Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

Gourd

gourd

hollowed dried

calabash humble took-took

how simple you look. But what

lies beneath that crusty exterior?

Such stories they tell! They say O packy,

in your youth (before history), as cosmic

container, you ordered divination, ritual

sounds, incantations, you were tomb, you were

womb, you were heavenly home, the birthplace of

life here on earth. Yet broken (they say) you

caused the first Flood. Indiscretion could release

from inside you again the scorpion of darkness that

once covered the world. The cosmic snake (it is said)

strains to hold you together for what chaos would ensue

if heaven and earth parted! They say there are those

who've been taught certain secrets: how to harness the

power of your magical enclosure by the ordering of sound

– a gift from orehu the spirit of water who brought the

first calabash and the stones for the ritual, who taught

how to fashion the heavenly rattle, the sacred Mbaraká,

that can summon the spirits and resound cross the abyss

– like the houngan's asson or the shaman's maraka. Yet

hollowed dried calabash, humble took-took, we've walked

far from that water, from those mystical shores. If

all we can manage is to rattle our stones, our

beads or our bones in your dried-out container,

in shak-shak or maracca, will our voices

be heard? If we dance to your rhythm,

knock-knock on your skin, will we

hear from within, no matter

how faintly, your

wholeness

resound?

hollowed

dried

calabash

humble

took-took

how simple

you look

Annotations to the Poem

(prepared by Olive Senior)

1-5] The gourd here represents the ritual instrument that calls people together; hence, it is an invitation to the book of poems. The poem lists many of the myths and legends associated with the gourd throughout the Americas.
The gourd is the fruit of either the Calabash tree (Crescentia cujete), common in the Caribbean, or of a vine (Lagenaria siceraria) more common in Africa and elsewhere. The fruit of both the tree and the vine vary in size and shape, but may be used in similar ways as vessels. All gourds are prepared by hollowing out the inner flesh and seeds, leaving the skin. Once dried, the thick skin hardens, producing a sturdy vessel or container. A hollow gourd filled with seeds or small stones and fitted with a handle, sometimes decorated, becomes a percussive musical instrument used for both secular and religious purposes. Higüera or Jigüera, the name given to the calabash gourd in the Spanish Antilles, reflects the original Taino and Carib name of güira.

7] took-took: A medium-sized calabash gourd used to carry water. The gurgling chuckle of the water pouring out from the small opening gave rise to the name.

10] packy: Jamaican name for the calabash gourd; it is derived from the African (Twi) word apakyi.

23] Orehu: Female water spirit of Amerindian mythology.

27] houngan’s asson: In Haitian Kreyòl, the asson is the sacred gourd rattle of the Haitian Voudon priest or houngan.

27] shaman’s maraka: The sacred calabash rattle of the medicine man (shaman) of the Amerindians.

32] shak-shak: Musical instrument—small calabash rattle filled with seeds or stones.

32] maracca: Musical instrument associated with Latin American music and dance; also used in Trinidadian carnival music.

Commentary

Written by H.M. Simpson

With “Gourd,” Gardening in the Tropics begins on a dramatic note with a concrete poem that is visually arresting. Its shape not only mimics that of the fruit for which it is named, but also functions as a means of uncovering layers of meaning in this poem and the collection as a whole. For example, the gourd is described in lines 13-14 as both “womb” and “tomb,” and the poem’s shape also mimics that of a uterus and a burial mound. Thus, the gourd is symbolic of beginnings and endings as it is the source, simultaneously, of life and death, of creation and destruction.

“Gourd” functions as the opening or the gateway to the rest of the collection. Significantly, it is the only poem that falls outside the four movements (Travellers’ Tales, Nature Studies, Gardening in the Tropics, and Mystery) which frame the collection. It therefore works in much the same way as an epigraph does in that it alerts the reader to the main ideas addressed in the collection. Indeed, the “stories” hidden beneath the gourd’s “crusty exterior” (lines 9-10) are revealed in the other forty-nine poems. The gourd is also described as “the birthplace of/ life here on earth” (lines 14-15), which is a reference to the Taino creation story that identifies the gourd as the source of life¹. Just as the gourd in Taino mythology is seen as the vessel in which life on Earth began, so too this poem can be read as embodying the creative power of the imagination that gave rise to Gardening in the Tropics. That poetic imagination presents the world it recreates through verse as a tropical garden, which Olive Senior explains is “the New World . . .the Americas that was ‘discovered’ by Columbus in 1492 and exploited thereafter by Europe” (On Gardens and Gardening). It is in “Gourd” that the reader is introduced to the use of gardens and plants as the collection’s central metaphor for addressing issues of historical, political, and social significance for the cultures and peoples that comprise this world.

The gourd is the first, and sacred, fruit in this tropical garden. It is significant that the poem identifies the gourd as the fruit of the tree of life and that Taino myth, not the Genesis story, provides the authoritative narrative of how this garden came to be. As Senior points out, Gardening in the Tropics “does not start with the European Garden of Eden, but with the native American, which grew from the tree of life” (Aiyejina 37). Thus, the poet locates “Gourd’s” (and the collection’s) spiritual and epistemological centre in the cultural knowledge of the tropical garden’s first peoples and those with whom (Africans transported to the New World) they intermingled culturally and formed alliances. Gardening in the Tropics therefore departs from a long and problematic tradition of fiction and non-fiction writing in which Afro-Amerindian cultures have been marginalized and invalidated. But here Senior does not adopt the polemical stance often ascribed to postcolonial writers. There is, for instance, no evidence in “Gourd,” as June Turner-Piscitelli argues, that the poet shows “disdain towards the story of creation as related in the Christian Bible” (159). To use an idiom popular in postcolonial studies, Senior is not “writing back to a Centre.” Rather, she chooses to “foreground those people who have been relegated to the background” (Aiyejina 37) and to present the tropical garden from their perspective. It is their world, and the poet allows them to tell their own stories. It is not surprising, then, that poems such as "The Tree of Life," "Gardening on the Run," and the entire fourth movement, Mystery, reify Afro-Amerindian spiritualism and worldviews and offer these people’s myths, legends, and voices as viable vehicles for poetry.

“Gourd” reflects the duality inherent to Afro-Amerindian spiritualism and so the poem draws attention to both the creative and destructive forces contained in, and symbolized, by this sacred fruit. In Taino mythology, the same gourd that produced life poured out the flood waters that covered the Earth. The poem warns against the chaos that can result if the two sides of life represented by the gourd—for example, heaven and earth and light and dark—are not kept in balance. Such imbalance produces evil, which manifests in various forms including the social upheavals explored in "Brief Lives," the self-abnegation that reduces individuals and entire communities in "Hurricane Story, 1944" and "All Clear, 1928," the colonial violence of "Meditation on Yellow," and the political failures that cast people adrift in "Caribbean Basin Initiative." Knowing how to restore and maintain balance in the tropical garden is the overall message of “Gourd,” and the poem informs the reader how this knowledge was, and can once again be, acquired. The poetic persona talks of those “who’ve been taught certain secrets” (line 21) and traces the source of this knowledge back to Orehu who gave the first shaman, Arawanili, the gift of divination in the form of a gourd (or Mbaraká) filled with stones and taught him how to conquer the forces of darkness and save his people from the misfortunes visited upon them by the yauhahu² or evil spirits. Gourd rattles have long been used as ritual instruments in African, Amerindian, and Caribbean cultures to summon the spirits and call people together. As indicated in the poem, the sacred gourd rattle (called the asson) is also used by the houngan in divination rites in Vodou, which provides evidence that African and Ameridian peoples in the New World are linked through their spiritual beliefs and practices.

Those who have been given the gift of divination also have the responsibility, like Arawanili, to act as oracles and as conduits for healing for their societies. In Amerindian and African traditions, the poet figure also shares this responsibility. In Gardening in the Tropics, “Gourd” is Senior’s asson or Mbaraká, and the forty-nine poems that comprise the remainder of the collection are the stones/beads/bones rattling in this first gourd poem, awaiting interpretation. The onomatopoeic sounds of “took-took,” “shak-shak,” and “maracca” provide an auditory complement to the poem’s shape and so bring the gourd rattle to life on the page. The stones/beads/bones that reverberate in “Gourd” turn up as literal and symbolic objects throughout the rest of the collection and the reader is invited to collaborate with the poet in divining their meaning wherever they appear. In “Finding Your Stone,” for example, the poetic persona turns to digging up stones (rather than bones) in her garden. But these are no ordinary stones. Instead, they recall and become the zemi and “power stones” of Afro-Amerindian spiritualism³, thereby suggesting that the people who currently inhabit New World societies would do well to tap into their own cultural knowledge and traditions as a means of regaining their spiritual centre.

Such acts of reclaiming and recovery must be done seriously and with conviction if they are to be truly transformative, whether that transformation is to be spiritual, psychological, political, or social. The poetic persona in “Gourd” makes this clear by voicing skepticism about those in contemporary New World societies who only pay lip service to their cultural knowledge and traditions. The poetic persona acknowledges that “we” (the people of the New World) have “walked/ far from that water, from those mystical shores” (lines 28-29) where the gift of divination and healing was first passed on to humans, and expresses doubts that using cultural traditions and knowledge simply as window dressing will have the required effect. “We” need to do more than simply “rattle our stones, our/ beads or our bones” (lines 30-31) or “dance to [the gourd’s] rhythm” (line 33) if the sacred fruit is to yield up the transformative knowledge that is the precursor to psychic and cultural wholeness.

The poem’s overall tone, however, is hopeful rather than doubtful. At the end it reaffirms the power of the “humble” and “simple” gourd. The shape of the final ten lines which narrow into a stem-like projection suggests that the gourd and the world it contains can still be anchored in that original tree of life from which Yaya and Orehu plucked their cosmic containers. This reading is borne out by the poems in the final movement, Mystery, where the African gods of the New World are remembered, summoned, and also speak. By ending with the orishas, Gardening in the Tropics provides an answer to the questions posed in lines 29-38 of “Gourd”: the people’s voices will be heard, and they will hear the words of the gods if they learn how to honor the spirits and ancestors. Indeed, the arrangement of the poem’s title and opening word at the top of the poem foreshadows and echoes “Guédé,” the final poem in the collection that invokes the African god of the crossroads. Like the gourd which is tomb and womb, Guédé, Lord of the Dead, is the keeper of the cemetery and of life and death in Haitian Vodou. Crossroads are sacred place, the point at which the world of the dead and the ancestors connects with that of the living. The collection’s beginning is its end, and its end is its beginning. The past can revitalize the present, and the present can help illuminate the past. Hence, influenced by the spherical shape of the gourd, the narrative pattern throughout Gardening in the Tropics is cyclical rather than linear; its poems cycle through different historical moments, in the process layering the present with the past. The permeable borders between past and present, the living and the dead, allow the poet to juxtapose pre-Columbian narratives with those that reflect twentieth-century life and point to the links and reverberations across time and space. The “humble” and “simple” gourd, which existed “before history” (line 11) is the repository of the New World’s cultural memory and history.

Notes

¹ As Phillip Wilkinson recounts, Taino mythology explains the creation of the world in (slightly varied versions of) the following story: “[T]he son of the supreme god Yaya rebelled against his father, and Yaya killed him. The great god placed his son’s bones in a huge gourd that he hung up in his house. A few days later, Yaya looked in the gourd and found that the bones had turned into fish swimming in water. Yaya’s wife took some of the fish and cooked them, and the pair relished the meal. One day, the gourd broke open—some say it was done by visitors to Yaya’s house—and the water poured over the Earth, forming the ocean that surrounds the Caribbean islands.” (See page 306 of Wilkinson’s Myths and Legends: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings. New York: DK Publishing, 2009.)

² An early written record in English of the story of Orehu and Arawanilli is provided by William Henry Brett in his Indian Missions in Guiana (London: George Bell, 1851). Brett, who was in Guiana as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, tells of how he prevailed upon a native informant to tell him the story of Orehu, Arawanili, and the calabash. The English translation of the version told to him by the native informant is given on pages 249-250.

An extended version of the tale is provided on pages 105-107 of Odeen Ishmael’s Guyana Legends: Folktales of the Indigenous Amerindians (Xlibris Corporation, 2011).

³ Numerous scholarly sources on the Tainos and Vodou have pointed to the cross-fertilization between Taino and New World African spiritual systems. One very accessible guide for readers new to the subject is Shannon R. Turlington’s The complete idiot’s guide to voodoo (Alpha Books, 2001). On page 25, Turlington notes : “The Taino believed that the souls of their ancestors lived in rocks called thunderstones, which they called zemi, the Taino word for ‘soul.’ Practitioners of Vodou adopted both the stones and the word. In Vodou, zemi are stones and other objects that have great magical power.”

Works Cited

Aiyejina, Funso. “Olive Senior.” Self-Portraits: Interviews with Ten West Indian Writers
and Two Critics. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies Press,
2003. 23-39. Print.

Brett, William Henry. Indian Missions in Guiana. London: George Bell, 1851. Print.

Ishmael, Odeen. Guyana Legends: Folktales of the Indigenous Amerindians.Xlibris
Corporation, 2011. 105-107. Print.

On Gardens and Gardening. Prod. Hyacinth M. Simpson. Perf. Olive Senior. Toronto:
Ryerson University, 2012. Video.

Turlington, Shannon R. The complete idiot’s guide to voodoo. Alpha Books, 2001. Print.

Turner-Piscitelli, June. “The Gourd of Unity.” Mango Season: Caribbean Women’s
Writing. 13.2 (2001): 154-165. Print.

Wilkinson, Phillip. Myths and Legends: An Illustrated Guide to their Origins and
Meanings. New York: DK Publishing, 2009. 306. Print.