Reckoning with “Home”

Some of Us Can Go Back Home is Yashika Graham’s debut book of poetry, exploring the complexity of home, belonging, womanhood, and family rooted in Caribbean situatedness. This collection closely follows her 2024 self-published chapbook My Mother Is a Bush Woman and is the culmination of ten years of meditation on family and origin. Graham explores the persona’s upbringing in rural Jamaica in Berkshire, Westmoreland; charts her move to the fast-paced city of Kingston; and probes the many questions this dislocation from her family of origin raises. For the persona, there are persons and tensions that give her pause and reasons to not want to go home, and Graham unravels these reasons with lyrical grace. 

There is a surging power that Graham’s voice carries as she makes generous use of poetic devices that give the poems a meandering but pointed narrative quality. In “To Buck a Bull” we see the speaker marking the complexity of place through the use of enjambment, free verse, and slant rhyme. The tracing of geography is bound up with the layered syntax: 

Is to then sit on a rock,
beyond the climb up from bamboo root
to hilltop, my brothers leaning on a guava limb
half-laugh, half-cry, saying give thanks,
is nuff things we survive. (43) 

The slant rhymes, such as “climb up / hilltop” and “half-cry / survive,” serve the poem’s musicality. Graham also infuses contrasting imagery with “root” and “limb,” giving a sweeping vision of Jamaica’s rural landscape from ground to sky and how keenly the children have explored it. She effortlessly oscillates between English and Patwa, demonstrating the persona is an interloper moving across various social strata within her own country but also showing that sentiments from her childhood require their original language to fully resonate. Sound grounds the work in the Jamaican context and brings along the various voices that comprised the persona’s upbringing, some meant for her good, others for her harm. 

Graham has divided the collection into four parts: “Directions from the Border,” “Sustenance,” “Finishing My Brother’s Work,” and “Catalogue of Silences.” The first section gives readers a fulsome picture of the persona’s sense of place through the use of vivid imagery. For example, poems such as “Miss B and the Way to God” acquaint readers with the community’s characters, while poems like “For the Rooster” poetically tend to what might otherwise be considered minutiae. The persona also begins to interact with urban life and its peculiarities, such as in “Between Mona and Manhattan, Lost and Found,” where she recalls getting lost in a Kingston suburb, paralleling that with learning to navigate an even bigger city like Manhattan in New York. Here are the first hints at a person who is becoming someone else, someone who does not quite fit in at home anymore. 

At first glance, “Sustenance” seems to suggest material nourishment like food, but this section probes the persona’s family life and how her family members have—or have not—poured into her. The push and pull of these relationships and the persona’s evolution result in the persona feeling both a sense of alienation from and belonging to her home. The poem “Going Home to Mama” features an opening dedication to Graham’s grandmother—“for Miss Nelly, 1929– 2024”—and ends with the following: 

She reminds me that I must go before full dark,
that I must come again before she leaves
and yet there is no going, no coming again to this place.
I am among the galloping children, our voices
haunting her yard and yet I feel like a stranger
standing at the gate, still calling to hold the dogs. (37)

This poem’s dedication, together with the line “and yet there is no going, no coming again to this place”—foreshadow the grandmother’s passing. In Jamaica, a person will shout “Hold dog!” at someone’s gate to ensure the dogs are tied up before they enter. It suggests the dogs are not familiar with them because they are neither resident nor there often enough. Graham references this cultural practice to demonstrate that the speaker has some underlying regret about not being around enough when her grandmother was alive. 

Poems such as “The Prodigal Conjures a Return” give more insight into why the persona stayed away from home, revealing the family’s more complex underbelly. She declares about her estranged father, 

all you do is stalk the land like a maggot in its marrow

You take my machete, give me your shirt,
say how you come to clear land.
We know you come to cloud memory. (33) 

“The Prodigal” can be read as a biblical allusion to the parable of the prodigal son and possibly a nod to The Prodigal (2004) by Derek Walcott, which addresses similar themes of dislocation and belonging. In contrast to the parable where the father welcomes his son with open arms, this family meets this prodigal with skepticism. Graham uses simile to liken him to an opportunistic maggot. In keeping with the collection’s title, this poem demonstrates why returning home is not always straightforward; despite one’s own personal transformation, persons may attempt to “cloud memory” or coerce us toward our previous states of being. 

“Finishing My Brother’s Work” is elegiac, a profound introspection on the aftermath of loss. Graham masterfully portrays how the dead haunt the living, what it can feel like to lose someone dear but to have to keep going. Across and within many of the poems in this section, the persona transports readers through shifting time periods, representing the disorienting feeling loss can bring. In “Pear Season,” readers experience loss alongside the persona and her family, and witness how they reckon with grief by relating it to their natural environment: “My mother says that when a limb collapses . . . that there is more to come in the way of things dying” (47). According to Peepal Tree Press, Kamau Brathwaite posits that “as opposed to the nihilist materialism of European mercantilism,” the Caribbean aesthetic retains “proof of the survival of an ancestral African consciousness whose cosmological centre is a spiritual relationship to the natural world.”¹ In keeping with this aesthetic, Graham captures the weight of familial grief but also the glimmers of hope to be found in the persistence of the natural world, since the pear trees keep “digging, rooting their lives to the hillside just so / they might keep standing even when they grow heavy in season” (47). 

Though called the “Catalogue of Silences,” the final section is the shortest of the four, yet it is perhaps the most revelatory. The persona reflects on younger versions of herself who did not speak about men’s trespasses against her, comes to the truth of what has happened to her, and is able to acknowledge it openly. There is a self-assured fierceness to the speaker’s tone that readers have not experienced previously. The speaker presents a list of men in the poem “Catalogue of Silences,” and after a series of personal vignettes about each man’s behavior toward her, she repeats the list but adds another name, suggesting that this list will continue to grow:

Tony, Barnes, Goosey, Carl, Dummy, Nesean.
Tony, Barnes, Goosey, Carl, Dummy, Nesean,
Adrian. There are not enough names to go around,
not enough space between them to spare me the
contact of men who have tried their hand at ending me. (57)

This section’s poems speak on behalf of a larger community of women—in Jamaica and beyond—who are vulnerable to the failings of their own relatives or wider community. Graham transforms personal experiences into a damning statement on the danger of women’s silences and a call-to-action to break these silences. 

Graham’s voice represents the next generation of Caribbean literature, one that honors its predecessors but expands on this legacy to translate it into a more contemporary context. Canonical Caribbean writers like Lorna Goodison, Derek Walcott, and Edward Baugh saw beyond the apparent mundanity of Caribbean life and imbued it with personal narrative to uncover its magic, which Graham has also achieved. Indeed, Graham even includes a tribute poem to the late Edward Baugh and his mentorship of those who “wanted to know how to make a poem sing” (22). This collection has sprung from the mentorship efforts of literary stalwarts and Graham’s persistence over the last decade. 

Some of Us Can Go Back Home is a daring book that challenges readers to ponder how their family of origin has shaped them: sometimes to their delight and nostalgia or sometimes despite their best efforts to untangle themselves from it. Graham has painted a vivid picture of her rural Jamaican context and the reorienting that must happen when someone decides to leave a place they call home. This collection reveals there is more nuance to “country life” than meets the eye: every tree has a lesson to share, every family has collective memory to which they return, and every individual has an origin with which they must reckon. 

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Shannon Chen See is a writer born and based in Kingston, Jamaica, exploring Caribbean situatedness from a Chinese Jamaican lens. She is currently pursuing an MFA in writing (poetry) at Pacific University. Shannon is the managing editor of PREE and an executive member of the Journal of Jamaican Art. Find her at https://watchensee.xyz or @watchensee on social media. 

[1] See Peepal Tree Press, “Spirit and Spirituality,” n.d., https://www.peepaltreepress.com/discover/spirit-and-spirituality.