KINGSTON, Feb 24 (IPS) – Jamaican author Velma Pollard supplied a particular type of daylight within the Caribbean literary house. Identified throughout the area for her heat persona and welcoming nature, she additionally defied easy classification as she shone past style. The work she has left behind encompasses quick tales, poetry, tutorial writing, and novellas. She was additionally a eager naturalist photographer.
An early poem, “A Case for Pause”, displays on the interconnections between all of the varieties she used: “Arrest the sense / and let the flowery circulation / With out design / gathering cloud and air / petal and leaf … Rein within the fancy now / unleash the sense … constructs and theories not but pursued / rush in perfected, entire,” she wrote.
Her sudden demise earlier this month, on Feb. 1, has created an enormous hole within the lives of those that cherished and admired her as an individual and poet and who should now draw solace from studying or revisiting her work. Her generosity to different writers, students, and artists was legendary within the Caribbean and internationally. Within the days and weeks earlier than her passing, and regardless of her incapacity from a fall and subsequent operation, she took pains to learn and touch upon work that younger writers despatched her, fastidiously and unsparingly collating her responses.
As fellow Jamaican creator and tutorial Earl McKenzie stated after her funeral service on Feb. 21: Dr Pollard “was a good friend and supporter of her fellow writers, and all of us miss her”. Her long-time good friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Wilson, added that the service was “an outpouring of affection”.
Born in 1937, within the parish of St. Mary on the north-eastern Jamaican coast, Dr Pollard spent her early years in a rural setting together with siblings that embody her equally famend sister Erna Brodber.
She later attended Excelsior Excessive Faculty within the capital Kingston, the place she gained a number of elocution contests, and he or she gained a scholarship to proceed her research on the College Faculty of the West Indies, specializing in languages.
Afterward, she earned a Grasp’s diploma in English at New York’s Columbia College, and one other Grasp’s – in training – from McGill in Canada, adopted by a PhD in language training on the College of the West Indies (UWI). She would go on to change into dean of the training college at UWI, inspiring quite a few college students, whereas additionally elevating her three youngsters – one among whom has stated she was the strongest girl he knew, with the most important circle of trustworthy associates.
Dr Pollard lent her presence and experience to essential scholarly and literary conferences around the globe, typically writing about her experiences. She as soon as joked {that a} self-important critic had remarked that each time she attended a convention, she “simply needed to write a poem”. However that expertise for acute statement and for recording the locations she visited and the individuals she met varieties a part of the richness of her work. Within the poem “Bridgetown”, she writes as an illustration: As a result of the ocean / walks right here / this metropolis / fingers you heaven.
She addressed myriad points in her work: household relationships, gender, colonialism (and its legacies), historical past, love, injustice. Lots of her poems are tributes to the on a regular basis struggles of strange girls, the unlettered makers of “scorching lunches and scorching garments / cooking and stitching miracles / with equal hand”.
Her landmark scholarly publication Dread Discuss: The Language of Rastafari stays a must-read for linguists and others, whereas her distinctive fiction – together with Contemplating Girl I & II – locations her among the many Caribbean’s finest quick story writers. In 1992, she gained the Casa de las Americas Prize for Karl and Different Tales (which is being relaunched this 12 months as a Caribbean Fashionable Traditional by a British-based writer); and, with Jean D’Costa, she additionally edited anthologies for younger readers, together with the important Over Our Means.
Her poetry stands out for its imagery, symbolism and use of Jamaican Creole, or nation language, with collections akin to Crown Level and Different Poems, Disgrace Timber Don’t Develop Right here, The Greatest Philosophers I Know Can’t Learn and Write, and Leaving Traces.
Her work has likewise appeared in a spread of worldwide anthologies, together with Give the Ball to the Poet, which sought to “signify the previous, the current and the way forward for Caribbean poetry”, as Morag Types, Professor of Youngsters’s Poetry at Cambridge College and one of many editors of the anthology, stated when it was printed in 2014.
Years earlier than that, Dr Pollard’s writing was included within the ground-breaking 1989 assortment Her True-True Identify: An Anthology of Ladies’s Writing from the Caribbean, edited by Wilson and her sister Pamela Mordecai, and together with different acclaimed authors akin to Maryse Condé and Merle Hodge.
Then in 2018, one among her tales was translated into Chinese language and included within the compilation Queen’s Case: A Assortment of Modern Jamaican Quick Tales / ??? ??????????, among the many first such publications in China.
Dr Pollard was maybe foremost a poet, however she was equally a scholar, editor, educator… an general literary star. When she contracted meningitis a number of years in the past, messages flowed in from all around the globe (as tributes are actually doing upon her passing).
Following her restoration from that bout with meningitis, she advised associates she felt the necessity to do “one thing worthwhile day by day”, as a method of giving thanks for her survival. A part of this naturally included writing, but it surely additionally concerned taking good care of her prolonged household and being there for her associates and neighborhood.
As her sister Erna stated on the farewell service, Dr Pollard obtained “10 out of 10 out of 10 out of 10” for following the commandment: love thy neighbour as thyself. The work she has left behind could also be thought of a testomony of that love, and light-weight, too.
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