Woman Song (review)

Jean Goulbourne's collection of poems entitled Woman Song delivers what the title promises—several poignant vignettes of female experience and, more specifically, female pain and resilience. The verses in Goulbourne's "song" span the gamut of the Jamaican woman's experience—motherhood, loss, the quest for peace, companionship, and the fortitude to combat/survive the adversity that seems to be her destiny. Goulbourne's choice of images and the overall style of the poems complement the preoccupation with hurt, survival, and hope. Her oscillation between Jamaican and English, places Goulbourne among contemporary Caribbean women poets such as Lorna Goodison and Velma Pollard and marks the poems as distinctly Jamaican.

The woman's experience of motherhood is a dominant theme in this collection. Goulbourne explores the perils of single motherhood and its associated social, economic, and emotional challenges. "I too Am Mother," for example, focuses on the impact of the mother's economic handicap and on the children. The first stanza signals the poem's emphasis on poverty and hopelessness:

Four hungry eyes I shall tonight face After four days of walking I return in disgrace

(1-4)

But despite her shame at facing her children without a meal, the woman affirms her status as mother:

I too am mother My breasts are sucked dry My children are hungry My children die.

(10-13)

The phrase "breasts are sucked dry" is both literal and metaphorical. The mother has, in reality, given the children all she has—nature's milk as well as all her material resources—and she is left physically, emotionally, and economically spent.

"Rock My Baby" echoes the poverty of "I too Am Mother" but inscribes a greater sense of hope and the availability of some meager provision. The mother feeds her child "bush tea." "Bush tea," the breakfast beverage of the rural poor (usually made from a herb such as peppermint or fever grass and sweetened with sugar), indicates the mother's inability to provide adequately for her children. But despite her poverty, this mother maintains her role as disciplinarian/value shaper. The Jamaican creole entreaty "No thief mi pickney no thief" underscores the mother's commitment to inculcating positive values and alludes to women's roles in perpetuating the traditionally high moral standards of the Jamaican rural poor.

"Like a Bridge" encapsulates the pain of motherhood that several other poems address, as well as the relationship between the mother's socioeconomic hardships and the inequalities within the wider Jamaican society, illustrated in the contrast between one man's "big Benz" and the other's "subservient mule." Images of pain and death abound in this poem. "The woman, thin with hanging carcasses of breast / that bled milk for a dozen years" (emphases mine) accentuate the excruciating experience that motherhood is for the woman in this poem and those she represents.

Yet motherhood is only one of challenges that the women in Goulbourne's collection must encounter, and several poems articulate the woman's constant battle for day-to-day survival. "Big City" charts the struggle of the woman in an urban space:

Night after night I trudge the tar day after day I face the war.

(1-4)

The difficulty is highlighted in the poem's diction. Words such a "struggle," "hard," and "strive" are repeated throughout the poem and emphasize the woman's ongoing battle to survive in a harsh and unfriendly city. This woman has been forced by circumstances to find questionable means of survival:

pimps and Pimpernels man after man night after night never delivered

(17-20)

But this life of prostitution plunges the woman into deeper hopelessness. Her pain has made tears useless and absent: "Tears are no more / they dried with the soil" (39-40). The dryness of the soil implies severe hardship in an unyielding environment. "Big City" ends on a note of despondency:

Big city city of death I long for pity I long for breath

(47-50)

Goulbourne also explores unfulfilled lives and dreams deferred. "Shadow in a Room" narrates the experience...