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Caribbean writing.
Born in Trinidad, she came to Britain when she was 11. For much of her career she was primarily concerned with exploring, understanding and writing through her consciousness of operating in that liminal space between two cultures known but never fully claimed.
She went to school in London and took a degree in English with African and Caribbean studies at the University of Kent. Although she had various stints teaching at one level and another, including for some time as a lecturer at the University of Warwick, she lived essentially as a writer, writing tutor and performer. She settled in Coventry in the late 1980s, where she was able to buy a reasonably priced house which, as she often said, gave her both the security of a base and work space and the freedom to travel as and when the inclination or opportunity took her. Although she had an ebullient performance persona and often wrote quite directly about her personal experience, off stage she was a private person, protective of her own space and the time she could devote to her writing.
Her sense of an essential identity was formed by her Trinidad childhood, but after the move to London, where her adolescent and adult life was lived in a sometimes hostile cultural environment, she was never quite comfortable in either place. Amryl confronted that hostility to her as a black woman in Britain - and the distinctive angle on British/Caribbean history it underscored - in some plain-spoken and angry early poems which appeared in her first pamphlet collection, Shackles. This established her reputation as an original voice at a time when there were relatively few young black
voices to be heard in British literature:
. . . I am
Black
And I am
Angry
My name is
Midnight
Without
Pity
However, her return visits to Trinidad
were not always unproblematic in terms of
her wish to identify with the place
and its people. The sometimes unsettling reaction of many of
those people to her - her blackness
there signifying less than her middle-class English
accent and inevitably metropolitan attitudes - caused her
some anguish. That sometimes painful
re-engagement with Trinidad - and indeed
the wider Caribbean - was the subject of two collections of poems,
Long Road to Nowhere
(1985) and the spiritual travelogue Sequins for a
Ragged Hem (1988).
Sequins is a powerful and unusual book, in that it
combines the familiar traveller's tales with
an account of another kind of journey
and process of discovery, as Johnson confronts the "ghost
who was haunting herself" in order
that she might come to terms with her sense of a fragmented identity. The poems in Long Road
to Nowhere chart that same journey
in different forms and show her experimenting with a creole voice
which gave her, and her audiences, another
way into the experience.
Through the 90s, Amryl became increasingly
fascinated by myth, and experimented with ways of inventing,
adapting and applying myth to her contemporary
multicultural experience. Her 1992
collection, Gorgons, engaged with the Greek myth of Medusa
in a sequence of very powerful poems that
took the twin metaphors of "the look
that can kill" and of one who "looks but never sees"
to an analysis of the situation of
women in contemporary life. Although she was impatient with
some of the exclusivities that characterise
different "schools" of feminism
at the beginning of the 21st century, Amryl was very much engaged
in and by the women's movement. The
diverse cast of women's voices in Gorgons is an expression of her commitment to that cause.
Her most recent publication, Calling, which
was launched last year, also engages with myth and the associations
of the female voice in poetry. There were plans to adapt and produce Gorgons as an opera
or musical. Certainly Amryl came to regard performance
as being an important - if not her primary - medium of communication.
She had a very powerful presence on stage,
but was also able to engage and enthuse
an audience, to involve them in the event that was her performance.
No one who ever saw her perform what she called her poem-song,
Far and High, was left unchallenged or unmoved.
Amryl Johnson, poet, born April 6 1944;
died February 1 2001.
(Reprinted from the Guardian.)