I met Mervyn Morris for the first time not in Jamaica but in Maryland. I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, studying in an MFA program there, and my teacher Merle Collins insisted I say hello to him following an event. It’s been nearly thirty years since that first encounter, which entailed only a quick exchange and one I mostly recall for how nervous I was to meet someone Merle had described as a towering figure in Jamaican poetry.
I met Mervyn for the second time in Kingston, several years later. Following the publication of my first book of poems, I was (miraculously to me) invited to read with him and two other great Jamaican poets—Eddie Baugh and Lorna Goodison.1 To say I was frightened would be an understatement. There were many reasons for this, but the one that is germane here is that by then I’d read Mervyn’s poems (and those by many other Jamaican and other Caribbean poets) and well understood I was out of my league.
None of my feeling of inadequacy was Mervyn’s doing. Not once in the times I’ve been in his presence has he done anything to make me feel other than welcomed. From the first time I met him, he was extraordinarily kind in trying to put me at ease. His demeanor is one I would describe as self-effacing. For a man of his learning and accomplishment, he wears his knowledge unbelievably lightly. In conversation, it is remarkable how much more he listens than speaks. Unlike the performance of humility I’ve witnessed in other poets over the years, Mervyn’s expressions of thanks and embrace of the limits of certainty feel entirely genuine. I realize I am belaboring personal impressions I’ve formed about his character in an essay meant to speak to his poetry. This is because what I’ve observed of how Mervyn comports himself in life aligns with what I heard at the center of his poems before I can honestly say I knew him very much at all. His poems struck a chord with me from the first time I read them, for their integrity, groundedness, evenhandedness of voice and vision.
First published in Examination Centre in 1992, “Jamaica 1979” is one of Morris’s poems I have returned to over the years. By offering my close reading of it here, I hope at the same time to underscore some of the aesthetic and ethical values I see underpinning his entire body of work. While I was never fortunate enough to be his student at the University of the West Indies, I have positioned myself at the feet of Morris’s poems many times. They have been and continue to be among my enduring poetry teachers.
Jamaica 1979
a stone’s throw
from the revolutionary
slogans on the wall
an old black woman
scavenging
in ruins
Cars idle
at the traffic lights
waiting for green2
“Jamaica 1979” consists of three, lean, triple-line stanzas and, counting the title, a scant twenty-eight words. Its brevity, coupled with the taut nature of its syntax, could make it feel unassuming, perhaps even slight, at first glance. Ironically, Morris’s ability to invert expectation as the poem unfolds ultimately renders it the more resonant. As with many poets who invest their poems with the faith that you can say a lot with a little, Morris trusts the reader to enter spaces his poems leave intact. The silences throughout—engendered by his sharpening of syntax and turning of phrases and lines—entreat us to dwell in the images and linger over each word.
From the title and a handful of key details in the opening lines, the poem’s context can be easily gleaned: Jamaica in 1979 is marked by “revolutionary slogans” scrawled across “the wall” of an urban landscape. “Revolutionary slogans” is a particularly powerful descriptor, since it operates as shorthand. The push for social and political change throughout the 1970s in Jamaica inflected daily life across the country, acutely so in Kingston. The complex history of this decade serves as the backdrop for Morris’s poem.
Yet rather than advancing an argument about the philosophical grist for this “revolutionary” moment, in the next stanza Morris executes the first of several major turns in the poem. The second stanza moves from drawing the urban scene to sketching the human figure singly visible within it: “an old black woman / scavenging / in ruins.” If we sit with the middle stanza—the fulcrum of the poem, I would argue—Morris asks that we bear witness to the life of someone who may be familiar but from whom many of us turn away without really seeing. In Morris’s hands, she, not the “revolutionary slogans” with which the poem begins, commands our attention.
I mentioned at the outset that syntax is a tool Morris dexterously wields as a poet. Looking closely at the grammar of this poem is key to understanding how the “old black woman” occupies the foreground and how Morris creates emotional and rhetorical reverberation in a linguistically spare poem. Firstly, I’d argue, Morris’s deployment of an introductory clause to open the poem functions as useful misdirection. In the opening stanza, the dominant image is of those revolutionary slogans on the wall, a powerful signifier in its own right as I’ve noted. Yet the first stanza is a dependent clause. The actual subject of the sentence is deliberately withheld; all we know is that something or someone as yet unseen is “a stone’s throw / from the revolutionary / slogans on the wall."3
When the subject of the sentence, “an old black woman,” enters in the first line of the second stanza, she is bracketed by two prepositional phrases that greatly expand the poem’s purview. The different use of each preposition offers insight into the way Morris’s craft is subtly sophisticated. In the case of the first—“from”—the phrase that contains it is a painterly one: spatial in its logic and conveying relative distances. “From” is a heavy-lifting word, positioning the “old black woman” as adjacent to the “wall.” It also juxtaposes her body against the wall’s “revolutionary slogans,” a pairing that becomes painfully ironic in the next two lines.
These lines deliver the verb modified by a second prepositional phrase, “scavenging / in ruins,” and complete the grammatical sentence that stretches across the first two stanzas. On first take, “in” seems to function as does “from” in the previous stanza. It could be read as further situating the “old black woman” within the scene. Combined with the powerful verb “scavenging,” the phrase is visceral and punctuated by what is present in the language of the poem and what we as readers must supply to form an image in our mind’s eye. As example, we might begin to see the “ruins” she scours the roadside for, as discarded items, rubbish, she needs to secure for survival.
Yet there is another possibility inherent in the grammar, which turns the preposition into something other than a spatial and visual marker. Syntactically encoded is the implication that she and her life itself are “in ruins.” In any poem, the literal image is often pressing to become symbol, as the physics of poetry is metaphor. But how do descriptions of sensory matter inside a poem gather into themselves the full force of metaphor? This is one of the million-dollar questions of poetic craft for which Morris’s syntax offers a possible answer, and a convincing one at that. In large measure, the transformation of the image from the literal to figurative in this poem is a result of Morris’s finely orchestrated ordering of phrases. His syntax doubles the poem’s vision and tone.
Small flourishes of diction—notably “scavenging” and “ruins”—also contribute to the poem’s situation becoming increasingly complex in the middle stanza. With nearly infinite language choices, Morris selects only three words to describe what the “old black woman” is doing. In its spareness, his diction attunes our ear to the always existing relationship between each word and what it potentially signifies. Unlike, for instance, the word “wall” in the poem, “ruins” is not content to remain primarily a visual descriptor. The word simply has too many connotations embedded within it, which the poet knows well. At the center of a poem, which seems at a passing glance to offer a snapshot of a Kingston street scene in 1979, Morris ratchets up the emotional stakes. “Ruins” invites into the poem the specters of history and elegy.
Despite the title’s temporal fixity, “Jamaica 1979” becomes strikingly nonlinear in this moment, encompassing the much longer story of Jamaica, whose foundation in genocide, slavery, and colonialism begins the “ruins” that extend to 1979 and beyond. The argument the poet makes about the cost of history, including revolution, comes through without grand pronouncement but with powerful implication, nonetheless. Morris’s focus on “an old black woman” grounds his position in what she represents, the outsized payment that has been and continues to be extracted from those who are most vulnerable within Jamaican society. The centrality of her experience to the scene asserts who is worthy of being seen not only by poets but by the culture at large.
While the poet’s witness creates an inherently dramatic situation, with the exception of “scavenging” and “ruins” the majority of the diction Morris chooses leans toward exposition and is fairly neutral in tone. Throughout the poem, he also uses minimal modification and favors generic categories of nouns. Even the clause “an old black woman,” the most elaborate phrase in the entire poem, by using the indefinite article still retains a gestural effect. Extending the painting analogy here, Morris’s brushstrokes as a poet are few and offer a light touch.
By over and again choosing to leave his image in outline rather than more fleshed-out form, he posits a relationship between poet and reader that asserts the primacy of certain values. These include a belief in poetry’s capacity to create intimacy and foster community. His poems are on the side of using language to contextualize rather than decontextualize experience, to clarify rather than obfuscate or hide from us the truths of who we are. He trusts the reader as a kind of cocreator of the poem, with shared cultural memory or enough curiosity to acquire the requisite knowledge of the histories to which the poem’s every word alludes.
The poem might have ended with the second stanza, where the emotional pitch is at its highest. But Morris does not settle for that kind of closure. The third and last stanza offers another turn that alters the poem’s vantage point and tone yet again. In the closing three lines, the poet pans out, focusing no longer on the woman but on the “cars” that “idle” in traffic, “waiting for the green.” Here, the “cars” are metonymic, a stand-in for the citizenry at large. As with “ruins,” the image of the “green” traffic light operates as a visual detail to paint the scene and quickly morphs into a figurative device. But tonally these words occupy nearly opposite positions along the spectrum of human emotion. Whereas “ruins” conjures elegy, “green” conveys the possibility of renewal.
In the poem’s closure, a better future is left as one possible outcome. This is not only because the poem ends on the image of “waiting” but because Morris sets the entire poem in the present tense. In the world of this poem, in other words, 1979 in Jamaica is always happening. Whether the “green” the populace hopes for will come, or not, remains unresolved. By its close, the drama is lower than in the previous stanza, but the tension is higher.
For some readers, a poem whose closure is open-ended is unsatisfying. I can say I am decidedly not one of those readers. Morris’s decision to leave without supplying a definitive answer feels far truer to me than any other way he might have exited the poem. It also has left a space for me to re-enter the poem, as I have done for years. Each time, I feel the weight of the poem’s implications and paradoxes shift. This is not because the poem’s language has changed, of course, but because I’ve aged. Because I see slightly differently at each juncture what 1979 in Jamaica means.
At the beginning of the rather daunting task I felt handed with this essay—to reflect on the impact of Morris’s poetry—I reread his collected poems Peelin Orange. I made a list of over a dozen poems I might want to discuss, being sure they were poems I hadn’t previously attended to in the review of that book I wrote after it was published in 2017.4 I even sketched notes for ways I might group the poems to highlight Morris’s development of themes across his body of work. It was quite a surprise to me, then, that when I sat down to actually write this essay, I just continued to peer into “Jamaica 1979.” In light of what I’ve written, I’ve had to ask myself if there was perhaps another reason I chose this poem, besides its estimable craft.
What I have come up with as an answer is so obvious that it seems strange I didn’t see it beforehand. I suspect I return to “Jamaica 1979” not only for its artistry but also because it feels deeply personal to me. The 1970s is a period of Jamaican history that has haunted me as a person; it has profoundly shaped my imagination as a poet and writer. As it happens, 1979 is the year my grandparents migrated from Kingston to Miami. Born in the early 1930s, they were more or less of the generation to which Morris belongs. I was born decades later, in 1972. In 1979, I was living with my parents and younger sisters in a Rastafarian community in Kingston, still two years from leaving Jamaica to join my grandparents in Miami. My parents’ lives had been disintegrating throughout my childhood for many reasons, some indelibly shaped by that “revolutionary” decade in Jamaica, the canvas for Morris’s poem.
One of the gifts I received by reading Morris’s poems in the mid- to late 1990s was gaining greater access to parts of Jamaican history and even to parts of myself—memories, images, and dreams I’d stored for a long time and for which I could not find correspondence in the life I had been living for over a decade in America. Morris was among the poets who shaped my development as a young poet in ways too unconscious and entwined to accurately tease apart now. But I remember his voice, from the start. It spoke to me in a manner that stopped me in my tracks. For nearly thirty years, I have continued to listen and have learned new things each time I revisit his poems. They are disarming, inviting, direct, and a bit sly, all at once, in the best of ways. They sneak up on you, with their quiet wisdom, and stay.
From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum has published six books in the US and UK, most recently, No Ruined Stone (Peepal Tree, 2021), winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Musgrave Medal, and an NEA Fellowship, among others. McCallum is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA.
[1] Shara McCallum, The Water Between Us (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
[2] Mervyn Morris, “Jamaica 1979,” in Examination Centre (London: New Beacon, 1992). Reprinted by permission of the author.
[3] Throughout, any italics in the poem are my own.
[4] Mervyn Morris, Peelin Orange: Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017). See Shara McCallum, “Metaphors of the Spirit,” Poetry London, August 2017; http://poetrylondon.co.uk/metaphors-of-the-spirit-shara-mccallum-on-two-poet-laureates-of-jamaica/.