Lorna Goodison, first female poet laureate of Jamaica, has a way with anecdote that is wise, grounded and funny – a skill in plentiful evidence in her collection of essays and adventures, Redemption Ground. She describes the intense pleasure of a visit to a tea shop in London with a friend in 1972 to eat Bath buns, fruity cakes baked with a lump of sugar inside and sprinkled with sugar on top, and swiftly undercuts it with the observation that ‘countless Africans were stolen, enslaved, brutalized and sacrificed’ to produce the sugar so essential to Bath buns.
I discovered there were many commonalities in our cultural backgrounds as colonial peoples – Bath buns were not one of them – such as a uselessly excessive knowledge of British history or being made to memorize poems about flowers we had never seen, like the daffodils in Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. But Goodison goes beyond anger and sloganizing, beyond ‘daffodil-bashing’ as she puts it. She sets herself the task of understanding Wordsworth and coming to terms with that legacy. After all, she says, ‘he did not personally command the colonial authorities to force-feed us his poems’.
