29 Grace Nichols

Dr. Parimala Kulkarni

1. Objectives

2. Introduction

3. About the author

4. Works

5. Themes and concerns

6. Poems

7. Critical reception

8. Summary

1.   Objectives

• Grace Nichols, Guyanese-British poet
• Works, themes and style
• Poems from her collections, i is a long- memoried woman, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems
• Critical reception

2.   Introduction

Grace Nichols, a Guyanese-British poet, children’s writer, and novelist, was one of the significant Caribbean women writers to publish in the 1980s. Nichols work is vital to the understanding of the Caribbean-British cultural connection. She identifies the Caribbean as the source of her writing yet her works are filled with remarkably eclectic cultural references ranging from Shakespeare, Whitman to Jamaican poets and places like Berlin, Brazil and Singapore to gods of the Aztecs, the Greeks and the Druids. From her early work to the most recent ones, Nichols has uncovered various facets of life as a woman, a Caribbean and an immigrant living in the United Kingdom. Her poetry can be seen as social commentary with a particular focus on women’s experiences, but with a marked devotion to her poetic art. Her writing is extremely musical.

3.   About the Author Grace Nichols (b. 1950)

Born in Georgetown Guyana, Grace Nichols grew up in a coastal village; when her family moved to the city, she experienced Guyana’s struggle for independence from the UK. Nichols attended the University of Guyana and while studying she was able to travel to the interiors of Guyana, where she studied indigenous cultures. Working as a teacher and journalist, she spent time in remote areas of Guyana which shaped her writings and sparked her interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. In 1977 she migrated to England with her partner and poet John Agard. In England poetry began to play a bigger part in her life. Nichols has also extensively written and edited stories and poems for children.

4.   Works

Nichols’ debut poetry collection, i is a long memoried woman (1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and was later made into a radio-drama for the BBC and a subsequent film adaptation of the book won the Gold Award. The humorously defiant persona of her subsequent poetry collections The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989) articulates some of her best known works. She published another poetry collection Sunris in 1996. Her books for children which are inspired largely by Guyanese folklore and Amerindian legends, include Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). She published No Hickory, No Dickory,No Dock: A Collection of Caribbean Nursery Rhymes (1991) with her partner, John Agard. Everybody Got A Gift (2005) includes new and selected poems, and her collection, Startling the Flying Fish (2006), is a mythological history of the Caribbean. Her most recent collections are Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010). i is a long memoried woman is a powerful poem tracing the journey of the black woman, uprooted from Africa and taken into captivity to the Caribbean. The long-memoried woman is the archetypal black woman of the Diaspora embodying all the experiences, the emotions, and the feelings of a slave woman and carrying with her all the tales of her ancestors and refashioning them in the Caribbean and the world beyond.

Nichols’ second and subsequent collections are characterised by humour and playfulness. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman cast a mischievous glance at black woman’s lives in Britain, confidently asserting her right to be herself and defying Western values, especially norms of beauty. The Caribbean cultural references pervade the poems suggesting the warmth, and the friendly spontaneity and sensuality of Caribbean life contrasted with the cool reserved nature of English culture.

Picasso, I Want My Face Back opens with a long title poem in the voice of Dora Maar, the muse and mistress of Picasso who inspired his painting, ‘The Weeping Woman’. Dora’s story is, one of personal colonisation and exploitation in which her face and identity were ‘taken over’ and used for another’s purposes. She journeys towards recovering her identity and self-respect.

Nichols’ poetry for children, influenced by the folklore of Caribbean, African and Native American culture, is known for the musical, rhythmic quality, sensual images and delightful word-play.

5.   Themes and style

Nichols is one of the increasing numbers of Caribbean writers who express their unique legacy of double colonization as women in a postcolonial community. She examines the implications of being black, woman and an immigrant living in England. Nichols, like many other contemporary black women writers, redefines and reconstructs new female subjectivities in order to challenge and resist (neo)colonial and patriarchal structures which marginalise black women. What sets her work apart is the absence of self-pity. Nichols challenges and resists the stereotype of black women as victims. Her work is a subversive and political revisioning of black women’s images against conventional oppressive discourses. Nichols’ poetry not only records the pain and history of the past, but it also represents the power of the future. The black woman’s spirit of self-assertion to chart her own future underlies the whole poetic production of Nichols. Her poetry reveals her need to celebrate her identity as a woman, while also being mindful of the differences in history, culture and voice. A diversity of cultural experiences and influences can be found in her work: a Caribbean migrating to Britain, negotiating a “black” British identity, dealing with the multicultural and multiracial nature of her native Guyana. In her poem “Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the ‘Realities’ of Black Women” she resists the essentialising racial or gendered identity:

I can say I can write no poem big enough to hold the essence of a black woman or a white woman or a green woman.

The themes of home, exile, migration and identity, the major preoccupations in postcolonial writing, are central to Nichols’ oeuvre. She articulates the British Caribbean perspectives on questions about origins, place, power, subjectivity, language and the boundaries that define them. Another characteristic feature of Nichols’ poetry is the skilful fusing of Creole with Standard English to capture the rhythms, orality, and atmosphere of Caribbean culture. For Nichols the reclamation of a folk language is an ‘act of spiritual survival’. Nichols explores the cultural variations in the language she uses in her poetry. Her linguistic style reveals the strong influences of Caribbean poets like Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Louise Bennet who were among the first to use Creole in their works. Nichols however uses a wider range of Creoles to express a variety of moods and voices.

6.   Poems i is a long memoried woman

Nichols’ first and most celebrated poetry collection, i is a long memoried woman, a classic in the postcolonial literary canon, is a poignant poetic exploration of slavery from a female perspective, a herstory. Its chief aim is to reconstruct and re/member (black) Caribbean women’s histories. This sequence of poems explores the epic, historical and mythic journeying of African women, wrenched from their native cultures and transported to slavery in the Caribbean. This poetic sequence reconstructs the African woman’s sense of self, ruthlessly damaged by slavery, in two ways: one through the recovering of cultural links with Africa, and the other through reclaiming the female body as the basis of power for women. The African woman journeys back into the past seeking her identity and inner freedom to triumph over oppression.

The volume is divided into five sections placed between an epigraph and an epilogue. Each section explores a different facet of slavery and a different stage in the slave woman’s life. The poems are structured chronologically moving from the moment of capture in Africa to the final emancipation after slave revolt, that is, from cultural uprooting to the (re)creation of a new individual and collective identity in the Caribbean. The story narrated is not that of one particular slave woman. The lower-case ‘i’ of the title represents a shift from a unified singular subjectivity to a fragmented collective subjectivity of African women’s experience of exploitation and dispossession in the Caribbean plantation system. The slave woman is not ‘I am’ but ‘i is’ who does not comply or conform but resists and rebels. A multiplicity of voices in the poems articulate the different experiences of slavery, just like the slave narratives which functioned as collective tales rather than merely individual autobiographies. Creole, the language of slave(ry) is skilfully intertwined with Standard English the language of master(y) which it critiques.

The story of the long memoried slave woman is recounted in five parts—‘The Beginning’, ‘The Vicissitudes’, ‘The Sorcery’, ‘The Bloodling’ and ‘The Return’. The collection opens with the epigraph:

From dih pout of mih mouth, from dih treacherous calm of mih smile, you can tell i is a long memoried woman.

The poems that follow dramatise the experiences that allow the ‘long memoried’ African woman to move from the position of resisting silence of the epigraph to the empowering speech of the epilogue:

I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung.

The first two sections evoke the horrors of the Middle Passage and the life in the Caribbean, which is seen as “another land”. ‘The Beginning’ narrates the ‘Black Beginning’ of being born into slavery, and the back-breaking work in the sugar cane fields. ‘The Vicissitudes’ articulates the pain of life and the need for hanging on to dreams as a survival strategy. ‘The Sorcery’ narrates the strength that slave woman draws from the African traditions of sorcery and magic to resist the oppression that she suffers in the hands of white masters, their wives and the Black overseers. The next section, ‘The Bloodling’ opens with the black woman pregnant with the white slave master’s child and wishing “to retch / herself / empty”. She calls upon her mother/motherland for comfort and redemption. The last section, ‘The Return’ invokes the warrior figures of her culture/s and important Caribbean female legends, Ogun, the Ashanti princess Nanny etc., powerful symbols of resistance and freedom. The collection in its cycle structure, its integration of the particular and the universal, the concrete and the mythical has been seen as a parallel in certain ways to Brathwaite’s trilogy The Arrivants and Mother Poem. The poem sequence is considered partly a response to Brathwaite’s work which takes into account only men’s experiences while Nichols focuses on the women’s role and participation in their history.

One Continent/To Another

“One Continent/To Another” is the opening poem in the first section, ‘The Beginning’. The poem not only starts the book but it is also the starting point of the diasporic Caribbean woman. It narrates the story of the long memoried slave woman’s uprooting from her native land, the horrifying and brutal journey of Middle Passage, the arrival in a hostile nature that is under the colonizer’s control and her rebirth after the “death” in the slave ships. Its rhythm together with its imagery expresses an almost corporeal anguish and pain associated with childbirth suggesting the displacement, uncertainty, and powerlessness that are similar to a newborn’s experience outside the womb. It is also the pain of being born into slavery where ‘one continent’ (Africa) represents the mother’s womb and ‘another’ (the Caribbean) represents the unknown place:

Child of the middle passage womb push
daughter of a vengeful Chi she came
into the new world birth aching her pain
from one continent/to another moaning
her belly cry sounding the wind

The slave woman ‘delivered’ on the shores of a new world remembers:

how she stumbled onto the shore

how the metals dragged her down

how she thirsted…

She survives the trauma of the middle passage only to be stunned by the colonial exploitation and sexual abuse. She tries to comprehend the harsh new world that is “bereft of fecundity”. However her painful experiences do not prevent her journey toward a new birth:

But being a woman

she moved again

knew it was the Black Beginning

though everything said it was

the end

The poem rejects victimhood and concludes on a note of possibility illustrating the ability of women to recover something from nothing and gives voice to female agency and new subjectivity:

Now she stoops

in green canefields

piecing the life she would lead

The treatment of time and space are central to Nichols’ poem. The passage of slaves and later migrants moving from one continent to another is a transition both in space and time. Nichols seeks to relate the past to the present and in ‘One Continent/To Another’ she describes the experience of the slave as a movement from the past of ‘bleeding memories in the darkness’ to the future of ‘piecing the life she would lead’. Nichols’ slave woman’s realisation that “it was the Black Beginning/though everything said it was/the end”, seems to suggest that past, present and future are simultaneous.

The role of personal and collective memory is central to Nichols’ poem; not only remembering, but, more importantly, not forgetting. Nichols skilfully transforms the memory of the past experience of slavery  into  a  discussion  of  the  present  experience  of  migration. ‘One Continent/To another’ narrates  the first experience of forced migration of  the slaves in the ‘middle passage womb’ who give birth to a New World-self. Each migrant experiences the sense of figurative ‘stumbl[ing] onto the shore’, the disorientation of displacement. Yet Nichols transforms the negative, ‘bereft of fecundity’ into her final affirmation of the future: ‘the life she would lead’. Through memory, Nichols transforms an essentially violent experience into one of affirmation and strength.

The Fat Black Woman’s Poems

In her next two collections The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, Nichols moves from the historical past to the present time and introduces a black Caribbean immigrant in contemporary Britain. The past however continues to be an inescapable subtext. The poems in these collections acquire a playful tone. Nichols claims that The Fat Black Woman’s Poems was created ‘out of a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman doing exactly as she pleases…taking a satirical tongue-in-cheek look at the world’. The poems are fun and funny but they also strongly critique and challenge the European normative beauty—white, slim, blue-eyed and blonde. Nichols’ use of humour and irony effectively expose, deconstruct and subvert the oppressive myths about black women.

The title The Fat Black Woman’s Poems evokes three contemporary social stereotypes: being fat, being black, and being a woman. The fat black woman is defined and marginalised in terms of race, gender and size. Nichols puts forward the fat black woman as her symbol of beauty thereby subverting the established European beauty norms. Filled with self-love, the fat black woman, proclaims herself the beauty of all beauties. “Beauty” the opening poem in the collection, announces “Beauty / is a fat black woman.” Nichols is not just content to state that her title character “is beautiful”; rather she is intent on redefining the word and concept of ‘beauty’ itself. And in its new definition the fat black woman is an embodiment of beauty, thus effectively dismantling several stereotypes and controlling images about black women.

The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping

“The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping” describes an immigrant woman’s experiences in London, drawing attention to the ideals of beauty oppressive to a fat black woman and the lack of fashion products to accommodate her needs and taste. Her “difference” and diasporic self is brought out through the fat black woman’s accent and her identity lying in between the “brightness and billowing sunlight” of the Caribbean and “the weather so cold” of England.

The poem describes her “going from store to store” shopping for suitable clothes in modern London. But for her, shopping in London winter is “a real drag . . . / and de weather so cold” and the shops display “frozen thin mannequins”. As a national, cultural, and  physical outsider, the fat black woman finds that “de pretty face salesgals” cast “slimming glances,” which seem to deride the fat black woman’s physical heaviness. Further the fat black woman discovers that the British clothes are not right, “nothing soft and bright and billowing / to flow like breezy sunlight / when she walking”. And, worse she finds “nothing much beyond size 14”.

In the poem Nichols conveys the literal and cultural coldness that marks the reaction to the migrant in England: the cold weather, frozen thin mannequins and the unfriendly salesgirls join hands in making the fat black woman feel unwelcome. Yet the fat black woman is not to be pitied; she is unperturbed by the hostile gaze of the salesgirls. In response.

The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba and nation language The salesgirls represent the normative slenderness of the Western society that devalues, mocks, or even resents the fat black woman’s self-esteem and humor. But the fat black woman refuses to be devalued. The poem ends on a humorous note:

The fat black woman could only conclude that when it come to fashion the choice is lean Nothing much beyond size 14

The poem highlights the anti-fat bias in the contemporary cultural landscape in the west and challenges the desirability of slimness as the normative ideal of beauty for women while also critiquing the fashion industry for conniving in imposing slimness on the female body by only catering to women up to size 14.

Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath 

Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath” is one of her best known and most celebrated poems in the collection. In poems like these, observes C. L. Innes, that Nichols challenges “not only Western and Caribbean male traditions, but also a developing tradition of black women’s writing…that focuses on their suffering and portrays black women chiefly as victims of white male patriarchy”( Innes 1996: 329). Here the fat black woman speaks in the first person and confronts the traditional discourses of anthropology, history, theology and consumer capitalism which relegated and continue to relegate black women to the margins. She mocks them by appropriating a scientific term that was traditionally used to define and victimise women. Defined as a ‘racial deformation’, the term steatopygia was used to categorise African women as subhuman and hypersexual. In the nineteenth century, the term Steatopygia, meaning “abnormally protuberant buttocks, was considered to be characteristic of “Hottentot” women. The poem opens and closes with the following refrain:

“Steatopygous sky / Steatopygous sea / Steatopygous waves / Steatopygous me”

The refrain praises the woman’s opulent body, comparing it with the Caribbean landscape and seascape. Only the tone here is comic and tinged with irony. The juxtaposition of this denigrating term with terms referring to the Caribbean seascape and its horizons neutralises the negative associations. Nichols’ use of this term in the context of the sensual celebration of the body not in the lecture room but in the bathroom subverts its association with a scientific and rational discourse (Innes 1996: 329). The woman appropriates the term to ridicule and deconstruct those scientific disciplines and cultural discourses that oppressed her: anthropology, which defined African peoples according to racist criteria; historiography, which excluded Africa from history and relegated it to an anachronistic space; theology, which demonised women and black people; and, finally, the slimming industry, which tyrannises women for an economic profit. All these discourses are annihilated by the woman’s body:

O how I long to place my foot on the head of anthropology to swig my breasts in the face of history to scrub my back with the dogma of theology to put my soap in the slimming industry’s profitsome spoke.

Nichols deconstructs the various discourses and the language of the oppressors with humour and irreverence. Though there is a great deal of the comic in the poem, it offers a serious challenge to the gendered views of beauty, science, religion, history and culture.

In The Fat Black Woman’s Poems Nichols fulfils the long memoried woman’s prophecy about the ‘Black Beginning’ by creating a new, powerful and strong black woman who ‘charts’ her own future and who with her new tongue sprung “from the root of the old one,” not only challenges but also turns stereotypes on their heads. In her works, Nichols vehemently rejects the stereotype of the voiceless victim with emphasis on agency and the capacity not only to endure but also to respond to the experiences of slavery, colonisation, postcolonisation and neocolonisation.

7. Critical acclaim

Grace Nichols is known for her poetic craft expertly laced with political undertones. Her consciously irreverent and playful tone of The Fat Black Woman’s Poems threw focus on the serious issue of what it meant to be a black woman living in the United Kingdom. Her works promote the cause of black woman’s self worth, recognition, multiplicity and resiliency. Her Guyanese-Caribbean identity informs her work. But the Caribbean identity must be seen in terms of hybridity because she was influenced by different immigrant groups in the Caribbean—East Indians, Chinese and Portuguese. Though her work explores the legacies of slavery and colonialism, she does not specifically want to be read as a postcolonial poet.

Instead she prefers the term ‘trans-cultural writer’ which includes a range of immigrant experiences. Her works have received awards like the Guyana Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. She was poet-in-residence at the Tate Gallery, London and is among the poets on the current GCSE syllabus in the UK. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Peter Forbes, in Contemporary Writers observed: ‘Deeply Caribbean in sensibility, she writes sensitively of other traditions, especially Africa and India’. Nichols is acclaimed for the linguistic interweave between the Caribbean and the UK.

8.  Summary 

• Grace Nichols is a Guyanese-British poet, children’s writer, and novelist.
• The themes of home, exile, migration and identity are central to Nichols’ works. She is also interested in the questions about origins, place, power, subjectivity, language and the boundaries that define them.
• Another characteristic feature of Nichols’ poetry is the skilful interweaving of Creole with Standard English to capture the rhythms, orality, and atmosphere of Caribbean culture.
• Nichols’ first poetry collection, i is a long memoried woman, explores the epic, historical and mythic journeying of African women, separated from their native cultures and transported to slavery in the Caribbean. Its chief aim is to reconstruct and re/member (black) Caribbean women’s histories.
• In her next collection, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, Nichols moves from the historical past to the present time and introduces a black Caribbean immigrant in contemporary Britain.
• Acclaimed for her poetic craft, Nichols is one of the most read and anthologised poets in the United Kingdom.
  

9. References

• Innes, C. L. “Accent and Identity: Women Poets of Many Parts.” Contemporary British Poetry:  Essays  in  Theory and Criticism.  Ed.  James  Acheson,  Romana Huk. New  York: State University of New York, 1996. 315-341. Print.