SESSION 11 — Writing Ritual
Photo by Jhaye-Q Shares: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-in-costume-on-a-parade-5905123/
Discussion:
Carnival. Subversive, transformative, cathartic. Ritualized abandon, embodied freedom.
What makes a ritual? Repetition? Transformation? The fact that it breaks the everyday wide open and creates a sort of portal to another way of being?
And what is that other way? That other us that we meet when we step through?
How does this poem explore these ideas? What techniques, images and associations does the poet use to illuminate the power of Jouvay?
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s oldest independent Caribbean specialty bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books.
All the Dead, All the Living
At Jouvay, it eh matter if you play yourself
or somebody else.
Play your dead eighty-year-old granny,
who had tongue like scorpion pepper,
two foot like twinned fishtail in Caura River,
a smile like a butterknife cutting through hot sada.
Play your living mother,
who made of more parts glitter than flour,
who teach you softness have more than enough space
to leave a cutlass waiting,
glistening between fat folds,
ready to chop yuh from a bed of ample waist.
Play all the dead and all the living in you,
in yuh shortpants,
in yuh badjohn drawers,
in yuh ragged fishnets and curry-gold battyriders,
in yuh half-top, in yuh no-top,
breasts swinging under electric-tape nipples,
panty forgotten in a culvert overflowing with holy water and hell liquor,
your own perspiration sliding between bodies at play
like the wetness from your body is purgatory-unction.
Play yuhself.
Clay yuhself.
Wine en pointe and wine to the four stations of the cross,
dutty angel,
bragadang badting,
St. James soucouyant,
deep bush douen come to town
to make a killing in mud and mudder-in-law
on fresh doubles, after.
Play like you eh playing in your public servant office on Ash Wednesday,
calves aching and twitching in sensible slingback heels,
a pulse in your lower back blossoming
each time you bend down to file a papers,
salute a clerk,
say grace before ashes.
You know where you are, really.
Just how you know the clerk is a chantwell,
the office is a concrete antechamber before the final mas,
the pavement is a busshead-convergence,
the parking lot is a gayelle,
the savannah is a arena where paint and abeer might wash,
but spirit does linger.
You eh waiting til next year.
Where you plant yourself this Jouvay
is where your spectral, midnight lagahoo rattling she coffin,
turning wolf
to woman
to wolf again.
Writing Prompt:
Write a poem that embodies a ritual. It can be anything—from your morning cup of coffee to Christmas Eve Mass.
Maybe your poem:
Uses repetition the way a ritual does—words circling back, shifting slightly each time.
Holds tension between order and chaos, between the expected and the unknown.
Blurs the line between the body and the act—where do you end, and where does the ritual begin?
Start with an action. A motion. A sound. A scent. Let the ritual take over.