Recent Media

Products

Loving The Skin I'm In

• Through the Eye of the Dragon: Earl Lovelace Reviews Loving The Skin I'm In
• Loving The Skin I'm In: An Explanation of the Cover
• Order

Through the Eye of the Dragon: Earl Lovelace Reviews Loving The Skin I'm In

It is good to be a part of this community that has assembled here at this evening’s ceremony to celebrate the launch of the book of poetry ‘Loving The Skin I’m In’, by Eintou. Our sister who continues to champion at the very roots of our society causes of our becoming, with strength, passion and style, as cultural activist, teacher, artist: a woman who in her special way straddles the verandas that have given us Audrey Jeffers and Beryl Mc Burnie and the gayelle that evokes warrior women Gangan Sarah and Sofie Bella the stick fighter, as well as Shouter and Shango mothers and the Flag Woman whose love and loyalty commit her fiercely not only to her band but to the great cause of what is to be human.

Those of us who know Eintou have watched her wrestle her way into our consciousness as an icon that in loving and celebrating herself  (as she says in her title poem) –

- moving to my own rhythm.
To a drum,
Of my own
Begetting-

has not only steepled herself beyond colonial diminution but has unclothed for generations to come a new affirming African Caribbean woman, who with confidence to sing in the voice of Louise Bennett:

if is liberation you after
is like we done have dat,
for is the woman toting we people,
for centuries on we back
and the secret of we power
over every race of man
is the mystery of black beauty
and the sweetness of we hand.

This public declaration by the black woman of her desirability and value, as we shall see, is not automatically endorsed by her man and it is this tension that forms the thematic backbone of this book.

In these poems, Eintou covers much ground, engaging a range of topics that demonstrate the breadth of her interest:

Reparation, Emancipation, Shango, The World Bank, Corrupt Politicians, The Invasion of Grenada. She mourns Maurice Bishop, celebrates Kit and Kin, utilizes the voice/forms of – speech band, the calypso, and the praise singer. She is Midnight Robber and Historian. Through her public masks, she enters the skin of the prostitute, victims, artistes and a variety of women to explore from the inside their feelings and to provide us with her own comments as well.

In Ode to a Beauty Queen
She is herself the Beauty Queen addressing other young women:

Look at me
you sweet young things
Come fly with me
I’m flying high.
Chuck the books,
career.
Books are good
for those
who don’t have
 the goods.

I’m sure you want
to be just like me;
hair all straightened and nice,
face all painted and bright.
And the flesh

And what is exposed in its self-congratulatory innocence, is not the naiveté of the beauty queen but the wretchedness of a society both for what it selects to represent it and for what it refuses to acknowledge. Eintou’ s beauty Queen is not excoriated because she represents the best of symmetry of features and form of body in our women, but for the distortions that the beauty queen is required to undertake to conform to an ideal that is not natural to her, to us.

But, the beauty Queen is successful at least in love and the woman in search of love; seeking acceptance form the man she has her eyes on is tempted to model her behaviour after her. In Long Distance Love, the woman confesses:

I’ve played the helpless beauty
but the role just doesn’t fit.
I seem to scare them silly
but why, is beyond me!
All the men who love me
live so far away,
nothing I can do
can make them stay

This relationship between the black woman and the object of her love is a subject that Eintou comes back to again and again and it is what I believe to be the central theme of this work: The struggle, the desire to have the black woman’s public declaration and affirmation of her desirability and value confirmed (even in private) by her man.

To explore this theme, the poet sets up a series of conversations to a silent man. These conversations begin in the bedroom where in a tone of patient reasoning in which, though wounded at being rejected, the woman speaks with great feeling and with a sense of respect, but at the same time asserts herself as an equal.

Why do you hate my strength?
I seek not,
 my love,
 to compete with you,
but to reach the heights of my own being

Are you not scared,
my love,
by the breakdown
of black relationships
everywhere.

These – they are not quite conversations, since the man never speaks – these addresses go on in this tone of reasonableness and patience until in London Blues the frustrated woman hails out to the man she needs/wants but no longer deserves her unqualified respect; she hails out to him in the voice of the jamette:

Yeow!
Is you!
Yes, is you I calling!
Like you doh know me
in this town!

Goat bite me
crapaud pee on me

By the time she gets to the poem entitled Bois, her tone is one of mockery. More accurately, it is a mammaguy tone that teases, challenges and provokes to get some response:

I want there to be
some,
one,
just for me,

Are there really no men
who are more strong
than I,
with whom I can share
everything;

These utterances are presented by the poet through public masks through which the poet vents her frustrations with a man she wants to love and wants to love her. She seeks to call him to account, to responsibility, to community, to love, to have him engage in a behaviour consistent with his history of struggle which the poet has addressed in the poems to do with reparation, emancipation, revolution: which have to do with domestic and psychical abuse (by men).

In these public masks too, we see the teacher, activist, reasoning out the answers, declaring her desirability, willing the man to stand up against the effects of history that has made him tootoolbay. She used these masks to shame him, to wake him up, to get him to see. But also to bolster her image of herself, to keep herself strong in order to endure.

But she is a person beyond these masks. And she must take them off at sometime if she is not to become her masks.

The occasion for shedding her masks is when she is alone, when her children are asleep and she can in solitude review errors, express her dangerous feelings, confess her fragility, her vulnerability, her fears:

Here is the poet in For Single Mothers

I watch my children sleep.
Now
the fear can show.
Now
the aches and pains
take centre stage.
Now
swamping me,
the ache for comfort
to fight shadows
imagine specters
echoing reality.

Not always
is there joy
In service;
not always
do the tender feelings
flow.
Often comes
the silent screaming
to flee far
from
clinging, stifling
responsibility.
Often,
the terror
of wrong directions,
wrong decisions,
made alone
with hope
with desperate prayers.

And in On Becoming a woman For her first born, Dara

Watching you grow
to womanhood,
seeing you
venturing into life,
questing
hoping,
brings back
 memories;
…………

I cannot
 protect you
from the pain
of being
WOMAN

BUT
I can
with a mother’s curse
that is
 like no other
DAMN
all who
would hurt you….

I can
with a mother’s love
that is like no other
give you the sum
of my pain
the sum
of my joy
in being
WOMAN
and wish you
LOVE.

The woman discovers also that the role of artist while fulfilling in a certain dimension is no bed a roses either and as she climbs to new heights there are fears and questioning:

The fear
of stepping
into space,
or making a step
that’s wrong
being pushed down
slipping down
I dare not
Look down.

Clouds beckon.
I shed a weight
of things
of people;
more things
most people.
I do not
want
to climb
anymore.

It is too much
to dare
to be so alone
and puny
in this heady
vastness.
I rest
looking down,

This work is also about how the poet resolves these conundrums. In the exquisitely crafted poem Requiem, she gives us an answer:

When I crawled back
inside me
bruised and battered,
chastened,
forced, once more
to watch hopes
blight, then
wither;
…..
When I crawled back inside me,
familiar hollows
welcomed me
with gentle reproach
reminding me
is not
the first time
I vow and
swear
never again
to feel
this now familiar
emptiness,
this
stupidness.

Here Eintou makes what appears to be a declaration and a confession and she glimpses and dismisses her temptation to surrender. She will go on as we see in the poems of love. In Twilight Heat she can sing:

My breasts are very soft.
Cup them
in your hands,
gently now.

In the end the poet Eintou is the lover and her story is about love, about duty yes, but about the need for companionship, for equality, for love. It is about frustration, about loneliness, of the desire to find companionship, as well as community, a place to belong to, arms to comfort whether as artist or ordinary woman.

This is an honest book of poems.

I see the poet’s ongoing engagement and conversations with man as her ongoing engagement and conversations with her society. It is a conversation not only on her own behalf but on behalf of her daughters, her sisters, the women battered and abused, the warriors, Shango, Stickfighters, Flag Women and Flagmen, the children and the very men who she sees suckled in matriarchal relays. (But we do not know the man’s side of the story). What is most inspiring about Eintou’s journey is that she has the wisdom and the faith not to give up on either man or country and she will not let them off or let them go until they bless her with their love.

Thank you Eintou.

Loving The Skin I'm In: An Explanation of the Cover

The central female image in the piece is red. Red represents revolution and Shango.

The most recognizable symbol of the ubiquitous warrior king, is the double sided axe, kin to the scales of justice. Shango is associated with fire, lightening and thunder, charm, and wisdom.

If Eintou is the personification of King Shango she is still the daughter of Baba Ogun. Ogun is the god of war, the blacksmith; the warrior makes an offering to Ogun first. If you want to find Ogun in the piece he is the Green mountain that rises above the red pyramid. He and his female counterpart stride across Orun valiantly to clash with the god of injustice, or the spirit of malevolence that is depicted by the abstract beast in the “right wing” of the piece with jagged teeth and small eyes.

In the Epicenter of the piece, in the heart of the ascending woman, is the womb. The fruit of the womb of the African woman will always invoke archetypes. Atavisms will come from the womb visually proclaiming Africa, again and again even when no one wants to listen. In a woman like Eintou the womb is more powerful because it is bolstered in its mission by intellectual and spiritual roots. A womb in this context is the best promise of continued struggle for better tomorrow.
 
Through symbolism Eintou Springer is depicted here as mother, alchemist of freedom, and warrior in an epic battle between the forces that represent all things good and those we might for the sake of simplification call bad or evil.

For me it was an honor to have been chosen to give this tribute. For your struggle - mojuba Mama. Ashé Ashé Ashé.

Shabaka Kambon

Order Your Copy Today