Tweet Tweet

There’s a blackbird
in my mango tree
and I think of Marley
and singing songs of freedom

I have followed birds
from hills
to home
and back
wondering where was Zion

but now I am content
on this verandah

the blackbirds come to my mango tree
and sing

home is always
where it’s meant to be

I am sure
that’s what blackbirds sing

Mango season, so I read, is just about starting in Jamaica. Meanwhile, blackbirds have been announcing spring in the UK for many months, in defiance of wind and weather. Tweet Tweet, from Jean “Binta” Breeze’s latest Bloodaxe collection, The Verandah Poems, twins these sense-delighting symbols of hope and home, the mango tree and the blackbird, in a poem to welcome the light and cheer us up wherever we may be.

The symbolism of bird and tree is heightened in the culminating lines of the opening stanza, where the poet “think(s) of Marley/and singing songs of freedom”.

Listening to Breeze, a Jamaican who’s often described as the first woman dub poet, I was surprised and delighted to hear her singing part of the same Redemption Song. She is a magnificent performer and in this earlier recording of her work there’s a powerful and overt political thrust.

The current poem, while far from apolitical, works through gentler stresses and silences, winding a thread of melody out of the past and its suffering. Its redemption story is simpler than the one Marley tells, and perhaps relies more on the reader to understand context. Yet the unpunctuated flow of the poem imparts some quality of Marley’s haunted lyricism, his sweet tone and leisured pace. Tweet Tweet impresses both the ear and the eye. I like the way it occupies the page, allowing light through its short spare lines, simple diction and frequent stanza breaks.

Characteristically, Breeze’s poems are more than personal: they gather up and speak for a collective experience, often the experience of women. Here, the big, sacred, Rastafari vision of Zion and associated political triumph contrasts with the smaller, domestic concept of home. In “wondering where was Zion” the poet hints at irony, and the reader might also notice, embedded in the sound of the cleverly chosen present participle, “wondering”, the “wandering” of a traveller between unsatisfied ideals of home. This second stanza evokes restlessness, despite the stops it makes to draw a strong breath at the line breaks. An ancient weariness pervades the movement “from hills/to home/and back”. Blackbirds fly more easily to their chosen tree, their mango-Zion.

There are probably at least 14 ways of looking at the blackbird(s) in this poem. Taking the literal one first, I wondered about the species itself. The Jamaican blackbird is a highly adapted bird, a forest dweller with a “wheezing call”. So perhaps it’s not the one in the poem. If Breeze’s blackbird belongs to the more widespread “common” species (which sometimes migrates), it could be seen as the unifying factor in the poet’s understanding of “home”. Breeze, I understand, has bases in the Caribbean and in England: she may well be “at home” with the English blackbirds’ song. Transplanted to the mango tree, that song may complicate ideas of home.

The blackbirds’ message, “home is always/where it’s meant to be” seems, however, to be unambiguous. There’s a faintly religious intonation: things that are “meant to be” are thought traditionally to be divinely decreed, or at least ordained by fate. The recovery of home, post-diaspora, might be seen as guaranteed by birthright. The embedded pun in “blackbirds” is light touch, sure-footed and it grounds the poem. There’s an echo in the last two lines, perhaps, of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Maya Angelou (“I know why the caged bird sings”). But here the cage is open, and the bird still sings.

Despite the glow of celebration and the touch of irony (not forgetting that of the title), Tweet Tweet is a strong-minded poem of identity, contentedly asserting its principles and priorities. Home, for the speaker, isn’t “over there” in millenarian Zion, nor in any adopted land. It’s here, where the poet sits writing, recuperating, socialising, in a very specific location: her Jamaican verandah.