My Poetry Corner May 2024 features the poem “To Enter My Mother’s House” from the debut poetry collection Doe Songs by poet and artist Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018). The collection won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.

Born in 1986 in the twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, where she later completed a Creative Writing Course in Poetry, taught by award-winning Trinidadian poet Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023).

Danielle was raised by her two grandmothers: Her maternal grandmother is of East Indian descent; her paternal grandmother is African and Chinese. One of her grandmothers was a secondary school English teacher who introduced her to reading and writing poetry at an early age. But it was not until joining Jennifer Rahim’s creative writing class that Danielle saw the power of poetry and committed to the craft.

“Poetry speaks not only of your brain and soul, but of your belly, your bones,” she said in a 2010 interview with Caribbean Literary Salon. “It is that bare truth and intensity that I love so much about poetry… the physicality of those simple words.”

From the very first poem, the poet launches the reader into the harsh realities of being a woman in our imperfect world filled with dysfunctional love that wounds male and female alike with disappointment, brokenness, and grief. What’s more, the poetic vision is one of interconnection between dreams/spirit and reality, humans and non-humans.

In the three-part “Doe” poem (pp. 10-12), the hunter remembers the doe he killed, not knowing she was pregnant:  It was still warm, breathing / deep inside the half-moon / of her open belly. / “Leave it,” someone said. / But I couldn’t. I feared / the darkness would swallow me, / that the sighing trees / would remember my face. The hunter’s wife remembers the fawn: Its eyes were like yours, / difficult, hungry, / heavy with the memory of its mother’s ruined body. The hunter’s only daughter hears the fawn song: They say once you hear it, / you lay yourself down / beneath the trees, // and the fawn is the one / walking home / in your skin.

The connections between daughter and fawn, mother and doe are further developed in “Dream of My Daughter as a Fawn” (p. 13). To the mother/doe: Her amber eyes are her father’s, but her wildness is mine. To the daughter/fawn: See my hooves, mother, she whispers. The beginnings / of my antlers. See how I am fiercely made. The mother/doe concludes: Oh, I too was a fawn once. I know / the shots fire whether we are wild or not. / The hunters come with their guns / even though we are good. / Go on and run, I whisper / and her soft hooves fly.

The long poem “A Hammer to Love With” unravels the mother’s tough lesson to her teenage daughter (pp. 73-75) who must learn, as a wife and later as a young mother, to balance her vulnerability and strength. On her sixteenth birthday / you gave her a hammer, / told her, / Here, love with this. The daughter remembers: After all, a heart too soft / will fail.

It’s in the opening ten-stanza poem of the collection—featured this month of May when we honor and celebrate our mothers—that we must also come to terms with the toxic mother-daughter relationship. In the first stanza, set apart using italics, of the featured poem “To Enter My Mother’s House” (pp. 7-8), we enter the spirit world at the birthing of the poet persona. Born with longing for love and life. Is it the curse of the unwanted firstborn daughter?

The Heron god created daughter
on the last day. Not knowing
what to do with the longing
left over from creation, he poured it
into her open mouth, still warm
and echoing with earth.

In the next three stanzas, we know the dread of the thirty-year-old poet persona when she visits her mother.

To enter my mother’s house
I must walk backwards with
smoke in my mouth.

To pass through the keyhole
I must become a spout
of water, a single hair
from an ocelot’s back.

I must go back thirty years
to recreate myself, carve
my face on the unburnt tip
of a match, strike my teeth
thrice against her name. 

The fifth stanza (in italics) takes us to the world of dreams where the daughter seeks answers for past hurts. In the sixth and seventh stanzas, the daughter recalls a loveless past of beatings, of struggling to be invisible. I must make myself small / and light as a bee, suspend / myself among the dust motes / and droplets, hum and fidget / among the noiseless things.

The closing one-line stanza echoes the opening stanza: I must never ask about my birth.

The circumstances of our birth matter, especially to those among us whose mothers show them no love or kindness.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the Trinidadian poet Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, go to my Poetry Corner May 2024.