Belmont Portfolio. John Robert Lee. Peepal Tree Press, 2023. 65 pgs.
A review by George Goddard
In an interview with Caribbean Writers and Poets, John Robert Lee (JRL) characterises his latest collection, Belmont Portfolio, as a companion book to his earlier Pierrot (Peepal Tree, 2020). And this is probably so thematically, imagistically, and in its exploration of language use with its formal renderings and its uniquely Caribbean Kwéyòl cadence — kadans, should you prefer it, if you consider the particularity of the distinct rhythms which infuse his verse. He references calypsonian Shadow (Winston Bailey), Patrick St. Eloi of Kassav and other singers he admires. In so much of the work in this collection the pulsing rhythms of his lines carry that distinctive vibe.
The sequence for which this book is named, dedicated to Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace, begins: ‘some girl you never spoke with / some girl who walked on the other side of your road / some girl you looked out for from your blue window / lived in a house like this’ (p.10). Then: ‘who will come to the red gate with the red mail tinbox / its pillars topped with red pyramids / who will walk past the yellow hydrant / and stare through the closed gate / at the thick variety of garden’ (p.11). The rhythm is unmistakably Caribbean. And so are the images from which he derives his ekphrastic verse. Lee told this writer that the Belmont Portfolio cycle was inspired by photographs he took around Belmont in 2019. He has long written ekphrastic poems inspired by art.
Themes: On Sticks of Oars, Journeyings, Many Meanderings
But it is the themes that move through the poems from ‘Archetypes: On Sticks of Oars’, that meander through Part One and Part two of the book that not only mark it as a companion work to Pierrot, but elaborate and expand on these themes in very interesting ways. The theme of daily life, that of our Caribbean, and JRL’s personal experiences, as a journey — an odyssey if you like — mirror the earlier volume. Along that journey the themes of unrequited love and infatuations, faith, aging and death, hopefulness, continue to occupy him. His elegiac and prophetic engagement with the world, in my view, comes out more strongly in this volume than in Pierrot - this more than anything else, makes his treatment of theme more expansive than in the earlier volume which is itself an excellent work.
In my review of Pierrot I observed that: ‘this collection mediates the poet’s thoughts through the prism of his life experiences, and the works of poets, writers and artists as varied as Dionne Brand, Francis Thompson, Nobel Laureate Sir Derek Walcott, calypsonian Shadow, …and photographer Corrie Scott’. In Belmont Portfolio there is a suggestion that he goes somewhat beyond this, to celebrate music and dance, painting and sculpture — even as he treads carefully, sandalled in his Faith, even as he pleads gentle apprehensions on approaching mid-70’s.
He dances the lakonmèt of his folk forebears, he iconises their wob dwiyèt dresses, gets into the dancing line and prances with the enigmatic (arthritic?) jump and wave of the aging Winston Bailey (Shadow). He belts out the throaty Zouk of Jacob Desvarieux (late Kassav musician). And what better literary venue in which to do this than in a collection named for his 2019 Carifesta dingolay in Trinidad’s iconic Belmont. He does not frown upon the reggae singer Chronixx of the younger generation — it is all part of this interminable journey represented in Jallim Eudovic’s (young Saint Lucian sculptor) sculpture, the inspiration for the poem, On Sticks of Oars.
On Sticks of Oars, the poem that opens this collection, is a piece that is simultaneously reminiscent of the journeying of, and the melding of Caribbean peoples that begins in the mists of time, and the poet’s own journeying. Although perhaps not following as closely its classical plot, Belmont Portfolio has echoes of his compatriot’s, Sir Derek Walcott’s, engagement with an odyssey, a continuing journey of discovery, of a people writing their own History which flies in the face of the coloniser’s challenge to produce magnificent monuments and the great classical wonders of the world as evidence of civilisation and history. Note Walcott’s ‘The Sea Is History’ (Star Apple Kingdom: 1980).
The Caribbean, its landscape and seascape, in Lee’s work, as in Walcott’s, becomes the theatre of a great journeying. For Robert, if not epic, it is certainly epiphanic.
The theme of journeying, of an odyssey setting out on ‘Sticks of Oars’, explodes through JRL’s unique literary paintings (renderings in ekphrastic verse) of Caribbean flora and fauna, through the meanderings of a certain Purgatorio. Here, as in Pierrot, the images of travel through the many twists and turns of a Purgatorio that ultimately leads to glimpses of Paradiso is ever-present. (His earlier Song & Symphony, a long ekphrastic poem, published as a chapbook with the art of Shallon Fadlien, 2016, and published in his Collected Poems (Peepal, 2017), evokes much of this Dantean imagery). Note the powerful images and the conjunction of the lines: ‘through a Caribbean parish of blue-hued hills / surf over veined ocean, beaches / that have always been there, / scissor-tailed sea-birds that translate / the metaphysics of my metaphors / into sacramental messengers…/…parting veils of the promised new beginning —’ (p.58). The journey of the poet and that of his Saint Lucian people merge here: ‘through the Capital of Castries, Kwéyòl villages down the coast, / the intriguing lives, their complexities, their fundamental mystery, /…poet and preacher, is this an “enigma of arrival”, / the predictable “Pilgrim’s progress” / to the “Celestial City” to “Paradiso”? The “Odyssey, and a return from…a return to…of “The Prodigal”? (pp.58,59). Note how this island pilgrimage connects to well-known literary works, of Naipaul, Walcott, Bunyan, Dante, Homer. Lee has also said that a general theme of this book, captured in the cover art by Trinidadian Jackie Hinkson, is “a return from, a return to..”
Here one experiences the marrying of classical themes imagistically and conceptually with those of Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. This infuses everyday Caribbean life, as part of an ethos that is part of world culture, but is distinctively and singularly Caribbean — and I suggest, Saint Lucian (Vespers: p.35). It is this elaboration of theme that allows John Robert Lee to boldly and confidently bear ‘…the Caribbean voice / to the table of world literature, / placing there in canticles, / our accents, our history, our songs, our dances, / that in particular celebrate our apprehensions of the Sacred…(p.59). Thus, the universal and theological import of his work.
A Faith that Treads Carefully
While the sacred and sacramental evidently infuse the work of one who has been described by Derek Walcott as a Christian poet, it is not done slavishly or in a doctrinaire manner. Indeed many of the epigraphs he chooses are biblical or quote authors like Auden and Eliot. But he also has much time for Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin who are certainly not of this Faith orientation. He also seems to me to run the risk, in the treatment of his themes, of drawing the ire of those who are plain, ultra-conservative, Bible-thumping believers. He allows himself the freedom and artistic creativity to interpret the message in the context of a certain unity of the physical and metaphysical: the kaiso griot becomes a metaphor for an earthly and earthy messenger ‘with your rough, beautiful, holy voice’ (p.18).
In all this Robert (JRL) is mindful that ‘faith must tread carefully / sandalled with the truth you wear’ (p.56). This passage has been referenced earlier. I delineate it here to make the point that he speaks powerfully yet not abrasively, he speaks today’s truth rather than yesterday’s obsessions:
‘like all our garbage throttling oceans, the barrage
of horrendous news from every corner of this fatigued planet
deadens us to suffering life in war zones, famine-plagued villages,
race-baiting sidewalks, grief-stricken ICU wards, streets of homeless children
& aging dementia, numerous catalogues of pain
to which we have grown numb, dumb & frankly, bored —’ (p.40)
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the poem, Watchman, epigraphed by Ezekiel 3:17.
Beyond the themes of unrequited love and infatuations (pp. 10, 15), crises of faith, apprehensions, alienation from self and community (p. 13), aging, decline, death countered with ‘…the joy that is / the sacramental grace that always is’, the fond reflections on the music of Shadow and Rudder and ‘ the girl with the nice voice / singing with Kes, the Band’ (p.14), Belmont Portfolio’s many melded themes take on the tenor of the prophetic and elegiac in its railings against colonial oppression, post-colonial disillusionments and various forms of human exploitation:
‘Ask native peoples who trusted paper promises
ask Africans chained below decks of slave caravels
ask Asians & other immigrants from islands of the sea,
ask them about liberal democracy that plants burning crosses
on their lawns, knees in their necks, metal in their fleeing backs,
that makes them invisible ciphers fenced in minority ghettos…
‘Ask the colonised in their complacencies…’ (p. 41)
While, in this latest work, his Faith remains one of the themes permeating his poetry, he seems to have infused it more gently into his verse than in his earlier collection, Sighting and other poems of faith (2013).
This Caribbean voice, Saint Lucian voice, is yet another placing of Caribbean literature at the fulcrum of world history.
So Much Things To Say…over the lost cities of yards
I have suggested that, taken as a whole, the Belmont Portfolio collection is a story of journeying, of discovery and self-discovery, of the vagaries and meanderings of the experiences of a melding of Caribbean peoples writing their History on the tapestry of the world. It is also at the same time autobiographical, as JRL himself points out in the interview earlier referenced. Part Two of this work is, in this respect, as engaging as the earlier poems. Its particularity further amplifies his treatment of theme, image and kadans in this section. Moreover it suggests the gravitas of an elder practitioner of the art, who has, in the words of the reggae prophet Robert Nesta Marley, “so much things to say”, despite his asking:
‘What remains to be said, written and sung? / we have been to the end of history and back again / we have returned from cities of perfection, come again to narrow lanes of Belmont / sat in the King’s halls of Cambridge, reentered Marchand..’ (p.51). The poet, approaching mid-70’s, observes: ‘love has left wrinkled skins of loneliness, / children gone to far countries as they must, /lovers distracted by diversions of age / and old flames rekindling dead wood — / what remains to be sung, made poetry of…?’. There's still so much to be said: ‘so write it down and say it like a kaiso griot / like Stalin or Shadow / sing it strong / like a chantwèl over shak-shak, drums and violon / like Bob Marley still wailing from passing vans / over the lost cities of yards.’
The poet still has lots to say to those in the lost cities of yards and their oppressors, for: ‘what, what do they know / they and their cabals / of oligarchs, bankers, generals / crime bosses and petty clerks — ‘ (p. 53)
He is not blind to, and does not turn away from, his Caribbean that is wracked by corruption at the highest levels, crime and oppression that permeates right through the ‘lost cities of yards,’ this Caribbean of the ‘fluting sound of wood doves’, this complex Caribbean of abiding illusions.
And he is speaking of and to his people who still may be labouring under the illusions that their history is only defined by the coloniser and not by their own innate creativity, by their self-discovery, the liberating experiences of:
‘ …blues harmonicas in late-night clubs
of blind singers in halls of arrogant empires
of Kwéyòl lamentations on aching violons
of reggae prophets in Trench Town gullies
folk chanters every time, everywhere
chanting down Babylon
pushing back beasts of earth and sea’
At the very centre of this self-discovery, this convoluted yet epiphanic journey, is Resistance. And in this resistance is the making of History. History with an upper-case H because the particularity of this history is in its challenging of “arrogant empires’ rather than in the building of oppressive empires. So resistance is another powerful image ekphrastically derived from our music and art in a way that is not as graphically etched out in Pierrot. The metaphor of resistance has been ever present in JRL’s poetry — in this latest volume however, it resonates with a sound unprecedented in his earlier work:
‘What imagination confronts unreasoning tyranny
with defiant chords?
What Shekinah sets tongues of fire in the streets,
shatters glass underfoot
And sent this Etude to us as certain accounting’ (p.51)
It resonates with the sound of shattering glass!
This volume raises the voice of lament and defiance — but it is also a trumpet of celebration. John Robert Lee’s celebration of Caribbean life is as evident in this collection as in any other. It is not a vulgar or specious celebration. Its flora and fauna, its faith and spirituality, its art in all forms are mediated through the prism of a people grappling with post-colonialism. In flowing measured rhythms he writes in a poem that records the world-wide Covid experience:
“Gospelling yellow breasts among avocado blossoms / butterflies cavorting around the Rose of Sharon / .. humming birds probing under grapefruit, / …children on this Sabbath chanting hymns from their verandah…who would think/that pestilence is ravaging our world? (p.24).
And again, celebrating what he as a poet learns from the great calypsonians:
‘So we learn, Dr. Bailey, gothic Shadow, how to put the story: / hear in your ear a prancing line /chant extension of syllables through waving melody /…straight from the yard behind the galvanise / …ricochet and dingolay and wave it / down in the common life you come from…’ (Belmont gothic, Thursday, p.18)
Sometimes the cadence of his poetry is more measured. Other times more pulsing. But always markedly in a Caribbean voice, with his Saint Lucian kwéyòl inflections, always cast in the light of the ‘the common life you come from’, the life in which “if your shoe buss up / you can still jump up / when music play” (Winston Bailey, the Shadow). It evokes a mood and an aesthetic that, while uniquely found in this arc of lands and islands from Belize to Cuba, continues to affirm the Caribbean’s place in world literature.
This Caribbean which has birthed and nurtured Nicolas Guillen and Kamau Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul and Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kincaid and more recently Kwame Dawes, Kei Miller, Canisia Lubrin, Dionne Brand among many others, continues to speak eloquently. In joy but certainly in protest. In a poem titled Ikons, inspired by art on the walls of a 200 year-old prison in Saint Lucia, unfortunately demolished in 2020, Lee writes:
‘Who conceived grills in thick walls behind green windows / to hold black men who wore the Imago Dei across flaring noses & sensuous lips?/ Who plotted their abduction and degradation from the Eastern land? / Who assaulted their wives and mothers beyond terrible imagination, / …why? Is any theory enough? / Is the answer hidden in the metaphysics of antiquity, some Cain & Abel story?’ (p.28).
His tongue-in-cheek rejection of the self-righteousness and “theories” of white supremacy in Christendom garb is pointed.
While I have commented in a somewhat oblique way on John Robert Lee’s use of various literary devices in the course of this review, I think there is need before ending, to make these more pointed concluding observations: his use of rhythm and line, of formal language interspersed with Caribbean colloquialisms, the evident Saint Lucian Kwéyòl kadans (while not writing expressly in Kwéyòl) which he employs — these elements are masterfully interwoven.
After all, what remains to be said, written and sung? I think we can expect so much more from this exceptionally skilled and prolific poet. In the words of the Saint Lucian Kaiso practitioner, Lucian Parrot, ‘as [he] getting older, [he] getting sweeter’. To quote Vladimir Lucien the talented younger Saint Lucian poet, Lee is indeed a “chronicler of the infinite in small places and in honest, quotidian experience.” Belmont Portfolio is a fine collection.
George Goddard is a Saint Lucian writer. A new collection of his poetry with art by Saint Lucian artist Alwin St. Omer, is due out in 2024.
