Cheryl on Writing Convincing the Body!

I cannot believe that it is almost four years since I wrote Convincing the Body.

Generally I write to document history, and to raise questions in the world, but mostly I write to make sense of my life and the world around me. Convincing the Body was no exception. When I wrote it, we were experiencing a severe bout of global warming. There was 911, then the terrible Tsunami that took so many lives, there was the war in Iraq, the bombing in Fallujah, that killed and maimed innocent children, and the Israeli conflict to name a few things. On the home front, I was breaking up with my partner of nine years, my son was facing a kidney transplant, my mother was entering her years of senility… Only writing could save me.

I had to convince my body that my life was amazing and beautiful, that good was everywhere. If only we could take the time to dig deep inside, we could find the magic we once had, and surely this would see us through.

On the cover of the book is a Slippery Elm Tree. The photograph was taken in Tobago at the ocean. The tree is fully alive, but because of the saltwater breezes it has lost its leaves. This reminded me of the human spirit, sometimes we lose our leaves, but we must never allow that to keep us off our intended path for too long. Cry, mourn, reflect, and get back on the road.

 

*** 

I was forty-seven when I wrote the poem, “Sunday Is For Dreaming Daddy.”

I left Trinidad when I was thirteen years old, my mother sent me to Queens, New York, to live with her older sister. She wanted me to get the best education possible, her plan was to join me in one year. Well as life goes, she was not able to join me in that year. Having never been separated from my parents, I was the loneliest I have ever been in my life. My mother wrote me regularly, but my father did not. It was at about that time that I really began to resent my father. I felt then, and still feel now, that it was not a difficult task for him to write his only child once per month. I believed that he gave me away to my aunt in New York because that was easiest for him; and he was relieved of his parenting duties. I was angry, and for years I hated him. It was only after his death many years later that I realized his worth in my life. I was finally able to forgive him and appreciate the gifts he had given me. That was when I was able to write that poem, “Sunday Is for Dreaming” the poem triggered “Toco,” a series of love poems written for my father.

When I was living in Trinidad before I came to New York, I lived primarily with my mother and her family, but I also lived with my father, who lived in the same town. That was co-parenting before it was popular and had a name.

My father was never strict; in fact he had no rules in his home. If I wanted to do something like play in the mud with no shoes, he would say, “your mother wants you to keep your shoes and socks on.” If I wanted to wash the car with him, he would say, “your mother does not want you to get your clothes wet.” 

This annoyed me to no end. I would give him a few words, and stomp off to his aunt’s house a few doors down. A few hours would pass and my aunt would say, “Cheryl, your father is outside in the car waiting to take you home.” I’d get in the car still peeved at him and sit in the back, really more embarrassed than peeved. And he would say, "lil girl, get in the front seat." Then he would chat with me all the way home as if nothing had happened.

My father never spanked me, or screamed at me. He allowed me to be precocious and out spoken. I finally see that the right to be a poet came from the complete freedom my dad gave me when I was a girl. He allowed me to say anything I wanted without fear of reprimand or punishment. He also spoke very frankly to me about his many girlfriends and love triangles.

I did inherit my straight talk from him.

At the moment I am enrolled at Stonecoast MFA Program, at the University of Southern Maine. I am concentrating on poetry. After many years of writing poetry, I decided to study formal poetry and the classics. Lately, I have been writing pantoums, ghazals, zuihitsus, and tinkering not very successfully with sonnets and sestinas. I have two more semesters left in my program, and I can say with certainty; that I have learned a lot. This was a great career move for me. My poems are shorter, tighter and better crafted. In my new manuscript I explore the reoccurring birth of twins in my family, and other family poems. This past January I had an opportunity to study poetry in Ireland. The Irish have certainly contributed generously to literature. It was a completely rewarding experience for me. 

I have been working on a series of poems honoring my father. He was a very complicated man. Over the years we had many arguments about his parenting, or non-parenting; but through it all I knew he loved me in sort of a boyish way. My father was not really parent material; he was more of a chum.  

***

ah knows  ma self well, deep in ma Goree bones.

CBT, Feb. 2009 

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RIDING THE WORLD

 

My father had so many women

his legs were girders

on the Third Avenue elevated train tracks

 

he stepped between their funk

riding the world   mambo

zouk   soca   chutney bhangra

 

who could stop him

his breath thickening to paste

a caravan of limbs trailed behind him

 

a small room in his palm reserved for me

his river grew loud and deafening

long wounds on my mother’s doorstep

 

****

 

“Riding the World” was published in PANK Magazine # 3

Michigan Technical University, January 2009

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