Radical Normalisation. Celia A Sorhaindo. Manchester: Carcanet, 2022. ISBN: 978 1 80017 239 5 100 pages.
Celia A Sorhaindo is a Dominican poet who emigrated with her family to the UK in 1976, and went back home in 2005. Her poems have appeared in various Caribbean publications and academic journals and in the anthology New Daughters of Africa.
In 2020 Papillote Press, a small, independent publishing house run by Polly Pattullo, published her first poetry collection, entitled Guabancex. The title of the collection refers to the supreme female deity of the Taino, one of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, associated with the power of nature. Guabancex was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Radical Normalisation is her second collection and was published by Carcanet Press in 2022. The title of the collection comes from the phrase “radical normalisation” as used by the pyschologist Dr Charlie Heriot-Maitland in his approach to psychosis. The ideas of norms, normativity, and normalisation run through several poems that deal with mental health issues and the difficulty of fitting into a “norm”, be that as an individual or an artist.
In that second collection, the poet also addresses similar themes to those dealt with in her first book, that is the trauma that came with the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Maria on Dominica in 2017, the creative urge, the small epiphanies of everyday life on a small Caribbean island, and the legacy left by the giants of Caribbean poetry.
Some of the poems published in Radical Normalisation deal with the theme of the trauma Dominican people had to go through after the coming of Hurricane Maria. These poems, like “Hypotonic”, “In The Air”, and “H2.5AZ (Strong Ties, Galvanized”), address the themes of rebirth and renewal after a natural disaster. In “H25AZ (“Strong Ties, Galvanized”) the poets focuses on the rebuilding process after the hurricane as a symbol of life going on against all odds. Lessons have been learnt and better things are bound to follow. The author mentions simple objects as her starting point (here “rafters, hurricane ties, wall plates”) and derives a lesson from the materiality of the building process. New words have been learnt, the new house will be better built, more resistant to future hurricanes.
In “Hypotonic”, verbal inventiveness and wordplay come to the fore as the poet concludes her poem, which is about the damage done by water during the hurricane, with the hard-hitting lines : “”even now writing, I well up” (23).
The creative urge and the need to keep on writng in adverse cicumstances is a very important theme in that second collection. In the poem entitled “I Am Not Amused”, the author playfully toys with the idea of the poem as a very nagging and obstrusive presence imposing itself on the poet and winning in the end. “Tension Created in Genesis Genius” focuses on the haunting terror of the blank page and the writer’s block and feaures a telling epigraph by Glynn Maxwell (“Start where we all remember”). The poem entitled “Forge” deals with the need to encourage the creative urge among “the broken people” (37).
The small epiphanies of everyday life on a Caribbean island appear in poems like “Knock on Wood” in which the poet recounts the joy of sitting with her husband on a bench in their garden while drinking a cup of freshly-ground coffee. Coffee symbolises in that poem a certain grounding, a connection with the local environment. In the poem entitled “What Do I Know”, another kind of epiphany is at work when the persona is confronted with a person who is apparently disconnected from reality (“His head is gone they say”, 91), but who may have some insights about how to start again.
The poet’s debt to the giants of Caribbean poetry is well in evidence in several pieces, like the poem entitled “Fragments of Epic Memory”, with its reference to Derek Walcott”s Nobel Prize speech. The poem is dedicated to Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the two giants of Caribbean poetry whose various positions on language and Creole divided scholars in the 1970s, but also led to new insights and a new surge of creativity. The poem starts with the very Caribbean word “Chupes !” (73) to focus on the importance of language and the vernacular in Caribbean poetry. In other poems, the voices of other Caribbean writers like Kei Miller, Martin Carter, Paule Marshall, and of course Jean Rhys (“Masochists”) can be heard echoing through the lines. Walcott provides a striking epigraph in the poem entitled “Conjunctio” (“peel your own image from the mirror”, from Walcott’s “Love After Love”,84) which deals with the themes of transformation and renewal.
There is also a beautiful poem (“Hintergedanken”) dedicated to and inspired by Paule Marshall, the American writer of Barbadian origin whose first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), drew attention to the Caribbean community in Brooklyn when it was first published. The poem was inspired by Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, and deals with some of the themes present in Marshall’s novel.
Celia A. Sorhaindo’s second collection thus extends some of the themes and concerns featured in her first collection while introducing some new ones ( like norms, normality, mental health issues among others). This makes for an engaging and thought-provoking collection which will no doubt find its place in the canon of Caribbean poetry in English.