Shrinking Violet

This is a re post from the below sited issue of Callaloo; a prose piece dedicated to Phebus Etienne, a Haitian poet of astounding talent and depth. I found this short essay as well beautifully stated and poetic as the artist it commemorates. Thus, I found it necessary to illegally republish it in my blog.

976 Callaloo 30.4 (2007) 976–977
SHRINKING VIOLET
by Joseph O. Legaspi
I’m writing this on the birth date of my dear friend, Phebus Etienne. If she were alive
and blossoming, we’d be sitting across from each other at a table in a downtown Manhattan
restaurant, perhaps feasting on sushi or duck, most likely pleasantly tipsy from our
aperitif, yet still partaking of saké or fruity martini with our celebratory meal. We’d laugh
our boisterous laugh for Phebus possessed a wicked sense of humor, which she withheld
from many; then the good Haitian girl, her mother’s daughter, would blush like a shrinking
violet: the dichotomy of her character in one swoop. However, as I learned through a
decade of friendship, Phebus was rather a field of purple flowers.
But she is gone and at times I begrudge the gods who plucked her in the midst of her
happiest and most confident days. Phebus was embracing life like never before; venturing
out of her often times isolated existence. In the past years she’d discovered P.J. Harvey,
her inner angry rock girl, plunging necklines, fortitude, acceptance of her wants and frailties,
hot chocolate and pretzel croissant at City Bakery, new friendships, her inner Asian,
holding her ground, trust, urban tribes, forgiveness, her youth, drag shows, letting loose,
the all-night taco truck on 14th Street and 8th Avenue, a pit stop in the wee blue hours
after dancing . . .
I do not profess to understand death, let alone the incomprehensible demise of a beloved
friend, a promising poet. I’m resolved in accepting the fact that her organ-the-heart gave
out. There is distinction between the valves that pump and her generous, embattled heart,
which, although it had too much of the world, was vast, powerful, and encompassing.
Indeed, for most of her life the world had been cruel to Phebus, and it was nothing short
of a profound miracle that not only had she not given up on humanity, but rather that she
reaped its fecundity and marveled at its peculiarities and wonder.
So, how to commemorate a life cut short and yet lived fully? A life of someone you
loved as kin? To memorialize is to remember and celebrate; to defy time; to flesh out the
person, transcending even the earthly body. In a way, taking care of business as usual,
Phebus had done just that with her craft. Her devotion and brilliant practice of poetry attested
to her pursuit of life’s rich pageantries and vagaries. And what a wealth of poems
she bequeathed! In those poems: Haiti, her mother, family history, pain, poverty, longing,
sickness, gardens of fragrant flora, nostalgia, New Jersey, Paris, colonialism, Creole, race,
unemployment, 9/11, diaspora, rites, love, rituals, humor, ambition, a childhood, sorrows,
self-reckoning, the poignant lives of men and women, and at the heart of it, the poet, the
woman, Phebus Etienne.

977
C A L L A L O O
I like to imagine that she’s with her mother, whose cradling, loving arms Phebus yearned
for, in a version of homecoming like one described in her poem Avenues Revisited: “I went
home for particular colors,/ the iron pots grating on burning coals/ as conch meat simmered,/
goat bells mingling with car horns,/ to find words that I have forgotten.”
Phebus, you had created words beautifully and you will not be forgotten.

There's Always a First...

I was browsing the blog postings of some friends and associates of mine, and decided that maybe something like this would be useful to me. Now, this isn't going to always be the kind of blog where you sit down and read it, laugh a little, and move on...some of the stuff will be long, and boring. Ultimately, this is a place where I plan to flush out my ideas (most being literary in nature, some politics, some stuff about gender studies, and some pop-culture/media related posts). The goal is to improve my writing, engage some ideas in a public space, and see what comes back. I'm not writing for "the masses"...I'm not a journalist; I never claimed to be. You'll see some essays on here about books that people no longer read for pleasure. You'll see some stuff on here, I'm sure, about Kanye West's lyrics. There will be some picking apart of films, some posts about things I see around me, but most of it is just a laying out of the stuff that I usually occupies the space in my head, where I live. I say look at. Some of it may interest you.