From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People.

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Jamaica-born, Toronto-based, and now teaching at Ann Arbour, Lorna Goodison has gained a deserved reputation as a poet for her eight collections of prize-winning verse plus two collections of short stories. In this beautifully written “memoir of my mother and her people,” Goodison the poet captures something of the character and the way of life, not only of her mother but of all her family going back several generations. But this is much more than a factual narrative of her ancestors, the family tree included notwithstanding. The poet in Goodison aims rather at reconstructing and reimagining in an aesthetically pleasing and spiritually convincing manner the history of her predecessors. Of course she takes liberties with dates and facts in order to make the narrative flow more freely, which is the function of poetic licence. From Harvey River is a wonderfully interesting and informative memoir, but it is also a work of art. Although her mother, Doris, lived in only two places throughout her life—Harvey River in the parish of Hanover, and the city of Kingston—this memoir goes back to the 19th century, runs right up through the 20th century, and tells us much about the history and customs of her native island in a narrative that is not strictly chronological, since the death of one character often sets the author flashing back or forward to another episode in the life of this fascinating family and their customs, their actions, and their neighbours.

From Harvey River, which is divided into three parts, takes us back to the foundation of the family home in early 1900 by Goodison’s maternal great-grandfather, Englishman William Harvey. Another great-grandfather was George O’Brian Wilson, father of Margaret Goodison’s grandmother, the dominating matriarch of the family, whose eight children pop out and into the narrative, especially Doris, the mother of the author Lorna. Faced with wartime poverty and hardship during the Second World War II, Doris and Marcus and family have to abandon the country paradise to settle sown in the lower class area of Kingston. Mama Goodison, as she was affectionately known, gains a reputation as a kind, charitable, but tough character, who helps family, friends, and neighbours by means of her sewing machine and her never empty cooking pot. To escape the harsh reality of life, Doris returns in dreams and memory to the lost paradise of Harvey River. In a sense, this is what the poet-daughter has done in this beautifully written memoir, as in her previous collections of poetry.

Lorna Goodison has a sharp eye and a keen ear for the sights and sounds and smells and rhythms of her native island, which she presents in a vivid, colourful, and at times dreamy, poetic prose—without ignoring the realities of life in 20th century Jamaica: the poverty, the racism, the political corruption, the anti-colonialism, and finally the 1960s emancipation from the imperial mother country which helped to form them. From Harvey River is a fine work of art and an entertaining family memoir that transcends time and place in its handling of universal metaphysical problems that confront the human condition.