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Books by Drisana Deborah Jack
The Rainy Season /
Skin
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Skin
Poems by Drisana Deborah Jack
Skin
News Release
GREAT BAY, St. Martin (January 22,
2006)—St. Martin’s newest book, Skin, by poet/painter
Drisana Deborah Jack, was released in The Hague, The
Netherlands, on Saturday, January 21, 2006. “Drisana is now the first St. Martin writer
to release a new book in the Netherlands,” said Jacqueline
Sample, president of House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP). Skin, Jack’s second collection of
poems, was published in St. Martin last week by HNP. Within
hours, copies of the title with its strange cover design, was on
its way from the Caribbean to the Dutch city. Jack was there to
participate in the Winternachten International Literature
Festival on January 20 and 21.
Plans for the book release started in
November 2005 with the author, festival principal Ton van de
Langkruis, and HNP. “We thought it would be a great idea to
launch at Winternachten. Especially since Drisana was appearing
on both festival days, discussing language politics, Caribbean
women in literature, and reading her poetry alongside famous
writers like Austin Clarke, Frank Arion, and Breyten Breytenbach,”
said Sample.
“We expected that The Hague release would
give
Skin an immediate new audience and sales beyond the
home base.”HNP was also busy securing international
attention for
Skin before its history-making feature for
the St. Martin book. According the South African writer and
critic Darryl Accone, “Skin is compelling.”
To Jacqueline Goffe-McNish of the State
University of New York, “Skin takes us through
… the textures in this land of Lokhay; gritty salt …
continues the tradition of poets like E.K. Braithwaite,
Mervyn Morris and Dennis Scott.” That’s no small comment.
For a clearer picture of how serious Jack’s
work is being taken, one has to read the Introduction to Skin
by the New York-based Diaspora scholar Dr. Hershini Bhana
Young. She calls the slim volume a “wonderfully sensual,
fluid and powerful collection of poetry, born out of the
Caribbean’s flux and flows.”
According to Jack on Sunday, “all went well
at Winternachten,” where St. Martiners in the Netherlands were
invited to attend the book release in the foyer of the Theater
aan het Spui.
Jack, an MPC graduate and university
assistant professor, hails from Cole Bay, where she is a member
of the Bells, one of St. Martin’s oldest families.
By the way, the attention Jack’s artwork is
getting is also jumping off the pages.
Dr. Young’s new book Haunting Capital (2005),
dedicates an entire chapter to interpreting and comparing
Jack’s art to a fellow artist. “This is tremendous,” said
Sample.
“I am told that this is the first St.
Martin painter to get this type of extensive critical evaluation
in a scholarly book.” In her poetry and art, Jack has been
developing salt as a St. Martin cultural/historical metaphor.
She is also unique among the island’s writers and artists for
her treatment of the “presence” of the hurricane, linking it
often to the Middle Passage.
To author/literature expert Fabian Badejo,
“It is clear from her writings that Dr. Young is impressed
with Debbie’s work.
“When a young artist is fortunate to have a
major scholar writing critically about his or her work it just
ads immeasurably to the already endless possibilities of good
art.” Jack is one of two St. Martin writers to end up in at
least three important books published in the USA and in England
in December 2005.
Badejo pointed out last Sunday on the Culture
Time radio magazine, that we should read something remarkable in
the fact that Skin is the second St. Martin book published in
January 2006, in less than one week after Cul-de-Sac People by
Mathias S. Voges and by the same publisher.
Drisana Deborah Jack is available in St. Martin at Van Dorp bookstore
and House
of Nehesi and over the next few days at Amazon.Com and
in other bookstores.
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Reviews
Compelling ... We are all migrants now,
children and foundlings of diaspora.—Darryl
Accone, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Skin takes us through blanket of night, seaweeds, the embrace of
the sea, interrupted sky, and rain storms.—Jacqueline
Goffe-McNish, State University of New York
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Contents
| Introduction: Oceanic mothering |
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ix |
| waterpoem 1 |
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1 |
| en memento mori |
|
2 |
| foremothers |
|
7 |
| waterpoem 2 |
|
8 |
| alovepoemaboutyouforme |
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9 |
| for a son … seeking |
|
10 |
| subway musings |
|
11 |
| saturday night |
|
13 |
| memory lapse |
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14 |
| on being home/sick |
|
15 |
| this little light of mine |
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16 |
| a song for AXUM |
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19 |
| in remembrance |
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21 |
| the lovers |
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24 |
| a salting of sorts |
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27 |
| pieced together |
|
27 |
| legacy poem |
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30 |
| a poet’s farewell |
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32 |
| seedlings |
|
32 |
| this poem |
|
33 |
| to the light and other things
of quiet beauty |
|
35 |
| waterpoem 3 |
|
36 |
| waterpoem 4 |
|
37 |
| waterpoem 5 |
|
38 |
| motherliness or breast-feeding
the diaspora |
|
39 |
| bitter water |
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44 |
| About the author |
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47 |
Source:
skin © 2006 by Drisana Deborah Jack •House
of Nehesi Publishers • Philipsburg, St. Martin Caribbean
• www.houseofnehesipublish.com
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Drisana Deborah Jack was born in Rotterdam,
the Netherlands, in 1970, to Caribbean parents. As a child her
parents brought her to St. Martin, her mother’s home island,
where she was reared in Cole Bay village. Jack graduated from
SUNY at Buffalo with an MFA in 2002 but by then had already
co-founded and acted with the Teenage Acting Company while
attending the MPC high school, and published her first poetry
book, The Rainy Season (1997), in St. Martin.She went on to exhibit her artwork in the
Caribbean, the USA, Europe, and Japan. Jack, A Caribbean artist
by “geography and cultural/spiritual location, constructs …
a personal/cultural history based on ancestral or re-memory
using painting, video, photography, sound art, and poetry.”
Her poetry has appeared in The
Caribbean Writer and Calabash.
Articles citing and reviewing her work have appeared in Today, The St. Maarten Guardian, Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten, Artpapers
Journal, Buffalo News, and in Fabian Badejo’s Salted Tones – Modern Literature in St. Martin (2003).
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Jack has recited her poetry and lectured on
the cultural arts at readings and festivals such as No To The
Franco-Dutch Treaty, CARIFESTA VI, VII, at the Studio Museum of
Harlem, the Miami Bookfair International, Crossing the Seas,
Poetry Africa, and Tradewinds. A leading St. Martin poet and
mother of one daughter, Jack is an assistant art professor at
New Jersey City University.
Awards and honors include a Caribbean Writers
Institute Fellow (UM), Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and New York
Foundation for the Arts grants, SUNY Buffalo Dissertation
Fellowship, Photography Institute fellow, Lightwork
Artist-in-Residence (Syracuse University), CEPA Exhibition
Award, and a US National Endowment for the Arts residency at Big
Orbit Gallery. skin is
Jack’s second book of poems.
Source:
skin © 2006 by Drisana Deborah Jack •House
of Nehesi Publishers • Philipsburg, St. Martin
Caribbean • www.houseofnehesipublish.com posted 4 March 2006
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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