Castaway

by Yvette Christiansë

In Castaway Yvette Christiansë presents an epic yet fragmented poetic story set off the coast of Africa on the island of St. Helena: Napoleon Bonaparte’s final place of exile, a port of call for the slave trade, and birthplace of the poet’s grandmother. Amid echoes of racialized identity and issues of displacement, the poems in Castaway speak with a multiplicity of voices—from Ferñao Lopez (the island’s first exile) and Napoleon to that of a contemporary black woman. Castaway is simultaneously a song of discovery, an anthem of conquest, and a tortured lamentation of exiles and slaves.
Instead of offering a linear narrative, Christiansë renders the poems as if they were emerging from the pages of imaginary books, documents now disrupted and scattered. An emperor’s point of view is juxtaposed with the perspectives of various explorers, sailors, and unknown slaves until finally they all open upon the book’s “castaway,” the authorial female voice that negotiates a way to write about love and desire after centuries of oppression and exploitation.
Daring and sophisticated, Castaway challenges and captivates the reader with not only its lyrical richness and conceptual depth but also its implicit and haunting reflections on diaspora and postcolonialism. It will be highly regarded by readers and writers of poetry and will appeal to those engaged with issues of race, gender, exile, multiculturalism, colonialism, and history.

Genres: Poetry, African Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 1999

Reviews

[Kelsey Heffernan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for class. I really liked the first half but it became to poetry-ey for me (yes I know it is literally a poetry book). It is cool though to read books for class that I would have NEVER EVER EVER heard of otherwise.

[Bren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christianse, born in South Africa, has family history in Saint Helena, and this incredibly beautiful collection of poems summons up the violent creole histories of the island by speaking in a variety of voices, from the exiled Napoleon to the exiled Dinizulu, nephew of the Zulu king Dingaan (he is actually spoken to by a woman he is haunting); some of the poems take obscure historical documents as their starting point, like the report of a "liberated" African woman who hung herself in 1846 (shades of David Dabydeen and Toni Morrison here), and some of them are spoken by imaginary figures such as "the girl who was a cabin boy" (who seems to me a revision of Moby Dick's lyrically raving black cabin boy, Pip). The inventively anachronistic titles of sets of poems ("from The Dutiful Granddaughter's Catechism of Warnings," "from The Lost Diaries of Fernao Lopez, The Island's First Exile," and "from The Book of Hate and Register of Poisons") give us the sense that these are only fragments of lost histories. While the poems about slavery are the anchor of the collection in some ways, the sea and the bleak island are full of many kinds of ghosts and loneliness, and longing for love in many queer forms is another thread that (only just) holds these poems on the verge of surreality together.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finding a copy of this in New York was, to me, like chancing upon someone else's hidden cache of gold. But like everything the product of someone else's hard work, I missed something in Christiansë. Unconfessed has been sitting on my shelf for ages and I'm really excited to get to it, but her poetry missed its mark in me. Perhaps I'm too tied to the lyric's illusions. What's undoubtedly true is the richness of this material, the sourcing of stories and the layers of subjects who form the compositional bedrock of these woven books of poetry. Strongest, for me, are the harnessed oxen of word repetition as the words sew themselves into textuality with the power of agricultural figures, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. Try "She Observes the Blue Bird"

Now, still, oh still, still day
poised and just poised in the stall
like a bird above the desert, holding
this – the red throat of a flower that
holds itself to a vine, so still, so still
you do not notice how still while
birds peel from tree to tree in search
of hemispheres under the same emerging
moon. The bluest day dips and pauses,
goes still, oh still as the eye of
the bluest bird on the stillest branch.

Trilling indeed. (Forgive me.)