April 04, 2019
Words. We seem to ignore their power. Shivanee Ramlochan weaves her tapestries of words in such a fashion that each grabs your soul. Her book Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting contains pages of poems that grasp different parts of your consciousness in a way that cannot be escaped. They actually haunt you, forcing you to absorb what you just read and, what in fact has just happened to you, by simply reading words.
When I first met Shivanee, as a colleague at Paper Based Bookshop in 2013 she seemed meek, unaffected and just the type of girl I figured would have zero impact on my life. However within the first month I realized I had never been more wrong. She wields a kind of power and strength with her words that is not just arresting, soundly impactful and inspiring, but her words… written and spoken, make you think. Not the superficial, general, kind of think either. They make you dig deep into yourself. They make you pull out the Red Threads that come together to make you who are and seriously contemplate how each and every one of them got to where it is. Her work has been used in collaborations with people such as poet Sonia Farmer of the Bahamas who placed an installation of letterpress versions of Shivanee’s The Red Thread Cycle poems at The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. She was also a participant in the first Douen Islands presentation at Alice Yard with founders Andre Bagoo and Kriston Chen along with Sharon Millar and Sharda Patasar.
As I sat to chat with Shivanee, now more than just my friend, in a very noisy coffee shop one Saturday, she was still that humble unaffected woman I had met six years ago.
If I asked you to start from the top where is that?
SHIVANNE: The beginning for me is literally a house full of books. I think about my earliest memories of anything and it is every room in our house having books… including the bathroom. It was comfort and escapism, but it was also a sheer delight. A lot of people think you have to read to escape a horrible world and that children who spend most of their time reading are bound to be introverts. I think I was happy with human people but ultimately preferred spending times with book friends rather than friend friends. It wasn’t because I felt deprived or because I was antisocial… I just really preferred the world of imagination I could find in books. I find that now at 32 I feel that way increasingly. I have a decent social life but in terms of what brings me joy and comfort and exhilaration and pure pleasure, it’s still books… rooms full of books.
So the importance is in the books themselves…
SHIVANNE: I am incredibly non-materialistic, but I don’t know what I would do without books. They are my one huge material indulgence. I have to have them. I would not understand myself without them. There are a lot of people who lament that they will not be able to read all the books that they want in their lifetime I have been thinking about that a lot, because you are surrounded by something that is incredibly beautiful and meaningful. I have long accepted that there are far more books in the world than I can ever get to read, that I desperately do want to read but to be around them is consolation especially in a place that is both violent and beautiful, as Trinidad is.
“Reading has become more and more my response to understanding how life works and doesn’t work.”
When things get invariably shitty, I turn to not just fiction but nonfiction and poems to try to make sense of the horrendous and increasing amounts of bullshit that we are subjected to by dangerous men in positions of power… by corrupt systems that don’t love us… by abuse from people who should love us but don’t and abuse us instead. When I think I can’t cope with that anymore I think there is someone somewhere in the world, who may have been dead for 400 years or who is alive and kicking right now, who has experienced that type of incredible heartbreak and has written about it. I can go to them and be in conversation with them and that way I can survive.
What would you say is the primary educational source of your writing? Formal education, natural talent, general consumption of reading…?
SHIVANNE: I think it is consumption of reading. I did study Literature and Spanish at UWI St. Augustine and that was a useful point in my life, but it was also eye-opening as to how unnecessarily cruel and petty the world of academia can be. So I think it’s a house full of books. I think it’s growing up enshrined in books, not just that but also having a mother for whom no book was forbidden. Maybe even some that should have been never were. As early as primary school I realised there were a lot of restrictions on what children were allowed to consume whether it was TV or books. I simply did not have a lot of that restriction growing up. That kind of freedom also made me want to choose books that were innately dangerous because I felt that conventional literature was all well and good, butwhen I was reading poems and stories and plays and novels by writers who were writing from great places of risk, whether it was political risk or social alienation or sometimes the very literal fear of death, I found that the truths they were telling were so very close to the bone that I never disbelieved them I never felt like there wasn’t room for anyone to say what they had to say.
I think that there is a fear of whom you offend in a small place, even though you yourself are willing to pay the price for it. It’s all well and good for me to say, “I will pay the price,” and I can take it on my back and move on with life. That doesn’t leave a lot of space for how someone who might read a very controversial poem might then accost my mother in the supermarket and tell her, “Your daughter is a witch and she’s going to hell. Why doesn’t she have a husband? Why is she writing outrageous nasty things?” It’s not that I don’t think that my mother or my dad can’t fend for themselves. Despite knowing that they can, I would prefer that they didn’t have to. This situation hasn’t happened yet, but it could.
So your parents face the consequences of your work?
SHIVANNE: The same is true for my brothers. Really it’s my immediate family that I’m most concerned about. As far as extended family goes, that’s pretty much up to them. A lot of the judgment comes from there as well. Especially uncles, who kind of assume that you are not married, you are fat, you work in some strange field that is not doctoring, lawyering or engineering, so it is impossible to say what you do. To them I kind of look like… toxic waste. It is something that I do think about.
“We have a perception of the brave woman writer as always proudly feminist who can write whatever she wants with no consequences. Consequences are there and they are real.”
I am aware that to write unorthodox things in a conventional place means you always put yourself before some kind of firing line, one you might not realize perhaps until years after the fact. Then you think about how close you were to an actual fire of reckoning. But I think if I thought about that at the time particularly in those 5 years that Haunting took to gestate it is good that I did not know how close I was at times to complete condemnation from social and religious circles.
How useful is secondary school literature education?
SHIVANNE: This is a good question and it is a good question globally because the Forward Prizes… publishes an anthology…
Ok wait… what is the Forward Prizes?
SHIVANNE: The Forward Prizes describes itself as the biggest prize for collections of poems and single poems published in the UK and Ireland. It gives 3 prizes annually.
Ok cool… Lit in secondary school
SHIVANNE: Every year the Forward Prizes publishes an anthology of all the shortlisted poems, plus 50 poems that they highly commend. In the introduction to last year’s anthology, which I am in, the chief judge said that one thing that ruins the experience of poetry for young people is high school education. She said, and I paraphrase, it often gives you watered-down, tedious, painful, dragged-out explanations by teachers who don’t care to be teaching or are seriously burnt out or jaded. It then produces generations of students who are apathetic at best about poetry and averse at worst,… even thinking about it. I think that is often the unfortunate truth, but I don’t believe that is always true. It is a useful point to consider. It can often be an oversimplification of a more complex issue.
I have seen the way my mom teaches poetry. Having just retired as a teacher, she is exactly that age people might think of her as boring and derivative, but truly just experiencing her teaching to a classroom is a complete delight. So I think some criticism can be a bit ageist.
In Trinidad we have the benefit of the incredibly popular and financially subsidized First Citizens National Poetry Slam. That means that a lot of young people’s first access to enjoying poetry is enjoying spoken word poetry… poetry meant for performance. I think it’s great. I’m very grateful that it gives young people an outlet for their pain and chaos, and also the need to express beauty.
What I wish would happen more is that these young people who are so passionate about the slam would read more actively. I think they often don’t realise it would enhance the quality and depth of their art.
“If you don’t consume words, what you are doing is ingesting the echo chamber of other people’s poems.”
I mean that’s fine, but, it means that your poems only go so far. There are tremendous poets who are great on the page and on the stage like Danez Smith. They were at this year’s Forward Prizes and will be at Bocas this year. They’re a good example to young spoken word practitioners, that some of their favourite poets like Danez read prolifically.
“My dream is to walk in to a secondary school classroom in Trinidad and see students deeply passionate about Derek Walcott, about Vladimir Lucien, about Rumi, about Kendrick.”
Finding value in the poetics of rap, is something I think we must explore more. This is what I think about a lot of teachers, even some of the best ones, are only willing to emphasize the value of poems to students on their own terms. I understand that there is a syllabus that they have to conform to but there must be room outside of that to invite children to discuss work they like on their own terms too… even if it never gets studied for an exam, even if it is never on a syllabus.
“Letting children share where they find poetry in the world would have an extraordinary effect not just on how they read and then come to incorporate English in their lives. It would also translate for that student that what they think about life has value and that school is not just an experience of going and receiving information in which you have no say and no autonomy.”
You have an actual career in books. How did that come about?
SHIVANNE: It started with my own book blog called Novel Niche. This is before I knew anybody, before I even thought that there could be such a thing as a literary scene in Trinidad. It was just me on my lonesome loving books, thinking, “Okay I want to write about books and share my thoughts with the world. I will make a book blog.” In 2010 I went to the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Writers. One of the best things about it was the other writers I met there. I met Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Alake Pilgrim, Colin Robinson, Desiree Seebaran, and many others including Andre Bagoo. Post-Cropper, Andre shared my email with Nicholas Laughlin, who at that point was looking for a blogger for the first ever Bocas Lit Fest. I get an email from Nicholas, whom I didn’t know, saying he liked my blog, that he’d gotten my info from Andre: would I be interested in covering a couple events for this festival that they were launching in April? I said sure. It was great. It was intimidating. It did take me a while to feel like I belonged in that kind of a space.
Through working for Bocas, which I have done since it started in 2011, I met Lisa Allen-Agostini who was at that time, with then Editor-in-Chief Judy Raymond, just setting up the Trinidad Guardian’s Sunday Arts Section which ran for about 5 years. So that is how I wrote book reviews for the Guardian for 5 years, from 2012 to 2017. Nicholas also asked me to review books for Caribbean Beat Magazine, which I still do, and then to work with him on The Caribbean Review of Books, which I still do. In the second year of Bocas I went to a store I had never been to before, to interview, who I thought was a lovely little old lady. Joan Dayal turned out to be that, but also much more than I had been expecting in every way. She is a complete powerhouse, someone who suffers no fools. Working with Joan at Paper Based has been a complete joy. Despite how much independent book stores struggle, though we sometimes wonder how we are going to make it to the next fiscal year, Joan’s shop has been a real lifeline when times are otherwise shitty.
“When I’m in Paper Based, the energy feels cyclical, and reminds me of how my life in this work started: a literal room full of books, some of the best books you can find anywhere.”
What I didn’t know, but soon came to know, was that all of these things were so closely connected. The people I work with rarely if ever feel like my authoritative bosses. I mean, they are that but they also feel like friends, like colleagues. They understand the intense stress of working as a freelancer in the arts in Trinidad.
These people have been and continue to be invaluable to me. They give me advice on how to do my various jobs better, how to approach things in my own personal writing life, including the very valuable advice of “Get your head out of your own ass, don’t be your own worst enemy, don’t self-reject.” All of that has been more useful that I could have predicted.
I feel a lot for young writers. By young I mean young to the business of writing, not necessarily young in age. They have a burning passion to be a writer, but have no idea how to get started. I have had the privilege and benefit of being surrounded by people who know a lot about this business, and I have become one of those people. People find my contact info often. What they say typically amounts to, “I am 16 or 19 or 65, I have just written my first poem, I have just finished my first short story, I have just thought about coming to my first Bocas workshop, I know nothing. Can you help me?” I will admit that the human capacity to answer maybe 10 of those a day, I don’t have that. I can do one a day.
I don’t want to perpetuate a sort of awful, bureaucratic red tape space, where young writers have nowhere to turn in their island. I don’t want to do that. Responding and giving advice takes a lot of energy and patience, and sometimes more hand-holding than I would like, but I want to offer as much as I can for as long as I can. It is the only way we are going to make shit that matters, indefinitely, generously.
Having been shortlisted for prizes more than once how does that feel? What does the disappointment do for your determination?
SHIVANNE: I tell people, quite openly, that losing prizes has been very good to me. I think people think that I’m being facetious, but I’m not. Dealing with Hollick Arvon was emotionally very rough, because I was in competition with my closest friend in poetry. I was a big believer, and still am, in what she makes. She had been writing poems in a more serious and sustained way that I had at that point. On the one hand it was a prize I thought she totally should win. On the other hand, I also wanted to win, because there was no prize like that, and there still isn’t in the Caribbean. It’s now administered under new sponsorship, as the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. Hollick Arvon was hard, but instructive. The prize was announced during Bocas, which meant that when it was declared, the festival wasn’t over, and I couldn’t go home and bawl my eyes out indefinitely. I had to get ready for work the next day.
You think you have an understanding of yourself as someone who responds to news in a certain way but really, it’s in that moment of the prize being announced that you learn who you are. When her name was called and she went up, I was also covering it for social media for the festival. I searched myself and I said, “Self. Do you want to throw a brick at her head? Do you have any badmind at all, festering?” The answer was truly ‘No’. I think that is the moment wherein you can’t lie to yourself. So if the answer were ‘Yes’… it would have been yes and I would have had to deal with it, but I was relieved to learn that I was genuinely happy for her. It did not conflict with how sad I was for myself, and I realized in an instant that those two things were more than possible.
So I come to work the next day at the festival feeling admittedly a little subdued and Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press comes over to me and says, “I would like to see your manuscript.” I was definitely stunned in that moment. It completely blindsided me. It was the last thing I thought would happen and there it was, happening. You see, before that I’d done this whole cycle of self-rejecting about ever sending work to Peepal Tree. I had decided — and I don’t know now based on what — but I had decided that my poetry was too strange, weird and too sinful for them to ever consider. What a spectacular way to be shown how wrong and stupid I was. If that never happened, there would probably be a book of some kind, but it wouldn’t be Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, published in 2017. It’s when I think the book needed to come out, and it was the exact right fit in ways that I could have never predicted. So yes, losing has been very good to me. It was the same with the Forward Prizes. I didn’t really have to think too much about winning or losing because you’re shortlisted for such a long time in advance, several months. I didn’t want my everyday thought to be “Would I win? Would I lose? What would happen?” The prizegiving night was truly extraordinary. It was surreal. There were hundreds of people who had bought tickets to come to the Southbank Centre, just to hear poetry being read and see prizes being awarded. That utterly blew my mind.
“It was a great reminder that one can be supposedly ‘famous’ in one small island in the Caribbean… and then outside of that you can be, as I was, virtually unknown.”
We all read poems. We all went backstage for the winner to be announced and when it was not my name that was called, I thought, “Self. How do you really feel about this?” And it was like, you know what? I’m cool. I just read on one of the biggest stages of poetry in the world. I’m alright. I’m going to go back to the hotel, take off this dress, order a little bit of room service, talk to my mother on WhatsApp, and go to sleep. I guess this is why I prefer the fry plantain and saltfish over caviar and champagne life.
“Life is what you do around those big glittery moments. It’s about whether or not you can hang up this mantle of fame that is so fickle and so treacherous.”
Can you be that person who calls your mother when you say you will, and pay your Flow bill on time to avoid disconnection, and remember to buy cat food? All of that helps to make a person good, right? Winning prizes does not a good person make. It might make a talented writer, and it also might not. Working at Bocas, if it has taught me anything, has taught me about literary prizes. They are, at the end of the day, simple value judgements. Yes, the judges may be people who have credentials and experience and who have won prizes themselves, but it’s still all opinion. The winning, the not winning, the short listed, being long listed, it’s all fine, and will all be fine. The best part of Bocas for me is the after-party on the Saturday night, when writers kick off their shoes and wine to the ground. It’s a big reminder that people are just people. You will see them the next day in panels, more or less sober, holding court, being super refined and using big vocabulary words, and that’s great, too. Bocas is also a good exercise in not meeting your heroes, because very swiftly you will realize that essential truth: that people are people, for good or ill. It’s an important lesson to take in, and a useful tool for avoiding deep, wretched disappointment.
What is the local climate for the industry?
SHIVANNE: At Paper Based, in the last few years we have seen a huge spike in self-published books. Everyone wants to write a story. I hope that the reality of Bocas has shown them that it is more than possible. The is why Bocas always tries to have sections of the festival devoted to people who are doing their own thing, who may never be Marlon James and who quite frankly don’t need to aspire to be Marlon James. There is Marlon James, who is incredible, and then there’s someone who wants to write their personal family history or a picture book about their dog. They might not have Marlon James or Kei Miller aspirations. A lot of them do, but that’s another thing.
“I think the publishing industry has to constantly recreate and reinvent itself. I think we need to accept that we must develop a solid local industry, one held to exacting standards.”
As much as I love the fact that people are compelled to write their stories, I wish they would take more counsel. It would help them to understand the entire cycle of what should happen to a book before it becomes a physical object. Most of the self-published books I see are tremendously badly edited. By that I mean, sometimes they aren’t edited at all. Many are atrociously printed, so they are not attractive products, and what’s inside them is possibly worse. I hope that this will change, that people will realize that there is value in paying for editorial, proofreading, and print production services, even though they are not cheap.
People not knowing and people not knowing whom to ask is a big problem. That’s a problem that speaks to accessible information. How we deal with demystifying the process will directly impact on the overall quality of books emerging in the next generation.
We are in a good place when it comes to people wanting to publish their own books, and I’m all for it. I think we should help people learn how to do that better. We should also accept that some people know, and choose not to. That’s their choice. I would like to say to them, very sincerely, “What you are creating is shit,” but it is up them. Yes, sometimes it’s finances. Sometimes, it’s hubris. There is a reason why the Writers First seminars at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest are always totally packed. Everyone has a story they want to tell or sell, and I’m hopeful more implementation of those seminars’ advice is taking root.
Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting… Where did this writing come from? It was the best title ever… the work literally haunted me.
SHIVANNE: I couldn’t predict that. I couldn’t predict how many people would tell me, “I’m reading your book, you know, and I like it, but I can’t read it all in one go. I have to read it poem by poem, and sometimes with long periods of not reading it in between.” I didn’t realize that would be a thing, but if I try to disassociate myself and float above the collection to perceive it, it makes sense.
It is also impossible to fully understand what it’s like for somebody else to live with these poems, which is one of the most fascinating things for me. What would it be like to have to experience the book like that? I can understand the need to take time. I have read books like that. No Pain Like This Body. Cereus Blooms at Night. The Vegetarian. When I’ve read those books, I’ve often felt sick, from the intensity and power of them. I tend not to be able to read anything for a while after. It’s because the books are still active in me. So I know exactly that feeling, but I never thought anything I wrote would be capable of doing that to other people. As for where all of that comes from, my mom often asks the same question, like, “Were you not happy?”
“The truth is, the lines between fiction and fact become very blurred. I suppose in Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, they become very bloody.”
Objectively, I could look at this book still and say, “This did not happen to me; this happened to me,” but after the book coalesces into what it is, it ceases to matter. The book has acquired a life of its own. The poems are not asking whether or not we think this thing happened 100 percent. They are saying, “What is happening in the poems is a million percent real.” That world of the poems, their scope of the fear, their shape of horror and survival: those are all real. I worked very hard to incorporate unforced joy in this work. The hardest thing for me to try to achieve is to write whatever ‘a happy poem’ looks like. I don’t even know what that is, in my own work, though I can identify it in the poems of others. Usually when I’m happy I might do something else, anything else but write poems. I wouldn’t be thinking of writing a poem. It is definitely true that most of the poems I write start with some kind of pain as locus, whether it is internal or external, and everything blossoms from that. I needed to write and publish Haunting to make space for the possibility of seeing differently, as much as I needed to make these poems for countless other reasons. A lot people say things like trigger warnings are stupid millennial bullshit. I understand where that derision comes from, but I also think that it is important to take care of your mental health. There might be some people in vast pain to whom I would not, right away, recommend my book. I’d tell them they might want to take it easy with this one. Some people might point blank ask me if this book is suitable for children, which has happened before. They might be buying for school libraries. How does that factor into my endorsement of my own work?
What I didn’t expect when the book came out was the direct, immediate appeal it would have to so many people who are considerably younger than me. An entire generation below me was buying the book with their very limited money, talking about the book, screenshotting it on Twitter, quoting lines from it on Facebook and Instagram. I was, and am, very flattered. They especially respond strongly to the poems that are about sexual violence. It makes me think, now that I’m talking about it: how much of that response was them maybe never feeling met by the truth, by anyone or anything that would tell them the truth about what was going on in their lives? I am glad that the work reaches something in them, reaches to everyone who’s survived sexual violence, but sometimes I wish it didn’t resonate like that, that it didn’t have to. So much of it is the pure reaction of seeing written down something that might have happened to you, or someone you love. You think it’s something you can’t talk about, and then you realize that you can, whether out loud, or on the page, or another creative or artistic medium. You know that ‘not talking about it’ is something they’ve probably schooled themselves to do, to say, “I can never speak out, in any way.” That cannot be allowed to continue.
“If the book is helping young people question the inherited suggestion that they have to ask permission to tell their own stories first, that’s wonderful.”
It’s wonderful if it does that for everybody, but there is a part of me that is especially glad if it does that for young people. I wasn’t muzzled when I was growing up, and I took it for granted. I have very unconventional parents who were beautiful black sheep in otherwise conventional families. I was, and am, very lucky. It wasn’t like they weren’t strict about certain things; of course they were. Still, I never felt like I couldn’t be my own person. It was a total novelty to realize that some people could be forbidden from reading a book they might want to read.
“Life’s too short, and too fickle, not to read what you need, whether you’re three or a hundred. Go for it. It’s yours, and you deserve to have what keeps you here.”
Thank you to PaperBased Bookstore for allowing us to use their space for our photoshoot.
INTERVIEWER: INDRA RAMCHARAN PHOTOGRAPHER: DAMIAN LIBERT
