{"id":965,"date":"2015-05-12T02:21:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T02:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/?p=965"},"modified":"2015-05-18T15:19:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T15:19:01","slug":"how-eve-survives-the-adam-less-urban-rainforest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/2015\/05\/12\/how-eve-survives-the-adam-less-urban-rainforest\/","title":{"rendered":"How Eve Survives the Adam-less Urban Rainforest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Loretta Collins Klobah\u2019s The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman<\/em>, a book review<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

by Faizah Tabasamu<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On a pedestal, in the eye of this hurricane of multilingual poetry\u2014\u201ca vibrant blend of English, Spanish, and Patois\u201d\u2014written by Loretta Collins Klobah, womanhood sheds her skin of \u201cconcrete and steel.\u201d Sometimes this skin is personal or societal loss, the loss of a lover or husband who left, or the loss of a young child, whose dead body was burrowed through by a motherless bullet. In the poem, \u201cEl Velorio, The Wake (1893),\u201d it is a harkening to the Puerto Rican national painting of the same name that had prophesied the \u201chalo of flies\u201d above the sleeping child. Also embedded in this skin, is a fisherman, brutalized by a police officer, who wrestled him to the ground like a fish baited and bleeding from the mouth.<\/p>\n

The award-winning collection, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman<\/em> is Klobah\u2019s white bud offering, dripping wet from the painful seasons of the soul and the perpetual injustices we are tempted to look away from, like Juanito, a singing street person with AIDS and festering foot sore in \u201cLa Madonna Urbana.\u201d He reaches over into another poem, \u201cBy the Waters of St. Lucia\u201d; his legacy and foot sores, \u201cbloody legions boil into small volcanic mountains,\u201d is fixed in the poet\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Klobah draws our senses back, quietly beckoning with the soft rhythmic weaving of languages, lolling us to look again until the deeds are done, until we have received the harsh truths about Caribbean urbanization, the harsh truths about the histories we live daily\u2014Maurice Bishop and all the Krik? Krak! <\/em>moments and massacres that cause us to write our bitterness on paper, plant it in a melon and throw it into the sea so that we can remember without the retching sorrow. Her pieces are bit-sized and beautiful and sometimes violent: the \u201c\u2026 rag-doll woman catapulted from her hammock into god\u2019s lungs!\u201d becomes the stylishly spread corpse in Klobah\u2019s \u201cNovena a La Reina Mar\u00eda Lionza\u201d second night prayer. And \u201cCanute Caliste\u201d recounts a brutal story of students shot and killed, a story Klobah recounts:<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the high fortress wall, tumble five bodies, their appendages flailing like starfish legs, turning like pinwheels. Small black figures\u2014children of the revo\u2014fly backwards into the rocks below or the sea. Sea foam gleams like new jewels, frothy dreams uttered the hoarse voice of the sea\u201d (29).<\/p>\n

In her collection of twenty-nine poems, Klobah captures some of the places women seek sanctuary from the leering public eye and men who\u2019ve left and crumpled their hearts. Her poetry reveals the rooms they find, the walls they build or the way they use their bodies or female friendships to bask in a tranquility that is impossible to maintain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"12footWoman-book\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman<\/em> by Loretta Collins Klobah.<\/p>\n

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\"collins_BF14_marigot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Loretta Collins Klobah at the St. Martin Book Fair.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is in a painting, in the unshared conversation between \u201cTwo Women Chatting by the Sea (1856).\u201d It is the place to slap their children, the refuge in a Chicago public bathroom, where \u201cthe growl rising like acid vomit in dry throats\u201d can be released (58).<\/p>\n

It is in the sustaining bonds of female friendship, in the London flat, where ill-fitted clothing is the first of many exchanges. It is in Jamaica, where her eighty-year-old landlady soothes her \u201cman-worries\u201d with milky soursop tea. \u201cMatron\u201d rules her home with a \u201cno men\u201d policy, a serene fortress her estranged son infiltrates when he passes a bag of tears to her through the iron gate. It is at \u201cThe First Day of Hurricane Season,\u201d peace, simplicity, and aloneness that find their way into other poems like \u201cBosque San Patricio\u201d and \u201cNight Wash.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like a displayed Christ who feels like coming down and forgetting, wanting to be un-caged and wanting to rail about injustices in love letters to the next generation, the poet is alone and content in the kitchen, her mind rollicking with sensual, feel-good memories of a man whose left traces of his stance behind her. His hands once clasp her shirt about her. He isn\u2019t there anymore, just the tree, the serpent and her, alone in the urban rainforest, walking her daughter through it, wishing they were away from it.<\/p>\n

She is also like the tree on her block: \u201cHeat clogging the veins of its dry, cracking heart, my flamboyant tree survives, solitary on a street named Los Flamboyanes for the once vibrant red satin-lined boulevard of torch trees and fallen blossoms\u201d (17).<\/p>\n

Klobah examines the solitary life through other women: Sister Carol and the nuns residing by the St. Lucian seaside, and even sixty-nine year old Yesmarie, who dead and decimated body, half-bitten tongue and the \u201ccocaine-packed condom\u201d filled the poet with a longing for peace and an Adamless garden of plantain shoots and small animals when she herself is aged. For Yesmarie, she constructs a pleasant eulogy of childhood memories to tuck around the news of her cruel death in \u201cSnort This.\u201d<\/p>\n

These poems hold hands, dancing around reoccurring themes, fingers interlaced tightly. For example, her daughter dreams of becoming one of the mermaids, who Canute Caliste says no longer \u201cLifted their heads to peep at him\u2014bobbing like a handful of yellow sea roses on the surfs\u201d (28).<\/p>\n

Despite the unnaturally wild display of the sea with its mountain-mimicking waves in \u201cAfter Hurricane Lenny, Carricou,\u201d despite the \u201cmaracas of gunshots,\u201d \u201corisha of whirlwinds\u201d and kicking the \u201crosary of fallen flamed blossoms\u201d in the air, the dispossessed, like Juanito, sees the magic of the barrio, where \u201c\u2026sometimes Our Lady\u2019s hair also moves, tossing like in a Clairol commercial\u201d (15).<\/p>\n

With the weight of Puerto Rico on her tilted hips, Klobah starts her collection with a praying woman offering up her \u201cwilted white bud\u201d and ends it as a praying poet, speaking more to her daughter about a hope and future filled with more trees that the one El Cristo de Buen Viaje carried. She hopes for a place \u201cabove the flood plains, where after our terrible storms, only roosters cry\u201d (85).<\/p>\n

(Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong> Faizah Tabasamu (Rochelle Ward), is a leading St. Martin poet; high school teacher; and blogger at www.rochelleward.com<\/a>. Her poetry appears in the anthology Where I See The Sun \u2013 Contemporary Poetry in St. <\/em>Martin<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Loretta Collins Klobah\u2019s The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, a book review by Faizah Tabasamu   On a pedestal, in the eye of this hurricane of multilingual poetry\u2014\u201ca vibrant blend of English, Spanish, and Patois\u201d\u2014written by Loretta Collins Klobah, womanhood sheds her skin of \u201cconcrete and steel.\u201d Sometimes this skin is personal or societal loss, the loss […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1354,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/1354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houseofnehesipublish.com\/sxm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}