AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "AVOCADO" BY ST. LUCIAN POET KENDEL HIPPOLYTE



KENDEL HIPPOLYTE, a Caribbean poet, playwright and director, was born in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1952. In the 1970s he studied and lived in Jamaica, receiving a BA from the University of the West Indies in 1976.


As a poet, Hippolyte is known for writing in Standard English, the varieties of Caribbean English, and in Kweyol, his nation language. He works in traditional forms like the sonnet and villanelle as well as in free verse and other forms influenced by rap and reggae music.


He is the author of seven books of poetry, namely Wordplanting (Peepal Tree Press, 2019), Fault Lines (Peepal Tree Press, 2012), Night Vision (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2005), Birthright (Peepal Tree Press, 1997), The Labyrinth (The Source, 1993), Island in the Sun – Side Two (V.W.I. Extra Mural Department, 1980), and Bearings (1986). Fault Lines won the OCM Bocas Prize in Poetry in 2013.


His work has appeared in journals such as The Greenfield Review, The Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies such as Caribbean Poetry Now, Voiceprint, West Indian Poetry, and others. He is also the editor of Confluence: Nine St. Lucian Poets, So Much Poetry in We People, an anthology of performance poetry from the Eastern Caribbean, This Poem-Worthy Place, an anthology of poems from Bermuda, as well as student anthologies from creative writing students at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College where he was a lecturer in literature and drama from 1992 to 2007.


In addition to participating in poetry workshops by Derek Walcott and Mervyn Morris, he has designed and taught poetry workshops in places such as Ty Newydd in Wales and the UWI Caribbean Writers Summer Workshop in Barbados.


His awards include the Literature prize in the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Awards, for many years the premier arts award scheme in St. Lucia, and a James Michener Fellowship to study poetry. In 2000, he received the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for Contribution to the Arts.


He lives in St. Lucia where his focus is to use his skills as a writer and dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions of critical social issues.


Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK) .



EXCERPT OF POEM "AVOCADO" BY KENDEL HIPPOLYTE



(for Gordon Rohlehr)*


i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone. / She'd definitely been there the night before, i'd heard her / singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of the oncoming rain. / A childhood song. i slept down into childhood. / i woke blinking in a null glare without sunbeams, with no winkling motes, / all things bright and 20/20 visible in neon but unilluminated. / And though the finches, doves, banana quits, tremblers, grackles, mocking birds / sang to each other still, the music ended when their singing ended. / Not like the day before when what they sang were motifs in an overture, / a maypole reeling and unreeling of ourselves and other selves of nature / swirling out into a futuriginal symphony of civilization entitling itself Caribbean.


i thought: she can't be gone. If she is gone, / what is this place? With her gone, who am I? / If she is gone, who braids the fraying fibres of memory into accord? / Traces the beach footprints of our children back to the first tracks of the Ciboney? / Who plaits the scattered flowers of islands and sprigs of continent into a votive wreath / cast in appeasement on the ocean restless with the unrestituted dead, / to sea us into the altering calm of Sunday mornings, trees in surplices of light / and the allaying litany of the waves' asking and the sand's assenting? / i thought: She isn't gone, just hidden. i'll go find her. / And so i went looking.


[...]


i left them [rum acolytes in a rumshop] in a spluttering fusillade of words about who'd seen her last, / and stepped into a Saturday morning of a market hopscotched with vendors, / their come-to-me calls crisscrossing in a birdflight chattering, / their seasonings, vegetables, fruits set out in clusters – breves, crochets, minims / of aubergine, pomerac, thyme along the staves of foodpaths – and i thought: / Surely, somewhere within this kente-tartan-madras self-arranging medley, / this market women melody within sound and smell of the hot pepper sizzling of Accra, / i will find her? And, tell you the truth, there was one moment.


A woman, sitting thighs akimbo, the cascade of her wide blue skirt / falling towards the plenitude she'd gathered from her hillside garden, / from the abundance of her country where land is still the earth, / called out to me, one hand holding the green orb of an avocado: /










EXCERPT OF POEM "AVOCADO" BY KENDEL HIPPOLYTE continued



"Solinah friend! For you." / And then the ceremonies of thanks, gracious inquiries, regards, "Ba-bye." / And somewhere in this intermingling, though i didn't know the moment: / between her fingers loosening and mine tightening around / (both of us holding, neither of us quite owning) / what she was giving me, what i was accepting, in that green present / which i received really only later that day when i'd stopped looking, / and realization ripened like a fruit or vegetable or whatever people call an avocado.

[...]

And somewhere along the arc out of my bag onto the kitchen table, the avocado / ripened into me: in the hot haggling of the market, a gift between two strangers / for her sake. In the green globe of one moment, the seed of a whole civilization.

Really? Had a market woman, hand raised with a gift, from her to me through / Solinah, in that casual gesture traced the curving line that rounds into community? / Romanticism, surely? Yet how else, through centuries of the stock exchange of flesh / – glistened black bodies tarnished silver coins transacted on an auction block – / how else had the bought-and-sold survived within their own unchatteled selves? / Gift. The unslaved remembering of hands held out with no calculating fingers, offering / the graciousness that grows out of a ground of knowing: existence is a grace. / Grace eliding into graciousness eliding into gift. The first fruits of civilization.

And since that glimpse, like a green flash, i've seen her, the Caribbean, / in unexpected places. Her visitations are a gleam and then a dimming: / a far hillside district, descendant of a freetown settlement, in the mid-day light / or a glint of zinc from a house changing half of its roof on a Saturday half-day, given / to a koudmen, lend-hand, gayap koumbit, fajina, jollification, maroon, gotong rojong, / holding the sheltering restored roof of community in place. Harder to find now, / and when found, best held lightly, in an open palm then unheld, let go / in an unexpected, unexpecting, freehand green thankful of avocado.

Footnote:
* Gordon Rohlehr (1942-2023) was a Guyana-born scholar and critic of West Indian literature.

SOURCE: Wordplanting, poetry collection by Kendel Hippolyte, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK, 2019.
Excerpt include stanzas 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 13 & 14 (pp.16-19).