As Hugh Epstein wrote in his Afterword poem to Common Mallow by David Winzar (1990), "There is the art of reticence/ and there's the life." In the case of Althea Romeo-Mark, the astonishing journey of her life confers a reticence to her poetry that the reader would not notice at first glance.
Island Childhoods
She was born in English Harbour, Antigua, where Nelson once had his dockyard and that loyal sailor, the future William IV, his island home. Her father was Gilbert Romeo, an entrepeneur farmer, union leader and story-teller from the Dominican Republic and her mother was a teacher from St.Croix in the US Virgin Islands. In the introduction to the first part of If Only the Dust Would Settle (2009), she descrjbes how the fences had to be painted whenever Queen Elizabeth came to stay at that same home. In one poem she from the same collection she describes an island funeral :
...the dead stared at life
the last time
for memory's sake.
We said our goodbyes
from behind closed doors
and gaps in lattices
and everything was still
-quite still.
Such Caribbean funerals are extraordinary, but it is Romeo-Mark's restraint that defines its now vanished culture.
At the age of eight her family moved to St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, according to her own account in If Only the Dust Would Settle. She fiercely evokes the sense of being a stranger."Is not kyat, is cat." They called the place "The Rock" and for the first time she experienced the excessive intrusiveness of American Caribbean society at that time. " "Our whereabouts were monitored by omnipresent neighbours." For all that the Island gave her an education, a first degree and that privileged prize, to be a Caribbean island woman.
Basins balanced on heads
water drips and trickles
and spills onto shoulders.
To the brave who pull the buckets up
from the center of the earth
they hold a soothing water.
Althea Romeo-Mark then settled in the US mainland as a national exchange student at the University of Connecticut. Her first impression of the American continent was the cold.
The cold nibbles our bones
and we draw shoulders up,
pull collars around our ears,
huddle to keep warm.
Though she also records its heat;
Khaki houses crouching
on sandy earth
creep onto the horizon.
A distant wildfire races
at the whim
of hot, desert winds.
Growing Up in America
She then went to Ohio. At the University she gained an MA in Modern American Literature. Her impressions of the Black American Civil Rights Movement are unique, as St Thomas was an American island where the majority of people were black. She felt mainland American blacks lobbied for an autonomy without bothering to study the experience of places where such autonomy already existed. Remarkably, it was with the African students that she found real friendship. She shared a culinary, linguistic and religious culture with them. She asks to borrow a child's smile.
I must stoke up
my flagging spirit
battered
and cold
from long journeys
filled with
blistering winters.
She joined the powerful African Students' Association at the nearby Kent State University.With them she published her first book, Shu Shu Moko Jumbie (1974)
A Liberian Adulthood
Inspired by the ideal of an autonomous country for Afro-Americans, Althea took a post as a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liberia. Her inspiration came from the Virgin Islander, Wilmot Blyden . At that time, Liberia was dominated by the privileged elite of the Americo Liberians who ran the country, despite the majority living in the interior, divided historically into diverse tribes. The economy was controlled by the milllion-acre Firestone tyre company whose workers were alleged to be no more than slaves by the ILO . Althea tells of the comfort and security of upper-middle class life. It gave rise to her second book., Palaver, which looks back to the Caribbean. Yet her house-boys told her tales about the jabless and the sukanahs, which awoke her memories of the jumbies of her childhood, part of the Animist religion, which spans millions of miles in its African diaspora. This is a world that co-exists with academic Pan-African theory. The title of her third book, expresses the dilemma, Two Faces, Two Phases. This is also the world of Bai T. Moore, one of Africa's most authentic writers, in which cultural privilege is undermined by the pull of tribal loyalty and faith.
She honours him in her fourth book, Beyond Dreams :
Then whisper in their ears.
Let them get up to take your place
for someone must continue
to cherish and to hold before our eyes
the glories of our heritage and our race.
The style of the poem is rhetorical and academic, unlike the demotic and colloquial style in which she evokes her earlier experiences. A remarkable feature of Althea's writing is the way each level of biography reflects both the life and the culture of place.
A Shattered Dream
Despite her marriage to a prominent doctor, three children and a position in the academic world of Liberia, the growing political unrest between the Americo-Liberians and the tribal interior slowly demolished her fourteen-year security. The coups of 1980, 1985 and 1989 took their toll. Althea Romeo-Mark's husband was taken away to be returned only after payment of a bribe. In her poems and short stories the dignity of her witness to this life is mirrored in restraint. Her poem on the Civil War (1989-2003) If Only the Dust Would Settle,
sets a tone of controlled anguish;
They stumbled over the dead
while fleeing to safety, marched long
across borders, battling searing sun
and battering rain, skirted dogs
devouring the flesh of swollen corpses.
The tone reflects the didactic Liberian tradition, but it is relieved by the detached informality of her earlier background.
Limbos of Exile
The family fled to England, on one of the last flights with just a suitcase: her husband came later. They spent six months in a London B&B. The experience of exile returned. In Bittersweet Interlude, she mourns
life in limbo,
depending on
the generosity of others,
is hard to swallow, but
it is not death.
It is not death.
As her husband's qualifications were Swiss, it made sense to settle in Switzerland. For the frist time in Basle, Althea experienced life as spoken in a dialect of a different language. She found Schweizerdeutsch a barrier. Even to learn the language meant she still could not speak to the locals in their tongue.
Her hair is a neglected garden-
the locks of a woman
who mourns the dead,
the locks of a marooned soul...
She lives and works in Basle and claims she will not move again.
Sources
- Firestone Rubber Plantation: An analysis of globalization and labour rights, Roosevelt Tule (Liberia) Available from; http://zope298.itcilo.org/ils/communicating-labour-rights/welcome Accessed 28/06/11
- Winzar, David, (1990) Common Mallow, Epsom, Manor Green Press:77
- Romeo-Mark, Althea,(1974) Shu Shu Moko Jumbi; the Silent Dancing Spirit Ohio, Kent State Department of Pan African Studies
- Romeo-Mark, Althea,(1978) Palaver; New York, Downtown Poets Co-operative
- Romeo-Mark, Althea,(1984) Two Faces, Two Phases, Monrovia, Speed-O-Graphics
- Romeo-Mark, Althea,(1989) Beyond Dreams, the Ritual Dancer, Monrovia, Sabanoh Press. Reprinted (2011)Basle, Ariagraphik Verlag
- Romeo-Mark, Althea, If Only the Dust Would Settle (2009) Basle, Aroma
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
