The writer and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane’s third book, and her second full length collection, Guaracara, emerges almost fifteen years after her debut, Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press, 2011), and more than a decade on from the appearance of her chapbook publication Houses Of The Dead (Thamesis, 2014). The long gaps were explained by Kane herself back in 2016, in a short interview with The Poetry School:

“There seems to be a view [in both writing and architecture], that anything less than full-time attention means you can never be a serious practitioner. But one side will always infect the other. There is always a battle to find some guilt-free time for one or the other. As architecture is my main means to make a living for now, writing has to be in short and intense bursts, valuable thought-time [but] too far apart these days…”

But despite these ongoing issues in finding the time to devote to her writing, it is clear that these three books, taken together, nonetheless stake out a cohesive imaginative territory and distinctive approach despite the long gaps (and changes of publisher) imposed by the circumstances between their respective appearances.

In Tantie Diablesse, Kane explored the history of her native Trinidad & Tobago through the figure of a fictional woman, “an immortal witness of Caribbean history”, tapping into the island’s traditions of folklore, carnival masking and ‘robber talk’ – an approach to storytelling “where real objects and events become hyperbolized into fantastic versions of themselves” – to create a shifting perspective, capable of bearing witness to the colonial exploitations of past slavery and present day ‘big oil’ alongside the many layers of ordinary life, family connection and everyday resistance taking place in their shadows.

Houses Of The Dead, meanwhile, drew on the voice of another semi-fictional persona, known only as The Surveyor, to describe a series of deserted and derelict architectural interiors in evocative prose segments set alongside the author’s own monochrome photographs. Now, with this third collection, Guaracara, Kane fuses the approaches of those two earlier collections, frequently alternating between the (mostly) lineated lyric and narrative poems of her debut, and the sometimes anecdotal, sometimes more dream-like or occasionally essayistic prose poetry of her chapbook, building Guaracara into a kind of fragmented but layered memory palace.

Her third collection’s title sequence, Guaracara, is named after a river in South Trinidad, to the north of her birthplace in San Fernando, and comprises a sequence of short, impressionistic prose poems delving into the author’s own childhood memories of a period of polio quarantine during the early 1970s, a period that, on the evidence of the poem itself, seems akin, in its heightened awareness of the surreal aspects of ordinary lived experience in the shadow of an oil refinery’s industrial pollution and an invisible threat, to some of the atmosphere generated by the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021:

I remember when the river caught fire. The water was already thickened with oil-sludge. Someone lit their rubbish and the wind threw sparks onto the water’s surface. We stood in our street a half-mile away, and watched the bonfire’s flames grow taller than the houses. It burnt through the night, despite the drizzle. The glow moved slowly, followed the river’s slackened flow to the sea, catching the crude covered trees along the banks, to bring death to the already dead. [‘Guaracara 16’]

As this passage demonstrates, however, the familiar aspects of this strange recollected hiatus (to those of us who experienced a more recent quarantine in the UK) are also grounded in the very particular and specific context of Trinidad itself, with its long histories of colonial and environmental exploitation, its economic and social foundations built on slavery and indenture. In the thirteen poem sequence ‘Let Us Mourn The Death Of King Sugar’, Kane considers the 300 year history of sugar cane production and sugar refinement in Trinidad, and the industry’s summary shutdown by government decree in 2003 after the loss of EU subsidies, as shaping forces in the lives of those living on the island. Its first section, ‘We Condemn You’, opens:

The final poem of ‘Let Us Mourn The Death Of King Sugar’, titled ‘We Place Your Shroud Over You, To Wait’, conflates the death of the sugar industry itself with the innumerable human bodies destroyed in its creation, the land it formerly occupied carved up into pieces to sell off, any resurrection precluded as “concrete will get pour // into your veins, to form / traces that swell into roads // where rainstorms hold themselves back […] until one day, they burst out…”

watch how it flood and wash
all nourishment from inside you

until your skin, your soul, turn
to a desert, a flat nothingness

spread out to the edge of the sea
until it fill up with your floating dead

Both between and within these larger scale explorations of colonial history and industrialised exploitation is the presence of ordinary life, family, children, the search for belonging and some kind of stable home. The book’s closing ‘Ancestral Coda’ section opens with ‘Home Is…’, a list of potential answers to the open ended ellipsis posed by the title: “a demolition where the heart implodes […] a dream that moves you, never to arrive […] a lost ticket to a play about a family in a living room”, and so on. The prose poem that follows, ‘X/Other’, tips its hat to the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self (1987) – much as several other poems here carry DNA from his formative earlier work on the Middle Passage and Caribbean history – while noting “My pen hesitates, wants to pretend it understands, pretend it knows where and when to place its mark.”

In ‘Gold’, the passing of “drop earrings, bracelets […] chain-linked anklets strung with jet beads” between generations of women, after their gifting to a newborn, comes to embody the larger histories within these small familial and communal rites: “[Her mother] knows that those who are owned // need to own something of themselves, / even if it must always stay // unseen, unworn, under the lid / of a basket. But she herself // has nothing to give except her / labour in the fields, with its glint // of cutlass against sugar cane / stalks…”

Ultimately, these are poems that draw on memory and lived experience – both ancestral and personal – to map and create resonances within a much larger history in both its most exploitative and violent, and most intimate and tender, forms. Perhaps, as in her debut, Kane’s deployment of those ‘robber talk’ storytelling approaches allows for the personal and anecdotal material to remain “real objects and events”, with a strong sense of the material conditions of the lives described, while also becoming “hyperbolized into fantastic versions of themselves”, or at the very least, much larger and more resonant versions of themselves.

The poems about family, locality and childhood here invariably exceed the literal and merely descriptive to open oblique windows into a far more evocative kind of ongoing historical vision. If that sounds like hard going, though, it really shouldn’t. The heavier, darker material is always counterpointed with a more intimate or human touch, and there is a strong lyric sense running across the whole collection. As a taster, perhaps the short poem ‘The Mahogany Copse’ is worth quoting in full to give a sense of the lyrical strengths and historical weight in play throughout Guaracara:

The Mahogany Copse

In this thin air they show us their own ghosts.
They ignore the time of wounds, and falling.

There are no tales of shaven skin, or limbs
pulled apart and cut to be burnt, as they know

the wicking of blood has its own grain. But soon,
they will group to form a timepiece of our seasons

which will slide under our bodies, and blend
their ichor tint with ash, while we sleep.

Wayne Burrows

[Full disclosure – I wrote a blurb note for Kane’s ‘Tantie Diablesse’ back in 2011 and published some of her earlier poems in Staple (2007 – 2010)]

Book Details

Fawzia Muradali Kane

Fawzia Muradali Kane is an architect and poet. Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, she came to the UK on a scholarship to study architecture. She now lives in London and is a director of KMK Architects. Her debut poetry collection Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press 2011) was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2014, Thamesis Publications produced her long sequence Houses of the Dead as an illustrated pamphlet. Her short story ‘Anguilla City’ was the 2018 City of Stories winner for Westminster in London. Her prose poem ‘Eric’ won second prize in 2023’s National Poetry Competition.