Introduction
The first time I met Elly Niland was at a poetry event about ten years ago in London’s Royal Festival Hall. After listening attentively to each of the performers – including her younger brother David Dabydeen – a number of us were sitting over a drink, and in the typical, dry style of academics, analysing the event we had just witnessed. Niland’s entry into that room was like a breath of fresh air; suddenly we are all smiling, laughing even, and began to talk about the poetry we had just heard in a wholly different manner.Even today, several years and many pleasurable encounters with Niland later, it is that exuberance for life which immediately springs to mind when reading any of her poems, as it so clearly under pins and informs all of her published work to date.
Niland was born in her grandmother’s house on the Corentyne coast of Guyana in 1954 and moved to the UK in 1967. As a mature student she studied at Hillcroft College and then went on to read for a Modern Arts degree at Kingston University, before completing her formal training as a teacher with a PGCE. Since 1971 she lived in Kingston, Surrey with her husband and children, where she continues to work as a teacher of English in a local school. However, unlike many of the (predominantly male) poets who emerged from Guyana in the latter part of the twentieth century, Niland did not begin writing poetry until well into her forties, which makes her achievements as a poet all the more remarkable. Her first collection of poetry, In Retrospect (2002), was nominated as a Best First Book of Poetry and runner-up for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2004. Her second collection Cornerstones (2005) won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2006, and her third collection, East Centre (2008), was funded by the British Arts Council. That is not to suggest, however, that writing poetry is something that has come easily to her; as she so tellingly explains in a poem from her first collection: “This writing of stuff is joyless and hopeless. But I have a grim determination to continue. It’s above motive and value. So let the clichés fall on fallow ground. And I’ll write slowly, celibate and sober.”
The selection of poems which are included in this new volume have been taken from each of the three collections mentioned above, and are designed to illustrate the many facets of Niland’s skill as a poet, together with her thematic preoccupations. Her literary influences are diverse-Shakespeare, Marvell, and Beckett are all acknowledged – as is her style, which is in turn delicate or robust, sardonic or compassionate, but always humane and filled with an irrepressible spirit. In addition, there are clear traces of what she so aptly terms “that amalgam of influence”, a Guyanese childhood; her adult life in Britain; and the creolised Indian culture of the Caribbean. As a result, she writes as fluently in Creole as she does in Standard English, freely switching between the two even in the same stanza (‘All Saints Junior School”, for example), and clearly relishing the linguistic dexterity that springs from her Indo-Caribbean heritage: “It is old days and ways the plaiting of streams of language Where diversity is our culture. This language puts a shape on my experience.”
Niland first began writing the poems that were to become In Retrospect as a response to the profound sense of grief brought about by the premature death of two of her sister. As she explained in a 2007 interview: “In Retrospect is (about) lament, a love, a loss…” In both ‘The Texture of Existence’ whose final line provides the collection’s title and ‘In memoriam Suzette Sabina’, she explores the darker side of emotion heightened by these bereavements, yet never in a self-pitying of despairing manner. Instead she uses the very tangible power of language to give form and meaning to events that sustain and heal, rather than smother the wounded human spirit: “You vanished in the grey-white-dust-storm/ And brought to light/ New words.” The ability to deal with death transformed into a source of life, a theme which she returns to and expands upon in later poems such as ‘Spacious’ and ‘White Days and Red Roses’: “Death is incurable, and it’s lifelong! / But it’s not such a devouring monster. at least, it’s fair: respects neither wealth nor stature. And restores a sense of perspective to life.” Her most sardonic take on the nature of loss in contained in ‘Lose Not Your Colour’ from the Cornerstones collection, where the doomed struggles against mortality is given a characteristically, irreverent twist: “When my time comes to leave this world/ when my tide goes out to sea. I’ll have one last cough – before departure, and a final pee. So fuck the pantomime of grief, the legendary facts fuck exaggerated fiction too.”
The creative output of Niland is, however, by no means confined to wholly personal concerns such as those outlined above. Whilst the theme of death or loss may have been the catalyst that opened up a path to her poetic imagination, there appear to be no clearly definable limits to the kind of subject that interests her and can provide the raw material for her poetry. Niland has talked about the way in which she becomes inspired to write something that happened instinctively, almost on a subconscious level: “Poetry. It is a line of a word I hear to start with.” The result of such spontaneous inspirations is a rich and varied outpouring of work that fears no boundaries: to topic is deemed too trivial or grand for her attention; no memory too scared or painful to share; no emotion too raw or profound for her incisive humor. Neither is she in any way constrained by the politics of gender, race or religion – she is much at ease in writing from the perspective of a child (‘All Saints Junior School’), mother (‘Churail Picknie’) or cane cutter (‘Blairmont Sugar Estate: Assam I’), as she is tackling the horrors of the Middle Passage (‘Female Cargo’), the beauty of a flower (‘Hibiscus Tree’) or the loss of faith (‘Email to God’).
In all three of her collections there are a number of poems which deal with some aspect of childhood or schooling, often with a sardonic twit in their tail. For example, in ‘Berbice High School’ from the In Retrospect collection, the context is largely sober in describing the child’s terror and pain at being caned on the hand by the ‘sadist’ teacher. However, despite the implication that this is anything but a one-off occurrence, Niland still manages to lighten the tone in the closing stanzas, and even raise a smile in the reader by subtly twisting the nature of the imagery from physical pain to that of an end of term report: “Degraded. D graded. Fled. Never to return.” The effects of being pressured to do well at school are re-examined in ‘End of Year Report’ from Cornerstones. In contrast to ‘Berbice High School’, this poem is written entirely in Creole and expresses the exasperated aspirations of a student who ironically equates an improved lifestyle with the (desire for) an enhanced academic performance in their child: “Mattie pickny deh a fetch water/ Them eat dhall and rice daily/…Them get good marks!/ Is so yuh stupid?/ Yuh come 8th out of 28?…A yuh eat too much, belly full. A yuh wear too much leather shoes and sock.” The implication for the child in question is, of course, that anything less than 1st would not have been good enough, and we, as readers, feel all the weight of parental expectation that rests so heavily upon their young shoulders.
Whilst the theme of scholastic failure can still be traced in the more recent East of Centre collection: “At home I prayed with my eyes open, prayed/ To be bright, remember one answer right”, not all of Niland’s childhood poems deal with the negative aspects of a colonial schooling system. The Cornerstone collection also contains a pair of poems, ‘Charting the Waters. I and II’ which are concerned with the positive effects that an inspirational teacher can have on their class. In stark contrast to the teachers that relied on the cane to ‘improve’ their charges, “Miss King” makes clever use of language to actively encourage her pupils to do well: “You are the bright future. Our uncharted fleet of words. You must pattern and plot your observations. Learn to read and write.” As a result of Miss King’s inherent belief in their abilities, the potential of her students is greatly enhance: “She enabled us to inhale exciting new words, allusions, apt associations. Words clung to pregnant minds. And the urchins like flowers, swelled.” This image of the children’s minds opening out like petals as the poem itself comes to a close, provides an effective counterbalance to the earlier representation of education as a potentially stifling and damaging force.
As with so many of the issues that Niland tackles in her poetry, the role of religion is another theme in which different and competing levels of cultural complexity operate. Christianity played a pivotal role in the kind of educational system that was imposed upon the children of what was, Niland’s childhood, still a British colony, and its presence is manifest in both ‘Hymn for Four seasons’ and ‘All Saints Junior School’. However, these nostalgic, childhood memories of “Morning Assembly and prayer” operate in stark contrast to those contained in ‘E-mail to God’, in which an older, infinitely more sardonic voice state: “… I’m scared and losing my faith. There’s no comfort in prayer. No hope.” Although its very premise – a computer link to God – and tone are both decidedly tongue-in-cheek: “The e-mail has been scanned for honesty and has been certified cliché free.”, there is no escaping the depth of feeling which such a crisis of faith has roused in the ironically-named ‘Orinoco_Online’: “Please don’t forsake me/ I do still try”.
Christianity was, of course, by no means the only religious influence upon Caribbean society, and for the Indo-Caribbean communities of Niland’s childhood, creolised Hindu beliefs and customs continued to form an integral part of their cultural identity. In ‘Seeing Red’ from the Cornerstone collection, Niland poignantly explores the web of emotions which are stirred by such memories. Throughout this poem, the senses of sight, sound and taste are skillfully intermingled, all sparked off by the image/sound of that one colour/word ‘red’: “red flags remind me of Jhandis. Jhandi flags remind me of taasaa and taablaa music/ And the Pandit, paann leaf in hand.Flags blowing to-and-fro like hungry children/ Posied to feast onaaloo in geera and masala.” What is particularly significant about this poem is that it is rendered in Standrad English, subtly highlighting the distance between Niland’s own generation with their Christianised, Anglicised schooling, and that of the ‘old ones’ for whom such events continued to remain ‘Sacred’.
It would be impossible to end any consideration of Niland’s work, however brief, without further mention of the way in which utilises humoiur to undercut the darker aspects of human experience that several of her poems explore. This is particularly apparent in a number of her Creole poems where verbal dexterity forms an integral part of the Indo-Caribbean voice: “It is sharing a sameness. Where humour is the bridge”. In ‘Bad Lucky Moo-Moo’, for example, the narrative of an unwanted pregnancy is rendered almost as farce as the young girl reinvents the story of the Immaculate Conception to try and excuse her ‘slack behaviour. “Mooman, I never sleep with no rangotang man. I tek me rock cake and mauby, sit under the sapodilla tree. And me fall asleep. Jumbi must be come and work obeah. And now…I expectin.” The far more contentious issue of sustained marriage violence is also tackled head-on in both ‘Lilac Veins and Still Waters’ and ‘Cent Ice’. Whilst the language in these poems is necessarily much more somber that that employed in ‘Bad Lucky moo-Moo’, there is no escaping the bittersweet humour in lines such as “Yuh full a sweet mouth an jigger foot./ Got more mange than me dog, more purr than me cat.” In fact whatever her subject matter – be it the disappearance of a husband in ‘Pitch Lake Prayer, Trinidad’, or the disrespectful behavior of a stepson to his grandmother in ‘Bloodclots’, Nilands’s careful balance between language and form is able to convince us that, despite everything, they are all events and characters worthy of our attention.
By Lynne Macedo
University of Warick