Tell Me/‘I Am Listening’: Ocean Stirrings and the Creole Vocalization of Nelson’s Royal Readers

Abstract

In this article, I explore Merle Collins’ reworking of poems from the Nelson’s Royal Readers. Focusing on Part V of Ocean Stirrings, I explore Collins’ use of poetic form to represent the mental unravelling and restitching of Louise Langdon Norton Little, the mother of Malcolm X. Louise Litte—a Grenadian migrant woman—is depicted as unmoored by the travails of racism in early twentieth century USA. Louise’s ensuing psychological cataclysm is refracted through the prism of the memories of her grandmother’s Creole voice—an oral text which discursively radicalizes the colonial agenda that was core to the Royal Readers. I argue that Collins is intentional in her use of a decolonized poetic versification to represent Louise Little’s imaginative maneuvering into self-reclamation. Transposing her grief and loss onto the poems learnt when she was a child, Louise is depicted as poetically and creatively harnessing her grandmother’s grassroot wisdom on the value of strategic resilience. This retelling allows Louise to survive the trauma of her incarceration in a U.S. mental hospital and returns her to her Caribbean self: Oseyan.

Merle Collins’ novel, Ocean Stirrings (Collins 2023a), fictionalizes the life of the Grenadian-born Louise Langdon Norton Little, a woman who the book title describes as: “working mother and activist, mother of Malcolm X and seven siblings”. Collins intentionally animates what she has described in the Afterword as a “work of the imagination” (p. 426) with the English-lexicon and French-lexicon Creole utterances of “older maternal relatives and Grenadian women of that age” (p. 423). By incorporating her personal history into this fictional scaffolding, Collins also pays tribute to these matriarchal figures—her own grandmother and mother—whose Creole vocalizations were pivotal in bringing her to a literary voice. This notion will itself be represented fictionally in the relationship between the protagonist, Helen Louise ‘Oseyan’ Langdon, “the girl who wants to be the whole ocean” (p. 62)1, and her grandmother, Ma Maryam, who brings Oseyan into her distinct personhood. Additionally, the life story of Louise Langdon Norton Little, a woman who was often described as “very educated” (p. 421) even though her formal education did not extend beyond primary school, allows Collins a space to explore educational practices in the nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Caribbean. The productive tension between these two tributaries of inspiration is the focus of this essay.

In a deliberate, archival sweep, Collins, in Ocean Stirrings, reinstates indigenous voices into the necessary memorializing of the legacies of all the grand women in Caribbean history who have, at home and in their communities, quietly yet powerfully done the political work of consciousness-raising and the building of national identity. Functioning as an archive of these lives, Ocean Stirrings addresses the importance of various forms of documentation, both oral and scribal, in challenging willful omissions and deliberate absences of the rural poor in colonial records. Once hidden from Grenada’s history, these women, through Collins’ fictional reconstruction of the past, can now be added to the annals of Grenada’s history. In an early poem, “Chant me a Tune”, Collins (1992) cautions against historical effacement: “Don’t try to dust my story/into the crevices of time” (p. 33). In Ocean Stirrings, she compensates for that erasure by intentionally entangling the lines of history and biography with that of fiction and autobiography so as to create a broadly representative, postcolonial archive that gives agency to the marginalized: “Here/hands and eyes and ears/begin to shape answers/to questions/tongue can find no words/for asking” (Collins 1992, p. 68). The creative and purposeful deployment of these various genres showcases the fullness of Collins’ literary reconstruction of the life of Louise Norton Little—a woman of courage, a woman of resilience, a woman of activism—whose story was once subsumed in the autobiography of her famous son, Malcolm X. Additionally, Ocean Stirrings makes a welcoming space for oral archives of resistance to sit alongside written ones. This accommodation reminds us that in our decolonial, archival mission, we need to be mindful of the precarity of reliance on only one medium or on only one point of view.

Collins’ poetics of ethical engagement is manifested in relation to her amplification of the many voices that animate the different communities to which she belongs. In previous works, Collins has, in seeking to legitimize the pedagogical power of the voices of her community informants, often used French-lexicon Creole (patwa2) words to represent their speech3. However, in Ocean Stirrings, the use of this French-lexicon Creole vernacular is more deliberate and sustained because it is consistent with the historical scaffold she sets up for her fictional biography. Although this Creole language (for many, their first language) was widely spoken in late nineteenth-century Grenada, there were nonetheless colonial restrictions on the use of patwa in schools.4 Collins is careful to set these language varieties alongside each other—English is the formal language of school life, but at home and in Oseyan’s community, both English-lexicon and French-lexicon Creoles prevail as vernaculars for the expression of a traditional, indigenous identity and the means of maintaining cultural integrity. Ocean Stirrings opens with “From the hills of La Digue, they can look down at the ocean, talking secret to the sands, shoo-shooing, playful…down there…” (p. 17), where the English-lexicon Creole phrases and words “talking secret to the sand” and shoo-shooing” capture the physical context of the La Digue community in which the story is set. The socio-cultural character is evoked in both vernaculars: “Fast he fast so they thinking. But there is nothing of that in their shouts to one another. Makoumè, kouman ou yé.? How tings…Épi, ti fi, ou gadé bèl, wi! Girl you lookin nice, yes!” (p. 17) Stylistically, Collins’ Creole vocalization at the outset of her narrative prepares the reader for her protagonist’s Creole vocalization, which serves both as a way of anchoring herself with a Grenadian community and as a sense-making strategy.

Harnessing the socio-linguistic power of her community, Oseyan is able to re-present the rote learning of the textbooks that she is being exposed to—specifically, the Royal Readers (1879) series. In 1877, Thomas Nelson and Sons introduced the Royal Readers series in response to the enactment of compulsory schooling laws in Great Britian and her colonies and the increasing demand for instructional textbooks. The Royal Readers series consisted of eight books. The Infant Reader and Royal School Primer were the first two books, followed by N0.I through V. The Royal Readers series was purposefully structured in a graded format, each book being progressively more advanced in its delivery of vocabulary and comprehension lessons that emphasized the importance of sound moral (colonial) values. The British colonial government mandated or strongly recommended the use of this series in schools throughout the colonies. Accordingly, the widespread use of the Royal Readers series throughout Britian’s colonies helped standardize English language education in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The stories, poems and lessons that made up this series of educational textbooks emphasized loyalty to the British crown and the superiority of British civilization. More perniciously, it promoted the ideal of the universality of colonial values while simultaneously devaluing indigenous knowledge systems and languages. In their novels, Caribbean writers such as Erna Brodber in Jane and Louisa will Soon Come Home (Brodber 1980), Merle Hodge in Crick, Crack Monkey (Hodge 1970), Jamaica Kincaid in Annie John (Kincaid 1985), George Lamming in In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming 1953), Earl Lovelace in The Schoolmaster (Lovelace 1968) and V.S. Naipaul in The Mystic Masseur (Naipaul 1957) and The House for Mr. Biswas (Naipaul 1961) have cogently depicted the consequences of this. The nineteenth century up to the late twentieth century primary school curricula, so richly dependent on the Royal Readers series, were geared towards the creation of the ideal colonial subject, regardless of the particularities of indigenous cultures, histories and vernaculars. In The History of the Voice (Brathwaite 1984), Brathwaite captures the consequence of this reliance: “we were educated away from ourselves, [it] made us see ourselves as perpetually inferior, and made us always look towards the metropolitan center for approval and confirmation (p. 13). In Ocean Stirrings, Collins’ narrative manipulation of the Royal Readers textbooks as a decolonized poetics to represent Oseyan’s imaginative maneuvering into selfhood speaks to strategies of resistance to this miseducation. Her subversion of British-based literary authority is to my mind what makes this fictive tribute so distinctive.

Undeniably, in the history of Caribbean education, the literary selections in the Royal Readers have had a powerful, long-lasting effect on those who were exposed to them. V. Joseph (2012) talks about how in her anthropological work in Carriacou, she was told: “people would meet each other as adults, long after their youthful school days were over, and discuss stories and lessons from the Royal Readers” (V. Joseph 2012, p. 149). Joseph goes on to add a personal touch: “Indeed, my mother on occasion would converse with friends about stories and together they would have lively discussions and deconstruction of the text for the important moral lessons” (V. Joseph 2012, p. 149). Like Joseph, Collins—in her Afterword to Ocean Stirrings—talks about the influence of the Royal Readers on her own family: “My grandmother was chanting remembered lessons from the Royal Readers well into her seventies and my mother, past one hundred is still able to chant them” (p. 422). This seductive influence then trickles down to Collins: “My fascination with my grandmother’s powerful chanting and the force of her narratives even resulted in my taking a guided tour to visit the Faroe Islands in the 1990s. These islands had so captured her imagination, that she chanted about them endlessly when I was growing up and implanted them in my imagination too” (pp. 421–2).

In their representation of the effect of the Royal Readers on generations of Grenadians, both Joseph and Collins are careful to frame this having a double-edged influence of both pleasure and indoctrination. It is to this ambivalence that this article speaks. The Royal Readers series were intended as a site of cultural control despite its advertised, benign pedagogy: “The whole book has been constructed with a view to induce children to take a real interest in what they read and to make them delight to exercise their power of reading” (Royal Readers, No. 1, p. iii). The content of these books along with the rote-learning that was the typical method of content delivery made these textbooks very effective means of propagating the controlling discourses of colonialism (Devonish 1986; Gordon 1963; Turner 1977). At the same time, it is important here to avoid the Manichean representation of all colonial education as bad and of the influence of Royal Readers series as destructive. In her depiction of the role of the Royal Readers, Collins is careful to show that although these books encouraged certain imperial-based patterns of thought, the learners not only found delight in them, but received a solid educational grounding.

Accordingly, in this essay, I argue that Oseyan’s relationship with the Royal Readers books is not an oppositional one. Instead, this imperial-based curriculum is constantly being indigenized by her grandmother—a process that enables the solidification of the formal instruction. Enabled by her grandmother’s Creole vocalization, Oseyan rewords the stories and poems found in these texts. In so doing, she dismantles their colonial logic, willfully imposing herself as a speaking subject rather than as a passive reader. The distance between Oseyan as reader and Oseyan as author is marked by a series of telling signposts, and the form and structure of Ocean Stirrings are deliberately engineered to accommodate these. Divided into five parts, each part of Ocean Stirrings engages with a particular aspect of the Royal Readers series. At the heart of Part 1 are Oseyan’s experiences as a student at Holy Innocent Primary School for five years. Many of these chapters are arranged according to the lessons learnt, both in the Royal Readers textbooks and from the oral text of her grandmother’s Creole voice that discursively radicalizes the colonial agenda that was at the core of the Royal Readers series. However, ultimately, it is the first book in the series, No. 1, that has the most profound impact on Oseyan, primarily because this is the book that Ma Miriam continually critiques, and in so doing, rearranges Oseyan’s role from passive receiver to agent of the discourse: “Read the book and learn how they do this thing that is telling story in book. Listen to their story. Read and learn” (Emphasis mine, p. 98).

Interrogating modes of knowledge transfer, Collins provides an interesting intervention regarding rote learning. As has been previously mentioned, primary school children in the Caribbean were required to learn set pieces by heart. Helen Tiffin, in “The Institution of Literature” (Tiffin 2003), argues that the emotional as well as the intellectual effect of this learning technique “afforded a strong and subtle mechanism of colonial control. She goes on to explain: “to learn by heart is to absorb into the very processes of one’s being the material so taught, to absorb that text as part of the emotional and sensory core of one’s nature” (Tiffin 2003, p. 44). Immersed in the literary world of Royal Readers No. 1, the child Oseyan, with the capaciousness of the ocean after which she is named, is learning and finding pleasure in new words, different sounds and syntaxes from those taught to her through her grandmother’s Creole home schooling. However, Ma is careful to teach Oseyan the difference between learning by heart and taking to heart: “Act it out, act it out with conviction, but know what you know” (p. 155). Whereas rote learning does not promote critical and creative thinking, Ma’s teaching is ensuring that Oseyan enters into a transformative poetics that undermines the collusion of English language and colonial hegemony.

Specifically, Ma Maryam’s Creole vocalizations stem from this awareness that her granddaughter is being formally educated into certain compliant patterns of behavior—ones that would not challenge the social order and would allow the colonial powers to continue in their exercise of maintaining socio-political control. Accordingly, functioning as a literary interlocutor, Ma encourages Oseyan to confront the epistemological eurocentrism of the Royal Readers textbooks that she is being schooled in:

Ma tells Oseyan…one day she could write about a little girl she knows and that little girl’s mother. ‘You don’t have to write about this Mary in the lesson, “Skipping”, and her mother,’ Ma says. ‘I sure Mary white. You could write about a little girl like you, you know. You could write about a little girl in La Digue… You could write about…planting sugar dish for the cold, and about how the sugar dish leaf rough, about picking soursop leaf for cooling. All of that is the kind of thing you can tell a special story about’ (p. 96).

Ma is here advocating what Freire ([1968] 2000) described as a critical pedagogy—one that allows the formal education gained from Oseyan’s primary school texts to be complemented with her cultural experiences growing up with a strong grandmother and a loving family in close-knit community. The Royal Readers texts, from nursery rhymes to oratory performances, are re-read through Creole eyes, through feminist eyes, and through Grenadian eyes. In encouraging Oseyan to become a co-creator of knowledge, Ma critiques the positionality of the colonial texts and annotates in the margins of these works a counter discourse that becomes a re-writing of the sociocultural environment within which young Oseyan is learning. Ultimately, Ma prepares the ground for social change:

And perhaps you can even find a father or an uncle who paying attention to children. Write about them, too. They really teaching all-you in that school that is woman to take care of children…When you could write, write about man taking care of children too, and when boys read what you write, your lesson might give them a different idea (p. 98).

Here, Collins is responding to the Caribbean myth of the mother who fathers—of the woman as primary caregiver—and is making a space for Ma’s Creole vocalization of the importance of accommodating and empowering men to take responsibility of childrearing.

The important historical contribution of men (T. A. Marryshow, William Donavan, Alister Hughes, Eric Gairy, Maurice Bishop, and Bernard Coard) as game changers in Grenada’s history is well documented and needs no rehearsing here. But in Ocean Stirrings, we have the recentering and constant affirmation of the role of women as change agents who facilitate social development, based in their insistence that their children—both boys and girls—take full advantage of educational opportunities, however meagre. In the small but powerful vignette where Ma Maryam takes Oseyan to school and, putting her on a bench at the front of the class, says: “That is your seat” (p. 100), she is claiming a space for the child, authorizing her to accept her right to belong, to thrive in that educational milieu: “Education is the thing” (p. 105). Part of Ma’s critical discourse is the ability to “pick sense from nonsense” (p. 109), to recognize the value of making strategic use of the knowledge found in books: knowledge about other cultures, imperial or otherwise. At the same time, she is promoting the development of an independent, Grenadian cultural and political identity: “Listen to your spirit and know what is what…Listen to your spirit, child. It strong inside you” (p. 130). The complementarity of these two epistemologies allows Oseyan to absorb universal moral values: kindness, industry, and respect. The resultant belief system that undergirds the adult Oseyan’s interaction with her world—her moral and intellectual maturity—is an antidote against the discursive perils of colonialism. It also fortifies her against what Fanon (1952), in Black Skins, White Masks, labels as an internalized inferiority complex born out of colonialism, whereby the indigenous population comes to internalize the dominant culture or narrative of the colonizer at the expense of their own native, local, and traditional culture. Thus, when the twenty-one-year-old Oseyan sets sail for ‘foreign’ lands at the end of Part 1, armed with her legal name ‘Helen Norton’,5 she has already learned how to “turn the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (Bhabba 1995, p. 35).

“Write as you speak; say exactly what you feel; and in the same way as you would speak if your correspondent were besides you” (p. 215, italics in original). Part 2 of Ocean Stirrings riffs off the ‘Letter Writing’ section of The Royal Readers Book V. Written in epistolary form as a series of fifteen talking letters to Ma Maryan, Oseyan enacts the authorship that Ma had long encouraged: finding a means of taking the material from the Royal Readers textbooks and making it specific to her cultural location. Except here, however, Oseyan extends Ma’s lesson through a Creole vocalization that translates her ideas from page to voice—specifically, a Creole voice: “I will write like Sir told us to—proper grammar, but sometimes I will just talk, Ma, as we talk…But what I used to speak to you, Ma, was our own proper Creole grammar, so is so we will talk sometimes” (p. 216). Attending particularly to form, Oseyan creates letters that she believes Ma would not only find engaging but would also approve of because of Oseyan’s creolization of form and her willful shift between the different linguistic registers—English-lexicon and French-lexicon Creole. In her validation of her Creole grammar, and her establishment of the hegemony of that vernacular, each of Oseyan’s talking letters are titled in Kwéyòl and followed by the English translation: Lèt ki di dédé. Goodbye letter; Lèt ki mwen ékwi padan tan mwen ka voyagé. Letter en route; Lèt memwa. Memory Letter. Lèt fanmi. Family letter. In these letters, she vocalizes her impressions of her surroundings; the people she meets; her feelings of excitement and trepidation; her resolve to tackle the world on her own terms. “Tjébé tèt-ou an-lè. Hold your head up!” (p. 235) These letters are examples of how Oseyan, the student-turned-teacher, is putting into effect what Ma, the now silent listener to her vocalizations, had taught her—how to make sense of the non-sense of her world. Whereas Ma’s storytelling had been an oral one, Oseyan, in writing these letters in her notebook, is breaking novel ground in moving these vernaculars to a scribal domain.

Again, in Part III: The United States of America, 1919–1931, the Royal Readers continue to surface, albeit now in an interior monologue as opposed to Oseyan’s earlier external Creole vocalizations. Travelling to Omaha, Oseyan’s knowledge of the geography of that place is parsed through rote learning from The Royal Readers:

“Nebraska, capital Omaha. She remembers that from extra lessons. She didn’t reach Standard VI to use the Sixth Book but Mr. Ansel had done some lessons from that book with her, because…she was showing such promise…Omaha is on the western bank of the Missouri river…” (pp. 263–4, italics in original).

This information that she learnt by heart is not only valuable in helping Oseyan to situate herself within this foreign landscape, but she also finds pleasure in her recollection of her childhood in Grenada. Moreover, because most of her learning from the Royal Readers has been indigenized by Ma, who taught her to think critically and creatively about the texts with which she interacts, Oseyan recognizes that, in its reduction of other cultures, this colonial text is always potentially dangerous. This understanding brings novel meaning to the concept of savagery learnt earlier:

Afterwards, when they reach Nebraska, Oseyan thinks again about her Royal Reader and the word savage. In fact, one thing that helps her get through the trip is constantly repeating in her head a sentence from that book: ‘Suppose yourself, Gentle Reader, watching a savage arranging his snow-shoes, preparatory to entering the gloomy forest’.…she keeps thinking about the savages who lynch people, and whom she would probably meet in this gloomy forest (p. 270, italics in original).

Thus, she intentionally draws on information from the Royal Readers and applies it to this American space, rearranging the concept of savagery to apply it to white, lynching men.

However, Oseyan is outwardly circumspect in her subversive deconstruction, lest in her voicing of this critique of whiteness her husband would think she was putting on airs. She remembers what “Ma had told her, Learn it how they give it to you, and study so that you can write your own thing. Yes, Ma” (p. 274). Quietly listening to Baron’s brother’s account of Notre Dame students confronting and unmasking Ku Klux Klan members, Oseyan recalls Lord Bryon’s poem on the destruction of Sennacherib’s army from the Royal Readers and mentally applies the powerful line “the Assyrian came down” to this rebellious incident. Similarly, in her moment of crisis when her husband hits her for refusing to cook him a pork meal, it is the line from “Facts for little folk” in Royal Readers No. 1 that constellates in her head as she attempts to make sense of his slap: “Pork is the flesh of a pig or a sow” (p. 278). Where as a child she may not have found purpose in the knowledge provided by the Royal Readers, here the repetition of set phrases and lines from poems and stories are part of the conversation that Oseyan has with herself. Indeed, in this section, Oseyan often talks to herself. Faced with systemic racism, Oseyan finds comfort in that private speech act. Returning mentally to these large blocks of information anchors her to her Grenadian identity. It allows her to use prior learning to instill resilience in her children and to carry on the tradition of liberatory knowledge-sharing set by her grandmother.

Significantly, in Part IV, Premonitions and Ending, in which Collins prepares the reader for Oseyan’s psychological unravelling, there are no references to the Royal Readers series. Instead, we are privy to Ma’s many Kwéyòl aphorisms—the indigenous yet equally foundational other text in Oseyan’s primary education. Debilitated by so many pregnancies, having no support system, Oseyan dreams continuously of her family in Grenada. When her husband dies in a car accident, the widowed Oseyan struggles to raise a family by herself. The narrative point of view shifts from third person to first. We, the readers, listen as Oseyan speaks, sometimes in Kwéyòl, of how she is now “eating the bread that the devil knead” (p. 353), “ye ka manjé pen ki dyab pentwi” (p. 353). Missing the extended family support that was characteristic of the life she grew up with, her constant refrain is “I have to talk to you Ma” (p. 338). The imperative power of “have to” gestures to the desperation Oseyan is now feeling—her lack of psycho-social anchorage: “My body tired. My spirit tired. The truth is, Ma, that I don’t know what to do…Truth to tell Ma, I don’t know what to do” (p. 339). This plaintive vocalization sums up Oseyan’s state of mind—a fragility that will result in her later confinement in a mental institution. After several years of struggle, Oseyan meets a man who she believes will make things right. But one pregnancy later, she is deserted by this devil of a man who only saw her fair skin as a conquest. Bedeviled by what seems to be post-partum depression, the lack of family support, and social workers who are always threatening to take her children away, Oseyan surrenders:

They are saying I am mad. If I could work up the energy I would tell them what is what and I will tell them one day but right now my spirit is tired…it have people who want to make sure I don’t bounce back and who want to take the children and it taking all my strength just to figure out how and how to move (pp. 346–7).

Oseyan’s narrative of fear and hopelessness forecasts the inevitability of her losing the battle to systemic racism: “Sé dab pou vwé. Is real devil, yes, Ma. Sé dab pou vwé” (p. 347). Finally unmoored and silenced by the debilitating hardships that characterized the lives of Blacks in early twentieth century USA, Oseyan’s defeat is transmitted to us in the voice of Spirit, who we were first introduced to in Part 1, Chapter 3: “I am the Spirit of the Place, hearing and seeing and knowing everything” (p. 32). Spirit has been the silent witness to the events in Oseyan’s life, and at this necessary stage moves into an active and supportive role: “…I have been here walking with her, watching with her, even finding for her the voice of her grandmother sometimes when the dark ocean too rough to let the voice and the seeing cross over easy” (p. 348). At the end of this section, Collins uses Spirt as the muse to set up the framework for Part V, where we see Oseyan’s willful and more explicit Creole vocalization of the Royal Readers. Spirit is a personified force, one that in channeling Ma, acts as the source of inspiration for Oseyan—the full-fledged creative artist.

Aptly titled “Leavings and Returnings,” Part V of Ocean Stirrings deals with Oseyan’s incarceration in a psychiatric hospital from 1938 to 1963. Oseyan’s experience in Kalamazoo is refracted through the prism of the stories and poems from the Royal Readers. There is here a turn from the self-conscious consideration of genre and form that we had seen in Part 2. Instead, we witness Oseyan’s textual manipulation of these lessons from The Royal Readers into a form of versification which is at once indicative of her mental degradation but also speaks to the Creole vocalization that ultimately helps her mitigate the trauma of her incarceration. The memories of Ma’s teachings, generated by the ever-present Spirit, feed Oseyan’s creative appetite and inform the versification that she deploys. In Oseyan’s authorization of herself as writer/speaker, she speaks her truths not only to Ma—her teacher who has become her best critical audience—but also to us, her reader/listeners. Oseyan now mounts her own oppositional pedagogy. By way of Freire, Oseyan’s versification reminds us, her reader/listeners, “that human life is conditioned, not determined, and that there is the crucial necessity of not only reading the world critically but also intervening in the larger social order” (Giroux 2010). Brought to self-reflexivity, the reader/listener is encouraged to become a co-producer of knowledge. Where the style of the poems of the Royal Readers No. 1 was uncomplicated, with a straightforward ballad stanza and an emphasis on rhyme, rhythm, and repetition, Collins’ choice to render Oseyan’s poetry as abstract and free verse underscores Oseyan’s mental unravelling and restitching. This poetic reformatting allows us to become critical readers of a new counter-discursive version of the Royal Readers.

Where the Royal Readers had used an omniscient narrator, Oseyan is intentional in her use of the first-person narrator, a pronominal shift that invites us, as readers, to be sympathetic participants in Oseyan’s self-reconstruction. Structurally, Oseyan’s versification in Part V is a return to the oral performance of Part II, but with some significant differences. In Part II, she was consciously speaking to Ma: “You know, Ma, every time I write I am talking the writing out aloud in my head, because I imagine you can hear me talking to you. I used to talk out to you all my Royal Reader lessons” (p. 222). Now, in Part V, she talks in her head, and although she is again talking out the Royal Readers lessons, not only is it a silent performance but—rather than addressing Ma alone—she also coopts the reader as listener. Meanwhile, however insistent though abstracted it is, because this literary performance is an internal one happening in Oseyan’s head, Collins is able to demonstrate the means by which Oseyan retrieves the power that has been taken from her. Interiority allows Oseyan to deny access to her institutional wardens who have misread her as insane—“That’s the word they use, ‘delusional’,/as if I am not important…/so they are pretending I am mad” (p. 356)—and who would like the power to read and judge her thoughts.

Thematically, in transposing her grief and loss onto the stories and poems learnt by heart when she was a child, Oseyan is depicted as poetically and creatively yoking the lessons of The Royal Readers onto her grandmother’s grassroot wisdom so as to benefit from the much-needed strategic resilience which was at the center of her grandmother’s life: “Sometimes you just have to keep walking back and looking again to see how the story stitch together. You have to remind yourself and to arm yourself for what and what will happen whether you like it or not” (p. 49). The first poem that opens Part V—"Why am I here? Sing a song to me”—reworks ‘The Bird’s Song” from the Royal Readers No. 1: “Look at that bird … Hark! Do you hear its song! How sweet it is! The branch swings to and fro in the air, but still the bird sings on. It does not fear it will fall, for it knows it has wings” (Royal Readers No. 1, p. 9). In that short story, the bird sings despite the unsettling, swaying branch, regardless of the risk that it may fall. The bird relies on its wings, but just as importantly, it trusts in a heavenly presence: “One there who cares for thee”.6 Oseyan’s choice to invoke the bird song is not so much to gesture to her faith in divine intervention, but rather to signal that like the bird, she too has resilience, wings that will allow her to transcend the horror: “they imprison me, a kidnapping.//A savage pulling off my shoes/…/pounding, shouting, stairs, screams” (p. 353). The phrase “sing a song to me” (p. 353) reminds the reader of the young child, Oseyan, to whom Ma sang to keep from crying:

The child’s eyes filled with tears…Ma settles her down and sings other songs, keeping the child smiling…they move their shoulders side to side, smiling, laughing, put arms akimbo and sing…Ma stretches her arms wide, flapping them like les ailes—the wings (pp. 63–4).

Whereas Ma was able to comfort the infant Oseyan, the adult, incarcerated Oseyan needs to self-soothe because there is no answer to her repeated question: “why am I here?” (p. 353). The next poem, “No one will answer me”, again includes the bird trope. Speaking to Oseyan’s desire to be free of Kalamazoo, the poem conveys her defiant refusal to be silenced by the indifference of those who are responsible for her captivity. Returning to the poem from the Royal Readers, No. 1: ‘The Bird in the Woods’, “I would not in a cage be shut/Though it of gold should be/I love best in the woods to sing…” (p. 14). Oseyan adds the emphatic ‘I WOULD not…’ so as to signal her desire for freedom and to broadcast her conviction that, the lack of answers notwithstanding, she does not belong in a mental institution.

In Oseyan’s versification of her imprisonment in a mental institution, she uses poetry to articulate her truths about her reality rather than accepting those imposed on her. Take, for example, her reworking of the poem “The Rabbit in the Woods” (Royal Readers No. 1, p. 83). In that poem, the rabbit, when it pleads for clemency from the huntsman’s gun, is reminded that it is its thieving of the farmer’s wheat that has brought it to that sorry fate. In her Creole vocalization of that poem, “1939/1940. In a wood where beasts can talk”, Oseyan, although innocent of wrongdoing, is still the metaphoric rabbit: “they catch me and put me in a trap” (p. 354). Significantly, many of the poems referenced in Part V relate to small, entrapped, defenseless animals who, like Oseyan, have their fate controlled by larger, more powerful forces. Ironically, these Royal Readers poems were meant for a specific pedagogical purpose: “Great use has therefore been made of the objects on Natural History, and of the incidents and common things of daily life, but which children are most likely to be attracted” (Preface, Royal Readers No. 1, p. iii). In her representation of Oseyan’s Kalamazoo experience, Collins seeks to “locate difference in both its specificity and its ability to provide positions for critically engaging social relations and cultural practices” (McLaren 1995, p. 18). The “natural objects” and “common things of daily life”—birds, rabbits, food, traps, and cages—function simultaneously as sites of entrapment and resistance. This reformulation unsettles the simplistic plotlines of the Royal Readers. In the poem “Kalamazoo, The Place where I am”, Oseyan is on her guard: “I know how they pretend and how they scheme,/build cages, create traps to capture my dream” (p. 357). In Kalamazoo, she is the wily bird who must not be seduced by false kindness. Kalamazoo is where the defenseless need to be careful because cages come in all forms: “Here they say we have something for you…they jook me body up with needles…” (p. 357).

As indicated earlier by Ma Maryam, when adult lenses are trained on these Royal Readers poems and stories, the meaning changes. The theme of love is interrogated in Oseyan’s poem “Love wins Love”. Oseyan returns to the Royal Readers, No. 1 story “The Pet goat”, where a child’s constant care for her pet goat earns her its unwavering affection. The naïve representation of reciprocal love on which that story was predicated has proven to be more complicated in Oseyan’s adult experiences. Half a century later, replaying and reciting the story of the pet goat, Oseyan can now ask the listener/reader to consider whose unrequited love gets left out of the story. Moreover, in assessing how in her own romantic experiences love did not necessarily win love and kindness did not necessarily beget kindness, Oseyan problematizes what is writ large. Indeed, a different kind of love story can be told depending on who is telling that story, or in fact who is listening to that story. Subject position remains important. Oseyan’s current deconstruction of the lessons taught in the Royal Readers harkens back to Ma’s oppositional teaching. As a child, Oseyan had remarked to Ma how much she and her classmates enjoyed the nursery rhyme “There an old woman who lived in the shoe”. When Oseyan recited the rhyme to Ma, she prefaced her recitation with Sir’s description of the story as comical. Ma, in turns, offered a counter-discursive framework within which to read the story. Using a feminist frame, she subverted the patriarchal assumptions that reduce women’s lives to comedy:

‘I guess it comical depending on how you look at it…. Especially for those who don’t have to live in shoe…Is to tell you how people make the world. Some have, a lot don’t have, and who to suffer with the children in the shoe is the woman…Is the woman who suffer. I sure all those children have father, but is this poor woman living in shoe alone with children’ (pp. 93–4).

In her critiquing of the nursery rhyme, Ma directed Oseyan to a consideration of how men who hold power affect the lives of woman and children. Now, in her rearranging of “Love wins Love”, Oseyan in turn educates her listener/reader on the pernicious impact of patriarchy. This lesson on the hierarchy of power is repeated in the poem “1903–1904 and 1959. She didn’t know what to do” (p. 402). Recalling the nursery rhyme about the old woman in the shoe and Ma’s critical reading of that rhyme, Oseyan, seasoned by her own experiences, blurs the lines between the material and the metaphoric. Her consideration of the old woman’s state of mind and the bewilderment she may have felt having no means to support such a large family—”I wonder if that old woman in the shoe/ever had time to figure out: what to do/who she is/how she is with man” (pp. 402–3)—is a projection of Oseyan’s own sense of helplessness, subordinated as she is by race, class, and gender.

Working with the historical fact of Louise Little’s extended incarceration in Kalamazoo state institution, Collins handles the theme of madness in Ocean Stirrings with great delicacy. In The Color of Forgetting (Collins 1995) and in the short story, “Rain Darling” (Collins 2011), she explored this theme and its connection to creativity, memory retrieval, and re-vivification. In their essay “Madness is Rampant on this Island”, Ledent et al. (2018) posit “the states of madness depicted in literature also offer a space of political, cultural, and artistic resistance and, seemingly paradoxically in some cases, a means of agency or even healing” (p. 19). Collins affords that space to Oseyan, a nineteenth century version of the Caribbean ‘madwoman in the attic’, who like Antoinette/Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 1966) is recovering her lost history and community. In her production of her own version of the Royal Readers, Oseyan as a Caribbean author is stretching that colonial text to accommodate alternative realities, ones that move the ‘native’ subject out from the margins of subordination into a central, authorizing narrative frame. In her creation of Oseyan as the literary madwoman speaking out her trauma, Collins makes her a forerunner to characters that contemporary Caribbean novelists, such as Brodber, Chariandy, Miller, and Mootoo, have enlivened.7 All these women are what Kelly Baker Josephs (2013) so pithily referred to as ‘disturbers of the peace,’ unsettling a status quo that decides on what is normal and what is abnormal, challenging—with righteous anger and frustration—categories which seek to contain them. The readers of both these texts and Ocean Stirrings are co-opted into the task of making sense of “the tension between the label of madness and the actions and interactions of the characters labelled as mad” (p. 20), as well as that of interrogating how “madness defines community, defines, gender, defines the form of the text, and, for some characters, defines reality itself” (p. 20). Baker Joseph’s position that madness in Anglophone Caribbean literature serves as a deliberate critical device that unsettles colonial ‘peace’ and exposes its psychic violence finds congruence in Collins’ representation of Oseyan’s literary innovation of her marginalization and resistance. Oseyan, like the female characters who populate the novels of the aforementioned writers, creatively restructures her experience to make known her inner world of pain, suffering, and trauma.

Oseyan’s poem “Yes. All the people have gone” is a case in point. It brings together lines from various poems from the Royal Readers series. Some of these are from poems already mentioned, like “Moments” and “The Rabbit in the Woods”. The significance of her return to them is not only a sign of the strong impression these poems had on her but is also evidence of Oseyan’s slow edging away from normative behavior because of the medication she is being forced to take. Similarly, in “1902, 1903, and the 1950s. The moments fly” (Oseyan’s version of the Royal Readers, No. 1 poem “Moments”), temporality is fractured, as demonstrated in the comingling of the verb tenses—present, future, and past. Oseyan is no longer sure of where she is in time and place: “They tell me it is 1952…//I will not give my grandmother that poem./It will make her sad…//Where have all the people gone?” (p. 377). The fracturing is also spatial as the poetic voice alternates between Grenada and the United States. The line “Where have all the people gone” conjures up images not only of her missing children taken away by the state, but also her Grenadian relatives separated by the ocean and by finances. This helps to underscore the psychological dissonance that diasporic Oseyan is undergoing. Miller, in an interview with Romdhani (2018), claims “There is always madness to diaspora, I mean a desperation to this nostalgia that is desperately trying to re-create something which it inherently cannot because it is negotiating within another home space” (Romdhani 2018, p. 295). In her inability to reconstitute her lost community—the immediate one with her children and the extended one in Grenada—Oseyan’s sensibilities become fractured by the insufficiency of memory.

In the poem immediately following, “Kalamazoo. 1950. Talking to myself again”, there is a provocative play on the concept of talking to oneself as a sign of mental illness. In Part III of the novel, Oseyan had also been depicted as frequently talking to herself. In the absence of a community with whom to dialogue she had found solace in this inner speech act. Collins’ return to this act of talking to oneself is strategic. Throughout Ocean Stirrings, she manipulates the notion that “tongue and teeth—lanng épi dan” (p. 23) brings the community to speech, be it gossip or information, prophecy or protest. The muse, Spirit, is intimately personified as “tongue and teeth—lanng épi dan”. It is Spirit who informs the reader of the birth and attendant village gossip about the child in the Langdon household. It is Spirit who, as “tongue and teeth”, verbalized for us Oseyan’s breakdown and her subsequent incarceration. There is authorial power in “tongue and teeth—lanng épi dan”. Oseyan’s talking to herself here is a claiming of this power that is her inheritance from the Spirit Muse of “tongue and teeth—lanng épi dan”. Speaking herself into fortitude and tenacity, she dismantles what constitutes madness, its social construction, and who gets to be in control of the labelling: “Well nurse, I’m talking to myself/not because my head is gone/but because there is a lot to say to myself!//…Yesterday./Is not tomorrow yet?/What is today?” (p. 378). In her seminal text Writing and Madness, Felman (2003) argued that “I am mad” is a contradiction in terms, because “if one is mad, then such a statement cannot be true or at least reliable, whereas if one is reliable, one cannot be mad” (Felman 2003, p. 269). Similarly, Oseyan’s “Not because my head is gone” is not an admission that she is mentally ill, rather it is her acknowledgement that the ‘system’—Euro-American and hegemonic—has classified her as such. Her intention here is to undo this classification and regain her subjectivity. The line “There is a lot to say to myself” reminds the reader that self-reconstitution for Oseyan is the intentional vocalization of self into form, one assembled by the pieces of Ma’s Creole vocalization, lines from the Royal Readers books that were formative to her education, and her creative, creole adaptation of both: “Learn the rhythm and the feeling./Make them your own./Change and reshape them” (p. 415).

In conclusion, through Creole vocalization in Ocean Stirrings, Collins deliberately positions folk ways of knowing and validating Grenadian society as undermining the colonial agenda of subservience to English imperialism. In the figures of Ma and her granddaughter, Oseyan Louise Langdon Norton, local knowledge constantly deconstructs the imperial agenda of the Royal Readers, subverting the coloniality of its myths and stereotypes and laying bare its historical distortions and biases. Ma Maryam and her student teacher Oseyan, through their constant and analytical sifting through of the Royal Readers series, make clear to us as readers—their literary grandchildren—the kind of ‘reading’ practice we should adopt: one where we do not genuflect to the great European tradition or to standards and practices established or promoted in the metropole. The richness and complexity of their Creole vocalization becomes a prototype for a creative pedagogy. Collins advocates, in this fictionalized biography, for the promotion of a creative bilingualism that fully engages the learner and encourages sociocultural growth across a variety of domains. As a result, we (as contemporary readers) experience a shift in our cultural values and become participants in the setting down of a critical and, I daresay, ideological framework for the literary decolonization of the Caribbean, which is fundamental to the success of the region’s sustainable development. Knowledge is more than what is found in books. In Ocean Stirrings, Collins depicts Oseyan as making strategic use of both the oral and scribal texts available to her to authorize herself. The resultant aesthetic sensibility—her Creole vocalization of her lived reality—allows her to survive the trauma of her incarceration in a U.S. mental hospital and returns her to her Caribbean self: Oseyan, granddaughter of Ma Maryam, and our literary foremother.

• Sometimes the lesson hard but—you learn!
• Even when those who don’t like you
• think the story is theirs, make it yours,
• make it yours! (p. 416)

In “The Future of Merle”, Collins’ afterword to the Caribbean Quarterly (Collins 2023b) festschrift honoring her, Collins reminds us of the importance of “honoring and highlighting women, whose quiet power and sagacity go unremarked” (p. 138). Ultimately, in Ocean Stirrings, Collins offers a blueprint for the ways in which contemporary readers can use what Brathwaite (1984) referred to as ‘nation language’, grassroots wisdom, and strategic resilience to galvanize themselves into sustainable, audible progress.

We speak our own stories.