Guaracara: Fawzia Muradali Kane

Fawzia Muradali Kane introduces her new collection Guaracara

Petit Carême

(‘little Lent’ – Caribbean Creole term for a short dry spell during the rainy season)

It’s been over a decade since my last collection. During that time, I felt a drought of words just after my parents’ passing. It seemed there was little left in the world that could be said. I have now spent more than half my life away from my childhood home. Trinidad and Tobago is a country evolving via sudden shifts in its history. Over 2 centuries ago, there was a quick bloodless change from one colonial power to another, where a new language of power and bureaucracy overlaid the previous. Swift shutdowns of longstanding state-owned industries - cane sugar and petroleum – altered the rural, industrial and urban landscapes forever.

The poems in this collection track the impact of some of these changes in the region, and the effects on my family’s history.

I return as often as I can, and have witnessed how the country has transformed into, at times, unrecognisable forms. Each visit underscores how much I risk forgetting. With the passing of the older generations, there's the possibility that I myself will be quickly forgotten. Will there be a time when we all watch the disintegration of our pasts, left to fade towards erasure?

‘I remember when the river caught fire’.

			Guaracara

There was a time when I thought all rivers would kill whatever they lined. Guaracara river in south Trinidad flowed close to my childhood home. The kerosene scent of its water wafted alongside us while we played in the back streets of Marabella, or walked to school in the nearby oil refinery compound. No laws existed at that time to prevent refinery waste being discharged into the river. I cannot recall seeing anything green along its banks, during those childhood years. There was nothing but desolation, a coating of sludge, greasy and black, its slime spread over trees and ground. There were tales of unwanted kittens being thrown in, to be watched as entertainment from the bridge, while the animals struggled to swim before disappearing into the sticky gunge. During the covid years, I had begun to write a poem about my own childhood experience of an epidemic lockdown, during the polio outbreak in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1970’s. The text's intended zuihitsu form of 'noticings' kept shifting towards the people and place of this experience, and the ways the textures of landscape and lives intertwined. This became the titular poem of my collection.

'If a thing does not move, is it still alive?'

			I am losing my eyesight &...

My diagnosis of early cataracts was a relief - finally, there was a reason why my colour rendition under different types of lighting seemed 'off'. The optician explained I have now begun to see the world with a sepia tint. I had assumed this would affect my work as a designer, but luckily over the decades I have built up a knowledge of the ways individual colours influence each other. My maternal grandfather became blind later in his life - due to diabetes, not cataracts. I was too young to ever witness his life as the strong-willed businessman who hunted in the forests as a hobby, owned racehorses and supported several mistresses with his 'outside' families. We would visit him in the small estate house of his coffee and cocoa plantation. His immoderate lifestyle had taken its toll. All I knew was a skeletal-thin man, with mottled skin, bald with straggly beard, and clouded eyes. His voice was soft and gravelly. We, his many grandchildren, would have to line up to pass slowly in front of his chair. As we stood in front of him one by one, he would lean his frail body forward to touch our faces with both hands and - always correct - say our names, and who our parents were.

'And if my love also dies before I grow old, where will I walk?'

			Namesake

My father's youngest brother is called Farouk, and Pappy gave us the names of the ex-King of Egypt's daughters: Farial, Fadia and Fawzia. My namesake was a famous post-war beauty but had a tragic life, married off in a political deal where she almost died from suspected anorexia and depression. There was a final period of happiness when she married again on her return to Egypt, and she died quietly aged 91. During my research on her life, I found a short video recording part of her funeral. The pallbearers held a small wooden coffin, and hurried awkwardly among disinterested onlookers from the hearse into the mosque. The coffin was open and at one point I thought it might topple over in the rush.

'there used to be whales here, a century and a half ago'

			Gulf of Paria

This is a forgotten part of Caribbean history. Great whales used to migrate southward, moving through the Caribbean Sea to breed along the northern coasts of South America. The series of islands off Venezuela and the north-west peninsula of Trinidad had small whaling stations where blubber would be stripped and melted down to process for household oil. All this happened concurrent with enslavement on plantations inland. This risky and lucrative occupation was worked mostly by free people, both on and off-shore. Somehow, knowledge of this brutal yet widespread industry has faded from collective memory.

'this is a slow dying'

			Let us mourn the death of King Sugar

My Trini friend Lynda and I were visiting friends in a village in Valencia, Spain. Lynda is fluent is Spanish and we spent time chatting with the local priest. He was young, from Gambia, and told us of the locals' surprise when he unloaded his drums from his car. He gave us permission to climb the bell tower of the parish church. Inside, above the altar was a statue of St. James, astride a white horse. The horse was reared up, right hoof hovering inches above the upturned face of a fallen Moor. We decided to walk up the hills to a small chapel, and the pathway was lined with the Stations of the Cross. The scenes of the shrines were painted tiles, with titles carved as delicate scripts on their small canopies. The steep path made the route even slower in the heat, so each station became a welcome pause in the progression from condemnation to extinction.

'My pen lifts and drips'

			X/Other

For almost every official form I need to complete, the ethnicity checkboxes are always a puzzle. My family's DNA results and what we look like do not join together fully. There is the expected northern India, a touch of Micronesia, and an unexpected amount of China. The UK's ethnicity list writers do not seem able to grasp their own country's undercurrents in world history. The checkboxes can never stack as a neat tower, especially for those of us whose ancestors were transported to remain permanently in ex-colonies. For some of us, our forebears assimilated and melted into the existing populations. For others, the ancestral memories and customs stayed and influenced the emergence of new cultures. Our bloodlines have grown to branch into new threads that pulse under the skin of our masks. What you see may not be what you get.

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This week's article, ‘Petit Carême’, is by Fawzia Muradali Kane, author of Guaracara, which is published this month! Remember to use the code JUNEBOOKS for 10% off and free UK P&P.