This poem, which is part of Lorna Goodison’s collection I Am Becoming My Mother, is representative both of the poet’s particular focus on the experience of women and their strength and of her interest in Caribbean history and the heritage of slavery.

It retraces the sufferings of Black women throughout the long history of enslavement and exploitation in the Americas, a painful memory they keep inside them in “thread bags / anchored deep in our bosoms.” Here the history of the oppression of Black people (the “blood agreements” of the slave trade) is opposed to the history of Black resistance, evoked through the image of “an apocrypha of Nanny’s secrets.”

Nanny—the African freedom fighter who defeated the British during slavery times and established the free community of the Maroons on the mountains of Jamaica, a recurrent figure in Goodison’s work and in the work of several other women writers from the Anglophone Caribbean—embodies the resistance of Black women and their determination to struggle for survival.

The poem is structured in six stanzas of varied length. The longer stanzas have the slow rhythm of a prayer, while the shorter ones incisively convey resistance:
“We’ve made peace / with want / if it doesn’t kill us / we’ll live with it.”

The repetition of the pronoun we at the beginning of each stanza and occasionally also at the end, together with the employment of the present tense, expresses a sense of shared experience while placing the emphasis on the connection between the past and the present.

In the fourth stanza, where the poet evokes the deprivation and humiliation of Black women at the hands of white people, the slow rhythm and the repetition of the word waiting suggest the long suffering that Black women have experienced—and their incredible capacity for endurance.

Here, as in many of her poems, Goodison offers strong portrayals of Black women and conveys a sense of sisterhood built on heritage and memory. The last lines open up to relief and hope and celebrate rebirth:
“we are rooting at / the burying spot / we are uncovering / our hope.”

Bibliography
Goodison, Lorna. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: New Beacon Books, 1986.

Categories: Caribbean Literature, Literature, World Literature

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