As the reader makes their way though first poem in "Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems" by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, they know this sophomore collection takes a great departure from her first playful and passionate collection, "Curry Flavour".
"Sita, the Ramayan's embodiment // Of purity did not tell you / About Rawan's charm. / How she chose stability over passion. / So when you left your husband / To be with my Ajaa none tested you / By making you walk through fire. / Everyone just called you a slut," she writes in "Deya For Ajee", a meditation on the life of her grandmother.
She ends: "Ajee, as I write this poem I light a deya / To your memory. May Lakshmi Mata / Give me wisdom to find your grit in me. / To see in you my Goddess Durga / Helping me to battle the demons of this life." So goes the opening poem, which sets the tone for a collection that draws upon mythology, lore, religion and language to address the trials and triumphs of a Caribbean heritage.
"I think one of the reasons I write is to harness and contain and make sense of something that's so vast and so overwhelming," Rahming explains. "What was happening in that period was that so many people were dying -- in my family, cultural icons, friends -- just so much was happening, and I think we all try to find meaning with what's happening with us, with grief and all that, and for me that's how it comes out: the poem and the short story."
It's an epic subject -- encompassing also the cycles of life and death -- fitting for the lengthy collection, which sports an equally hefty glossary to keep readers afloat in her poems that can reference Hindu goddesses and Bahamian dialect in the same space. "With 'Curry Flavour' I totally resisted a glossary, simply because of my philosophy which is if you provide a glossary, people are not going to be as willing to find out for themselves and really get into the work when you do your own research," Rahming says. "It didn't stop me from reading a piece of work if there was no glossary. I never felt as if I needed a book to have a glossary and I never wanted to encourage people to do that. But now I'm trying to reach a market that isn't English."
Indeed, this second collection is traveling far beyond Caribbean shores -- reaching the far East. "Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems" was a finalist for the 2009 Proverse Prize, awarded annually by Proverse Press, a press located in Hong Kong. Though the 2009 prize itself was jointly awarded to two novelists -- Laura Solomon and Rebecca Tomasis -- Rahming's collection was the only poetry collection on the shortlist.
For her, reaching a new market can be challenging with the language and cultural barriers, but mostly holds excitement and possibility in a shared cultural exchange -- fitting as The Bahamas now stands on the precipice of a population shift with thousands of Chinese workers entering the country. "I'm still being asked 'Why Hong Kong?' even though we have this huge Chinese presence here, but the connection is still not in the public consciousness," she says. "I'm very excited to be in Hong Kong like that and to have that far East market -- because you have all of China, you have India, you have all of the Asian countries with contacts and distributors.
When I Google the book, I can see it appearing in all these shops all over far East."
Meanwhile, the collection will be available in local bookstores shortly, and also at the official launch of "Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems" at Chapter One Bookstore (College of The Bahamas, Oaksfield) on Saturday, July 30th, 2-5 pm. Making the book available to locals is important because the book at its core truly speaks to the Caribbean experience.
"There is no place in The Caribbean, I think, that this book cannot function. It's Caribbean. It could be nothing else," Rahming says. "George Lamming during his recent workshop asked me to read a piece so we could talk about creolization and Caribbean identity. And the whole question of what is creolization came up, and creolization means you are here and this is where you belong and this is who you are, it could be no other place."
"And I thought about how well that described my work: it could be no other place but The Caribbean -- it cannot be India, it cannot be Africa, it cannot be China, it's the Caribbean, because it's the Caribbean that is the only place that has produced this sensibility," she continues. Yet on a deeper level, too, the book functions as a testament to story and keeping story and individual experience alive.
Rahming cleverly navigates this by engaging with several religions, mythologies and landscapes to convey a sense of wholeness, a sense of transcending the fragmentation -- of language, of cultures, of religions, of societal norms -- which pieces together the Caribbean region. Though she heavily draws upon figures in Hinduism -- credited, she says, to her upbringing in Trinidad -- readers find Hades, Adam and Eve, Artemis, and a slew of mythical and religious characters and places intricately woven into her poignant poems.
"I don't see any vast difference or unbridgeable difference between any of the religions. In my mind, whenever I'm introduced to a new mythology, I'm like, I already know this, because there is not that great a difference between our cultures and our mythologies. I mean we're people, that's what we are," Rahming says.
The effect ties into the overarching theme in the collection of reincarnation. The Bhandaaraa puja, after all, is a prayer that helps souls leave the earthly plane, and the Immortelle tree with its orange blossoms evoke a renewal, a beauty and celebration.
These dual entities function in these poems that are at times somber prayers, at times playful chants, at times renewing meditations. "In my own view, death is not something that is separate or apart from birth or life. As far as we know, we don't know what happens when we're dead. But maybe deep down subconsciously, we do know. Who knows?" Rahming says. "And that's what even life is, we're constantly going through situations and experiences where you feel as if you die and you have to be reborn."
This all has a sense of Joseph Campbell "monomyth" to it , but make no mistake -- the hero on this journey is undoubtably female. Indeed, the collection is a testament to the feminine, tackling themes of motherhood, desire, fertility and the cycles of the earth, examining the gamut of human nature through the nature of the Goddess. "I never had to wonder about the Goddess," Rahming says. "We grew up with the Goddesses -- we grew up with Lakshmi. We grew up with Sita. I had no reason not to know the Goddess. Divali was the biggest Hindu celebration we had, and that's Lakshmi, that's a Goddess. So I didn't think of God as male in that sense; my deity was always female."
The book's five sections offer Goddesses to guide each collection of work through life, death and rebirth, coming to an unsettling but satisfying place in "Parang Serenade". "But I have songs for you my mothers / In my blood. I take you with me," she says in this concluding poem, creating a finality with the women she paid homage to in the collection. Later in the poem she continues, "I know the Christmas story, / The gift of Baby Jesus born in a manger, / And how his name Guanahani / Became San Salvador, // Then sugar become king", entering finally into a space that is a mesh of language, place, people and time -- a place that is undoubtably Caribbean.
"I hope readers find resonance in the work that I've written. So much of it references Trinidad and so much of it references The Bahamas and I hope those two cultures can recognize their similarities," Rahming says. "We have so much in common as a people. I hope we in The Caribbean can appreciate this kind of existence."
"Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems" by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming will launch at Chapter One Bookstore (College of The Bahamas, Oaksfield) on Saturday, July 30th, 2-5 pm. Rahming will read from her collection, which will be available for purchase.
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