HUGH HODGES


practitioner of black magic dealing in herbal poisons that sow discord
and confusion. Each succeeding verse begins with a formulation that
is part freshly-made proverb and part counter-magic to this science of
bitterness herbs. The proverbs help create a community defined by
shared wisdom. The poem then calls on that community to witness
and chastise, a call it makes in terms that suggestively allude to the
old Myal practice of rooting out Obeah, in order to prepare for the
return to Eden: "Such herbs are best destroyed, rooted out of the
garden." In this way the proverbs help create a kind of rhetorical magic.
Each proverb elicits surprised assent as acknowledgment of its novelty
is followed by recognition of its validity. Importantly, that recognition
is here bound up with recognition of shared cultural knowledge
(specifically knowledge about herbal medicine and Obeah), making
"the necessary and preordained past" not a source of bitterness, but a
source of shared experience so that nobody has to eat alone or "bake
bad-minded bread."
 Goodison's poetry frequently uses this combination of proverbial
formulation and folk knowledge. Take, for example, "Name Change:
Morant Bay Uprising," a poem about the 1865 rebellion led by Baptist
Deacon Paul Bogle. The immediate cause of the uprising was the
government's refusal to allow Jamaican peasants access to farmland,
forcing them to either accept wage-slavery on the plantations, or try
to scratch out a living on the slopes of Jamaica's mountains. The poem
uses proverbs as a frame, beginning with the observation,

 After the trouble
 some with the name Bogle
 catch fraid like sickness
 and take panic for the cure,

and ending,

 Sometimes after man see hanging
 as example, preach like Paul,
 your words will fall on stony ground.12

In this instance Goodison is drawing on two apparently different
traditions of proverbial wisdom, the oral folk tradition and the biblical


12 Goodison, "Name Change: Morant Bay Uprising," Roses 37.