LONGING AND BELONGING

Bittersweet is a collection of poems by Indo-Guyanese writer Natasha Ramoutar.

The poems evoke both a reconstructed homeland and Scarborough, where she now lives. Using memory – intimate as well as collective – prompted by photographs, maps, language, and folklore, she meditates on themes of obscured and suppressed history, time and liminality.

Her poems journey from home to home to home, from Toronto to Guyana to South Asia. They are about all the various places we call home, where we come from. With a few words, she recreates the heat welcoming them back to Guyana, or the language her grandmother spoke.

And Scarborough, omnipresent with its mix of identities and a strong, active, and boisterous youthful presence, appears in the streets of Meadowvale, while waiting for a bus, or a train that pulls into Kennedy Station.

Ramoutar reveals that she had a hard time writing about the concept of homeland in her acknowledgements.

Cartography traces the journey of her ancestors on old maps.

Ask me where I come from and I will tell you: from the remnants of melted sugar cubes, from rough grains ripped from stalks, from spiced and saccharine scents, from a sweetness that mixes with cardamom hanging in the air. I come from a line of bittersweet women, women shrewd enough to empty pockets, to upturn kingdoms, to launch ships to war. On a journey long ago, I witnessed the origin point: fields of cane standing tall like soldiers on patrol. But cane is raw; just long stalk, unbridled wild and free.

As does Brave New World.

The grandmother of my grandmother’s grandmother must have arrived on a ship that rolled through tempestuous waves. At least that’s what I suspect; where are the faded documents, the sprawling maps, the dog-eared photographs of her journey? The stories I know by heart are not of her; tales of Othello and outcast, of young Miranda all bright-eyed. My father grew up studying Hamlet in grade school. What of spoiled kings, tortured princes, and frigid Danish air was relatable? Grief, maybe. I think of her upon that ship from Denmark, grasping at faeries in the moonlight. Sometimes, all you need to tell a long story are a few words.

The fiction editor of Feel Ways, an anthology of Scarborough writing, and the social media assistant at the Festival of Literary Diversity, Ramoutar credits her teachers at West Hill CI for instilling a love for literature and for reassuring her that her that “wanting to be a writer wasn’t some bizarre, unattainable dream”.