Books Launch—Eason Lee's'Encounters'

The Book Launch of Easton Lee's "Encounters", Kingston, Jamaica, 8/12/2003, by REX NETTLEFORD "Good morning gentleman good morning sar how can I be of assistance how can I help you sar oh, you looking for rector. No sar, him is not here right now Tek the missis to the doctor Yes, sar, feeling sick, every morning Nothing too serious In the fambly way..." And so the character goes on in a tonally piping monologue anticipating questions, volunteering answers before those questions are asked, and chatting her boss's business to a visitor who would probably be better off not knowing. But before the visitor could decline audience he finds himself the subject of diagnosis and the recipient of a prescription for the flu he is assumed to have - a prescription complete with such homegrown remedies as ginger, garlic and ganja. And on the story goes in a breathless stream of unsolicited data that are at once amusing, amazing, and with much to contemplate as well as even to disturb as Easton Lee, the author, in his Preface prepares us to expect. The protagonist in what I read is the Cleaner from the poem of that name. It is appropriately placed at the very beginning of the collection for it captures a great many of the brightest and best features of this latest collection of poems aptly entitled Encounters. This first encounter between his Cleaner and the visiting gentleman who comes to see the rector, her employer, speaks a great deal to Easton Lee's own keen Jamaican eye and ear, his highly nuanced sense and sensibility honed in the myriad encounters he himself has experienced throughout a life which is itself the result of one of many and myriad encounters. Such are the encounters which together make his native Jamaica the textured, diverse, unpredictable, kalaediscopic entity it is, and produce the likes of us all who demand from each other the constant exercise of the creative imagination in order to cope with characters like that cleaner and all the others who emerge, poem after poem, in this quite fascinating collection. The pieces are all mediated by the social reality of this aggregation of souls we call Jamaica and reflect the tapestry with its variety of threads interweaving their way into patterns that make sense and speak to sanity. Easton Lee is himself a perfect example of this feature. The collection has two subtitles - one, "voices and echoes", the other, "poems from a Chinese Jamaican experience". They both prepare us for the range of offerings with each echo driving us back to the original sound whether in the lilt of the language used by a particular persona or the theme ferreted out of the deep-structured cultural veins of precious material which original encounters helped to shape. So we are led to feel both the orthodox Christian and syncretic energies that drive our people to baptismal waters of a Bedward or that have Sister Ann and the flock labour "body and soul in prayer and fasting/ singing and chanting/ down on the ground the faithful! fall and writhe/ catching the spirit/ groaning moaning, trumping, to hoarseness and rapture..." Call it a generational thing but it is in poems like these that someone like myself catches the spirit of a Jamaica whose rural vitality once bolstered the sturdy independence of our peasant folk and provided sustenance for a life beyond the bush that would stave off urban blight and conserve, preserve the richness of inheritances from wherever all of our ancestors might have previously come. And here the photographs by Owen Minott, Dave Reid and the poet himself not just add to the text but bring into bold relief the images on the printed page. It is that rural setting from which the best of our values and attitudes presumably came that Easton Lee, I suspect, draws so much of his inspiration to give us so many of the gems in Encounters waiting for the orality of our tradition of elocution and the sonority of the echoes to the voicings. …