Lorna Goodison in 2008
Halfway through Lorna Goodison's stunning collection By Love Possessed, I realized I was holding my breath. This was partly because of the uniqueness of the subject matter: Jamaicans of various classes and castes, from country and town, passionately in and out of love; and it was partly because of the uniqueness of style: a cool, faintly decorous prose, incorporating a witty, intelligent, idiosyncratic Jamaican language.
As a rule, Jamaican patois, broadly deployed, amusingly distances us from the characters. But Goodison's alchemy of standard and Jamaican English locates us deep within the consciousness of her people.
Goodison is also an accomplished painter, an example of a very West Indian tradition of writer/artists that famously includes Derek Walcott and novelist Roger Mais. Her characters are figures in a landscape reigned over by the majestic lignum vitae.
In the opening story, The Helpweight, a Jamaican woman agrees to meet her former lover. As a young woman, she had adored his blue-black skin, which symbolized to her his commitment to the people. He called her his Egyptian queen, and together they established a club devoted to ancient black civilizations. They planned to marry. After university studies in England, however, he has returned home with an Irish wife. Nevertheless, at their meeting, he professes his undying love. It takes some time before she accepts that nothing remains of their past. Like a number of black women writers - Lynn Nottage and Djanet Sears are two - Goodison explores the dream of piecing together the African family that slavery broke apart.
Goodison describes a shift in values for which the man is not always to blame. In the humorous Bella Makes Life, the title character moves to New York to earn extra income for her family. At first, she longs for her husband and children. But she comes home a different woman, loaded down with goods and extra pounds, and consumed by the idea of "making it." Her husband, Joseph, expresses dismay:
"(He) missed the old Bella who he could just sit down and reason with and talk about certain little things that a one have store up in a one heart …"
The realm of Jamaican love is not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, as Goodison points out, rules pertain. "If I am going to put away Bella," Joseph says, "I have to do it in the right and proper way."
Lilla, in Jamaica Hope, is also concerned with propriety. She and Alphanso have lived together for 10 years. They have two children and have survived a number of "crosses," chiefly the death of a little girl. Lilla insists it is time they marry. But Alphanso would rather use his money to buy an expensive bull.
As his friend, Tipper, explains: "I don't believe you have one Jamaican man ever willingly get married. Jamaican man married because them tired."
Indeed, Lilla finds subtle and delightful ways to wear Alphanso down.
Goodison's stories represent a refreshingly realistic depiction of Jamaican life. Yet their simplicity of form and pointed truths also call to mind the traditional fable. In addition, the stories, like Jamaican speech itself, are peppered with axioms and proverbs, the wisdom of elders remembered during times of trial. In Henry, for instance, an old woman warns her neglectful daughter: "Can a woman's tender care cease toward the child she bear?"
The daughter eventually abandons her son, and 12-year-old Henry must make his own way in Kingston's rough streets.
Goodison depicts a Jamaica where want rubs brazenly up against abundance, and where the often light-skinned wealthy never know the surnames of people who serve them for years. It is a country in which the disenfranchised confront a police force nearly as violent and unpredictable as their neighbourhood gangsters. The Pushcart Prize-winning title story examines a dangerous Jamaican machismo that wins respect and dominates relations between the sexes.
Throughout, Goodison urges Jamaicans to return to their core values, and never more powerfully than in her exquisite final story, I Come Through. Here is another tale that left me breathless. In it, a famous Jamaican singer recounts the vicissitudes of her life. Abandoned as a baby, she is taken in by a domestic and raised in secret in the woman's tiny sleeping quarters. Most days, she is left alone with a bottle and only the radio for company. In later years, she develops an astonishing musical gift.
For Goodison, the story is a virtuosic performance; a rags-to-riches tale, full of glorious lyrics, mystical dreams and mesmerizing seascapes. It incorporates the popular history of Jamaican music from a female perspective while telling a cautionary tale of a good woman who loses, then finds her way. Ultimately, I Come Through is a very true kind of story about the heart of the Jamaican people, about their astonishing capacity for generosity and love. And it is where Goodison leaves us: waiting to exhale.
Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing.
Editor's note: A version of this review published in Saturday's newspaper mentioned the story The Last Jamaican Lion . The real title is The Helpweight . This online version has been corrected.