St. Martin’s poetry will again be experienced live abroad when poet/artist Drisana Deborah Jack recitesin South Africa at the 8th Poetry Africa Festival in October 2004.
Jack is one of an international group of authors slated to recite at the major international poetry festival. Orders for her first and only book of poems, The Rainy Season (1997), are already coming into her publisher from organizers. However, the House of Nehesi title was sold out a few years ago—but not before it was well read in St. Martin and, by at least three years after its publication, it was a New York college required reading text for a Summer course (along with the literature of USA greats James Baldwin and Toni Morrison).
Jack is focusing more on her video art and is not certain about a reprint. House of Nehesi is encouraging her to work a new collection or try her hand at fiction, which she has a knack for. There are those who think that she could be the one to write the first true St. Martin novel. For now, cherished copies of The Rainy Season can be found mostly in the island’s homes and libraries.
In 2003, it was Changa Hickinson who went “overseas,” in the Caribbean and Indonesia, as part of the Netherlands-based Winternachten literature festival. At all of the stops, Changa’s thundering voice drew on verse from his first and only book Illegal Truth (1992) and his new poems—developed in Cole Bay at the Creative Writing Program that same year.
At the Indonesian venues in Bali, Java, and Jakarta, Changa was powerfully inspired by “the ideas, the coloring, flavoring, and bravery of the poems I heard and the poets that I met; and to see so many young people out there writing and writing well. I still feel I should do more to take the time from life and write. It is not to the extent that I want it yet, but I am realizing everyday that it is not going to happen in bulk but in bits.
I am forever thankful to House of Nehesi Publishers and Lasana Sekou for making that experience possible. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet with other writers and to see such a tremendous contrast of people, cultures, and landscapes from another part of the world that was only in my imagination to that point,” said Changa. The poet last recited in St. Martin at the Marcus Garvey birthday celebration on August 14, 2004. He is currently working on the “bits” that will make up the “bulk” of his new collection.
Starting in the late 1980s, right up to 2001, it was only poet/author Lasana M. Sekou who was invited nearly every year, sometimes more than once a year, to recite poetry at major literary conferences and festivals abroad. With 10 books of poetry, short stories, and drama to his name, he has since read on four continents and throughout the Caribbean. His consistent appearances and publishing other poets have gone a long way in generating interest abroad about the island’s poetry scene and the poets who can “compose and compete with other dynamic wordsmiths from around the world.
“When abroad, as a St. Martin poet and as projects director for House of Nehesi, I promote our authors and literature by talking about them at the festival and in the media; by presenting their books to festival organizers, reviewers, fellow authors, and sometimes to bookstores, libraries, and schools,” said Sekou.
After reciting at the International Poetry Festival of Medellin in June 2004, Sekou made well on a promise to the Colombian organizers in less than a week after returning home. He emailed them the names and House of Nehesi website bios of other St. Martin poets for consideration in future Medellin festivals.
Sekou says that he has an ear and eye out for new and upcoming poets who will push theenvelope, “to tear open literary excellence for life’s sake. I’m interested in originality, the daring and informed treatment of the St. Martin human experience and the socio-political, cultural, and historical landscapes, the fusing of regional and international realities, and crafting in the nation’s and universal aesthetics.”
But it is the poet’s own new collection that is long overdue. He does not talk about that much. His last full collection,Quimbé – The Poetics of Sound (1991), was published over ten year ago. For those who love poetry and what Octavio Paz calls its “enthusiasm,” its “divine frenzy,” Sekou should not get away anymore with saying that he hasn’t come out with his own book of poems because he is busy helping others to get published. It is true that his Brotherhood of the Spurs (1997) had the poetic touch and it was well critiqued in the Caribbean but it was a book of short stories. He is the editor of National Symbols (1996), a landmark book yes, but it is not poetry.
Sekou’s Big Up St. Martin (1999) with one essay and one long poem, “The Cubs Are in The Field,” was a 25-page booklet, not a book. The fact that Big Up sold out quickly probably meant that there is a public hungry enough to see his poetry in print again. The content quality of the “The Cubs …” does show that with all of the poet’s talk and examples of helping others get published he never stopped writing. He admits to using his hotel room time during foreign recitals as a sabbatical to pen and re-work new verse. (Being invited to recite, in one’s community and abroad, could also keep a serious poet on his toes!). Nevertheless, Sekou’s new book of poems cannot be that far off.
Major festival organizers appear to have a preference, even a bias, for published poets, especially for those whose books get media reviews. Getting St. Martiners published and their books critically reviewed at home and abroad are features of a crusade of the House of Nehesi press, pointed out Fabian Badejo in his book Salted Tongues – Modern Literature in St. Martin (2003).
When an international festival comes calling for a virtually unknown poet or a first time author from an island that does not have a long history of writing and publishing its own literature, it is not happening by magic. Leading Caribbean critic/scholar Dr. Howard Fergus practically calls the labor of love culturing St. Martin’s emerging literature at House of Nehesi, a revolution.
The Aruban literary historian Dr. Wim Rutgers wonders how, that though young and few in numbers, the St. Martin writing and writers are making wider leaps on and out of the island than their fellows in Aruba and Curacao. He said it is not just the presence of Sekou or House of Nehesi. He points to the steady use by the writers of what is historically their nation’s language, English; also the coming to terms functionally, even celebrating, what Sekou has called the polyglot or “language laboratory” and what the author/scholar George Lamming termed a “sophisticated” cultural feature of St. Martin.
While networking and choice of language(s) may be key to where St. Martin’s poets and poetry are and are heading these days, the bottom line remains that for a poet to be selected for recital at a major international festival (or for a nation’s publisher to accept a manuscript to publish as a book), the quality of the poem’s content, certainly of the published poem, will count the most. Rhoda Arrindell, language department head at the University of St. Martin, was brave enough to say as much publicly. She did this in a time and place where some well-known, aspiring, and amateur artists can get equally “super sensitive,” highly offended, if you do not agree with them that their poem, song, or painting is the best that you have ever read, heard, or seen.
On a Speaking of Everything TV show aired on August 22, 2004, Arrindell pointed out that any set of words written down and called a poem by the person writing it “does not make it a poem.” She emphasized that whether metered or free verse, good poetry follows certain rules of structure, style, knowledge of what is being written about, and other “elements of literature.”
The discipline and creativity that poets are developing and delivering over the long term to their people at home, along with getting published, constitute a major part of why more St. Martin poets are receiving attention and invitations from international literature festivals. In poetry, hard work and good work pays off. Good poetry can literarily take a poet around the world to places that most people visit only in their imagination.
To keep up with St. Martin’s poets, authors, writing and book activities international literature
festival organizers also visit www.houseofnehesipublish.com.
ditor’s Note: Jacqueline Sample is president of New York’s Black Dimension in Art Inc.,
chairman of the Arts Facet of the Albany District Links, and president of House of
Nehesi Publishers Foundation.