Timothy Hodge, winner of the 2020 Malliouhana Poetry “Spoken Word” Competition with his Virtual Reality, The Year of Uncertainty, has had four of his poems published in a regional publication, the 34th Edition of The Caribbean Writer. The poems, Slave River, Memorial Stones, Westward from Elmina, and Catharsis, form part of a section of travel reflections from participants, including Mr. Hodge, in the University of the Virgin Islands’ Passport to the World trip to Ghana, West Africa, in December, 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the scheduled launch of the publication at the VI Literary Festival and Book Fair was replaced by a Webinar on July 18 and 19 under the theme “Interrogating the Past, Re-imagining the Future”. The Webinar featured conversations and mini-workshops with prominent Caribbean personalities and authors, as well as presentations by several of those whose works were published, including Mr. Hodge. The Keynote Presentations were made by Dr. Hollis Liverpool, who is Trinidad and Tobago’s leading calypsonian “Chalkdust” and a lecturer at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and Paul Keens-Douglas, one of the Caribbean’s most eloquent and best-known raconteurs and social commentators, writing and performing and preserving the oral traditions.
The Caribbean Writer is an international, refereed, literary journal with a Caribbean focus, founded in 1986 and published annually by the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI). Its mission is to publish quality writing by established writers that reflects the culture of the Caribbean; promotes and foster a strong literary tradition; and serves as an institute for the development of emerging writers. It features new and exciting voices from the region, and beyond, that explores the diverse and multi-ethnic culture in poetry, short fiction, personal essays, creative non-fiction, and short plays.
Mr. Hodge, who completed his undergraduate studies at UVI, is now a PhD candidate nearing completion of a PhD in Creative Leadership for Innovation and Change, also at UVI. He has written a considerable number of poems, as well as plays, which he intends to publish and have performed shortly. He has kindly shared two of the poems published in The Caribbean Writer with The Anguillian newspaper.
- Contributed
Poetry by Mr. Timothy Hodge:
MEMORIAL STONES
The stones
They left behind
Formed by nature’s hand
Shaped by eons of crashing waves
The stones
Monuments
To the ancestors
Taken away
Shipped
To distant horizons
To distant shores
To toil
To suffer
To shape
Foreign lands
The stones
Memorials
To the ancestors
Who leapt
Who were thrown
To watery graves.
The stones
Not shipped
The stones remain
Memorial stones
Millions
Multitudes
Missing
The stones
Remain
Monuments
Memorials
Messages …
SLAVE RIVER
Capture!
Slave River
Assin Manso
Sacred place
Wailing walk
The last bath
Cannot wash away Africa
Cannot wash away Africanness
Auction cannot devalue human worth
Branding cannot create ownership
Chains cannot constrain strength
Fear cannot overpower faith
Horror cannot murder hope
Shackles cannot restrain resistance
March to Elmina cannot exhaust spirit
Dungeons cannot destroy dignity
Door of no Return cannot sever forever
Middle Passage cannot annihilate
Enslavement cannot conquer freedom!
