The Rose of Toulouse
by Fred D’Aguiar
Carcanet Press, 2013
80 pp, $18
Report from Planet Midnight
by Nalo Hopkinson
Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012
128 pp, $12
Born in England, raised in Guyana, degreed in England, and now a prof in the United States, Fred D’Aguiar is a most gifted poet, both in English—and also as a transatlantic, “Black” bard.
Also well travelled is African-Canadian novelist and short-story writer Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaica native, raised in Canada, and now a prof in the U.S.A.
Both D’Aguiar and Hopkinson are writers of accomplishment, fine style, and international publication and audience.
I also like D’Aguiar simply because he was, like me, born in 1960, a transitional, generational year making us too young to adore The Beatles (except as cartoons) and too old to worship Nirvana.
D’Aguiar’s sixth book of poetry, The Rose of Toulouse, treats politics and geography as aspects of autobiography. Also, the poet wants to canvass America. Strong, British influences—Auden, Hughes, Walcott—are ever-audible.
So, slavery is personal. “I wash with soap / History’s soap” and “Onion skin / crackles off me.” Under “layers / Of black,” there is “white,” and then “raw red”—the colour of blood, of course, but also the skin tone of Malcolm X (1925-65). D’Aguiar may refer to both. The poem ends with the speaker now, “Tin-whistle-clean,” ready for us to “Play something.”
In “Dreamboat,” the poet imagines that his very body has been occupied by a slave ship: “I tried to steer / the ship back / to the slave coast.” In the end, “I sank in clouded deep. / The ship sailed on.” The poem warns one to not get stuck in history’s sorrows.
“Wish” works similarly: If the speaker could “turn the (slave) ships /
Around, not a single bullet, whip, or cutlass // Sound (would) deafen our ears for centuries.” Then, there’d be “No Atlantic road of bones from people / Dumped into the sea to form a wake.”
The title poem proves D’Aguiar touched with greatness: “The anti-terrorist knife just about splits / Crumbly, boomerang-shaped bread and sends / Legions marching to Paris in Roman formation // Patterns of the dominated….” It’s a bravura style, reminiscent of Walcott.
But D’Aguiar is sharpest when his voice is most clearly his own: “(This) country realigns your sorry backbone. / The country is the place your spine calls home. / You come to the country when you dead and gone, / Only then history content to leave you alone.”
D’Aguiar also presents several, “vulture” poems. The vulture displaces the eagle as a symbol for America, and, thus the poems remind one of Ted Hughes’ “crow” poems.
D’Aguiar is a master of verse—and a fine novelist. Seek out his work.
Nalo Hopkinson is an irrepressible author Canadian publishers once ignored: Her mix of Caribbean folklore and sci-fi/fantasy writing seemed too “exotic.” But then she won a New York-based, first-novel prize, and got acclaimed—finally—in Maclean’s.
That was 20 years ago. Her admirers are now legion, and she is a recognized queen in a genre ruled (if not defined) by white male “geeks.”
Her 2012 book, Report from Planet Midnight, is a mix of items: A splendidly weird short story about a quasi-time-travelling, ingenious, truly precocious girl (with a mature brain in a pre-teen body); a speech about race and racism in the sci-fi/fantasy world; another tale that combines mermaids with a prose revision of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest; a feisty, engaging interview (with Terry Bisson); and a bibliography of Hopkinson’s works.
Report from Planet Midnight is the kind of book a writer gets to publish when the publisher knows there will be an audience even for a grab-bag collection. And it is worthy.
The first story tells of Kamla, a big-head child, implanted as an embryo in a “Womb-donor.” She is actually “from the future,” and her DNA has been altered to slow down aging. She looks 10, but her age is 23. She tells her story to a family friend, who, at first, believes that she needs help, and then realizes that she represents everything he doesn’t like about children, even a fake one.
Hopkinson’s prose is anti-racist with provocation to spare. Her logic is breathtakingly moral. For instance, for those who attack “employment equity” as “reverse racism,” she has this correction: Such programs are about “reversing racism.”
