A note on ‘Sailors’ with Adam Patterson

SAILOR MAS takes distinct form in the Caribbean, but really the sailor is a universal symbol. A sailor is someone who crosses water. Before he was a poet, Langston Hughes was a sailor who explored. 

We were both inspired by Hughes. We discussed sexuality’s mediation through a sea of oblique encounters - be it in books, on screens, through spyglasses. For me, making a film poem fit. I wanted vast complexity relegated to a small screen in a small corner, mirroring how queer sexuality in Trinidad and Tobago is often suppressed and gazed at furtively in discrete recesses. Hughes, who visited Trinidad and had ties to this country, is the perfect symbol of how queerness is dismissed and etherised by straight power.

Also, I wanted to suggest we should think of poetic form more widely. Just as poetry works through what is withheld, so does it gain by what is absorbed. All art is poetry, Heidegger said. And performance need not be a grand gesture. In fact, it’s the supposedly smaller everyday performance via laptop screens or in quiet corners that matter. As the opening line of my poem suggests, Hughes was a performer all his life.

Finally, it felt right on the night of the event last Sunday at Alice Yard to have proximity to Adam’s stationary maypole, a reference to the Barbados landship tradition. For me, this proximity came to embody the idea of dance through negation; of impulses that could be acted upon left dangling; of horizons yet to be explored.