An Introduction to Shara McCallum's Madwoman

    Madwoman by Shara McCallum

     Alice James Books, 2017

    ISBN: 978-1-938584-28-2

Shara McCallum

Let me confess: I had never heard of Shara McCallum. At AWP Conference 2017, mid Friday morning, I listened, rapt, in a session called, �Written on a Woman�s Body: A cross-genre reading of bold writings about women and their bodies.� The presenters were prepared and impressive. The last presenter on the panel was Shara McCallum. A tough spot to be in, last. She opened, not with her own work, as the other four presenters had, but by reading Lucille Clifton�s �leda 1,� �leda 2,� and �leda 3.� McCallum�s commanding voice pulled off this reading and, in the process, put her own work in a vulnerable position. Then the strength of her own words followed�outstanding. She read from her newest publication, Madwoman, the following poems: �Madwoman a Rasta Medusa,� �Oh Abuse,� �Insomnia,� �Grief,� �To Red,� and �The Parable of Shit and Flowers,� in that order. Wow. The book was available at the Alice James booth in the book fair; I read it as I flew home from D.C. And this served as my introduction to Shara McCallum.  �Melva Sue Priddy

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is the author of four previously published poetry books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

 Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and other awards. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian.

McCallum�s dramatic reading drew me in. But the strength of her own words are admirable, at times lapsing into her Jamaican patois. As if this weren�t magical enough, her poems slip in and out of time, yet remain timeless. She includes the mystical and commonplace. She writes of all life�s maddening contradictions matter-of-factly, without explanations, reflecting real life. Madwoman does not step neatly from one age or stage to the next; her contradictions and paradoxes are often stirred in with rewritten myths, life challenges demanding one�s need to adapt and push through living, doing what has to be done, especially for a woman of color.  

One can, of course, make a search of all the wonderful reviews and interviews available on the internet (Consider reviews listed at the bottom of http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/madwoman .) and so I intend only to introduce McCallum to readers unfamiliar with her work.  

The persona, Madwoman, marginalized, sane, insane, and, more likely, multiple beings at once, reoccurs, scattered throughout the book, and remains an engaging thread that confounds with her many anomalies. At one point, she is �the madwoman now being all women� (27). She is addressed by various voices from multiple intersections: �Madwoman as Salome�(8), �Madwoman in Middle Age� (24), �Why Madwomen Shouldn�t Read the News� (41), �Lot�s Wife to Madwoman� (51). 

One theme that binds this book concerns the various stages of womanhood. In response to a question about those stages and whether madness was an inevitable trait, McCallum states: 

I suspect some forms of �madness� are an inevitable byproduct of aging. As we go along in life, if we are fortunate to live long enough, we will all accumulate losses�of people we love to death or to the changing nature of relationships over time, or of parts of ourselves as we are forced to confront the fact that versions of who we thought we might be or a life we imagined we would live will simply not [be] coming into being. The poems in the collection address various feelings of �madness� roiling below the surface�among others, rage and sadness and dislocation of the self but also defiance, a wanting to say or actually saying �fuck you� to societal norms and expectations. The vantage points through which I look closely at or dwell in these poems in anger, despair, fear, moments of coming unhinged, etc. are those of womanhood and girlhood and the stages in-between, as you note. But I am sure the gamut of emotions the Madwoman confronts exists in men and women alike, in anyone who has eyes to see and does not close them. (�Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum�, interview by Alice James Books)

A recurring motif is memory; what gets remembered, by whom, and why. In fact, McCallum�s prologue poem, �Little Soul� after Hadrian, opens the possibilities of memory�s role in, or lack of, influence. 

Little soul�kind, wandering�
body�s host and guest,

look how you�ve lowered yourself,
moving in a word of ice,

washed of color.  My girl, 
what compelled you once

is no more. 

Such a small, unassuming poem, and yet there it is: How are our lives shaped by memory, �what compelled you once�? Which begs of Madwoman, what role has memory played in your development? These questions will not be answered in this book. No neat little strings. McCallum doesn�t try to tell us what the meaning of her life is, what the meaning of our lives are, woman or man, madwoman or sane. And she reinforces this in the book�s second poem,�Memory� (quoted in full): 

I bruise the way the most secreted,most tender part of a thigh exposedpurples then blues.  No spit-shine shoes,I�m dirt you can�t wash from your feet.Wherever you go, know I�m the windaccosting the trees, the howling nightof your sea.  Try to leave me, I�ll pin you between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,even as you erase your trackswith the tail ends of your skirt.  You thinkI�m gristle, begging to be chewed?No, my love: I�m bone.  Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps.  That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin. (5)

Nothing sentimental here, no, rather bruises, dirt, howling, bone and ruin that linger. At best, the truth will confront: �Friends,/do you remember when we were young?/Life plump with promise and dreams?/Me neither� (41). Memories can �become unbearable� (12). But answer our life�s questions?  One voice asks midway through �Madwoman Apocrypha,� �Shouldn�t the death of ten thousand matter/more to you than that of just one person?� and another answers, �Yes. But I�m afraid grief isn�t math� (75). �Insomnia� speaks: �Dear one, why do you assume/there are lessons?� (64).

Yet even in the grittiness of life, McCallum gives us some beauty and innocence, but not much. �How else chart/a course than the way a child//plucks flowers from a field�/the eye compelling the hand to reach� (11). Even �Death� waxes poetic, if absolute: ��for I am in you/as the river is inside the stone�(56). 

In McCallum�s last poem, and the longest covering nine pages, �Madwoman Apocrypha,� several voices are speaking at once. Interlaced are those who will question and those who will tell Madwoman something, each with his/her own agenda. �Apocrypha� is a biblical term referring to texts of largely unknown authorship. When asked how this word defines the poem, McCallum responds: 

It speaks to it very well. But there�s another part of the definition of the word that is important to me to add to the mix. Apocryphal texts are those omitted from the �canon� and are therefore not accepted as doctrine. Aspersions are often cast upon apocryphal narratives�due to their supposed lack of authenticity or truthfulness or sufficient evidence to back them up�in order to qualify and rationalize their exclusion. (�Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum�, interview by Alice James Books)

An excerpt from this poem is difficult to layout, the page is broader than the regular page, but let me try, in order to show these voices intertwining.   

          Q: Why do you make the past a fiction?
          A: Everything is a wager.

                                                                                              Duppy know who to frighten. 
                                                               I heard this as admonishment 
                                                                           when a child.  But now
I think she is, I will be,
                                                                                        we have always been
                                                                                                             the duppy we fear.

          Q: What do you mean �a wager�?
          A: I needed to enact a search, but something happened
          I didn�t mean to have happen. I�ve become
          a sifter and a counter of grains.  


                                                                                     When as a child I couldn't sleep,
                                                                                                  stroking my arm,
                                                            she would sit with me, repeating,  �

                                                            nursery rhymes, song, nothing making sense
                                                            �

  but her voice and the dark.

          A: I don�t know where she ends and I begin. (77)

This last answer, above, has no question before it. The poem attempts to imitate the many voices each of us may have to confront within ourselves, even when there are no easy reassurances. 

Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world. Find her work and read. And so I give McCallum the last word.

Q: Why do you keep referring to this woman

in third person? She is you after all, isn�t she

A: I�ve come to believe all stories

are self referential. Or else none of them are. 

When comes the night of your unmaking? (78)

Melva Sue Priddy lives near Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys gardening, sewing, and grandmaw-ing. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has published work recently with Still: the Journal, Friends Journal, Poet Lore, and LexPoMo.. 

Pricking by Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello 
Pricking 

Tiger Bark Press
http://www.tigerbarkpress.com/


By the numbers 

ISBN: 978-0-997-63051-0 
Publication: 2016 
Total pages: 74
Number of poems: 69

__________

Pricking is Jessica Cuello's first full-length manuscript. Her second collection, Hunt, was the winner of The 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works and will appear in March 2017. She is also the author of the chapbooks My Father�s Bargain (Finishing Line Press 2015), By Fire (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Curie (Kattywompus Press 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the Saltonstall Foundation.

I interviewed Jessica on my personal blog last year about her chapbook My Father's Bargain. You can read that interview here.

�Nancy Chen Long

__________

Jessica Cuello's first book Pricking is titled after the act of pricking, a method of witch-hunting in the Middle Ages. Suspects, usually women, were forced to strip naked, while witch-hunters, usually men, pricked the marks on their body�birthmarks, moles, pimples. If the hunter found a spot that didn't bleed, the suspect was declared a witch. Using special needles, these often-times paid hunters would prick and prick until they found a spot that didn�t bleed and would identify that mark as the devil�s mark. The title of the book is indicative of what I sense to be the primary impulse of the book: Woman�s struggle for autonomy over her body, the connection between bodily integrity and empowerment.

The book as a whole is comprised of compressed and spare persona poems that place us smack in the Middle Ages. We find ourselves caught up in the lives of three French women thought to be heretical: Esclarmonde de Foix, Joan of Arc, and a midwife. Through the use of imagination and historical fact, Cuello fleshes out a captivating narrative that brings each woman to life.

There are three sections to the book, one for each woman. The first is in the voice of Esclarmonde de Foix, a prominent leader in Cathar Church in the thirteenth century who was accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. The origins of the Inquisition are in Rome�s effort to quash the heretical Cathers, a religious group in the south of France whose practices were believed to contain elements of witchcraft. Esclarmonde had six children and is thought to have turned to Catharism after the death of her husband.

This first section opens with three poems that set the stage for Esclarmonde's rise as a leader of the Cathars. The first poem "The Births: 1186" is about Esclarmonde giving birth to her children and introduces birth as one of the themes of the book. This first poem also signals Esclarmonde's turn towards religion after her sixth child: "After my sixth I locked the door. / ... / The natural world is hard and dirt. / I want to scrape it off my skin." The second and third poems center around her mystical conversion experiences. In "Conversion: May 1204," Esclarmonde begins to hear voices, a whisper that has "no decision it," faint voices that she discovers can't leave, because "they were in the body." While there was indecision in the first conversion poem, the second conversion poem, "Conversion: June 1204," is resolute: "God reversed me. See my legs / jaunt up the hill. / The hot wind is His mouth / around me."

In the remainder of this first section, Cuello's poems propel us forward with Esclarmonde through a Cathar-Catholic debate, the atrocities of the Cathar Wars (aka the Albigensian Crusade), and her life as a fugitive, a time during which she was rarely seen. Throughout this first section, the tone remains even and matter-of-fact in the face of violence, for example "The Foot of Monts�gur," which depicts the remaining remnant of the Cathars corralled and then burned alive, "All night, sun sets on the town. / Easily they fit us in the circle. / We are the last of us." This section closes with a funeral lament voiced by Esclarmonde for her brother Raymond Roger, a non-Cathar who fought to oppose the crusades:

Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix

While I was finding room
to hide refugees and heal the sick
you were present.
We never lacked
for things to do and moved
in the self-importance of our birth.
Once, pinning up my reddish hair
I paused and thought of your boyish head.
We were two foxes
from the last litter of our kind.
Our tongues were South.
When you were before the church
half-dressed and shackled,
I couldn�t look.
The world did not seem
long enough in history.
No, it was done.
Our land. Our tongue.
At the end you said your only wish was
that you�d killed more of them.

The second section of Pricking is set in 15th-century France. Most the poems are in the voice of Joan of Arc, another woman who heard voices and had visions. It's a shorter section comprised of ten poems. Around the time that Joan of Arc lived, there were prophecies that France would be saved by a virgin from Lorraine. The first poem, "Jeanne D�Arc Thinks of Her Virginity" hints at the importance of virginity to her ("a virgin / can prophesy for God"), possibly in light of the prophecies. The poem also suggests that once she becomes a mother, she would (or could) no longer be an instrument of God ("but once / a mother, / nothing else.")

I read the first poem of this section to be at a time when Joan of Arc is still with her mother and father. Earlier in Joan's life, her father had a dream that Joan would go off to war. It was a dream that made him frightened for her. This first poem seems to take place soon after Joan hears her mother say that her father told her brothers he would want Joan drowned if she were to leave for war ("I pretend not to know / that he told my brothers // to drown me.") With respect to timing, the remaining poems in this second section seem to take place during the last two years of her life, that is, the year she spent in prison after her capture in 1430 and the subsequent year when she was on trial for heresy. For example, the second poem "70 Feet Down" is likely about one of her attempted escapes from a tower at Beaurevoir Castle where she was first imprisoned. ("Can you be dropped from the lips of the Lord? / I leapt. The ledge / less certain than the bracing cold.")

The poem "In My Cell" appears to be set during a time when the interrogations for Joan of Arc's trial of witchcraft and heresy were moved to her prison cell. In this poem, we see the return to the of idea of mother in which Joan of Arc is mother to herself:

.... shackled to the wall at night
I dream in silence of Lorraine.

The fields are wide. I hold
my left hand in

my right and kiss
my fingers like a mother.

This reference to being a mother bridges back to the opening poem of this section and suggests that Joan is realizing the end of her prophesy, of her usefulness to God. The idea of mother continues in this section's final poem "Isabelle D�Arc Thinks of Jeanne," which is in the voice of Joan of Arc's mother. Coming as it does after a poem titled "Executioner," we know that Joan of Arc is now dead. It strengthens the poignancy of the poem, a mother bearing the grief of a lost child, as we listen to Isabelle talk to her daughter: "I hear your humming while I work / as if you left it in the timbers of our home." The idea of the child being heard and held within the timbers (walls) of a home presages a metaphor of womb-as-a-room, a metaphor that is introduced in the next section.

The third and final section of the book is set in 1580 during the Reformation and associated witch trials. The poems are told in the voice of a midwife. Unlike the second section, which begins with the speaker not wanting to be a mother, this section opens up stressing the importance of motherhood and birth. In the opening poem, "Midwife," the speaker, who is assisting in a birth, uses room as a metaphor for the womb: "All of us began in a room." Speaking of the woman giving birth, the midwife asks "What room is she?" and answers her own question, an answer which highlights the importance of bearing children during this time period: "Walls that go / when they hold no one."

Even though the first handful of poems in this section are about birth and midwifery, the reader will find herself immersed in death. In this arc of the narrative, the speaker recalls one of her own children, a son who died after nine days ("Nine days. The court / remembers. Even my goat / has babies longer", from the poem "Baby Boy.") In addition, one, possible two of the babies whose birth she attends die ("Sick Infant," "Baptism.") In addition, the speaker becomes a widow ("Widowed Young.")

The story turns once the speaker is widowed: She stands accused of witchcraft, likely due to the death of the babies. At the time of the Reformation, some people drew a connection between midwifery and witchcraft. Midwives were not infrequently prosecuted in church courts for providing charms either to assist the mother in childbirth/ pregnancy or to encourage conception. In the poem "Evidence Before the Court" (see the third poem in the link), the midwife denies that she crafted an aigullette "to take a man away." An aigullette is, among other things, a knotted loop of thread used by midwives and/or witches to cast a spell, either for bareness in the case of women, or impotence in the case of men. Through the skillful use of anaphora ("I never / never" repeated twice), the reader is left wondering if perhaps the speaker has indeed used the aiguillette. In the poem, the allusion to Eve, Original Sin, and the biblical garden ("an apple in my / bucket smelling / of the devil") foregrounds the belief at the time of the inherent evilness of women and the blame of women by the Judeo-Christian church for all ills that beset humanity.

After the accusation of witchcraft, the midwife is subjected to a number of tests: "Lack of Tears (see the fourth poem at the link)," "Pricking Test," "Water Test," and "Fire Test." The tests were nothing less than legalized abuse, sexual violence, and murder. Unfortunately, the midwife meets the fate of many who stood likewise accused�she is found guilty of being a witch ("They found the marks," from the poem "Limbo.") The midwife speaks from beyond the grave in this final poem in an understated tone, with what I read as relief: "How familiar: I won�t belong / to the face that made me. / I won�t belong by living." One leaves this last section feeling the full potency of being accused of, and/or prosecuted for, witchcraft, how potent it was as a tool of intimidation, how effective�almost foolproof�it surely must have been in controlling women and their bodies.

Pricking is a successful first book. Its themes carry the reader through each woman's life and time in history, beginning and ending with birth, mother, and midwifery. The themes of body and agency integrate the poems to form a satisfying whole, from the first section, in which Esclarmonde, in "Material," tells us:

My God had no argument,
he panted through my body
until the body was inward
like the caves: cool, silent.
Until it was as the cliffs...

...until the final poem, "Limbo," in which the midwife "waits with the unsaved babies," her soul in limbo, body-less like the others there, until they are reunited with their bodies at the Resurrection. Cuello's consistent use of an understated tone and her finely-chiseled, spare language serve the poems well by standing in contrast to the violence witnessed in the poems. Cuello's poems bring history to life.

__________

Apprentice
- by Jessica Cuello

Soon she would have learned
to strip the membrane
near the womb.
One finger to set
the labor on.

Then she would have learned
to turn the baby
in the mother�s water.
A sailing planet in her hands.

"Apprentice" and "Planh For My Brother, Raymond Roger, Count of Foix" � Jessica Cuello Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016)

---

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light Into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013.) You�ll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, The Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Superstition Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. nancychenlong.com