I have two poems set in Jamaica.
They share, I guess, an attempt to describe that space you
notice when you're in another--
not only when you're in another culture,
but in this case, when you hear another language spoken,
because I suppose the Fodor's guide to the Caribbean
claims that the language spoken in Jamaica is English,
but it's a patois and operates very differently
than our English does and has a different grammar, in which,
for example, they make relatively no distinction
between male and feminine pronouns,
so that confuses one's ordinary sense right away.
And people who operate with a grammar who works that way
think differently of gender than we do.
This goes all the way along the line,
so I was interested by the amount of mistranslation
and misinformation that goes across this cultural gap.
And I wrote some poems trying to embody that
and to investigate it, and here are two of them.
The first of them, it's a poem called "Jamaicans Posing to be
Photographed," something that I myself would never do.
I hate taking photographs.
I'm vain and don't mind being photographed,
but I don't like to take pictures with a camera
because it means that I somehow imagine that I'll
have that information, and therefore, don't
need to remember it as accurately as possible.
So I don't carry a camera.
But if I did and I were taking a picture of Jamaicans
posing to be photographed, it would come out like this.
Illiterate Esther watched me closing a book and asked,
can you hear from the dead with that box?
God yes.
Today I take pictures.
My subjects are full dress.
My subjects!
As the language I live by flows through me
it carries so much history I'm embarrassed, I
who believe in language and distrust its exact parlor
tricks.
Full dress, historical posture, as if they
were running for office or these were wedding pictures,
since white folks care about weddings.
Somber Ronald, age three.
And Esther, archival, though nothing
keeps in the heat and the dead don't live in boxes.