Writing a novel is harder than I ever conceived! I’ve written and published books of three books of poetry but those books are full of personal poetry arranged chronologically. They’re linear rather than a cohesive whole like a novel.

When I first got the idea of writing a novel, I spent years typing down whatever came to mind and only casually organized them in Google Docs. Then, being a poet, I decided it had to be a verse novel and/or epics. I started reading to gain a sense of the genre.

I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, the David Ferry translation; Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali; The Epic of Askia Mohammed, etc. After reading Gilgamesh and Sundiata, I came away with a new book idea centered about one of the women mentioned in Sundiata. As a womanist, it was disturbing, to say the least, how rape played a role in both epics but was treated both briefly and casually. I started thinking about how there are no epics where women are centered. So I spent even more time typing out an outline for that future story/book.

I read Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming; tried to read both Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Kwame Dawes’ Prophets. Of the three, Brown Girl Dreaming was the most approachable. The beginning of Omeros contains a poem about the cutting down of trees to make canoes. Have you ever eaten anything that was so good, so rich, you couldn’t finish it and told yourself you’d save it for later but never do; because when you go to eat, you’re still full off of the memory of how good it was? That’s that poem, a portion of which was excerpted here. I think I was too full of that one poem in Omeros to give Prophets the attention it deserves. Plus, by that time, I was burnt out on reading the genre.

That was years ago. Today, literally and figuratively, I am in writer’s mode and writing a verse novel is hard. One of the difficulties I’m encountering is the setting of the novel. It’s set in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. How to cross the language barrier because their English is not the English of today. Then, there’s my main character, an enslaved woman, unnamed in the historical record, who was probably one of the victims of English privateers (legalized piracy) pillaging the ships of England’s greatest competitor of the time, Spain and it’s settler-colonies in the Caribbean/South America. Because of the relative earliness of her being enslaved, she undoubtedly spoke her mother’s tongue; maybe even picked up a few Spanish words on the brutal trip to what is inexplicably called the New World.

I assumed I would have to build a language for her so we could communicate. More research was called for! I did a Google search for Spanish-African creole. I figured that just like with English, there would be a language created out of the experience of the enslaved and I was right! In Colombia, there’s a region called San Basilio de Palenque. Known as the “first free town in the Americas,” I was delighted to hear about the language the inhabitants speak as the island in the Caribbean my main character was Providence Island, now under the domain of Colombia; even though the language might be dying from underuse, it was a step forward. Or so I thought. Poetry to the rescue:

small stones of spanish skimming
the surface of her speech
the closer to the atlantic
her body was forced