An Introduction to Shara McCallum's Madwoman

    Madwoman by Shara McCallum

     Alice James Books, 2017

    ISBN: 978-1-938584-28-2

Shara McCallum

Let me confess: I had never heard of Shara McCallum. At AWP Conference 2017, mid Friday morning, I listened, rapt, in a session called, “Written on a Woman’s Body: A cross-genre reading of bold writings about women and their bodies.” The presenters were prepared and impressive. The last presenter on the panel was Shara McCallum. A tough spot to be in, last. She opened, not with her own work, as the other four presenters had, but by reading Lucille Clifton’s “leda 1,” “leda 2,” and “leda 3.” McCallum’s commanding voice pulled off this reading and, in the process, put her own work in a vulnerable position. Then the strength of her own words followed—outstanding. She read from her newest publication, Madwoman, the following poems: “Madwoman a Rasta Medusa,” “Oh Abuse,” “Insomnia,” “Grief,” “To Red,” and “The Parable of Shit and Flowers,” in that order. Wow. The book was available at the Alice James booth in the book fair; I read it as I flew home from D.C. And this served as my introduction to Shara McCallum.  —Melva Sue Priddy

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is the author of four previously published poetry books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

 Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and other awards. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian.

McCallum’s dramatic reading drew me in. But the strength of her own words are admirable, at times lapsing into her Jamaican patois. As if this weren’t magical enough, her poems slip in and out of time, yet remain timeless. She includes the mystical and commonplace. She writes of all life’s maddening contradictions matter-of-factly, without explanations, reflecting real life. Madwoman does not step neatly from one age or stage to the next; her contradictions and paradoxes are often stirred in with rewritten myths, life challenges demanding one’s need to adapt and push through living, doing what has to be done, especially for a woman of color.  

One can, of course, make a search of all the wonderful reviews and interviews available on the internet (Consider reviews listed at the bottom of http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/madwoman .) and so I intend only to introduce McCallum to readers unfamiliar with her work.  

The persona, Madwoman, marginalized, sane, insane, and, more likely, multiple beings at once, reoccurs, scattered throughout the book, and remains an engaging thread that confounds with her many anomalies. At one point, she is “the madwoman now being all women” (27). She is addressed by various voices from multiple intersections: “Madwoman as Salome”(8), “Madwoman in Middle Age” (24), “Why Madwomen Shouldn’t Read the News” (41), “Lot’s Wife to Madwoman” (51). 

One theme that binds this book concerns the various stages of womanhood. In response to a question about those stages and whether madness was an inevitable trait, McCallum states: 

I suspect some forms of ‘madness’ are an inevitable byproduct of aging. As we go along in life, if we are fortunate to live long enough, we will all accumulate losses—of people we love to death or to the changing nature of relationships over time, or of parts of ourselves as we are forced to confront the fact that versions of who we thought we might be or a life we imagined we would live will simply not [be] coming into being. The poems in the collection address various feelings of ‘madness’ roiling below the surface—among others, rage and sadness and dislocation of the self but also defiance, a wanting to say or actually saying ‘fuck you’ to societal norms and expectations. The vantage points through which I look closely at or dwell in these poems in anger, despair, fear, moments of coming unhinged, etc. are those of womanhood and girlhood and the stages in-between, as you note. But I am sure the gamut of emotions the Madwoman confronts exists in men and women alike, in anyone who has eyes to see and does not close them. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

A recurring motif is memory; what gets remembered, by whom, and why. In fact, McCallum’s prologue poem, “Little Soul” after Hadrian, opens the possibilities of memory’s role in, or lack of, influence. 

Little soul—kind, wandering—
body’s host and guest,

look how you’ve lowered yourself,
moving in a word of ice,

washed of color.  My girl, 
what compelled you once

is no more. 

Such a small, unassuming poem, and yet there it is: How are our lives shaped by memory, “what compelled you once”? Which begs of Madwoman, what role has memory played in your development? These questions will not be answered in this book. No neat little strings. McCallum doesn’t try to tell us what the meaning of her life is, what the meaning of our lives are, woman or man, madwoman or sane. And she reinforces this in the book’s second poem,“Memory” (quoted in full): 

I bruise the way the most secreted,most tender part of a thigh exposedpurples then blues.  No spit-shine shoes,I’m dirt you can’t wash from your feet.Wherever you go, know I’m the windaccosting the trees, the howling nightof your sea.  Try to leave me, I’ll pin you between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,even as you erase your trackswith the tail ends of your skirt.  You thinkI’m gristle, begging to be chewed?No, my love: I’m bone.  Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps.  That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin. (5)

Nothing sentimental here, no, rather bruises, dirt, howling, bone and ruin that linger. At best, the truth will confront: “Friends,/do you remember when we were young?/Life plump with promise and dreams?/Me neither” (41). Memories can “become unbearable” (12). But answer our life’s questions?  One voice asks midway through “Madwoman Apocrypha,” “Shouldn’t the death of ten thousand matter/more to you than that of just one person?” and another answers, “Yes. But I’m afraid grief isn’t math” (75). “Insomnia” speaks: “Dear one, why do you assume/there are lessons?” (64).

Yet even in the grittiness of life, McCallum gives us some beauty and innocence, but not much. “How else chart/a course than the way a child//plucks flowers from a field—/the eye compelling the hand to reach” (11). Even “Death” waxes poetic, if absolute: “…for I am in you/as the river is inside the stone”(56). 

In McCallum’s last poem, and the longest covering nine pages, “Madwoman Apocrypha,” several voices are speaking at once. Interlaced are those who will question and those who will tell Madwoman something, each with his/her own agenda. “Apocrypha” is a biblical term referring to texts of largely unknown authorship. When asked how this word defines the poem, McCallum responds: 

It speaks to it very well. But there’s another part of the definition of the word that is important to me to add to the mix. Apocryphal texts are those omitted from the ‘canon’ and are therefore not accepted as doctrine. Aspersions are often cast upon apocryphal narratives—due to their supposed lack of authenticity or truthfulness or sufficient evidence to back them up—in order to qualify and rationalize their exclusion. (“Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum”, interview by Alice James Books)

An excerpt from this poem is difficult to layout, the page is broader than the regular page, but let me try, in order to show these voices intertwining.   

          Q: Why do you make the past a fiction?
          A: Everything is a wager.

                                                                                              Duppy know who to frighten. 
                                                               I heard this as admonishment 
                                                                           when a child.  But now
I think she is, I will be,
                                                                                        we have always been
                                                                                                             the duppy we fear.

          Q: What do you mean “a wager”?
          A: I needed to enact a search, but something happened
          I didn’t mean to have happen. I’ve become
          a sifter and a counter of grains.  


                                                                                     When as a child I couldn't sleep,
                                                                                                  stroking my arm,
                                                            she would sit with me, repeating,  …

                                                            nursery rhymes, song, nothing making sense
                                                            …

  but her voice and the dark.

          A: I don’t know where she ends and I begin. (77)

This last answer, above, has no question before it. The poem attempts to imitate the many voices each of us may have to confront within ourselves, even when there are no easy reassurances. 

Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world. Find her work and read. And so I give McCallum the last word.

Q: Why do you keep referring to this woman

in third person? She is you after all, isn’t she

A: I’ve come to believe all stories

are self referential. Or else none of them are. 

When comes the night of your unmaking? (78)

Melva Sue Priddy lives near Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys gardening, sewing, and grandmaw-ing. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has published work recently with Still: the Journal, Friends Journal, Poet Lore, and LexPoMo.. 

Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain, forthcoming from Red Hen Press, 2017

Diane Gilliam is the author of chapbook Recipe for Blackberry Cake, 1999; and full length books One of Everything, 2003; Kettle Bottom, 2004, winner of the Perugia Press Prize; and Dreadful Wind & Rain, 2017. She is A Room of Her Own Foundation 6th Gift of Freedom Award winner, 2013. AROHO gives this award biennially to a female poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer to complete a project for publication over a two-year period. She also received, in 2008, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. 

     I first met Diane about ten years ago at the Appalachian Writers' Workshop, Hindman Settlement School, Kentucky. We roomed together there once and have been friends since. I received an advance copy of Diane’s Dreadful Wind & Rain, expected  from Red Hen Press in 2017. Diane is a small unassuming woman, but when she speaks through her poetry, usually in persona, she packs a wallop. You just don’t see it coming.

The poems in Dreadful Wind & Rain are divided into 4 sections: “Girl” is about early lives and losing one’s hands (as in The Tale of the Handless Maiden); “Anyone” is about other lives and this particular one, coming of age/struggle; “Or Else” includes poems of claiming, taking hands back, and moving toward wholeness and connection; and “After”, the shortest section with only four poems, leads us into acceptance of not happily ever after but the threshold between a life that’s behind and the life that’s ahead. It is both a sad and hopeful tale told with simple and stunning language. The collection includes one villanelle (“His & Hers”); six prose poems (two in each of first four sections); one “Where I’m From” borrowed from George Ella Lyon; and the remaining 45 are free verse. 

In the opening poem “Girl” a young child is looking out a window wanting “Whatever is she is wanting” which “is not/too much to ask”. It ends with these lines which pulled this reader in:

…. And if I still can’t say

what it is I am wanting, look closely at the windowpane, 

it’s what I brought you here to see—how it holds us 

in that house apart from what we want, 

how the glass makes it look 

like there is nothing

to stop us 

at all. 

And so Diane starts us on a journey which looks like “there is nothing / to stop us / at all” and travels through female (and male) time, fairy tale time, Biblical time, and story book time. Her poems speak from different personas and cover stories women often tell and don’t tell, which are key to how we are who we are, how we diminish ourselves, and how that can change over time. She brings us to the first window in the first poem, then takes us on a journey that allows for all our versions to step into consciousness. The second poem, in its entirety, reads:

  Tale 

Someone put my mother in a box.

This is an old story.

The box could have been gold 

or glass or ice. It was a cedar chest

weighted with blankets and quilts

for a family of ten. He took them out

and put her in, she was three maybe four.

He told her not to move, pressed the quilts

and blankets down on her face 

and the box clicked shut.

This was after. This is the story

of the sins of the brother, hand-me-down

version of the sins of the father.

They searched first the yard inside

the fence, then the wood. They went

up the mountain, into the old bear cave

back of the house. They called, they shouted.

They tore their hair.

He’d told her not to move.

Every tale has its local inflections.

Hers could have ended with kindly strangers,

a woodsman and his wife longing

for a child of their own. Instead, it was

a whipping for the hiding and the scare.

This is a long story.

The brother long since dead,

the box, of course, still alive, dark heirloom 

crouched in the corners of all our rooms. 

We walk by, something clicks

and whispers,

  Don’t move.

Very telling. “Someone put my mother in a box.//This is an old story”.  The box could have been anything—it’s something most of us can relate to for this is how we are trapped in the stories passed down. Themes of separation, isolation, deceit, and “heirlooms” passed down reoccur throughout the book. I could spend more time here but I won’t. There are things you should discover for yourself.  

Diane uses turns of phrases in unusual ways, especially in the first two sections.  The poem “For Goodness Sake” uses versions of common phrases: paid the price, swept under the rug, a straw to break the camel’s back, mad money, turn the other cheek, and cry like a baby. In Diane’s hands, the phrases do not come across as trite but rather as familiar and intimate. In the last stanza these phrases tumble into:  “we understood—it was ordinary / hunger, we were hungry, like everyone else. / And that, at last, was good.” 

I want to highlight the phrase “turn it into nothing” which is echoed from the first poem: “And you were nothing, the mother / will say. And I was nothing, / the girl will say.” “[T]urn it into nothing” threads into this, the third poem, “The Father’s Story”:

Back then, people knew how to make

something out of nothing.  If there wasn’t grass,

women’d go out with a broom and sweep

a pattern, like fan quilting, in their dirt.

….

The narrator explains how he came to live with his aunt and uncle who “didn’t have any kids to work their farm / and they were, hands down, [another turn of phrase] / the meanest people that ever lived.” 

Once I found some old rusty wheels in the barn.

I thought to build a wheelbarrow

to carry the stove wood up to the porch

from the field. Uncle Jim pitched a fit,

called me a thieving son-of-a-bitch

on account of those wheels. Man, oh, man.

They knew how to take something, too,

and turn it into nothing.

In “The Bargain,” another child, or perhaps the same girl at an earlier age, is asked to be nothing, as had the girl was in the first poem.  The phrase “with next to nothing” is later used in “The Knot” where “The prize, / of course, is marriage.” In the third section of this poem, “Decades later, on her way out the door, / she still is looking for the why of it all”. 

She insists on an answer. 

All he can say is this—

he doesn’t know why, 

but he thinks he loves her

when he sees her working for hours 

on something all laid out on the floor, 

down on her hands and knees, 

with next to nothing

of something impossible,

trying to make it work

and willing for anything.

 I have selected of Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain those poems which I found satisfying. To merely touch on poems which awed me, I tempt you with this one, previously published in Massachusetts Review:

PSALM OF LEAH

Leah….Rachel.  The names mean “cow” and “ewe” respectively.

--Zondervan NIV Study Bible

You Who Hear Me,

though my name is only the sound

of the low groan in the field, the rip

of grass from the ground, the obscene

wail of the one

cut off from the herd; You

Who See the wince

of the small humiliation of milking,

the twisted grimace of husbandry,

the face beaten like a plowshare

into the shape of what happens to it;

I know

You are not the stone eyes of my father’s

small gods, You are nothing

Rachel can steal. You are not the stones Jacob 

heaps as altars over top his sins 

to mark his trail. You are not the stone

from the mountain broken, You are the mountain

broken, its face undone, the space left open

when the men with the hammers have gone.

Diane shows us how we inherit stories, how we become trapped in stories, but she eventually shows us we can learn to see in different ways and change our own narratives. And she takes us to a door in the last poem, where we find

the breadcrumbs

meant to lead you out

of this enchantment, your own,

whatever it is.

The door opens

           when you touch it. It is not wrong

to pause on the threshold, here at the very

end of the story. Behind you, everything ever.

Before you, on the dark road,

everything after.

“Before you” is not happily ever after. Let’s be real—life is never going to be easy. But this book shows us we can claim our own story. 

I am one of those people who love to read the books I love over and over. It is a comfort thing. And with each subsequent reading, I find more depth in Diane Gilliam’s Dreadful Wind & Rain. Watch for it. 

                                                                                                  --Melva Sue Priddy