SPEAK OF THE ADVENT OF NEW LIGHT: JAMAICAN PROVERBS AND ANANCY STORIES 81

tradition, but there is, as far as I can tell, no sense that two different
kinds of language are being spoken. The closing line's allusion to
Matthew 13:5 "some seeds fell upon stony places" feels as if it
comes from the same metaphysical place as the allusion to herbal
medicine in the opening. Partly this is because the biblical text
Goodison has chosen uses the same kind of concrete language as folk
proverbs. But more important, perhaps, it is because they really do
come from the same place; both folk proverbs and the Bible are part of
the Jamaican's share of inherited knowledge.
 This meeting of folk knowledge and biblical knowledge in Goodison's
poetry creates some of its most characteristic effects. In "Speak of the
Advent of New Light" the poem that gives this paper its title -
Goodison imagines light sparking "from the heal of a homeless woman's
shoe" and glowing

 in the cupped palms of a night fisherman
 as he bends to test the waters off the bay
 near surrender, the wonder of the living water
 bearing footprints and currents of fresh beginnings.
 And small children will come in from play
 pulling like kites behind them luminous
 streamers of light, infused with such colours
 as never the prism of the eye has reflected.
 New light succeeding dark is certain, is expected.13

The last line here proverbially combines folk wisdom and religious
conviction. It is a reformulation of the folkish observation that 'it's
always darkest before the dawn,' but it is also an assertion that the
revelation anticipated in Christ's miracles in "the living water/
bearing footprints" will come to pass, and that the oppressed, the
homeless and the poor, will see it first. In this respect, the poem
works in the same way as an Anancy story: it describes the setting
up of a trick that is paradoxically both anticipated and impossible
to foresee because never before seen, and then it describes the trick
itself, a turning inside-out of expectations. In this case the trick makes
darkness into light, and the discarded and downtrodden into the
children of God. In fact, the Anancy trick has become the Christian
miracle.


13 Goodison "Speak of the Advent of New Light," Roses 45.