Here

Raymond Ramcharitar dons many hats. He is a playwright, poet, short story writer, journalist and critic; a polymath with degrees in Economics, English Literature, and Cultural History and a graduate of the Boston University’s creative writing program. And all these biographical details seem to lend his latest collection Here, its definitive style and quality.

Here is a book-length autobiographical poem which is, perhaps, a contemporary Caribbean echo of the Odyssey. It is ambitious in intent, seeking to remodel large epic themes, articulated by the protean voice of the narrator.

Divided into five sections, the first shares the book’s title and is set in Trinidad. Ramcharitar begins energetically:

The mise en scene is a pastoral; a plain
rolling slowly across an island’s torso,
its rivers curves corseted by spines of cane,
marshland cut into squares by crooked fosses,
and jagged fractals dissolving the grass skin,
sprouting factory smoke stacks, then cilia
of mud and asphalt, the fragile veins
joining the clutches of huts, the overseer’s white villa
to glints of glass and nickel, and the sheen
of neon and streetlights.

Almost immediately, one feels out of breath. It is as if the reader and poet had started a race together, and at the first pistol shot, the poet raced off, with the reader left behind to feel like a lump of lard. Reading on, there’s a sensation of being stuck in a serpentine lane of rush-hour traffic. Ramcharitar is not overly fond of full stops. There are sentences which run on for a page. A poet does have every right to use such devices, especially when serving an epic ambition. But, to also congest sinuous sentences with arcane words, and far-flung metaphors, is to make excessive demands of the reader.

The next section, “Yearning for the City,” is more successful. The speaker narrates the tale of his journey to Antwerp for higher education. Ramcharitar’s favourite devices work in sync here. The  multi-disciplinary metaphors, meta-textual references, aid his purpose and there is greater cohesiveness about the work.

You know this dream: the burning places of light;
Spenser saw a distant crystal city;
Hardy saw an anchor to transcendence,
a doctrine of eternity sculpted
from the granite of medieval mortification –
rococo creeds of earthly paradise

You know this dream: the burning places of light;
Spenser saw a distant crystal city;
Hardy saw an anchor to transcendence,
a doctrine of eternity sculpted
from the granite of medieval mortification –
rococo creeds of earthly paradise.

“Toronto”, articulates the epic theme of migration, but changes it from “despair to resignation;” as the speaker’s  love affair, and quest for employment fail. This is followed by, “The Dream Diary” which tells of domesticity, its tensions and affections, the changes brought by the birth of child, his thoughts through divorce, and his hopes for the future. The section is written mostly in heroic couplets – a stylistic choice which imposes an order and rhythm and is an apt reflection of the theme: feelings of beauty, of untainted but fragile love, and the stresses which define home life.

The final section “The Last Avatar” features the descent of the Hindu trinity – Creator (Brahma), Preserver (Vishnu) and Destroyer (Shiva), who when woken

… descend[ed] into creation as mere men
to shepherd the flock to its final end.

This is more epic burlesque than epic. Or an epic in the tradition of Iliad’s Olympus scenes, where the gods behave like lesser humans. The high thought of the epics is no longer available to us, because whenever there is concourse with the divine, the effect is ironic. The final couplet is of so ambitious a project that it is nearly trite:

Salvation was just a game of the immortals
played to amuse themselves in the starry portals.

After reading this collection, I wondered whether Ramcharitar’s themes would not have been more suited to the essay form, or the short story: forms which would have allowed him to express his gift for narrative or his scholarship. With Here, I am left uncertain about the success of Ramcharitar’s epic design.

 

Skendha Singh