Title: I Name Me Name
Author: Opal Palmer Adisa
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
Reviewer: Barbara Nelson
Jamaican-born, award-winning poet, educator and storyteller Opal Palmer Adisa's newest book, I Name Me Name, is divided into three sections. In Part 1 are some 90 pages of Poems; Part 2 is Prose and the final section the Postscript.
Some of the poems and essays represent pieces that have been previously published in other journals and anthologies. Dr Adisa, a full professor of creative writing and literature at California College of the Arts, uses prose, dramatic monologues, lyric poems, praise songs, blues and other methods in this compelling book.
In Foremother 1: Mary Prince (1788(?)-1833) she speaks through the voice of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave who was born in Bermuda, then sold to John Wood who took her to Antigua. The author says (in part):
me did born into bondage
at brackish pond
one foolish man
think him own me
as if me could belong to someone
when me little like tree stump
him sell me from out of me mammy's arms
me tell you another thing
eye-water don't know sadness
but I wouldn't mind him
him beat me him touch-touch
me up him spit pan me
nothing don't left for him do me
but him could never
make me believe him over me
and him know so him decided
fi mek me suffer
Another poem, Understanding my story, has Phyllis Wheatley saying:
i had another name
a name given to me
by my mother and father
a name that connected me
to my people
Phyllis Wheatley, born in Africa, was kidnapped as a child and sold to John and Susanna Wheatley when she was eight years old. She eventually became the first published African-American poet.
Looking back at the events of September 11, 2001 at the Twin Towers in New York, Opal writes in Last Thoughts: 9/11 voices
West Indian Woman
lawd god look how me
come America fi betta me life
fi get weh from the violence
to come meet death this Tuesday morning
what go happen to me four children
who gwane look afta dem
no place fi run
The Prose section describes a great deal of how the writer's life was shaped. It begins with 'Sitting Between my Mother's Legs while she plaited Opal's hair'. She observes "I have always loved and been grateful that I am a woman of African descent with strong hair that defies all attempts to dominate or tame it … "
personal, disturbing
Then there is the deeply personal and very disturbing 'Children must be seen and heard'. We must no longer silence children to abuse, Opal writes. On a personal level she says: "I name yet forgive all the men who touched my body and made me feel shame. I denounce and forgive them. I reproach all the men and women who touch children inappropriately and abuse them, causing children to feel shame, silencing them and leaving them always vulnerable."
The Prose section also includes the poignant 'A Birthday card from my Father' where she exposes and examines the fears, hopes and emotional bruises she experienced in her relationship with Orlando, her father, the first man she loved.
He actually remembered my birthday, she muses as a grown woman when the card arrives, and then has to admit to herself that all she really wants is for him to treat her as an adult and respect her reservations as much as he wants her to respect his.
painful memories
In this monologue she uncovers the painful memories as "the past overtakes" her … her parents separating when she was very young, her father scolding her and her sister at the dinner table, taking them very early Sunday mornings to swim at Gunboat Beach, her father washing her face and hands in a basin of water placed on a table next to the body of her dead grandfather. Her father disappearing from her life before she was 11 years old.
"I sat under the ackee tree and cried from missing you," she writes.
In The Echo of Words (2006), she writes, "Words are like the saliva on my tongue. Without moisture I cannot talk, without writing I cannot live, at least not in any meaningful way. I write out of love, a need deeper than the bluest ocean, a need connected to my marrow, surging through my blood, pumping life from my heart, streaming down the Rio Cobre, misting the Blue Mountains, snaking its way through Fern Gully, and flowing down Dunn's River Falls."
The Postscript includes tributes to Toni Cade Bambara (1996), "a funny, serious woman who said exactly what was on her mind without concern about how it came out"; to Barbara Christian (2000), the first African American ever to receive the prestigious distinguished teaching award in 1991; and to June Jordan (2002) who had such love for justice, for truth, and for sharing.