Abstract
This chapter explores some of the ways in which Grace Nichols’s descriptions of English countryside are linked to Caribbean references or terminology, a connection made explicit in her poem “Hurricane Hits England”. Nichols’s affection for the English countryside is increasingly evident in her later work, and especially in the collection Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2010). Here, she closely examines parts of Britain’s countryside, including views as she travels on trains, evoking (as does Walcott) other English poets. Nichols finds much of comfort in the countryside of Britain, and, as with the poem “Hurricane…”, she increasingly celebrates the topography of her countryside home, including in Sussex, where she has lived since her arrival in England in the 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
This first collection of poetry detailing the experiences of a woman slave was initially rejected for publication because Kamau Brathwaite had “already done it”, even though his account was not about women’s experiences (deCaires Narain CCWP 182).
- 2.
Derek Walcott raises a similar question in his 1962 poem “A Far Cry from Africa ” (In a Green Night ): “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein / I who am poisoned with the blood of both”.
- 3.
See Shaw, Andrea Elizabeth . The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies. Lexington Books, 2006; Anim-Addo, Joan. Touching the Body: History, Language and African Caribbean Women’s Writing. Mango Publishing, 2007; Easton , Alison. “The Body as History and ‘Writing the Body’: The Example of Grace Nichols”. Journal of Gender Studies vol. 3 no.1, 1994 pp. 55–67; Griffin , Gabriele. “‘Writing the Body’: Reading Joan Riley , Grace Nichols and Ntozake Shange”, Black Women’s Writing, edited by Gina Wisker, Macmillan, 1993. For more general discussions of Caribbean women’s poetry see Denise deCaires Narain . Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style. Routledge, 2002 and Ian Dieffenthaller . Snow on Sugarcane: The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Great Britain . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
- 4.
This is also reminiscent of Antoinette’s conversation with Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea where Caribbean Antoinette wonders how “rivers and mountains and the sea” can “be unreal” while English Rochester wonders the same about “houses and streets” (49).
- 5.
It is conceivable this reference alludes to the 1961 category 5 hurricane “Hattie” which swept across Central America causing over 300 deaths and significant damage, though the hurricane did not pass particularly near Guyana.
- 6.
See also the discussion of this poem in relation to the poetic metre and Brathwaite’s comments that the “hurricane does not roar in pentameter” in the introduction.
- 7.
Nichols was first drawn to Maar when she was in her residency at the Tate Gallery (1999–2000) and wanted “to give that face a voice” (Picasso 8).
- 8.
There is also a small section in this poem (for which Nichols provides a footnote of explanation and expansion) which details the highly colonialist encounter Williams himself had with Picasso. At the time, Picasso declared that he would very much like to have a chance to paint Williams’s “very fine African head”. Nichols notes that Williams had been very disappointed by this meeting with the celebrated artist (Picasso 24). This, too, might be read as one interpretation of the collection’s title: Williams might very well have wanted his face “back” from Picasso if he had been met with this particular description.
- 9.
See earlier discussion on mining in this chapter; also Chapter 4 where Walcott makes connections between coal miners’ lives and the indentured workers who were brought in to work the sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean.
- 10.
The line is also evocative of the lines in the first section of Walcott’s poem, “The Schooner Flight ”: “I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea”, where the speaker embraces that which is also the cause of his demise (CP 347).
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Johnson, J. (2019). Reframing the Landscape. In: Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04134-2_5
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