Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
IN HIS 2005 collection 37 Poems, Lasana M. Sekou delivers one poem per square mile of his home country, St. Martin. However, the mostly short poems are not geographically constrained to that country or even the Caribbean, as the collection shows the influence of a trip to Hong Kong, during which many were written.
Whatever the location, St. Martin is never far from Sekou's mind, nor is his passion for his homeland, which still remains a colony. That passion, which is combined with a literal desire for independence, inevitably finds words in literary comparisons of the colonising and colonised spaces in whatever:
"see paris and die"
there must be reasons to
see St. Martin and live
all the reasons to.
The general brevity of Sekou as well as his use of verse that does not rhyme are strong features of 37 Poems and comparison with the European metropoles comes up again and again. In st. martin children 1 he writes "this is not the count of the bastard motherlands/who suffer from afar the little children/to have them not unto bigness come to nation".
Sekou's passions do not override his poetry, as his ability to turn a fine line is seen throughout the slim, though not thin, book.
He makes the transition from Standard English to creative creole well and at will. So it does not seem incongruous in the sin when he follows "then let some chattel you to a neutered day/walk a virus of splintered glass" with "buh who t'is wearing the kosha torn", then switches back to English with "prickling deep and seep on a cross of salt".
One of the few poems (and also one of the longer ones) to be written totally in creole is the strainer, which is directed totally at nation-building.
THE COLLECTION
Sekou writes three multi-part, or continuing, poems in the collection (st. martin children I and II, st.martin soul I and II, nation suite 1,2,3,4), but there is a beautiful, unstated link between title X and not done, which share a line in which plus signs at either end signify marked "+males of military age+". And both poems are very much about the same topic, though title X takes the perspective of the hunted and not done that of the hunter, both of whom are in Iraq.
37 Poems is not all patriotism and protest, though. Matters of the heart get a look-in on last night and hallelujah.
The book is published by House of Nehesi Publishers, based in Phillipsburg, St. Martin.
