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Prairie Journey

Madeline Coopsammy

Source: www.jahajeedesi.com

Trinidad-born, Canada-based poet Madeline Coopsammy launched her first book, Prairie Journey, at the National Library on April 15.

The author, whose poetry and short fiction has been anthologised in the US and Canada, is probably best known for her poem The Second Migration. It was used as the title of a Toronto conference on the 150th anniversary of East Indian immigration to Trinidad.

The poems in the new book span many years—the earliest, Delhi, was written out of her student days in India in the 60s. Prairie Journey is arranged in sections by geography, from Trinidad to India and Canada and back to Trinidad.

In an e-mail interview with Lisa Allen-Agostini in April, Coopsammy talked about her themes and her writing.

LAA: What was the process of writing poetry like for you in the early days, compared to the later work? I see a difference in tone and subject and style and wonder if it’s because poetry has got easier or harder for you to write.

MC: I definitely think that it has gotten easier. I certainly feel freer, I am less reluctant to express my ideas. When I began, I was always afraid that perhaps what I had to say was not important enough or that no-one would be interested in reading it. I began to write poetry as a release from all the things that troubled me, or when I was bored. I remember some particularly dull university courses that made me sit down and put my thoughts to paper to relieve the boredom.

Your book has joined the small but growing number by East Indian-identified Trinidadian women writers, including Ramabai Espinet. What do you think your experience in the Indian community here has brought to your writing, if anything?

I felt very isolated being East Indian in Port-of-Spain, and though St James, where I grew up, was populated by many East Indians, I was never part of the East Indian community. This is because I attended the convent—I say the convent, I mean St Joseph’s Convent—and most of my friends were from the other races, especially the mixed-race people. I often felt that I never really belonged to any community.

The strongest influence was, I think, our large extended family, some nearby, some farther away—that was my community. And the church. Church and convent school were very strong influences.

As I grew older, I found myself trying to be part of the larger Trinidad community and to be less insular, but the extended family gave me my roots, my base.

My favourite piece in the book may be the entirely sweet Subject to Icing. What’s your favourite and what’s the background to it?

It’s hard to pick a favourite. After all, poems or stories are like your children. One should not have favourites. Some poems have phrases and lines or sections that I feel are very well done, and I even wonder whether I wrote them consciously or where they came from. I like Roots, First Hot Dog, The Birth of Roti, King Corbeau, the first four poems in the book, very much.

I also like Prairie Journey and Island Breezes and though Island Sounds is a harsh and bitter reflection on what our island has become, I feel it has great strength in it.

At the same time, In the Dungeon of My Skin has been well thought of enough to be in a Norton anthology and The Second Migration was chosen as the title of the celebration of 150 years of East Indian immigration to Trinidad held in Toronto, so I feel quite proud of those two poems.

Could you talk a bit about your struggle between Trinidadian identity and the Canadian economy that you’ve articulated so well in your book?

Was that word meant to be economy? I’m not sure if that is the word you wanted. However, I will try to answer.

One’s Trinidadian identity is hard to shake off. When we were growing up, everything from away, from England, Europe, North America was better than what we had. As we matured, we began to realise that monuments and cathedrals and symphonies, everything that Western Europe had was not necessarily better than what we had.

I love the great monuments and buildings of England and Europe and I love some classical music, but I love my Trinidad rhythms, too, and our Carnival—as it used to be, not as it is now—and our calypsoes—as they were, not as they are now.

Our cuisine, as so much of the cuisine of the third world, has come to be loved and appreciated now. So that the economic stability of Canada is something we seek, but the spirit, the warmth, the uniqueness of our culture should not be rejected.

(From: Subject to Icing)
And I muse upon the wisdom
of these merchants of the signs
who sitting in their offices
could conceive of such a line as
“Bridge subject to Icing.”
It must have been a man
a woman would have known
that it would never do
would only make one wonder
about consistency and texture
and even will it ever dry?

(From: The Birth of Roti)
Parvati was the only one who
habitually brought
a curried lunch
packed in a carrier
the kind that only labourers used
and in those conquered islands
where “culture” meant
anything European
ballet and opera
and cucumber sandwiches at tea
her school lunch was despised
derided
the others held their noses while we
the few of us who counted ourselves
lucky to be there
were deeply troubled
that Parvati should
subject herself and us
to this acute humiliation
flaunting our culture
for all the world to see…

Ever since there's been a West Indian nation, or at least a West Indian people, migration to the north has been a tried and tested route to a better life, a means of escape from the stultifying poverty of small, backward, insular and mean-spirited Caribbean islands.

Some of us who do migrate occasionally return home on holiday, flashing the almighty Yankee dollar and brimful of stories about how wonderful life is in the good, old US of A.

Rare is the "returnee" (a word I coined a long time ago to describe our migrants when they do come back home) who will admit to any kind of disappointment or disillusionment about the so-called Good Life.
Even more rare is the Trinidadian female writer who has gone through the mill of the migrant's experience and crafted out of it a collection of poems, titled Prairie Journey, which are well worth reading not only for their craft but also for their honest content.

So meet Madeline Coopsammy, nee Mitchell, a former neighbour of mine from Coronation Street in St James whom I remember best wearing her stiffly starched blue St Joseph's Convent uniform and looking skinny as a rake.
Mrs Coopsammy has grown somewhat since, and how.
Her first taste of migration was India, where she attended Delhi University. And then it was on to Canada, where she met a Tunapuna boy called Lloyd Coopsammy, got married and didn't exactly live happily ever after (though it had nothing to do with her still happy marriage but in fact had to do with the life she encountered).

Mrs Coopsammy's poems are wracked with angst. This is a poet with a clear eye and her both feet firmly planted on the ground. She also has few illusions about her own journey.

In the poem appropriately entitled "First Hot Dog", she recalls that in her childhood the "American Dream" took the form of "Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean their sultry-eyed surliness tearing at the heartstrings of every teenage island girl black, white, yellow or brown."

This sets the tone for what is to follow in later poems, which cry out the disillusionment that can also accompany the migrant's thirst for The Good Life.
"...the wonder and beauty
we sought
have brought us to
apartment blocks in
decaying inner-cities
suburban ghettoes."

Her poetic eye catches regular sight of a fellow immigrant in Canada.
"I see her every day
crossing the parking lot at four
a black anomaly within a land of snow."

That image of a cold and forbidding Canada returns repeatedly in other poems but is captured best in the poem titled "Recession and the Third World Immigrant":
"But now the land is vast and wide
and cold,
surprise, fear and anger greet them
from the Circle to the Island
the land is bone
will this winter of opprobrium, doubt & discord never end?"

Not without her own ironic sense of humour, in the poem titled "Birth of Roti", Mrs Coopsammy's reveals much about her background, upbringing and growth:
"Parvati was the only one who habitually brought
a curried lunch
packed in a carrier...
her school lunch was despised
derided
the others held their noses while we
...were deeply troubled
that Parvati should
subject herself and us
to this acute humiliation
flaunting our culture
for all the world to see."

The humble roti has since of course been transformed into a virtual national dish, and not just in Trinidad and Tobago. As the poet notes:
"Today our
Roti-loving culture
is everywhere
carried
to the farthest corners
of our multicultural earth
this global village
free-trade zones
the refugee-filled metropolises
of New York, Winnipeg,
London or Miami..."

This fine new collection of poems also contains a tribute to the playwright Freddie Kissoon, titled "King Corbeau":
"You alone above the crowd
stood to elevate
the dialect of our people
to carve a hero
from unheroic matter...
you built an epic
in a homespun style."

Her views on the Caribbean and on her own island are no less coated with her own perspective. On Grenada, where she seems once to have spent a holiday, she recalls the American invasion of 1983 thus
"...our spice-crowned
island of the west
was doomed to
ravishment and near annihilation
caught in the crossfire
of the power play of nations."

When she comes home to Trinidad, she builds poetic ideas around something as simple as "Tunapuna Market":
"Through thirty-five years of my wintry exile
the Tunapuna Market
remains unchanged, caught in a time warp
still unspoilt
despite American tv, the Colonel's chicken
those ubiquitous malls
overpriced and overburned supermarkets
surpassing any in the "developed" world..."

The Trinidad she's long left behind hasn't left her memories though. In "The Second Migration", she refers to the experience of settling in Manitoba, Canada, where
"...lounging in our bite-sized backyards
and pretending that we do not see
the curling vapours of our neighbour's burger feast
(his third this week)
borne on the Prairie wind across the picket fence

This collection of poems really explores two kinds of journeys made by the poet. One is firstly to India and then Canada; and then there is the return home where, in spite of all that the Great White North has to offer, the poet longs for the simpler things of the life she has known.

A very special welcome home, Madeline.

— Raoul Pantin