Fables from the Women's Quarters

Sparling Mills was a freelance reviewer living in Herring Cove, N.S.

Claire Harris, the author of Fables from the Women’s Quarters, is a black woman whose roots “are very deeply embedded in the black earth of the West Indies” (p.43) and who now lives in Alberta. The most vivid of the poems is “Policeman Cleared In Jaywalking Case” (pp.37-4l), set in Edmonton. First of all, Harris quotes a passage from the Edmonton Journal, which reports that “The city policeman who arrested a juvenile girl for jaywalking March 11, has been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Alberta law enforcement appeal board after the girl was arrested, strip-searched and jailed in the adult detention centre.” The girl was black. Harris contrasts the brutality of the above scene with a time twenty years ago at home in the “loud tropic air” when she herself was fifteen and stepped off the curb into traffic. The black policeman was solicitous. When she had assured him she was all right, she was “released with a smile, ...with sympathy sent on in the warm green morning” (p.39). In anger, Harris condemns the “white fire white heavens white words” (p.38). In defiance she declares “here I stand black and female bright black on the edge of this white world and I will not blend in nor will I fade into the midget shades peopling your dream. ...This is a poem black in its most secret self” (p.40).

This ability to identify with others further manifests itself in “Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent” (pp.21-28). For inspiration, Harris has gone to the testimony of Rigoberto Manchu (Guatemala). His words are at the bottom of each page, while above is the poem. He tells of the army burning people alive to serve as a deterrent to others who might become guerrillas. He tells of the soldiers torturing his mother in an open field, filling “her body with worms” and staying to watch the buzzards and dogs eat her. We read: “our only way of commemorating the spilled blood of our parents was to go on fighting and following the path they had followed” (p.27). We know from Harris’s accompanying poem that she understands Manchu’s depth of feeling.

The two poems I have mentioned are the most important ones in the book; however, others are certainly worth study. The author even includes five Haiku — I quote the best here:

in the prairie dawn

a pheasant calls to its mate

In three lines, Claire Harris has revealed her profound empathy.