Cane, Corn & Gully

Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781739902155
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Cane, Corn & Gulley is a genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe, question and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity. Using labanotation and rhythm to analyse movement from Caribbean dances to movements carried out in everyday rituals, Kinshasa uses these motifs as a form of cartography for the poems.

Cane, Corn & Gulley interrogates survival, sexual exploitation, race, gender, and class and invests in a unique discourse on the violence inflicted on the black female body (historically and presently). It explores the meaning of movement in oppressive ideological structures and serves to vindicate the rebellious acts of black women past, present and yet to come.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Phrase 18
• I Tied My Teeth to My Feet & Ate My Own Testament
• Bone & Breathless
• De Wind Only Likes Me From de Waist Down
• The Casuarina Tree Is an Elder
• Small Breasts & Sweetcorn
• Phrase 4
• Flying Fish
• I Am Doing the Best I Can
• I Salted de Mud With My Palms but More ah Me Grew
• What More Do You Expect From a Woman Whose Hands Are Made From Okra?
• Behind de Garrison
• Sometimes Death Is a Child Who Plays With Rubber Bands
• Preface: And if by Some Miracle
• Gully
• Hungry Man
• We Coming
• The Devil Can’t Two-Step
• They Lived. That Was Enough
• Phrase 57
• Excerpt from A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes
• A Mother in Israel
• Testimonial From Castor Oil Girls Who Still Found Rainbows After
• 12 Shots Who Warned Me ‘Sweet’ Was Dangerous
• G.O.A.T.
• I Am Holding the Mona Lisa Hostage Until You Return My Fourth Great Grandmother
• I Laid Flowers on His Grave Then Waited fuh Him on de Veranda
• Phrase 41
• Across-Atlantic Child
• Pork/Interlude
• Phrase 63
• Our Culture Came of Age & Grew Nipples for the BBC & Hollywood to Suck On
• Marilyn Monroe Is de Bogeyman
• Coconuts
• Hereditary
• Phrase 15
• Miss Barbados Is No Longer Vegan
• A Dancehall Queen
• The Smell of Dark Girls
• Care For Me Like You Would a Leg Injury
• In Bridgetown, a Man Who Hangs His Socks in a Shopping Trolley Is Saving Up to Buy His Dead Mother a New Hat So She Can Finally Gain Some Control Over the Sun
• Speightstown Is Such a Darling Place
• The Cage
• Phrase 20
• Cinderella
• ‘Avoid Direct Contact With the Skull’
• Duplex
• Slow Whine
• Choreography: She, My Nation
• I Stood at the Edge of an Eclipse Facing My Captor
• Key
• Appendix
• Key Informants & Agitators
• Acknowledgements
• Other titles by Out-Spoken Press