Continental Shelf Fred D’Aguiar July 2009 Podcast 3, Series 1 Length: 15:34 mins File Size: 7.4 MB Narrator: Continental Shelf is Fred D’Aguiar’s fifth poetry collection and was selected by the Poetry Book Society as its 2009 Summer Choice. Comprised of three distinct parts, the book traces a journey from his youth in Guyana, through a powerful elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University, to the reflective closing section which gives its title to the book. Although Fred D’Aguiar spent his childhood in Guyana, he was born in London in 1960, and he trained as a psychi-atric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He now lives in Virginia, USA. He is the author of several prize winning novels and plays. His last collection Bill of Rights (Chatto Press, 1998) was shortlisted for the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize. During summer 2009, Fred D’Aguiar undertook a UK tour to celebrate the publication of Continental Shelf, with events in Manchester, Aberdeen, at the Southbank Centre, London, Ledbury Poetry Festival, and elsewhere. In this podcast he discusses the inspiration behind his new collection, interspersed with highlights from his tour.

‘The Return’

Fred D’Aguiar: You can never go back. You can never put your feet back into the same place twice... But you must

always try to return in writing. It is a nostalgic gesture initially and then in the second step there is sentimental

danger, and obviously you try and avoid both. You can undermine what you are talking about by problematising it.

That sounds academic for saying, ‘never trust a sentiment but always trust a feeling’. A sentiment is when you cry

into your soup; a feeling is when you eat your soup, before crying into it!

The other thing I was trying out [in this poetry collection] was the idea of the accordion. When you bring it out like

that [gestures] it is like a fiction, a novel; but when it is most compressed, it feels like what poetry should be, when

you bring it in and you want the poem to hold that moment. There is no note there...

There are many images [in this book], but there is one that I want to pick on. When I was young I have a distinct

memory of a guy selling ice. [Fred describes buying ice as a child in Guyana before the advent of electricity]. So we

had electricity arrive in Guyana and we enjoyed the benefits of it. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said,

‘here is a loan for electricity’ and then the government took the money and ran off! ...That is what happened to us in

the 1970s. The IMF came and gave a lot of loans to a bureaucratic government that took those loans and didn’t finish

the roads, didn’t deliver [the electricity] which would power the infrastructure... So the Iceman cometh and he went-

eth away. The bulbs shone and the bulbs died. The fridges were empty. I tried to get all of that into this little poem...

‘The Return’

by Fred D’Aguiar

For Ruby and Victor Ramraj

Whether Titta stands for sister or no

No more icepick and its flint on the blockhead of ice

Whether Mama Dot stands for Grandma Dorothy or no

No more right hand cutlass swings at the left hand’s juice and jelly

Whether Cooperative Republic village number 162 stands for Airy Hall or no

No more full-frontal kiss of cars on the pronounced curves of the S-road

That’s the only road into town

Whether guinep or stinking-toe or sour-sop or jamoon stand for fruits or no

No more sprints from the house at the first smell of rain in nothing but our peeled skin

Whether to lime is to hang and to gaff or labrish is to shoot the breeze or no

No more shielding the wick of the oil lamp as I duck under the top half

While I toe open the bottom half of the back door’s half-doors

Whether Backdam stands for Koker or no

No more going Dutch for a day trip to Kyk-Over-Al

Where the Essequibo spreads like a sea

Where the Mazaruni and the Cuyuni part mineral company

Whether Kaieteur falls for a record 741-foot single drop or no

No more eye-turn head-spin shuffle of up and down

So that the falls rise and the forest canopy bows to the floor

Whether Guyana is Kanaima or no

Whether I-an-I stands for you and me or no

Carribean Accent

Narrator: The first section of Continental Shelf, entitled ‘Local Colour’, consists of thirty-five poems about Fred’s childhood in Guyana. He conjures up a sensuous world of characters and stories that is distinctly Caribbean.

On June 16th 2009, Fred D’Aguiar and fellow Carcanet poet Kei Miller, from Jamaica, gave a joint reading at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. Here they discuss their experiences of the Caribbean and and the literature of the region. Kei Miller: I remember years ago when I had just written my first collection, Kingdom of Empty Bellies, I wrote a very excited email to Fred because I was reading through his collection, Mama Dot. I had a whole sequence of poems called ‘Church Woman’. I was reading Fred’s collection and writing the poems at the same time, so I wrote him a kind of embarrass-ing fan letter. This is the first time I am meeting him face to face. There probably are natural conversa-tions that take place just because he is one of the writers that I was reading [when I was younger]. Narrator: Fred D’Aguiar and Kei Miller have both made significant contributions to contemporary Caribbean literature across various genres. When asked about the similarities between their work, Fred, currently a professor of Caribbean literature at Virginia Tech University, discussed the historical influences which he feels have shaped the literature of that region. Fred D’Aguiar: That is an interesting question because what it teases out is this idea of a colonial pattern in the Caribbean that is shared by the islands, in terms of obsessions and the things that happen to their bodies in a space where the history is very similar, and repeated island by island. Although the Caribbean has four different languages and we are separated by those languages (the four European languages initially), the pattern of colonisation is the same: the extraction of wealth, the subjugation of the local person, the building of certain civil buildings, one botanical garden, many prisons, and so on...! When we come to write, those are some of the things that play on us, so I am not surprised that there are similarities, at least in terms of the utterance. ‘Calypso’ By Fred D’Aguiar I stuttered in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1966, and was so ashamed I did not speak even when spoken to, Until I hear one song that ran, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ a long ‘o’ in that second ‘know’ converted Doubt to wonder itself, and continued, ‘Why they got people bad minded so,’ Repeating the couplet erased all doubt,

Kei Miller and Fred D’Aguiar St. Anns Church, Grasmere The Wordsworth Trust, summer 2009

That independence year of overproof Rum and absolutes. The singer groaned How his efforts only invited envy, how ingrained failure made a stranger of success, then he launched this boast: ‘I got the rhythm,’ three times no less, Adding his own made-up word—what a cheek— ‘tan-tantilism.’ That extra tan stretched, creolised, ironed smooth my creased tongue. Was I alone in the capital in not joining the country’s club of bad minds ranged against singer and song after it stuck all year in the charts? Everything about 1966, six feet below sea-level, drained from me, everything except that little strain lodged in my skull and always budding on my tongue. It tea-teases, tau-taunts, tan-tantalises. On poetry, tragedy and the pressure of speech Narrator: While the ‘Local Colour’ section of Continental Shelf reflects on the landscape and events of Fred D’Aguiar’s youth in Guyana, his ‘Elegies’ sequence is dedicated to the thirty-three people who died during the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. The loss of unique and particular individuals is mourned in a series of twenty-one sonnets which scrutinise American civil life and demonstrate the capacity of poetry to deal with the grief of a community. Here Fred discusses the pressures of poetic utterance in the face of tragedy, and his choice of the sonnet form. Fred D’Aguiar: I was teaching a Carribean literature class and a student called Erin Peterson in my Caribbean litera-ture class went to her French class and was killed in her French class. We had to meet the next day. That evening I called my mum and told her about the terrible things that happened. What to do? She said, ‘I am going to come to your class and cook a Caribbean breakfast for them, so make sure to tell them to come along as usual.’ She organised a flight from Florida to Virginia and we got together, but Erin was not there. When my mum came and we began to break the bread and so on... The students had that meal and we didn’t say very much, but when they left, they asked me what I thought about the whole event. The pressure of speech became very important. To have to write on the loss of Erin Peterson, literally, in a sort of elegiac way. [...] And then in a wider way, because of the availability of guns and so on, and being in America coming from the UK, and the gulf war was raging... a wider imperative, more historically based, began to pressure the work. I soon left the elegy form, or at least widened it out to include a conversation with America from a UK and Guyanese vantage point, seeing America’s responsibility as a world power. It has changed now, for many reasons, with Obama in office. He is trying some things with democracy and reversing some things. So the poetry was arguing back to Bush’s regime and then trying to assess the last ten years and my own presence in the US in relation to Guyana and the UK. And I began to do something I do in reading, which is to look at the sonnet form through the ages and try to write my own revisions of those. Hence the proto-sonnet would bring in some Caribbean speech forms, a calypso instead of

quatrains... Or like in Ben Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’, an amazing poem which has only twelve lines but when you read it over and over, it reads like a sonnet. It has the power and the pressure of a sonnet. That’s a proto-sonnet for you... [...] My concern was to get the poetry to land in Guyana and belong, to land in the UK—any city— and have a place, to be in America—rural or urban— north or south— and have a place... So the sonnet had to work over time in these three geographical locations. ‘Elegies Part III, Section I’ by Fred D’Aguiar Police speckle campus lawns, their cars parked Ostentatiously, illegally, public exhibits In an open-air museum of broken hearts. Their gun-metal charm sets me on edge. The ones in plain clothes stand out even more, Their inconspicuous intent is itself conspicuous. Bless them for their crude cover of us in our raw state. We believe in nothing but slowness when in the open, For the sun as it slips cloud cover, startles with its glare. And no man, woman or child looks quite so lost, As when left to idle before an impromptu memorial, By an impulse that stays one step ahead of thinking. What am I thinking when I catch my self in its stasis? That love’s cloak keeps us warm in a crisis.

Narrator: Finally, Fred explains the significance of the book’s title, Continental Shelf, and describes how the

experience of moving between Guyana, the UK and the US has influenced his poetry.

Fred D’Aguiar: Continental Shelf... It should be shelves, only because whenever I come back to the UK and go to

the States or Guyana, there is a time when you are coming in and if the plane is low enough, you can see the island

beginning before it begins. It’s the same in South America— it is underwater, the land— and so I became intrigued

by this submerged aspect of those places as I began to get familiar with the three of them. I spent 10 years in Guy-

ana (I left here when I was two and came back when I was twelve) and then I lived in the States. What I try to do is

to get the three to speak to each other in the poems as much as possible, to give a sense of roving and landscape.

I would like to close with ‘Demerara Sugar’ and thank Carcanet for a beautiful book. The cover is by a wonderful

artist from Guyana [Caesar’s Plume by Frank Bowling]. There are a number of Guyanese and Caribbean painters who

are painting the interior and speaking of an ecological world, addressing resources and so on...

Virginia Tech University Burrus Hall, Blacksburg Virginia

‘Demerara Sugar’

by Fred D’Aguiar

In neat sachets where each grain

Flows with crystal clarity in a slalom

Of Swiss blinds ready for my tongue

Sugar cut by hand-swinging cutlass

With half an eye kept on any snake

Wrapping its way around cane fields

Cane pressed for its last ounce of sap

Boiled down to molasses that is cane

Marrow if cane were bones broken

From fields for a bone feast

Demerara whose east coast raised me

From a mere stalk to stand straight

To stand tall no matter what current

Help me find your grain your flow

And Demerara sweeten me

So my art keeps your river’s caveat

Your sense of cane fields bathed in sweat

Narrator: With special thanks to Manchester Central Library and The Wordsworth Trust. Fred D’Aguiar’s

Continental Shelf, priced £9.95, is available from the Carcanet website, Amazon and all major bookshops.

Related Carcanet Books

There is an Anger that Moves by Kei Miller

New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology edited by Kei Miller

I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems by Mervyn Morris

Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems by Lorna Goodison

Further Reading Publications by Fred D’Aguiar Mama Dot (1985), Chatto Press Airy Hall (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize), Chatto Press British Subjects (1993), Chatto Press Bill of Rights (1998; shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Chatto Press An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems (2001), Chatto Press The Longest Memory (1994; winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award), Pantheon * Please note the podcast script is summarised Narrator/Producer: Eileen Pun Edited by: Eleanor Crawforth