Interview with Andre Bagoo

We’re honored for the chance to share words by Andre Bagoo including a reading from his book Pitch Lake (2017). A wonderful storyteller within his deft and varied textures, Bagoo talks to us about his path and inspirations as a writer. He also gives insight into understandings of rebirth—is it something that happens first on a personal level or collectively? What does it mean for an individual to experience growth within a country that lags? He tells us how even in La Brea Pitch Lake, the world’s largest asphalt deposit found in Trinidad, buried trees will find their way back up. To watch the interview, visit our Instagram IGTV at https://www.instagram.com/napkinpoetry_review/channel/

We have included the transcript of both Andre’s discussion as well as his poems.

How did would you describe your writing journey?

I began writing poems in high school like most troubled teens. In my case, though, there was an added charge: I would have these crushes on boys so I would write poems and give it to them—sometimes I would write entire chapbooks which would perhaps have been traumatic for them! So that’s how I got started writing poetry in those years. I’ve always been interested in language, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, and that just carried on into adulthood. But strangely, here in Trinidad we tend to be very regimented and I don’t know if this is because we’re post-colonial, but we tend to have very straightforward career paths, you know you become a doctor or a lawyer. The idea of being an artist, making a living from art, was for a long time disregarded as a feasible option. I mention all this to say that I studied law and here I am as a poet!

What would you say is the theme of your collection?

Poets, we always cross boundaries, and most of the most well-known authors of all time, Dylan Thomas, Borges, even Hemingway, wrote poems as well as prose. Even poems themselves don’t always stay in one genre. They often cross over into different forms, different media. I don’t know if you know, but Trinidad has the world’s largest asphalt deposit and we call it the “pitch lake,” and I thought that was very prevalent. It has many connotations obviously, but the physical geography of this lake was my starting point for these poems. I wanted to create a sense of profound engagement with history and with language because one of the well-known characteristics of the pitch lake here is how it is thought to be inexhaustible—for centuries, people have been taking pitch out of it and its levels haven’t changed.

One frequent occurrence that happens when you go to the pitch lake is that, overnight, you might find a fully fossilized tree come out, fully intact and it’s such a great metaphor for challenging linear notions of time as well as challenging a limited notion of history—Walter Benjamin called history an ‘unfolding catastrophe’ when he wrote about that painting by Klee. He talks about history as something that’s not left behind in the past but that still haunts us, and we have this very dynamic relationship with it today. So for me, that was really the starting point and it was further enriched by the Trinidad and Tobago literature. Alfred Mendes also wrote a novel called Pitch Lake, Huxley wrote a novel about the pitch lake—so many representations have been done before, but I wanted to point out this moment where prose and the idea of language itself became the lake.

The book is divided in three sections: the first is on environmental themes surrounding the lake, the second about art and sexuality, and the third is a series of prose poems that aim to build to this mass that gets us to question poetry and its margins and, I hope, ultimately our understandings of contemporary life.

Could you describe your process for writing Pitch Lake?

I think one of the things that happened was that I had begun on this prose section towards the end, those are among the earlier poems, and the poems started to take shape during my daily life. I was working as a journalist and my job was very demanding, news never stops so whenever I had time, I’d write a poem. A lot of them came about very obliquely, almost on the penumbra of conscious thinking, not yet a full system or schematic. If I thought about waking up on Monday morning and having to go to work, I wrote a poem about that. I was very much at this stage influenced by poets like Mervyn Taylor, Martín Espada, people who are very good at showing the extraordinary within the ordinary. And I started to look at the things around me in a similar way. Eventually, as the process went on over years, I got commissions and people asked me to respond to specific issues. As I turned my gaze in different directions slowly, the whole thing started coming together. But once I realized that this lake, this idea of the pitch lake to be the essential ordering idea, I was also aware that I didn’t want it to seem too neat, robotic, because that’s the opposite of what the lake is—of what life is! So I also made a decision to not spell it out too much in the book, what was my own conceptual moray behind the poems. I wanted the lake itself to be a presence throughout the book, not really explained at any point but just alluded to because I think that sometimes in poetry, the most important thing is just on the penumbra—we can read the poem and though the poet hasn’t said anything explicitly, we just kind of get that “aha,” I get that.

During these times when we’re seeing so many protests and so many attempts to address the past, I was reminded how in art you can enact the justice you don’t see happening in the world in your work. Whether it’s providing some sort of fantasy or engaging directly with the political issues, simply providing something more subtle or symbolic, I think that’s what I’d hope poems would do.

I once said resistance is futile­­—actually no, the Borg said that! But we as poets carry on, and that’s what I think it’s about. It’s about speaking truth to power.

Poems:

So, I’m going to read On Titian’s Diana and Actaeon. I wrote this poem a few years ago about when the National Gallery in the UK bought this painting by Titian and there was a huge outcry over it—it was really expensive. Out of curiosity, I searched this painting and what I saw was really revealing, and I thought there was a lot to interrogate which is what I hope this poem does.

On Titian’s Diana and Actaeon

August. The asphalt

road to Trafalgar Square,

as hot as Trinidad noon.

Like the pigeons, the world flocks,

a legion of specks on the steps of the

National Gallery where they hang

Diana and Actaeon.

Titian’s scene could be the Caribbean,

sky as blue as Lear’s macaw,

wood that could be rainforest, nude

Diana and her five maids

like a lost Carnival band.

In a corner a black woman stands

outraged, the shadow

of a race’s conscience.

Though frozen, she whispers

to all who can see:

Such as I am, you will be,

such as you are, I was —

free. A nation spent millions

on this property but she,

not Actaeon, pays the price.

This next poem was inspired by a short story by the Jamaican writer Olive Senior who won the Commonwealth Prize a few decades ago for his collection of short stories, Summer Lightning.

After Olive Senior, Flying

light      smoke      how to dance

disco ball blocked by bodies

the sun eclipsed by moons

men growing like trees

in this club we leap

we do not look

yet look at me now Grandma

whatever I’m drinking it’s right

now I don’t care what Buju said

or the poet who called me buller

let our republic spread

above clouds—a dance-floor

of dreams

leap

like that time at your house Grandma

when walls disappeared

and he called me into the night

called me through the night

all through the gentle night

call, called to light—this sapwood

this heartwood no nails only bone

empty core mystery   bark crackling

there is human flesh in me

in forest we

run deep

until trees no longer have meaning

Hurry up. Rain is coming. Let’s go.

there is a dance better than geography

he is a poem yet to be danced

Lay with me he says after the club

Grandma I’m not sick

I am love

no one tells you

there is no time without man

there is only bliss

we don’t need potions to fly

when we have this

In Trinidad there’s an island off the coast that’s called Chacachacare that was used for many things, most famously for lepers. 

Chacachacare

The coast draws itself, wave

after wave sketching this study: a broken pier to nowhere,

houses torn down by time, island in the shadow of island.

Someone has written on a fallen

beam, “JONAH WAS HERE”.

No fence is needed.

The Trees are poisonous,

they keep the dead.

Butterflies guard what they must have hoarded:

beer bottles, porcelain mugs, a microscope.

Everything ends up here,

in the hot mouth of a panting dog.

The last poem I’ll read is called “The Forgetful Friend:

The Forgetful Friend 

She forgot the days they made love, though this was an important

detail for him. Though she did not forget birthdays, she forgot

mutual trips to the cinema, fetes and romantic dinners out. He was

worried she was erasing him and would not know who he was when

she got older. She said it was okay because she had ADHD and it was

common for people to forget things. She was getting electro-pulse

therapy to the head to improve her memory. A childhood trauma had

caused bad signals. She forgot his name sometimes, and he would get

angry. He implanted memories, but she erased them with furniture.

She liked to buy wooden stools and their apartment became clut-

tered. She eventually forgot she loved him. That was when she started

to remember everything else: the fetes, the dinners. She would wake

at night wondering about that man she ate mango sorbet with in the

Botanical Gardens, but then her Facebook page would tell her there

was no such man and that she really loved somebody else.