Graham, Millicent

English

Iowa Research Online

University of Iowa 
International Writing Program Archive of Residents' Work 
9-4-2009 
Voicing Desire in Caribbean Literature 
Millicent Graham 
Panel: Literature of Desire 
Rights 
Copyright © 2009 Millicent Graham 
Recommended Citation 
Graham, Millicent, "Voicing Desire in Caribbean Literature" (2009). International Writing Program Archive 
of Residents' Work. 767. 
https://ir.uiowa.edu/iwp_archive/767 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online. For more information please contact: lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
Millicent Graham 
VOICING DESIRE IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE 
 
“The classic love story, the sonnet to the beloved, the tale of erotic desire, airport romance, on-line-sex at the fingertips, 
sexting.” 
 
This is my second encounter with the word ‘sexting’, and apart from the strange gleeful-guilt 
it conjures, I wondered who would give such a thing a name!  I found it reaching to think of its 
impact on literature or how it might change writing everyday things. 
Considered the great persuader of human action, desire is often famed in romanticism and 
eroticism. That hankering for someone, something, someway; I first found the voicing of my desire 
in Shakespeare, Sonnet 57: 
 
Being your slave what should I do but tend  
Upon the hours, and times of your desire?  
I have no precious time at all to spend;  
Nor services to do, till you require.  
Nor dare I chide the world without end hour,  
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,  
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,  
When you have bid your servant once adieu;  
 
It was easier to own this two toned rhetoric; faulting love for my feelings of wanting; the sarcastic 
allusions to the subject’s desires and rebutting one’s pandering to convey an urgency felt! I recall 
tracing these words with a deliberate finger, closing my eyes at each line-break to funnel myself into 
sweet vicarious pain, to hang from the final couplet like a wrung rag on a nail; there was ecstasy in its 
denial!    
I learned to write desire as a child does, learning letters from a grownups large script. 
Perhaps you also started in this way. With Roethke, “I remember the neck curls, limp and damp as 
tendrils; And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile”; or Lowell’s  dark swallows. We begin as 
witnesses to another’s world and through their words, pretend at desire.  But, as we adapt the images 
and triggers to our own, and dig towards its heart, we come, not to the catharsis of desires 
expulsion, but instead, to the place where we linger in its Potential. It is here, submerged in the 
rhetoric of the emotion, that we seek our native tongue to write the agony of our internal 
conversation.  
It is not enough to trace another’s language or symbols; the dignified restraint of 
Shakespeare’s polished desire, does not resonate with a Caribbean culture where desire is infectious 
moving quickly from the mind into the belly. One that is ripening in all seasons, where there is 
always the loud friction of the word on the genitalia.  Desire must be braved-through in the 
everyday, confronted within those nuances that lie under the skin. 
As a Caribbean poet, I write of a ‘brazen, hiss-teeth, hurry-up’ desire, it is guileless, accusing 
and bitter, accustomed to hurt and unfulfilment.  We allow it to lend itself to an eclectic language 
and form. Assonance, image and metaphor become instrumental in fostering a fastidious aesthetic 
that dissects emotions and pits words against each other, committing these Moreauian creations to 
page.  It is no wonder that in the work of many Caribbean poets; and certainly in my own work, 
there is the impulse to register the multiplicity of a words meaning. How else to transcribe desire, 
but, to rely on the potential of a word to be sensational, visible, audible and bendable all at once, 
uploading a mélange of textured experiences that a word pronounces, to find a meaning that befits 
wanting. 
In Tony McNeil’s The Catherine Letter 1, economy, improvisation and the visual form make a 
raw and fluid internal monologue: 
 
Strange     my writing to you 
 
Can I say a cliché 
 
Never thought I would see the day when you would cut me     glimpsed you in    should have said at     
should have said near    a bank one day; smiled; waved; and you cut me 
 
Catherine     name from the north 
 
Well    there’s a mystery to women of frost     the young men stride to the woods and snip them dark 
lilacs    a wren wheels in the distance     the sun shells east of the lake 
 
Couples kiss in the field across the wild cherries 
 
In the dream the woman is sitting under a cotton     a man kneels on the slope     the pair meet in the 
mist, stuttering prayers 
 
Have you seen lilies tilt in the wind 
 
Do banks stretch shadows on people so that when they see the familiar they turn away 
 
 
But body and aesthetics also take on representations that are spiritual and existential. Desire 
needs no moral right; it simply is and nature admits to it in its living, pining unkempt design.  In 
Voyages, Wayne Brown writes: 
 
no mater how the hawk’s head hang in the sunset, 
the dawn reiterate all our offerings, 
the same sea beats on the seawall 
 
The poem dies, 
the cry in the wake of the slaveship under waves 
dies and resurfaces 
in a hundred house-and-land simplicities 
 
in the gaze of that old man, quiet as a stone, 
the simile of a child from a shack near Boscobel, 
in one bronze girl’s awakening –  
 
As if a flower should open in a waste 
 
To write desire is to recognise its ubiquity. As the complexity of desire, though universally 
felt is so inaudibly and insufficiently explained, as poets we set about what Walcott calls ‘ Adam’s 
task of giving things there names,’ and in so doing we are continually drawing our thumb against the 
blade to test how well our meanings cut.   
This was the word inherited, but new ones emerge.  Technology ushers desire into another 
Eden, without language or form.  We surface in a cyber void as new-lings, where human 
vulnerabilities go unperceived and feelings are expressed with a truncated speak; our vowels 
annulled, our words and our emotions represented by emoticons or ascii hieroglyphics.  Again, the 
challenge is in naming desire, in making words and meaning native. 
 


Voicing Desire in Caribbean Literature

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1768&amp;context=iwp_archive

Voicing Desire in Caribbean Literature

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