poem & audio recording
West Indian Primer
for the diasporas. for no more Emmett’s, Sandra’s, Eric’s, Breona’s, George’s, Lesandro’s…
Look-and-say words train the pupil to look and say how lovely
you are, here. How lovely it was, it is, it will be here gradually
learning, as the need arises, that “I” alone says its own name.
That I am the one you assume the kings and queens ask permission
to compete in this ugly business of learning to roll our oars, followed by
easy phrases are was were: mama, go no so: papa, or for you:
But all y’all niggas owned slaves.
Let us read easy sentences with pictures of apples feeding zebus.
That you are: he has: she has: it has: we have been reading the story of how we were
all conquered at the hut: in the bed: by the bank: on the boat over with from
under the foreign management of Tim and Tot, look and say words
to tropical fruit spread over their dirt, her skirt, his shirt
to industrial bleach clean their floors, our fluency, our flaws
to become an international host, cost, lost. Then,
the pupil can send home a postcard for sound practice without pictures of
jouvert mud smearing Laylock Place, without pictures of
purple feathers moulting on Eastern Parkway, without pictures of
last lap Devils, Indians, Robbers, and Dames roti’d around Caribana curry goat.
Little attention need to be given to this at present while gradually learning
to drive a taxi, to open a door, to wipe an ass.
Note to Teacher—the pupil should pronounce the name of success as
Doctor, Lawyer, Accountant, Fenty and then emphasize the initial sound: capital
so, old sounds carried on in your baby’s breath, baby’s fat, baby’s stueup teeth
will grow and solder into lickle baby fangs colored red, black, yellow, brown.
Has Tim and Tot a viper on their hands. Yes, they have.
Say hand sand ant misbehaving and underline the subject.
The intension is human, the sign is black, the referent hangs
by its own name but me nah need a referent to know which candle
to bring out, to burn up, to breathe on, to build a vocal library.
That me deh: he deh: she be: we be talking about how we moved apart
in thinking: of each another: from the forests: to the fields: on the block
by the thousands since our arrivals. Come, le’ we recognize the sentence.
Bring out solidarity, burn up nostalgia, breathe on
and don’t build another how lovely ism
but look and say demands so that when “I” am gone’d again
we have permission to look-and-say mash up in your name.
Cathy Thomas is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work is invested in black feminist and womanist pedagogy, practice, critique, and play. She studies Afrodiasporic Literature across periods & genres, especially speculative fiction, Caribbean culture, comic books, and STS. Her current book projects are the monograph Unruliness: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girlhood, a slipstream collection of mother-daughter-alien stories called Girls on Film, and a novel Poco Mas that explores a historically unprecedented Afrofuture attentive to the long histories Humanism, afterlives of anti-black violence, and aftershock of weather through the lens of Carnival and the poetics of masquerade.