The Frock by Yaya Richards
for UNESCO Mother Language Day in
St. Martin
Marigot, St. Martin (February 13,
2011)—A book party for
The Frock & Other Poems by Laurelle “Yaya”
Richards will be held at the Marigot Waterfront on Sunday, February 20,
at 7 PM, said Minerva Dormoy, head of the Collectivity’s Department of
Culture.
The new book launch is one of two
activities, on February 20 and 21, organized by the Collectivity for the
annual UNESCO International Mother Language Day.
The new book party will feature
guest speaker and USM lecturer Alex Richards, along with readings by
artists honoring the late folklorist Yaya Richards, and celebrating the
St. Martin way of speaking as cultural heritage, said Dormoy.
“The young generation poet Melissa
Fleming will perform Yaya’s poetry from the book. And we’re inviting the
general public to the book party,” said Dormoy.
Other guest artists will include
Fabien Richards and Leon Noel. There will be a skit of oldtime sayings
and proverbs by Alphonso Conner and Lucita Richards, both natives of
Free Town, Yaya’s village, said Dormoy.
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The use of the nation’s
mother language, “the way we speak naturally on both parts
of our island, is the sweetness to the ear and the heart of
Miss Yaya’s spoken word, storytelling, and talks about St.
Martin’s folkways,” said Jacqueline Sample, president of
House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP).
Richards had completed
working on The Frock with HNP at the time of her death at
age 55, on May 26, 2010 – about four months before the book
was published.
The plan to launch the
book on the UNESCO-declared day in 2011 came out of meetings
between the culture department, the publisher, and Yaya’s
family representatives Priscille Figaro, Adrienne Richards,
and Laurellye Benjamin.
“We need to recognize
our artists like Yaya who are working so hard for our people
and our identity,” said Dormoy. “It’s an honor to be
involved with this book as part of Yaya’s legacy that can
live on, and to launch The Frock in connection with the
International Mother Language Day,” said Dormoy.
“When Yaya came to the Department
of Culture she explained that her book was a way to pass on her style of
storytelling and cultural information to the young people. The book
party on Sunday evening is a way to show our commitment and to take home
a copy of Yaya’s first and only book,” said Dormoy. Refreshments will be
served at the affair. The Collectivity’s President Frantz
Gumbs, the human development sector directors, and the Executive Council
supported the government’s partial sponsorship of the book’s
publication, said Sample. |
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The Frock & Other Poems is
available at Roland Richardson Gallery in Marigot, Van Dorp in Simpson
Bay and A.T. Illidge Road, Arnia’s bookstore at Bush Road/Zagersgut
Road, Philipsburg Jubilee Library, and
www.houseofnehesipublish.com.
* * * * *
| The Frock
The garment, pieces of love in harmony
represents
individual memories and family
histories,
people and places, births and voyages,
bondage and
emancipation, jollification
and nation building.
From the
neckline to the sleeves,
from the
waistline and over the knees
to the
hemline, here is a picture of the people,
of history
and culture,
of green
pastures and hills
given to us
by Our Father,
of the
nourishing fruits
sweet as the
St. Martin we know,
of the
surrounding blue seas and the bounty of
fish,
of the heavenly skies above us.
This frock
is fashioned
from the consciousness of the village.
See in this
humble fabric
eight
Richards sisters
the many
salt ponds from Grand Case to Great Bay
blue madras
memory of cotton and sugarcane
and all them
other plantations
walking on
foot from Rambaud to Longwall
for exchange.
37 beaches
to match 37 square miles of God's garden
church and
Sunday cricket
coco plums
and cherries on Long Bay
mountain
cabbage trees in Paradise
and ground
provisions in Sandy Ground
from our
foreparents putting foot on this island
three-to-four hundred years ago
to African
Liberation Day
and the
Creole Day in my headtie
to the band
around my waist in memory to all those
who passed
over /
The band
around my hat is the ark
of what the
Emilio Wilson Park could be
Storytelling
in bright moonlight like St. Louis Fęte
Christmas
baking, guavaberry making
and Ponum
dancing
cornbelly
grits and the amount of arrowroot
we pound in
Colombier
and so many cattle we ship to feed people
around us.
St. Martin
culture opens us to the world and opens
the world in us.
See these
stories,
a movement
of Quimbé
in grace
and music in memory.
See in this fashion our living culture
unbound. |
* * * * *
Yaya’s Frock
book party draws large audience
MARIGOT, St. Martin (February 22, 2011)—Last Sunday,
an audience of about 200 people “from all walks of life”
came to the amphitheater at the Waterfront for the
launch of
The Frock & Other Poems
by the late Laurelle “Yaya” Richards, said Minerva
Dormoy, head of the Arts & Culture Department of the
Collectivity.
The book
party was the high point of the opening program for the
UNESCO International Mother Language Day. The two-day
program ended on February 21 with an “exciting
discussion” on SOS 95.9 FM about St. Martin’s language
and culture, said Dormoy. The discussants were political
scientist Joe Lake, Jr. and USM lecturer Alex Richards.
The
Collectivity president Frantz Gumbs opened the book
party program. One of the two short videos shown about
Yaya and her work featured Daily Herald “Artist
of the year” Ruby Bute rendering and discussing a
painting of the late folklorist.
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The “St. Martin English” was celebrated in
the blessing by Pastor Eugene Hodge, poems
by Leon Noel and Fabien Richards, the skit
by Lucita Richards and Thierry Gombs, and
the literary and language analysis by Alex
Richards, said Dormoy,
Melissa Fleming read the book’s title poem
while Priscille, the author’s sister,
modeled the popular frock that Yaya wore
during her public appearances before she
passed away on May 26, 2010.
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Family
members of Yaya during closing remarks at the book
launch. The author’s sister Priscille, at the podium
reading part of the family’s thanks to the organizer,
publisher, and the island’s people – wears Yaya’s frock
and hat. (CLF/CT photo)
Councilor Louis Jeffry, Jr. gave the vote of thanks on
behalf of the territory’s government. The Arts & Culture
Department coordinated the book party and the annual
International Mother Language Day activities.
Traditional snacks and drinks such as tamon juice
(tamarind) were prepared and served by the Richards
family. Even before the program got under way people
were “picking up copies of the book like hot bread,”
said Dormoy. Yaya’s sisters Priscille and Adrienne
autographed The Frock on behalf of their beloved
sister.
Published by House of Nehesi late last year with a
partial cultural arts grant to Yaya Richards from the
Collectivity,
The Frock & Other Poems
is available at Van Dorp and Arnia’s bookstores, Roland
Richardson Gallery, and from family members of Yaya
Richards.
*
* * * *
|
Spirit of We Fish Pon
Fish pon, fish pon, where you gon?
Yo mean yo gon gon gon fo true?
Ah wha we goin do now?
Gon fo true: no mo fish in the pon.
Shrimp pon, crab pon,
Yo mean to tell me every ting gon from us?
We lost the love in a sauce ah shrimps
A lil bowl ah crab to eat.
No mo crab in rice;
Ah where the culture gon?
No mo shrimp n rice n bread
The pon belly dry up.
No mo 10-pounder ‘n’ cremole
No mo hedo ‘n’ mullet
No mo bass ‘n’ fini, no mo, no mo
No mo corn mullets ‘n’ corn fish to send
away
Or even to carry Marigot or Great Bay.
We culture dry up; corn mullet ‘n’ cassava
gon
You can’t even fry on wood their own fat
Because they gon, gon, gon!!!
© 2010 Laurelle Richards. |
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* * *
Nature Is
not Innocent in the St. Martin Yard of Yaya Richards
By Alex Richards
The Frock & Other Poems
by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards celebrates her memory, her
words, her thoughts, the sentiments and feelings that
drove her actions in favor of a more vibrant cultural
expression, and a recognition of what it means to be
from and for St. Martin. When the book was
launched in Marigot in February 2011, as the highlight
of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day, it
served as the best way to honor the late Yaya, a
contemporary St. Martin woman of significance and an
activist in her own right. Over the last few days,
re-reading
The Frock & Other Poems
and attempting to refresh a brief critique of the book,
stirred aspects of my whole being, my past, my present,
my future, my foundation as well as the identity I am
still busy building, my internal construction, my
nature.
I refer to Laurelle
Richards as an activist because I believe that activism
is needed in fields other than politics. Culture, the
promotion of culture, the rightful definition of culture
and its proper positioning and/or repositioning within
our reality calls for activism. I called Yaya an
activist because I remember her as the kind of person
to: 1. SPEAK UP and address the issues regarding our
culture; 2. EDUCATE herself before she took on the
world; 3. STAND UP for what she believed in; 4. BUILD a
solid network, a coalition, a movement; 5. PUBLICIZE her
message to reach a broader audience (And her book is a
concrete example of her message that lives on even after
she passed away on May 27, 2010).
Consider her words in the opening
poem of the collection:
|
Wake up this morning
Praising God and stretching to the new day
Under the green shadow of Paradise hill
The cool breeze of
Kawtah… |
In her words,
there’s a close connection between geography and
cultural production. Immediately, right from the start
of the book, voice is given to the volatile geography of
St. Martin. Whatever the writer is involved in does not
prevent her mind from wandering across her land. As she
does this, she uses models of her own to express the
realities of St. Martin as if to say that European
literary models could not have allowed her to express
herself.
Poetry and nature,
expressed in most of her poems in the mother tongue, are
implicitly linked in the idea of a kind of garden of
Eden, a safe place, a place of hope. For her, this
fusion, this blend with the land is also inseparable
from a natural association with the “home” and the sense
that the domestic space provides an obvious and
uncomplicated site of belonging—a
place which should, and can, be protected from
outsiders, from colonial intrusion. Yaya’s unobtrusive
subtlety in this regard may appear surprising or even
subversive to some. It can be said that Laurelle
Richards writes exclusively in “S’Maatin English,” the
everyday or domestic language of most St. Martiners,
what Brathwaite has termed “nation language” (others
have termed it mother tongue, mother language, or nation
tongue, all implying that language and identity are
linked).
The folkloric work
of Yaya, for at least 10 years, has been highly
influential in establishing S’Maatin English language
and culture as an alternative, as an alter/native,
indigenous, cultural resource instead of the appealing
exclusively for acceptance and sole legitimization from
European or “Yanking” cultural forms. Yaya, folklorist,
spoken word artist (to use a current term), presents in
The Frock & Other Poems
the choice of employing S’Maatin English as a deliberate
and self-conscious rejection of inherited poetic models.
She creates her own, she draws from her own!
Though it is just
one slim volume, I feel strongly that Richards’s work
signals a shift away from purely innocent or passive
landscape and nature, a shift from a constant focus on
outside and the outsider to a consistent focus on St.
Martin people and the privileging of St. Martin language
as a powerful source of agency and national identity.
What I am foregrounding here is the importance of
literary history manifesting itself before our eyes;
what it excludes and includes at specific cultural
moments and how this might be gendered; and what kind of
writing it might, in turn, engender. Yaya’s archive also
encapsulates the strong, black Caribbean woman. In
“Precious Black Woman in Patchwork,” which is actually a
modern set of fragments for the poet from Freetown, this
monumental woman is perceived as rooted in the soil and
having a robust physicality. Her vibrant speech provides
amplitude with which to challenge European cultural
norms that are elemental to the crude language that
denies this Caribbean woman her womanhood; such
definitive norms that even causes her own men and women
folk to “dis” her very own femininity (hair, skin,
facial features).
When reading this
posthumous work, it is essential to “listen” to the
author’s tone of voice at times. The diverse range of
representations suggests that Richards’ is able to
negotiate a variety of poetic paths through the somewhat
contested terrain of Sweet St. Martin Land. In doing so,
she perhaps negotiates different poetic models but for
sure, she challenges and transgresses them deliberately.
For example, I love how Yaya presents tilling soil,
picking salt, or ponging pan as a way of reading or
interpreting history. As she puts herself in the place
of the one she describes and carries on her activity she
shares with the reader what she finds buried in the
village soil, in the salt pond, in the steel pan. Here
nature is not presented as innocent or outside of
history, nature becomes always already imbricated in
history; earth, our land, becomes an archive, which,
with patience and humility, can be read.
To endorse
Richards’ work and the St. Martin language, is to
recognize her description of the home or the yard, our
home, our yard, as separate and distinct from public
spaces and institutions in which politics, mediated
through “standard” languages, take place. She dares to
present these private spaces as representative of areas
uncontaminated by an unmediated outside influence, by
colonial culture. In this way, Yaya’s work is
essentially representative of mother tongue and mother
culture at work, and not in any simple way, it is
representative of St. Martin, the whole island, as an
industrious and creative motherland or “mothernation”
(as Sekou termed it in the early 1990s).
In closing, the
poems of Laurelle “Yaya” Richards serve us now, to
assess: Our language is an archives collection, a
library and a wealth of knowledge; Anyone who denies us
access to information in our mother tongue actually
denies us a fundamental right. It is a serious error to
think that a nation, a territory or a country, can reach
its full productive potential if the people of that
nation are forced to work, in their own land, in a
language that is foreign to them. Multilingualism is a
political obligation essential when attempting to
democratize the society; it gives each one an
opportunity to lend his/her contribution. Language is a
source of creativity, spontaneity and self-esteem; it is
an element of our identity.
Someone said: “To
have English as mother tongue, is to dominate the
world.” In the title poem “The Frock,” Laurelle Richards
puts it this way: “St. Martin culture opens us to the
world and opens the world in us.” We language,
therefore, provides us with a fair chance of playing a
more significant role. Let’s embrace our reality and
prove to Yaya and to all those who went before that we
will preserve and generate dynamically what’s ours and
thereby make our contribution to the redefinition of our
villages, our nation, our island, and our region, the
Caribbean!
posted 28 May
2011
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Laurelle Yaya
Richards Passes
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posted 5 March 2011 |
