An Introduction to Imprendehora by Yvette Christiansë

November 12, 2009 Imprendehora is an utterly beautiful collection of poems that stand, separately and together, in their independent right as sites of pleasure and darkness. But the work of this collection is also to unmake and remake the language that slaves lose in the condition of slavery, and have to reinvent as they come out of the dark tunnel of that condition – in other words, the poems of Imprendehora begin somewhere in the depths of Sila’s silence and end in a place she could never reach.

All poetry is the product of the author’s willingness to go diving in oceans invisible to the naked eye. But to understand just how much diving was involved in the production of Imprendehora’s poems, it suffices to search for St Helena on Google Earth. The picture you get from this exercise reveals no visible landmass but a miniscule graphic check-box, smaller than the computer's cursor, hovering in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Nothing could more nakedly demonstrate the absence of St Helena's reality in our picture of the planet we live on. In such an apparent void, Yvette has done the work of an archaeologist, a naturalist, a historian, a collector of secrets, and ultimately of a mythmaker, in excavating the human shadows from the air of this invisible place, capturing voices locked in the stones there, and fixing them in the form of these words on paper that seem simultaneously to grow like grass out of the hard soil, and to hover like birds watching something indecipherable down below.

For me the silence that surrounded my first encounter with them was precious: it allowed me to hear in them many different moods and tones, and discover inside each poem several different people living the same solitary experience. And I think that I heard in them a process at work that, as rooted as it is in the particular experience of slavery and post-slavery, is also the quintessential human cultural work in the world: how the individual being, stripped of everything that has swaddled and guided and secured him or her to a place, to a society, has to (re)construct existence – language, memory, territory, relationships, a sense of the future – from scratch, once that original home is taken away; and how this new existence simultaneously carries traces of a broken past and, in its very form, incarnates an irreparable rupture with that past – you can't go back home no matter who you are. You no longer possess the language of home.

Yet you are not lost to yourself; as long as you breathe, you are making what will become your future landscape out of those ‘scraps’ of yourself that constitute what’s left of you after the original rupture (which of course, in this context, is enacted as slavery, and the ‘liberation’ from slavery that is in fact a new form of loss of the self). In ‘Things fall apart’ we hear a voice saying “All breaking things/are at hand” and “This earth dissolves./A sleeve edging/from a cuff . . .” and then in ‘The secret lives of maps’, the next poem in the sequence, another voice – or perhaps the same one? – says:

We believe,
we carry ourselves
as believers and our progress
is high and our foreheads
are high, our voices tell us
we are good and the winds
give back our hopes . . .

Not that it is a simple matter of “every day in every way things are getting better and better”. There's nothing simple about this process of thinking the self into being, using the raw material of the new landscape to shape the future. It's as iterative as the winds that scour the surface of the island, making what they unmake.

A tempting reading of St Helena's role in this story is to see the tiny island itself as the metaphoric incarnation of the individual soul, emerging from slavery with nothing but its own battered body to work with, taunted by impossibly distant echoes of other worlds now forever unreachable. One almost thinks that those who abandoned the liberated slaves on the island did so out of a sense of the allegorical fitness of this fate.

The collection moves from the floating population of voices in the first section, ‘Scraps’, to introduce one voice that has coalesced into a particular version of stability, Sister Thomas in the section ‘Winds’ – the section which features in its entirety in the December 2009 issue. For her this island is complete home, a perfect embrace, because she recasts it entirely as the landscape of a biblically defined universe of faith, sin, punishment, redemption.

Her poems begin by offering reassurance, in some way, that a familiar and valued social identity can emerge from even this terra nulla – that of the devoted servant of God. But no – not even this is stable – her voice breaks open as it pursues its remembered holy course, in turn producing out of the biblical cadences of the old world the contours of the future homeland that will receive and root the former slaves – the island rhythms of the West Indies. The trajectory of history scoops up this voice and flings it forward into a kind of survival not imagined in the backward-yearning language of the first freed slaves, or in the old religious mantras they are offered as consolations.

If Sister Thomas’s is a stern love for a mythologised territory that incarnates religion, Fernão’s is the detailed, tender love of a gardener who dilutes the bitterness of a lost past with the sweetness of things growing under his fingertips, here, now. His consolations, articulated with a different kind of intensity in the third section of the book, ‘Rust’, are particular and fragile; his language is full of the materiality of a world that can never embrace him again, but that still lives intensely in his mind. Everything he names is what the slaves do not have access to in their surviving language.

His sense of continuity with an earlier self is, paradoxically, what makes the light of the present “strike like so many lances” (‘Fernão the Gardener’), and leads to the further decay of the past, the longer it lives in memory (‘And this too, he sees’). Not having been a slave, his ‘face’ remains clear to him, but is of no help – the ability to hold what was loved clearly in memory does not bring with it happiness or love of self.

And yet the tension is palpable between what he was and what he is, in the natural course of things, becoming – the island is making him part of its landscape even as he works it into a beauty he cherishes from elsewhere (a transmutation intensely captured in the poem ‘Groundwork’). If Sister Thomas enacts the open-hearted embrace of fate's stern imperatives, Fernão suffers the unresolved pain of human(ist) existence, always losing the self as part of the creation of the self, always conscious of what has been lost as the world remakes one – as in these lines from ‘And so it was that he was drawn . . .’:

Shocking hours that turned him
like a wing in their drafts.
And he, observing something
banished, rose fresher than rainwater,
though struggling, something of himself
struggling, like a flag in the wind,
the country of his body falling away . . .

And this process unfolds most fully in and through language. In ‘Fernão the gardener has premonitions’ he says “I grow away from one tongue/and into another, though neither/ will save me now, or the world”, lines which are a kind of summary of the whole history of dispossession of the self that slavery, exile, and fragile recovery encompass.

Language, again, becomes the material out of which the young future grows itself in the final section of the book (‘Indian/Katembe’), as the children of the slaves move forward through it and with it, using it like inherited goods to fashion their new world. This last section enacts the clash of the bureaucrats’ language, in which the slaves themselves are inscribed, pinned down, and eventually destroyed, with the new grammar and lyricism of existence, the new territory, literally growing out of the mouths of the children of this generation.

It's a tour de force of poetic technique in the way it marshals interlocking rhythms, formal echoes of diverse genres, historical points of reference for the uses and abuses of language, and leads all these resources out of the dungeon of the past up into the light of the new world – all in the words of a curious new generation fighting to keep its secrets and fend off danger, defensive and hopeful at the same time: daring children, running a little way out into the open, running back to find protection, gradually melding their discovery of their own language into a critique of that wielded by other people, as the new sense of self reaches maturity and claims its right to name the world and possess it.


There’s very much more going on in the poems in this collection than the particular reading of them described above; one of the signature qualities of the writing is its openness to being read in many directions. The poems are intensely detailed and textured but very quietly offered, like a wild country on a calm day, and one is able to move quickly or slowly through them, pausing at any point to absorb what's happening, turning back to draw a previous line closer, or to go outside the poem to something it recalls of all the worlds it echoes; and thus to create an own reading of them, an own narrative – because it is possible and necessary to read each poem alone, as its own site of disintegration and reintegration of self and meaning, and to hear in each poem the echo of all the others, the ways in which they modify and extend each other, reverberate through each other.