I
I begin thinking of loss. This morning I hear that Edward Baugh has died. say family / say friends. Mervyn and Eddie were poets, critics and literature professors in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. I marveled at their mutual respect and old-school camaraderie. Mervyn read poems at the launch of Eddie’s 1988 collection A Tale from the Rainforest. When Mervyn’s 1976 On Holy Week was republished in 2016, Eddie was the launch speaker. In 2021, they both received the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for “their instrumental role in decisively establishing a Caribbean school of literary scholarship.”1 say learning / laughter.They often shared the stage at conferences and poetry readings, light shining on them both. Over the years, across the globe, at various events: Mervyn and Helen, Eddie and Sheila. say wife.
I begin again thinking of the legacy of these two great men, grateful for having been taught and supported in my career by the both of them. say love.
Mervyn Eustace Morris, may you have many more years with us. say life.2
(Open the bottle of white rum. Pour the libation.)
Edward Alston Cecil Baugh: Teck time / walk good 3
II
Yu buck yu foot
an memory ketch yu
like a springe4
Mervyn taught me at UWI. In West Indian Poetry, he would stumble in with a boombox twice the size of his chest. Midway through our tutorial, he would press play, and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s revolutionary fire or Louise Bennett’s satirical ballads would spread through the room and out the louvre windows, singeing the green mountains. In Is English We Speaking, and Other Essays, Mervyn writes,“Most of our West Indian poets inhabit the differing contexts—and must wrestle with the differing requirements—of print and of performance.”5 In class, he taught us to interrogate the binary that existed between “performance” and “print” poets, one that often relegated perceived “performance poets” to an inferior position. He was an excellent teacher who inspired us to critique Caribbean poetry by focusing on prevalent themes as well as varied techniques and styles. Word. Sound. Power.
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Perhaps Mervyn doesn’t remember this, but to this day I shame when I think of how, emboldened by his approachable demeanor as a lecturer, I walked into one of his consultation hours and proudly declared that I, too, was a poet. Well folks, I placed one of my poems on his desk—a poem that compared a plant to a vagina. I sat there smiling as if it was the most original concept in the world. I think I even had the word clitoris in bold. Mi did proud!
In true Mervyn fashion, he found the most gracious way to say wheel and come again. That meeting with Mervyn stayed with me because as he went through my bad poem line by line, it taught me the importance of giving my students my time when I later became a lecturer. He never made me feel as if I couldn’t write about vaginas, but lawks, I am so grateful that he encouraged me to read more widely and search for deeper (no pun intended), more original metaphors. And if you’ve read “Stripper,” you will understand why Mervyn read my amateurish poem without even raising an eyebrow. He is a poet who consistently explores both the sacred and the secular, in one poem imagining Mary’s pain at the site/sight of the crucifixion (“Mary (Mother)”) and in another portraying Jesus as the object of desire (“A Woman Named Mary”). There are shadows, mirrors, and ponds in his poetry, those brooding spaces where the profane and spiritual “thrash / and slither” (“Shadows”) as they work out how to live with each other.6
III
Extraordinary
trade
When you woo her
she will fade
This is how
the game is played 7
I asked Mervyn how he was doing following his knee surgeries.
“One leg shorter than the other but limping along just fine,” he said.
But Mervyn has always hobbled; his students held their breath
as he climbed onto the N2 classroom dais. I only knew the power in his legs
when I saw him playing tennis on the grounds of the Senior Common Room.
Steady running from side to side as if his feet were built for speed and not
the mundanity of walking.
No wonder his poems never amble. Think of them as perfectly executed
approach shots.
Movement. Timing. Precision. Surprise.
Mervyn always supported student activities on campus. After attending a lunch-
hour concert put on by the UWI Dance Society, he greeted me in class by saying,
“I didn’t know you were a dancer.” I could tell I had gone up in his estimation, perhaps
sparking a renewed hope for my bad poetry.
the bodies
imitate
contraction
and release
. . . . . . . . . .
Artfully
dancing
identity8
On stage, on the court, on the page.
---
Mervyn’s poems are short,
so much of their meaning
held in the spaces,
the quickstep
from line to line.
In the poem “A Word”
the depth
is in the tension between
the rapid movement
across and down
the page
and the request
for the persona
to linger
in memory beyond
this quick motion
of reading.9
---
The word is the body.
One theoretical approach to Mervyn’s poetry could be the examination of the body as a contested site that vomits out poems (“To Tell the Truth”) and displays the suppurating wounds of the psyche broken for the reader’s/audience’s consumption (“Oblation”) while also trying to keep somethings inside for its own nourishment. Think of the poet personae in “Toasting a Muse”: one stands to give a toast after the spirit moves in him but one keeps quiet even though, he too is moved by the “beauty of spirit lighting up the place.”10
There is a constant play in Mervyn’s poetry between revelation and concealment and so much of that deliberation takes place through the portrayal of the body; for example, the movement of the fingers under instruction from the father in “Peelin Orange” is a metaphor poised on the verge of complete disrobement—an exposition on the son who fails to live up to his father’s unreasonable standards of perfection—but instead, it ends as it begins with an image of clothes as concealment.
In “The Day My Father Died,” we are reminded of Mervyn’s preoccupation with the true / fictions (“Data”) of poetry and the blurring of fact and fiction as a thematic concern: “My father’s face, I swear, / Was not serene. // Topple that lie, / However appealing.”11
The line ending on “I swear” actually undermines the persona’s positioning of himself as a truth-teller. The father’s face on the pillow—of which he says, “[It] wrote mourning to me, / Black and white”—is symbolic of the body as a readable text as well as the source of poetic inspiration.12 It is not surprising, then, that in the poem “A Woman Named Mary,” Jesus is described as “a lovely piece of man; real sweet. / Those hands. That mouth. Those feet.”13 Mervyn understands that the differentiation or conflation of fact and fiction is often negotiated within the confines of the body.
What the body says and what it doesn’t say. In returning to “The Day My Father Died,” the persona says, “For me my father’s death / Was mother’s sorrow; / That day was her day, / Loss was tomorrow.”14
I would argue that one of the reasons this poem continues to appeal to so many people is Mervyn’s skillful use of parallelism to contrast the mother and son. In the present moment of the poem, we feel empathy for both of them, but in the aftermath of the poem it is the son whose sorrow will come tomorrow, that utterly devastates us as we are left to imagine what that will look like. We are left to recreate his body, one that we imagine is like the persona’s in “Jamaica Dance #2,” where there is no distinction between the nine-night and the dancer, between grief and the body.15
IV
Remind them you’re committed
to the line
that saying what you feel
is fine16
and if poems move through the body and the body is in motion and the body is never quiet then poems must give us music
if you know Mervyn, you know his laughter, that conspiratorial ripple of schoolboy mischief,
imagine his delight at each right rhyme: deliberate and organic
give thanks for the way he works—a true dub master mixing meters and language
registers, cutting and tweaking until di riddim matches the meaning—
interrogating postcolonial politics, blackness, revising biblical narratives, reasoning
eye to the I
way out in the crowd and we hear Don’s trombone in the alliteration, the assonance
we’re out of breath from the in and out movement of lines, the caesurae
all of us have loved a melancholy baby, / sweet, with fire in her belly17
some of us call her poetry
V
say cycle
circle18
Mervyn, I say, center.
I started teaching creative writing at the University of the West Indies, Mona, after Mervyn retired. A baton he handed to me while I eyed the track ahead, uncertain of how to run the race, but he broke the rules and ran alongside me. The first few years, I sought his advice before assigning final grades. He visited my classes and gave additional feedback to my students, who were always pleased to be in the presence of the man who wrote the infamous “The Day My Father Died” from their CXC syllabus.
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I would argue that the current landscape of Caribbean literature, in keeping with a trend in the Western world, has shifted to a more individualized examination of texts where the writer as celebrity has trumped the collective dialogue and camaraderie between Caribbean writers of a certain generation. (controversial, yes, I know!) However, when I talk about Mervyn as the center, I think of the ways he has encouraged writers to connect: Have you read so and so? Have you met so and so? I told so and so to call you. Mervyn still sees the value in the collective, still asks of us to create community.
He is a writer’s writer, an advocate and a cheerleader. Way before he was appointed as Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2014, Mervyn was doing the work of promoting and supporting Caribbean writers in and out of the classroom. He edited manuscripts, organized literary events, judged writing contests, shared publishing opportunities, etc. It was an honor to have been a member of his Writing Circle at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts at UWI in the 1990s; a small group of us sitting on the rotunda’s stone steps or the visitors’ chairs in the front office getting feedback from Mervyn, getting more of his time. Check the acknowledgement page of nearly every Caribbean poetry collection over the last 40 or so years and you will see Mervyn being thanked for his support. Even well into his retirement, he continues to mentor another generation of Caribbean poets.
It is not easy being a writer based in Jamaica. I will not use this forum to bemoan the lack of resources available to us. What I will say is that if it were not for Mervyn, many of our local writers, me included, would have probably given up on this poetry business. I also imagine that thanks to his poems and his outreach work, there are others who are still holding on to the dream.
---
So, I end as I began: with tears.
An’ pray / dat God-Above
will grant us many, many more years.
Give t’anks19
Tanya Shirley has published two poetry collections with Peepal Tree Press in the UK: She Who Sleeps with Bones (2009) and The Merchant of Feathers (2014). Her work has been featured on BBC World Service, BBC Front Row, Scottish Poetry Library, and www.poetryarchive.org and translated into Spanish and Polish. Shirley is a former lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. She is the recipient of a Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for her outstanding contribution in the field of literature. She is also a proud Cave Canem Fellow.
[1] “Bocas Henry Swanzy Award,” Mervyn Morris, under “All Awardees,” NGC Bocas Lit fest, https://www.bocaslitfest.com/awards/henry-swanzy-award/.
[2] The italicized “say . . .” text interwoven here is from Mervyn Morris, “A Chant against Death,” in Peelin Orange: Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017), 227. All italics for Morris’s poem lyrics throughout is my own.
[3] Morris, “Walk Good,” 3.
[4] Morris, 3.
[5] Mervyn Morris, “Printing and Performance,” in Is English We Speaking, and Other Essays (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1999), 51.
[6] Morris, “Shadows,” in Peelin Orange, 40. See also “Stripper,” 11; “Mary (Mother),” 139; and “A Woman Named Mary,” 134.
[7] Morris, “Muse,” 28.
[8] Morris, “Dialogue for One,” 24.
[9] See Morris, “A Word,” 217.
[10] Morris, “Toasting a Muse,” 36; see also “To Tell the Truth” (53) and “Oblation” (30).
[11] Morris, “The Day My Father Died,” 221; see also “Peelin Orange” (7) and “Data” (50).
[12] Morris, “The Day My Father Died,” 221.
[13] Morris, “A Woman Named Mary,” 134.
[14] Morris, “The Day My Father Died,” 221.
[15] Morris, “Jamaica Dance #2,” 220.
[16] Morris, “Advisory,” 200.
[17] The three italicized lines are from Morris, “Valley Prince,” 44.
[18] Morris, “A Chant against Death,” 227.
[19] The three italicized lines are from Morris, “Give T’anks,” 100.