verse novels

Writing the Bones, Entry 1

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

The Resurrecting Writers Series: Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol (Repost)

image Taking the book solely at face value, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol are verses concerned with the disintegration of the marriage of Lawino, a rural African (Acoli) woman and Ocol, her western-educated husband. However, peeling back the cover of the words even a tiny bit reveals a woman committed to her indigenous culture versus a man who thinks that her culture needs to be removed from the face of the earth. How could two such people co-exist in the same household? How could two such differing ideologies co-exist on the same planet? According to Ocol, not at all. His song is full of imagery that calls death upon the culture Lawino praises in her song.

We will smash

The taboos

One by one,

Explode the basis

Of every superstition,

We will uproot

Every sacred tree

And demolish every ancestral

shrine.

In Ocol’s song, the thing that is so striking about this book – the use of indigenous Acoli symbols to present a woman solidly rooted in her culture – gets turned on its head. Every thing African becomes associated with death, decay and other imagery meant be extremely negative. However, that is not the case with Lawino. Unlike she does not hate foreign customs. They are simply not hers.

I do not understand

The ways of foreigners

But I do not despise their

Customs.

Of course if things were as simple as that, there would be no need for Lawino to sing her song. For instance, I agree with Ocol’s installing of an electric stove in their house. . Lawino doesn’t know how to use it and is, in fact, scared of it.

I am terribly afraid

Of the electric stove,

And I do not like using it

Because you stand up

When you cook.

Who ever cooked standing up?

And the stove

Has many eyes

I do not know

Which eye to prick

So that the stove

May vomit fire

And I cannot tell

Which eye to prick

So that fire is vomited

In one and not in another plate.

Instead of patiently teaching Lawino the benefits of the stove and how to properly use it, Ocol rails against her. He considers her lack of knowledge one more African deficiency he wants to divorce himself from. His attitude is revealing especially because he later becomes a leader of his country’s independence struggle for Uhuru (freedom). As Lawino tells it, Ocol says

White men must return

To their own homes,

Because they have brought

Slave conditions in the country.

He says

White people tell lies

That they are good

At telling lies

Like men wooing women

Ocol says

They reject the famine relief

Granaries

And the forced-labour system.

After revealing this, Lawino goes on to question an Uhuru where her husband can’t even get along with his brother.

When my husband

Opens a quarrel

With his brother

I am frightened!

You would think

They have not slept

In the same womb,

You would think

They have not shared

The same breasts!

And they say

When the two were boys

Looking after the goats

They were as close to each other

As the eye and the nose,

They were like twins

And they shared everything

Even a single white ant.

Even more astute however, is her statement describing the period of “independence”.

Independence falls like a bull

Buffalo

And the hunters

Rush to it with drawn knives,

Sharp shining knives

For carving the carcass.

And if your chest

Is small, bony and weak

They push you off,

And if your knife is blunt

You get the dung on your

Elbow,

You come home empty-handed

And the dogs bark at you!

In raising questions that center around the concept of post-colonial independence and how such an entity impacts on the consciousness of Africans who have been educated outside of africa as well as rural Africans who have never left the continent, the Song of Lawino & the Song of Ocol ranks up there with Ama Ata Aidoo’s Sister Killjoy. Both Sissie and Lawino were asking the same questions. The current state of the continent provides the answer.