Following is an excerpt from a presentation by artist Leroy Clarke at the opening of his exhibition
“Voice Of A Smouldering Coal” at the Y Gallery in late July. The title of the exhibition was derived from his childhood observations as he fanned the coalpot for his mother’s ironing. Readers familiar with Clarke’s writings would recognize the artist’s use of the word “Eye” for the first person singular.
By Leroy Clarke
As a little boy, one of my duties was to fan the coal pot when my mother was doing her ironing. Until Eye was old enough, she would first settle the pot, made of wrought iron, on a rough, stone-built stand just outside our kitchen. She would put the coal in the pot, but with extra care, she arranged slivers of pitch pine wood, both on top of the coal in the centre and in the furnace compartment below the grid.
The time she would put aside for ironing her laundry was accompanied by as strict a discipline as with the many, many chores of women who had families, and whose supreme calling was the fashioning of the home from the bare house which the man in it built, provided for, and protected.
Convocation
I have so much to do: I done wash and starch a big bundle of things, ready to iron on Thursday! I have so much on my mind, I have no time to sit down and rest –only going and going and going like a train with no stop in sight till I dead and gone! A woman’s work isn’t done, even until she dead and gone!
The days were too short; the months too long, a woman’s work is never done! It was with ease that Eye followed her every step, meritoriously held to an altar raised in her defiant singing of hymns.
All mothers in Gonzales used to sing. They sang as if they were raising an alarm. Their jubilance swelled the trees as their raw versions reached for God’s ear. And, instinctively, the fowls and dogs in the yards would go up in an uproar of cackling and barking. Even Kanaka’s donkey with its oversize tote’ dragging on the ground responded with braying hallelujahs!
If all the children felt like me, they would cower behind their own eyes in the way that embarrassment touched the innocent who selfishly cherished any gesture of their parents in humility that was private.
She would roll a piece of brown paper into a wad, light it and place it under those pine sticks. Sometimes when the wood was cold, she poured a little pitch oil on it to quicken its flammability. When it caught, she would blow and blow, as if she were speaking a strange language to a mutually strange ear, until the little pile of sticks held their own spark through stuttering specs of light, soon to be razed enough to cause the coal to crackle. One actually sensed uneasiness as the coal gathered itself into its ripe element –fire!
Much later in the lengthening of his life, then given to poetics, he dug up the image of that fussing, crackling coal from his memory and saw it –the body of a man, like melting tar, his flesh tearing away from embers of bone– tattered clothes hung out to dry against a soot darkened sky filled with the laughter of knives sharpening their beaks on the bitter rind of a tired Eye, from which a soul was launched from hell, renewed, heaven bound!
Suddenly, there was a burst of smoke, clouds filled the air, irritated my eyes and my nostrils to tears. Eye coughed back at the game into which Eye was now drawn, teased by the mystery of that awakening and, she saw it, the solar spirit that rises from clouds of smoke! Mother would ward me off from him.
The smoke died gradually as the fire lifted its flaming arms to threaten the eave of the house. Its sparks taking all liberties, reached the low-lying branches of our magnificent avocado tree whose sky was a nest of suns, and whose arms were strong, even to the weight of the heat tossed upwards!
A child’s heart, as permeable as a wish, is quickened by such experiences. Some thing about which he knows nothing takes root deep down in his subconscious. He could taste it though, as his tongue watered for that cindery psalm of memory, asleep in his blood.
Above it all, a ritual that had its genesis in the far-reaching practice of traditions was now passed on to him in a code of embers: you will hear me among the immortals –the seed parting its lips for a first kiss; water tiptoes in stone; the solemnities of arcades of light in trees; the inebriated pulse of warm embrace of birdsong; the ripening bursts of breasts on mornings polished by riddles of centuries in awakened noumena and perpetual vertigoes falling down themselves– ripe vowels, lighter than air– caught nascent in a dewdrop, weighed at a leaf’s end!
Something physical was emerging as a realizable event! Often missed by our engagement with it was, in no doubt, a throng, no, a fusion of potencies that was entering our sensual field –a primary setting of signifying elements borne to its identical source– called Home; at the end of the day, visual utterance of rhythms; contours of all fragrances lead us there!
The racket of flames settled down to a low burn, having chewed and swallowed the last superfluous wisp of smoke. And it was precisely then that she placed the irons, which had been polished smooth with lard earlier, on the platform of burning coals.
Daring the terrible heat, my little boy, was easily entranced, woven by the yet forbidden beauty of the burning coal in the furnace that, strange enough, did not conjure in him, hell, but rather, the interior altar of pure beginnings – where mirages were being unveiled by the silent screams of ashes, revealing the quietude of word, as it is engendered by futures that can make our world more contemplative.
Surely, he saw that, a solipsism, much later, as with the unfolding of the Coal Pot experience becoming a symbol of the open, providing challenge for imagination’s delve, even beyond the nature of things, things more ethereal. There he was in adolescence, treading backwards, in a posteriori, lured by the warm, misty tenets of dream.
She noticed everything. Intermittently, as if instinctively gauging the height of the flame, she called me to attention when Eye grew unaware of my drift, too close to it, and, Eye will promptly take my cardboard fan to vigorously re-energizing the fire.
With their dazzling boisterous character, the flames would howl again and Eye am always wafted into an elation of sentences made vapour, made ghosts bedecked in an elegy of sparks, an aurora of broken bodies of fire, ashes sucked-in, in an act of disappearance, heavenwards!
My Mother would say: It is okay now; Mommy’s boy is getting sleepy! Put down the fan. The fire raging too much, let it boil down a bit.
Fire is life itself. It starts off cool like a child in its Mother’s womb. Then, when it is time to come out and go on its own, there is pain. And, there is screaming and more screaming until it becomes full grown, standing tall in its rage.
And, there comes a time as if it knew that all that raging was for a season. It will soon reconcile with its fate. It smoulders, settling its accounts. That was the moment that held him sternly and he felt that fire deep within him as it leapt sheered to perception, widening the berth of his imagination to its dreamed zenith.
When an iron was ready, she knew this by bringing it close to her left or right cheek, then wiping it, with a towel for that purpose. She brought it down on shirt or pants, on blouse or sheet or dress with her apt steadiness, pressing out every ruffle, wrinkle or fold of the damp, moistened, starched fabric bringing them to a stiffened, smooth gift of pluperfect laundry!
Witnessed only but by the invisible ones, a gifted child was already being transformed by a work, cautioned carefully to a moment of pride in which innocence blossomed delightful sensations. As long as he is a child, he is enraptured by a faith that has not gone out, wholesale to adult fancy.
Those ironing sessions were long lasting, sometimes as many as three to four hours! Her method was flawlessly consistent –all seemed to be in the complete way that things in nature take –patient, punctual, as sure as an unfolding. She kept him close to her, all the while telling stories to him and to his brothers. Two sisters came later. In the end, we were nine in all, with me as the eldest. Big brother!
Eye was born in Gonzales, a coal pot shaped valley with an oracular air, postured like a heart, snuggled in a dip of querulous hills –Laventille to the south east; St. Barbs opening to Morvant to the north east and Belmont hills ridged by our kite-flying Boucoo Hill to the north.
Looking westward to the port, one felt a squint of advantage at being perched on chosen ground. The heart changes its spectacles with every leap flowering along the sheerness of the gaze to the sea’s chimeras to the open whose architecture is solvent and tastes of salt and its murmurs make visible –silence– the pomp of sculptured winds that touched us with the fleshed soul of sound.
To walk, to run, and to dream from here is to unfix the tether of twittering grammars’ conscriptions to trimmed hedges, to jump the dissonant line of corrugated roofs and fences; to unsheathe the common eye of its clawing habit, is to rend my coward of its mob, its scurrilous mimic; is to walk, to run, and to dream with anthropological quest, beyond our consternation with nature’s rivalry to our spirit that innately yearns to recreate itself.
But wait, our boys knew it all along: they brought Pan into the world by beating themselves, by beating the path, re-charting the ruin; piecing fragmented things together in the foundry of their memory, turning the blotched, rusty and misshapen, back to their goodly round. They were “Beating their voice into being!” They understood the word, the act, and the actor consummate as one –the identical desiring to be!
Gonzales, East Dry River, Behind the Bridge, where it all started –Pan! His beginning was there. Then, he knew nothing of the First World War and probably less of the Second; although in his early years just past his birth-year 1938, in November, he could already sense the world was coming to an end, when an air of uncertainty occupied his parents.
Dada, a prophet, grand in the line of Jeremiah or Ezekiel, my Grandpa from St. Vincent, a towering embodying of a religious man who sculpt his prayers into garrisons that kept doomsday away from our yard!
Eye yearned after his stories and the cosmic assurance of his dancing that energized worlds as he related births – those of the sun, the moon and the earth; he could have been there when God gathered mud and, with his saliva, fashioned the first man and blew air into him. But, he said, as if God had made an error, He took out one of my ribs and with it, made the first woman!
With that broad spacey grin and smile of a mythmaker, he said “I, the Sun, have been looking for my rib ever since; woman in the turn of her moon, gave birth to wars!”
In the “earlies” soon after being weaned from her breasts, Eye could be found tidied to her polished style of teaching me to read and write. The way she fitted my hands in hers –her gloved coaxing soon bore lines that stroked and curved, dashed and squared at the tuning fork of her voice, giving each letter of the alphabet its hallowed presence between tongue and teeth and lips in its buoyant leap to the waiting ear!
Eye saw those images repeated in everything around me. Eye was caught in the spell of the energy they exuded.
Before Eye met Joan in third standard, Eye was writing and drawing. Eye drew her a heart on a piece of coloured paper and added my name. She frowned in that girlish delight that girls alone have the right to, and threw it to the wind.
Stunned as if hit by a spark to the eye, Eye inhaled her rejection, felt my chest aglow, imagined my hero-self growing to make the climb to her heart, affluent of passion and as real as any utterance of my Word can be.
My Word –my gift with many arms– Eye write; Eye paint; Eye sing! Eye confess to be possessed by a malady: Eye think colour to taste and to melodies of sound Eye make visible to touch, rendering emotions their grace –Obeah– the power to herald imagination’s truth, by declaring universal expression its liberty, grounded in the spirit of an inalterable dignity!
There it began, in Escallier E.C. School, my primary education meant no more to me than a playground, the width of a planet with endless elations reliably measured to a boy’s jubilant overture that seemed to have had a memory of nothing but an artistic path that wound its way merrily through dreamlike states of faith, assured of a personal grand destiny fashioned by the work of my ‘blessed’ hands!
For a long time, Gonzales was his only home, his world. A little red covered book called Homes Far Away broke that spell when he was just nine. First, it was the very neat drawings, illustrating strange people and strange habitats that caught his interest, then came, the startling literature that breached his innocence, nestled there in the Hills.
Emerging suddenly was his wonder: Creation of the Universe, the vastness of space with whole worlds within unfathomable skies spotted with stars and planets, dreamed from his Earth –the recitation of texts from that beautifully embossed Bible in Dada’s hands!
Suddenly, his mind was sensationalized by an increase of ecologies; to survey them, that child had wings; he flew hither, thither and ‘yond! Ah, the splendour of his infant flights in the weightlessness of his buoyant beginnings, how they come and go –their kaleidoscopic ripening!
But, there are stains they leave that are irreducible glimpses that waft the soul’s continent, bringing forth the odes of first-kiss at Dawn or Dusk; espousal and, ardent to the flame’s pleasure in longing. Eye came to know, always, that all conscience is, and has a passion for its fulfillment in beauty.
The aforesaid labyrinth is meant to be that of energy, “vintage bared, for new nuptials” (S.J.P) …it prefigures, while, and at the same time is constant companion to any theme ventured in my Art or Poetry, which is essentially autobiographical.
At seventy, one feels a tightening prudence on all endeavours, as if holding back the bladder. However, one cannot be embarrassed at this point of sheer involuntariness, let go to fancy. One dread remains: the life long challenge to change things leads to futility unless one accepts the terror of choice between what one can and one cannot…yes!
