Say to my pyre that I wore only gold to death

A poetic response to Olive Senior's "Meditation on Yellow"

Some years ago, I interviewed Olive Senior before a full auditorium of secondary school children, here in Trinidad and Tobago. A grateful intermediary, I was quietly astonished simply to be there. I listened, grinning wide, as student after student plied Olive with questions correlating to those they were accustomed to fielding in their English Literature mock examinations. Senior’s work was, and still is, a mainstay in Caribbean curricula across the region, at both secondary and tertiary levels. They were asking her about the technical, craft-based aspects of her writing, presumably the better to face the standardized tests that loomed ahead of them – but layered in and among their formal queries were more elemental concerns. Hidden in their asks, I heard the curiosity and excitement that not even years of militarized academia can crush: “What were your origins?” “Tell us about why this word, and this one, and this one also, matter to you.” “Why, out of every possible path, are you with us Now?”

The truth is that I cannot imagine a Caribbean literature without Olive Senior. As a multi-genre writer, a sensitive short story writer and novelist and a prodigious non-fiction researcher and reporter, those books of hers are cultural mainstays, prize-winners and frequently-cited treasures: no library in our region should consider itself complete, or striving for completion, without them. Yet I confess I love Olive as a poet best, selfishly and with unflinching certainty. I’ve heard her read her own work to audiences within and outside of Trinidad, from the urban stages of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest to a windswept Barbadian harbourfront at dusk, and most recently in a well-appointed salon tucked into a London enclave. Each time, it’s a sonic, sensory concert for me, like listening to a beloved chanteuse. Each time – again, selfishly – I hope Olive will read “Meditation on Yellow”, from her 1994 collection Gardening in the Tropics. Joyously, she often does. Each time, I swear, the experience is a rapture.

“Meditation on Yellow” is a political firebrand of a poem whose genius lies in never announcing itself to you. Sly and subversive, in the convivial tone of a dear friend wielding a dagger behind her back, the narrative wends you through generations of First Nations indigeneity, empire’s brutality, slavery’s persistence, right up to the modern embodiments of these, the oldest spectres of greed and profiteering in our so-called idyllic isles. Theses and dissertations, keynotes and profuse papers have all been offered up in service of what Senior’s doing here, and I encourage you to seek those out – but first, spend time with this poem. Search up an audio recording of Olive reading it to you herself, and by the end of those six-odd minutes, feel yourself remade, consciousness blazing at the frontside of your being, ready to holler and whoop and punch the air, or else ready to contemplate which side of history you stand on, and whether you want to keep positioning yourself right there.

If poems were songs (and who says they aren’t?), “Meditation on Yellow” is on my everlasting hit list. When it comes on the radio of my repeated reads, I always turn the volume up as high as I can bear it. I know I’ll always come away from the reading, the listening, with something vital and impossibly new, scorching me alive more radically than I was mere moments before. So many of Senior’s poems do this: alert you to the fact that the existence you imagined you were carving conscientiously has room yet within it for further joy, deeper feeling, heightened imagination, prolonged wonder, amplified activism, more fiyah. There is no voice like hers, and also no denying that her poetic voice has fed and watered so many of us, who write to imagine the highest/deepest/truest frequencies of ourselves and our societies.

How, then, to respond to a voice so transformative, without feeling inherently unequal to such a mission? The answer, as Olive herself might say, with her signature, irresistible archness, is not overthink it. “Say to my pyre that I wore only gold to death” chases this impulse: to surrender, as both poet and spectator to life and death, to the most alchemical moments of witness I know. For me, these have long been subsumed in the legacy of indenture my East Indian ancestors experienced, a complex and complicating history I best understand through the relay of sensations, like receiving generations-old information on the wind. As the speaker of Olive’s “Meditation” moves their body through lifetimes of resistance and outrage, I carry the voice of my response poem’s speaker through a journey they themselves have both experienced intimately, and experienced through the bone-and-blood memory of those who precede them. I let go of overthinking, offered myself to a yellow-themed envisioning of primordial survival, and allowed my spirit to lead me to the poem you read here.

To consciously write in the footfall of another: I’ve been wary of this, if not abjured it outright. Yet there’s no finer poem than “Meditation on Yellow” to follow. The truth is, the bonds between writers – as mentors, co-colluders, instigators, supporters – make this business liveable when it often feels more fraught than is humanly safe. Even if I shy away from the concept of a mentor, I am instinctively, and proudly, bonded to Olive Senior – her language, her legacy, her own transgressive poetic power – through our Caribbeanness, our placement in this space, separated by decades but brought closer in the work and practical industry of writing poems.

Olive’s poems do what poetry should do. An auditorium packed with inquisitive, engaged teenagers reminded me of this, years ago. More than this, or alongside it, Olive’s poems remind me of why I am here, at all. I embrace those reminders every time I turn to one of or a book full of her poems. I sink with immeasurable gratitude into that truth, every time “Meditation on Yellow” wends its way into my life again. There is no living female poet I can recommend more than her, because there is no finer starting or sustaining place to experience what it means to be Caribbean, what it means to be a Caribbean writer. I have said I wouldn’t recognize Caribbean literature without Olive Senior, and that is true. What is also true is that without her voice, world writing would be that much emptier, too.

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This written reflection and poem were commissioned and originally published by Magma Poetry for its Magma 87 — Islands issue. My continued thanks to the editors of that issue, Niall Campbell, Fiona Moore, and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. The ensuing independent video recording was filmed and produced by Elechi Todd/ETV and Baseline Projects/Marielle Forbes, inspired by the original commission, shot on location in Trinidad & Tobago.

There are two weeks left to sign up for Your Poems are Powerhouses, a Bocas Academy three-part masterclass I’m delighted (and a bit awestruck) to be teaching with Olive Senior as my special guest tutor. This course is designed to strengthen, clarify, and crucible your most urgent writing in verse to date. It’s open to anyone from anywhere in the world. All voices are welcome. I hope you’ll join us.

Living in T&T, and desirous of paying for the masterclass in parts? Email me, wild rebel.