his eyes.” That night in bed, your rigid body make the room tense. This time there’s no men in boats with sonar, no search party. I’m the one toting the wet shiny bag; whatever’s inside it is wiggling, trying to get out. But I can’t bear to look at it. So I grab the priest and start beating it. I can’t even stop myself when I’m wide awake. Startled by the violence, you’re trembling, biting your lip and bucking your hips. But it’s like I’m looking out at myself from somewhere I can’t control, like a caged animal, or a ghost in a bad dream. I’m shaking your shoulders furiously, till we both roll off the bed.

In the morning during breakfast, you ask, “Why so angry lately? What’s got into you?”

“Just a bad dream.”

“Again?”

I put down the coffee mug and sigh.

“Want to talk about it?”

“I keep seeing these men in boats, searching for something. And there’s a bag.”

“A bag?”

“Yes, and something’s moving inside it.”

“What?”

I write: “I don’t know. It’s as if I’m afraid to face it, as if I’d rather kill it than admit I’m complicit in the shame of a compromised existence.”

“A mercy killing. There’s always redemption in a dignified death.”

I look in your face, former national champion, Pan American silver medallist and Olympic hopeful, always so sure of your fucking self. “But we’re not talking ’bout fish here, are we?”

“It’s your dream. You decide.”

“And what about those who died without dignity, and weren’t allowed to live with any?”

You glaring like I slap you when you read the note.

I push my face close to yours. “I never stood up for him.”

You open your mouth, then swallow your words.

“The sculpture’s finished. I’ll bring it home lunchtime. Thanks for the chat.”

When I remove the shroud, both of us look on a long time: it is the image of a man, his face tortured, his mouth open as if in an agonised scream, and his hands raised over his face as if struggling to push a great weight off of him.

“I call it the Wrestler. What you think?”

“No, Grace, he’s not wrestling this time . . . he’s thrashing about in his coffin, suffocating, screaming to get out.”

You ask me to take you back into the house. Now whenever you sit at the table, you can barely eat.

In the latest dream we’re struggling, I finally gain the upper hand and force the wet zipper down, but the face melts back into darkness, and I can feel sound shifting from one ear to the next, like a delayed effect of something falling. The pitcher crash to the floor, jolting me out of sleep. “Trevor?” I race to the kitchen. The tears welling from your eyes and trailing down your nose, you can barely balance yourself over it, it’s like both of you wrestling again, the way you used to after school, practising moves in the garage. Even as we sat there in the gym cheering him on, you must have known. That even after pushing through the pain of a separated shoulder and X-rays and painkillers, just to please you, his heart was never in it. You pushed him too hard, Trevor, and never listened to him. And when you discovered by accident who he truly was — when you catch him researching gender reassignment surgery, when you realise him feel trapped inside him own body — you couldn’t accept it.

You saying over and over in that harsh artificial voice, “Forgive me,” as if the bust can understand it.

I kneel down and pull you away. You sobbing like a baby. I run my fingers down your shoulder blade, the way I used to when the pain after practice, or fighting school bullies calling him gym queen and battyman and Mary made it too difficult for him to sleep. It’s as if I’m dying gently, as if I’m inside him momentarily. Dead or alive, Mummy, I’m leaving this house. Daddy won’t have to make good on his threat. He won’t have to buss me lip or bloody me eye any more. I won’t have to lose another tooth. I speak to you slowly. “Trevor, you remember what you said on our first date? ‘You have a really pretty mouth, Grace . . . I want to marry you so I can keep it.’ But I was afraid, Trevor, you were so assertive, in that Maroon way. I was sure in another life you’d been an African chief. But was I a worthy wife? I felt like living with a man like you would be an endless chore of self-effacement, that after you had the mouth, maybe the smile wouldn’t please you any more, neither the kisses. Then maybe you’ll start abusing it with bites, then your fist. But it never came to that. Then we had a son or daughter. Who cares? But now we have nothing.”

“I sorry, Grace.”

“You helped them take him away from me, Trevor.”

“I was tryin’ to die, Grace! Walkin’ through that minefield was like walkin’ on a hot bed of coals! I was tryin’ to mortify the
flesh . . . ”

“I know . . .”

“I was tryin’ to seal me own death — cause I don’t want me own life any more. I don’t deserve it!”

“Atonement isn’t walking on a bed of hot coals, Trevor. It’s changing the behaviour that caused the damage in the first place. Come, sleep it off. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“No, Grace. I won’t. And those dreams won’t stop till there’s a reckoning. We have to close the account, Grace. Look at how Marco force himself back in our lives — into this house.”

Tonight we’re all in the boat, a family again. Marco’s sore bloodied hands are thumping the wood, he’s almost there, and I won’t lose him again. Finally, he breaks out. “Baby, you want a sandwich? You want to help Daddy with the hooks?” He says something, but it’s not words that pour from his lips, but spit-up like a newborn. I look at you; you’re grimacing with a foul coldness.

“It’s too late, Grace . . . too late to save him from himself . . . look at him, with puke pouring out his face. He’s a nasty reprobate, a disgrace.”

I follow the line of your head, thirstily looking down Martha Brae’s bosom, wishing your own child dead. From somewhere on the muddy shore I hear a spindalis singing, soaring to the top of the prop-roots of the red mangrove. Free. Free.

“You have to choose, Grace, me or Mary.”

“ . . . Else there’ll be no peace in this house, or in this body,” I wake up saying. I look at the clock. 4:33 a.m. You fast asleep. I stagger out into the semi-gloom barefooted, listening to swallows swooping from their shelter in the limestone caverns of the Cockpit Country, warbling their watery-sounding song, while the sculpture rustling through the thick undergrowth of ferns in the footpath. I’m dragging it like the Asofo colonel’s enchanted pylon, searching for a place — a home. I give it a last embrace, but it hang on so tight I have to heave its whole body to get it over the studio’s threshold. I can’t part with it. So I trudge back to the cottage and lug it all the way to the foot of the bed, feeling like I don’t belong in this house any more, or anywhere else, uncomfortable in my own skin, defenceless, while you lying there wrapped in a blanket of deaf soundless sleep. Spit in me eyes, I praying. One last time. What was it Marco always grinned and said, whenever I got so mad with you, Trevor, I couldn’t speak? Mummy, pretend you’re doin’ a chest X-ray, take a deep breath and hold it. Now close your eyes. Somewhere in my head, my palm is resting on cool sweating limestone, but the air is so acrid with the guano of ghost-faced bats I can’t breathe. I hear an echo in the dank darkness, full of distress like the woman’s tongue knocking on the window, begging not to be cut down — “Baby, is that you?” — asking a question whose answer is its own cruelty.

“What’s outside this cave, Mummy?”

“Mary, outside the world is waiting for you.”

AFTERWORD

Cherie Jones

Over three decades ago, a young girl read The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) by Roger Mais, for the very first time. My recollection of that first reading is that its impact was profound on my younger self, not only because of the fact that it detailed gender-based conflict and violence in the Caribbean in a way that I immediately recognised, but because of how disturbed I was by the representations of violence against the female characters in that book. The Hills Were Joyful Together became one of the books that I repeatedly returned to over the years, and I marvelled, with each new reading by older and perhaps wiser selves, at how my engagement with the book’s thematic attention to gender-based violence (GBV) increased, even while its representations of that violence sat uneasily with me. One of the things with which I wrestled, after experiencing intimate-partner violence myself, was the very graphic depiction of the murder of one of the female characters in the novel. While I could not dispute the authenticity of that account, and its reflection of the lived experience of too many Caribbean women, I, as a writer addressing issues of GBV and conflict in my own writing by that time, resolved to write differently about and against it.

In literary discourse about gender-based violence in the Caribbean, Caribbean writers have long told it like it is. The work of older generations of writers, including V.S. Naipaul, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Sylvia Wynter, Beryl Gilroy, and Roger Mais, has addressed the scourge of violence against women in the Caribbean and its diaspora primarily in an expository way — presenting the reality of this problem in narratives that reflect the lived experience of many, and perhaps going further to represent violence in ways that question its relevance in our society as a feature of gender-based conflict.

If, however, as bell hooks asserted, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible,” then our contribution to the discourse on GBV requires of us writers
. . . more.¹ Academics like Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef have advocated for narratives which evidence discernible attempts to write against GBV and have called for the further movement of narratives about violence into an imagining of alternative realities for victims of violence and the promise of a society without it.²

Audre Lorde asserted that it is not possible to deconstruct “the master’s systems” using the “master’s tools” and thereby endorsed the utilisation of innovative poetics, including language and form outside of classical traditions and ideals, in narratives which aim to identify and destroy some of the systems underpinning patriarchy to effect social transformation.³ Kamau Brathwaite made a similar call for the decolonisation of language in the construction of post-colonial narratives which seek to influence and build identity outside of colonial norms.⁴

Unstitching Silence answers both calls — it reflects and decries the reality of gender-based violence in the Caribbean, but this incisive and unrelenting anthology goes further, not only to indict the underlying gender conventions and social norms which support a culture of gender-based violence, but also to imagine alternative behaviours and approaches which can transform prevailing attitudes to violence and ultimately signal its demise. Of special note are the revolutionary poetics which its contributors employ in doing so.

Caroline Mackenzie’s short story “Things They Say”, for example, deploys the testimonial narrative to foreground how the community voice perpetuates harmful gender-based stereotypes. The story maps a survivor’s journey from embrace by that community to isolation from it and the ensuing fractures in the female self, both psychic and physical, when it becomes clear that alignment with the values of that community requires the sacrifice of the woman-self. In relating how the community’s perpetuation of patriarchal social conventions is the fertile ground within which violence against women finds footing, Mackenzie dismantles conventions of structure and form to write against GBV.

Similarly, karen lee’s reverse contrapuntal poem “dear Audre Lorde” subverts patriarchal notions of romantic love, while Neala Luna Bhagwansingh’s erasure poems pulse with a violence of their very own, used not only to destroy classical elements of the literary canon, but also to rebuild and remake narratives of power from experiences of horror. Considering that silence and shame are overwhelmingly a feature of the lived experiences of women subjected to gender-based violence, the poems in which space is a critical element of structure are particularly striking in their amplification of the unspoken. The mourning and loss associated with violence is borne out by kevanté ac cash’s poem “not mine”, where what is missing illustrates and emphasises how much is lost in a life enumerated by abuse.

Repeatedly, the sense of betrayal experienced by women oppressed first by GBV, and then by the inaction of and ostracism by the communities charged with nurturing and shaping them, is foregrounded in this anthology. Repeatedly, the sacrifice of the feminine self on the altars of black pride, community cohesion, religious piety, and Judaeo-Christian values like “goodness” is not only demonstrated, but deconstructed and redeemed, giving birth to new possibilities. As such, while community is silent witness,
“ . . . a hundred crow residents/ (who) sit on rooftops waiting for the white sheets and stretchers” in Courtney Conrad’s “Snapper”, or the “mute neighbours” who “lurk behind pinched curtains” and kekeke with the abuser the following day in “Shhh … Gunshot can pick padlock”, community is also source of support, the ally in resistance which recommends traditional methods of fighting back.

For me, therefore, the signal triumph of Unstitching Silence is the way in which its contributors demonstrate the employment of radical poetics not only to foreground domestic violence, but to decolonise and deconstruct classical conventions of language and form and to use the detritus to craft a new language and therefore a new identity, a narrative which maps a blueprint for social transformation in this context. The anthology requires that we re-examine the individual and collective behaviours which support a culture of gender-based violence and signposts a process of pruning, of remaking from the root, including the reclamation of the very way we speak about GBV. For indeed: “Atonement isn’t walking on a bed of hot coals, Trevor. It’s changing the behaviour that caused the damage in the first place.” (“Guavina Death Frenzy”, Dwight Thompson).

ENDNOTES

Endnotes

Preface

1  World Health Organisation, Violence Against Women Prevalence Estimates, 2018 https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240022256 [accessed March 10, 2023].

2  See UN Women, Caribbean Women Count: Ending Violence against Women and Girls Data Hub https://caribbeanwomencount.unwomen.org/index.html [accessed July 29, 2023].

3  See World Health Organisation, Violence Against Women Prevalence Estimates, 2018.

4  Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef, Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through Caribbean Discourse (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 19.

5  See Halimah DeShong and Tonya Haynes, "Intimate partner violence in the Caribbean: State, Activist and Media Responses", Global Public Health, 11:1–2 (2015): 82–94; Gabrielle Hosein, Tricia Basdeo-Gobin, Colin Robinson, Sabrina Mowlah-Baksh, Simone Leid, and Amílcar Sanatan, Gender-Based Violence in Trinidad and Tobago: A Qualitative Study (Government of Trinidad and Tobago and UN Women Caribbean Multi-Country Office, 2018); Jahnine Davis and Dominique Graham, Breaking News: Gender-Based Violence in Jamaican News Media (Kingston: Caribbean Policy Research Institute, 2022).

6  Caroline Williamson Sinalo and Nicoletta Mandolini, "Chapter 1: Introduction", in Representing Gender-Based Violence: Global Perspectives, ed. Caroline Williamson Sinalo and Nicoletta Mandolini (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 1–21 (8).

7  Ramona Biholar, "Critical Inquiries of Gender-Based Violence in the Anglophone Caribbean: An Introduction", in Critical Caribbean Perspectives on Preventing Gender-Based Violence, ed. Ramona Biholar and Dacia L. Leslie (London: Routledge, 2022): 1–9 (1).

8  Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (London: Little, Brown, 2021), 318.

9  Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, 319.

10  Tracy Robinson, "Foreword", in Critical Caribbean Perspectives on Preventing Gender-Based Violence, xii–xiv (xiv).

Afterword

1  bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 2006), 281.

2  Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef, Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through Caribbean Discourse (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), 150.

3  Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–114.

4  Edward Brathwaite, "History of the Voice", in Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 259–304.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Christine Barrow lived in Barbados for nearly fifty years and, after retirement as Professor Emerita at the University of the West Indies, shifted to creative writing. Her ethnographic research informs her stories, which focus on family, parenting, and childhoods; gender and sexuality; poverty and social exclusion; respect and shame. The short-story collection Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2018. Her work has been published in BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, Poui: The Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, The Caribbean Writer, and Callaloo. In 2023, her novel The Rainbow Window received second prize in the Barbados Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award.

Sara (sah-ruh) Bastian is a Bahamian writer based in Chicago. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami. Her work has been featured in PREE and The Rumpus. Her work often meditates on home, family, girlhood, and belonging. She is at work on something currently undefined. But at least it’s something.

Neala Luna Bhagwansingh writes from Trinidad and Tobago and was shortlisted for the 2022 Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her poems and short stories have appeared in The Caribbean Writer, PREE, Small Axe, Acalabash Poetry Portfolio, and Susumba’s Bookbag, and have been anthologised in RUSH (Black Pansophy Books, U.K., 2022) which explores the last seven decades as seen through the eyes of women of colour. Three of her short stories were adapted into audioplays for the anthology narrative podcast series A Blind Play of Social Forces (Mau Haus Productions, USA, 2024). Neala Luna is a fellow of the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Residential Workshop (Trinidad, 2014), and the Drawing Room Project’s Writers’ Retreat (Jamaica, 2017). She is the founder of Write Club TT, a peer-review writing group established in February 2014, and co-co-ordinated the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Residential Workshop in 2019. @NealaLuna on IG, FB, X.

kevanté ac cash (she/they) is a poet-artist, community organiser, workshop facilitator, and movement artist living and working in Nassau, Bahamas, the land of her birth and rearing. Using confessional and experimental poetics, essays, scratch films, and choreography, kevanté explores the emotional landscapes of living with mental-health conditions, a multi-marginalised identity, Afro-spirituality, and the processes of healing. They make work to keep a record of their existence, holding a BA in media journalism, MA in creative writing, and having been published across the Caribbean, US and UK since 2018. kevanté is the author of o f f e r i n g s (Fourteen Poems, 2023); a devotee and practitioner of Ifá, an African Traditional Religion (ATR); enjoys skating, swimming, audio-journalling, sunbathing on the beach, hugging trees, and tweeting (X-ing?) about their feelings.

Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet based in London. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence is published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a winner of the Eric Gregory Award, Michael Marks Award, Bridport Prize Young Writers Award, and Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Prize. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, and the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Magma Poetry, Propel Magazine, Poetry Wales, The White Review, Stand Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Bath Magg, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Lumiere Review, and The Adriatic Magazine. She is currently a Cave Canem fellow and an alumna of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, MPK, Barbican Young Poets, Obsidian Foundation Fellow, Poet in the City Producers Programme, Out-Spoken Press Emerging Poets Development Scheme, and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Website: courtneyconradpoet.com, Instagram: @courtneyconradpoetry

Kevin Jared Hosein is the author, most recently, of Hungry Ghosts, which was the winner of the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and fiction winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize. It was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. He is a two-time recipient of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, regionally in 2015 and overall in 2018. His previous novels include The Repenters, which was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction, and The Beast of Kukuyo, which was awarded a Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. Both were also longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. He has been published in numerous anthologies and outlets, including Esquire, Wasafiri, Lightspeed, Moko Magazine, BBC Radio 4, and Perspective. He lives in Trinidad and Tobago.

karen lee is the winner of a 2023 Cave Canem fellowship, Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Poetry, and 2020 Pacific Spirit Poetry Grand Prize, PRISM international. Her polyvocal refusals are published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Room, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, Brick/Brickyard, anthologised in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, and shortlisted for the 2018 Small Axe Literary Prize. Tekkin Back Tongue, her first manuscript, is named after her self-directed writing residency in Ghana and Kenya (2018), courtesy of the Ontario Arts Council, followed by Kenya (2021), Germany, France (2022), Jamaica, and Senegal (2024), courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts. lee supports accessibility and social justice as a fully accredited Jamaican Patwa court interpreter (Ministry of the Attorney General Registry), voiceover artist/vocalist, actor, and writer in Tkaronto, Ontario, Canada.

Caroline Mackenzie is a Trinidadian writer and translator. In 2005 she won a National Open Scholarship and went on to earn a master’s in scientific, medical and technical translation from Imperial College London. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, won the 2018 Small Axe Short Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the 2022 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest and the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her short stories have appeared in literary publications around the world, and her non-fiction writing has appeared in Red magazine, MACO Caribbean Living, and MACO People. Her debut novel One Year of Ugly was published in 2020 by Borough Press (HarperCollins UK) and Simon & Schuster (US), was optioned by Netflix, and was named one of the Best Summer Reads for 2020 by Stylist magazine. She lives in Trinidad with her husband and two sons. She is tired.

Tanicia Pratt (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, poet and writer from The Bahamas. She began her career in Nassau’s underground poetry scene, dedicating years to spoken-word performance before moving to London to study experimental poetics. Writing through the body, Pratt views her practice as a spiritual act that creates space for divine connection, introspection, transformation, and ancestral reverence. This intention in her work finds common threads in family, sexuality, violence, love, and Self. Tanicia is the author of BLUE — a poetic narrative exploring the inescapable blues of living and loving (in) The Bahamas — and her writings and performances have been platformed on international outlets including Bad Form, PREE, Lungs Project, Soeurs, Write About Now, Middle Ground Berlin, and Marché de la Poésie, among others. Her books were collected by the National Poetry Library of England, and she holds a masters in poetic practice from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Dwight Thompson is a Jamaican and author of the novel Death Register (2018) and has published short stories in the Montego Bay Western Mirror, Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean, PREE, and The Caribbean Writer, where he won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition, longlisted for the 2021 and 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and has been a featured writer at the Bocas Lit Fest. His upcoming novel My Own Dear People will be published by Akashic Books in 2025. He works at an international school in Hiroshima.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, essayist, and critic. Her collection of poems Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press) was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second poetry collection, Witch Hindu, and her debut creative non-fiction book of lyric essays, Unkillable, which focuses on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, are in development. Shivanee has served as book reviews editor of Caribbean Beat magazine since 2012. She has worked for the Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest anglophone literary festival, since its inception, and currently serves as festival and programme manager. Shivanee is social media and events manager for Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s sole Caribbean specialty bookseller. She was chief guest editor for Susumba’s Book Bag Issue 10: Natural Disasters in Our Caribbean/Queer & LGBT Caribbean Lit, and has served on adjudication and editorial panels for Commonwealth Writers’ adda; Honeysuckle Press; the Forward Prizes; The Caribbean Review of Books, Discover T&T, and others. Currently, she serves as translation selector for the Poetry Book Society.

Lucy Evans is an Associate Professor in postcolonial literature at the University of Leicester, UK. Her current research focuses on gender-based violence, arts activism, and Caribbean literary cultures. She led a collaborative research project, Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2021–2024), working with researchers and creative practitioners in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the UK. A key output was an open-access teaching resource: GBV Education for Youth: A Caribbean Arts-Based Facilitation Guide (https://tinyurl.com/mr3acfb3). She has a broader research interest in representations of crime in the anglophone Caribbean; her book Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice was published by Oxford University Press in 2024, and she co-edited the journal special issues, “Crime, Gender and Sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean”, Caribbean Journal of Criminology, 4:1 (2019) and “Representing Crime, Violence and Jamaica”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22:1 (2020).

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST

Sarah Knights (b. 1983) is a Trinidadian contemporary artist who has been practising professionally for over ten years. In 2008, Knights graduated with an associate degree in Visual Communications from the John S. Donaldson Technical Institute. She later pursued a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, and graduated with first class honours in 2011. Her formal training at the UWI helped her see art as a means of self-expression and healing.

After graduation, Knights began working on a body of mixed media paintings using herself as the main subject to discuss issues of identity.

Her paintings are self-portraits inspired by her ancestral past, popular culture, politics, religion, and current and social events. The subject of “self” has become very important in her work throughout the years, as she examines “the fact of being” in this complex, ever-changing society, heavily influenced by mass media and social platforms. Collage, embroidery, acrylic, and found objects are employed in most of her paintings.

In 2018, Knights had her first solo exhibition, entitled One Thousand Mes, at Medulla Art Gallery in Port of Spain. Her works have also been exhibited in various group exhibitions in Trinidad and Tobago, Paris, London, and St. Croix.

Peekash Press is dedicated to publishing the work of emerging Caribbean writers living at home in the region, and presenting a new generation of literary talent to an international audience.

Begun in 2014 as a partnership between Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom and Akashic Books in the United States (hence the name), Peekash evolved from the CaribLit initiative, devised by the Bocas Lit Fest in partnership with Commonwealth Writers and the British Council.

In 2017, in keeping with the original intention to bring Peekash “home” to a physical base in the Caribbean, the Bocas Lit Fest assumed responsibility for the imprint.

Based in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bocas Lit Fest is a not-for-profit organisation working to develop and promote Caribbean writers and writing, through an annual literary festival, a series of prizes, and year-round programmes and projects aimed at writer and reader development.

Visit www.bocaslitfest.com for more information.