Poetry
I Am Becoming My Mother
Lorna Goodison · 1986
Synopsis
Poems about the women of Jamaica, their courage, their humour and their patience in the face of men and history. In the title poem, the daughter feels her mother returning in her, a yellow and brown woman whose fingers smell of onion, who watered her rare flowers with tea. “For My Mother” tells of the girl from a good family who studied to become a schoolteacher, married a man who had only words with which to seduce her, left Harvey River for Kingston, raised nine children and sewed tirelessly for them; other pieces salute Rosa Parks and Jean Rhys.
Context
The collection appeared in London in 1986 from New Beacon Books, a house founded twenty years earlier by John La Rose and Sarah White, in some fifty pages. It was its author's second book of poems, after a first collection published in 1980. She returned to the story of her mother, who came from the village of Harvey River, in a memoir published in 2007 and honoured in Canada the following year.
Who it is for
In English, with passages in Jamaican Creole. The poems are short and carried by image rather than narrative.
Prizes and reception
Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas region in 1986; the title poem was displayed on the London Underground in 2020.
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