Wandering Spirits of Exile offers a series of conversations with history, individual ancestry, the experience of being out of Jamaica in Britain, and with musicians, artists and writers who have been creating new forms of Black expression.
In the first part of the collection, poems explore the historical experience of exile through reflections on the voyages of a series of slave ships, revisioning voices like John Newton’s deep implication in the cruelties and awakening moral vision of that time. Here, the collection enters the dialogue about the possibilities of reparation and forgiveness. It makes a connection to the arrival in England of enslaved Africans such as Ignatius Sancho almost 300 years ago and deepens the universal resonances of these earlier arrivals by making associations between this forced trans-Atlantic crossing and other exilic wanderings in World literature.
In the second part, poems tap into the means of resistance through the poet’s own Maroon heritage, of Nanny of the Maroons and the keeping alive of African traditions, and how that spirit of renewal works its way into dancehall music and into the Black Caribbean body, including the poet’s own.
In the third section, poems seek inspiration in the work of visual artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Kapo (Mallica Reynolds) and Gene Pearson. And as the extensive notes make clear – they are an essential part of the collection – Wandering Spirits of Exile is a work in dialogue with a generation of Caribbean poets and writers, from Kamau Brathwaite and George Lamming to NourbeSe Philip and Shara McCallum – not forgetting such common ancestors as Chaucer and Shakespeare. In poem after poem, Monica Minott combines the authority of the historical record, the intimacy of the individual voice and an adventurousness with poetic forms that is both ambitious and satisfying. Multi-layered in time and space, the collection displays parallel movements in language, between standard English, Jamaican patwa and the ghostly echoes of African languages asking to be heard.
"In her brilliant new collection, Wandering Spirits of Exile, Monica Minott presents poems as a series of dialogues, conversations, arguments and ripostes. Classical tales are subverted to the perspectives of the “burnt face … people … of the West Nile” and there is a celebration of the voices of the everyday and quotidian which shines through. A stunning series of poems devoted to Jamaica’s sole national heroine, Nanny of the Maroons, offer delightful juxtapositions as when Queen Nanny meets Chaucer at his English home. The poems are insistent in telling these stories from the point of view of the oppressed. Gorgeous poems dedicated to Jamaican Taino artefacts abound, insisting on the melding of Africa, the African and the Indigenous. While the collection engages with the visual arts, the poems single out the work of Basquiat, who is treated as a truly diasporic figure. Despite the weight of history, these poems are generous, incantatory, incandescent and enchanting."
Jacqueline Bishop
"Monica Minott’s intriguing collection, Wandering Spirits of Exile, extends her investigation of heritage. Various streams are shaping the identity of a 21st century Jamaican woman and poet, “hybrid”, “multicultural”. The poems do many voices, predominantly Jamaican English with patois infusions. By allusion or respectful imitation they acknowledge many influences, and they often identify explicitly what has prompted a poem. The prompts include written narratives of European voyagers colonizing new worlds; stories of resistance to slavery, especially by Nanny and other Maroons; cultural phenomena such as Jonkonnu and dancehall (“archives / of oppression”); and various items of contemporary visual art – by Ebony Patterson, Kapo, Gene Pearson, or the Haitian-American Jean-Michel Basqiat – reflecting spirits in exile. This is a rewarding book."
Mervyn Morris
