Book Review: West of West Indian, Linzey Corridon

I met Linzey in A-Level College, the Vincentian equivalent of Grades 12 and 13. We were in French together, a class that attracted weirdos and outsiders. It felt safe, or at least, safer than the rest of the outside world. He and I weren't close, but we were friendly. The type of person that runs in similar circles as you and who you thought was cool, but didn’t know as well as you might have wanted to. I understand now that we were both awkward queer kids, fish out of water in the tiny bubble of our homeland. 

Fifteen or so years later, the bubble has long since burst. We are both out and proud and live in Ontario, Canada.

He has become a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and PhD candidate at McMaster University, and has published his first book of poems, ‘West of West Indian.’ 

In this beautiful and heartbreaking collection, Linzey writes about the beauty and pain of being a queer person from small-island Caribbean (as in, born and raised there, a very different experience from being of Caribbean descent, born and raised in the diaspora). The below is less a traditional literary review, and more a written version of the reflection that his poetry induces in me, a queer person from small-island Caribbean. 

The experience of being a Canadian-based, Vincentian-born-and-raised queer person is an extremely specific, extremely emotional one. I am grateful to him for putting into words what I could not.

He writes, which I highlighted in red,

The land of my birth refuses to love me back

In tears, I said almost that very sentence to my dad, a few days prior to writing this.

There is a deep grief in Linzey’s writing about his experience of forced exile from the country that we are from. As queer Caribbean people, we know that we cannot return to our countries as our full selves without facing overt discrimination, harassment, disgust, discomfort, scrutiny, rejection, dismissal and ridicule at best, and arrest and life-threatening violence at worst.

He writes,

Amazona guildingii shriek for us,

and our half-written sinuous chapters,

they are to remain unfinished.

This is the tragedy of the Caribbean queer.

Although the perspective he shares is unique to Linzey as a Vincentian, anyone who was raised in a country where they are persecuted for their gender or sexuality will see themselves in his work. Replace the Amazona guildingii with Jamaica’s doctor bird or Trinidad’s scarlet ibis, and the rest of the passage would remain just as true.

Defiantly, almost triumphantly, Linzey uses, reclaims regional queerphobic and transphobic slurs freely throughout the book: “funnyman”, “antiman”, “buller man”, “chi chi man”, “he she”, “girl man”. There are no translations for these words, no footnotes explaining the history, meaning and intended impact of these slurs. And so the poems read as an if-you-know-you-you-know, for an audience who already does know and needs no translation. They are for us. The words are jarring on the page, like when someone says a dark and unspoken truth out loud at a family event. 

And at once, the collections read like a love letter to the people given these names, who survive this violence and create a pained and fragmented forced diaspora. 

Linzey’s poems name these people, us, in black and white and describe their stories briefly, but in full colour.

The last verses of the second-last poem, titled like the book ‘West of West Indian’, read,

Let me remind you that I, that you,

that we will never be extinguished.

For me, this is the note that ties the work together. It is the assertion that regardless of the violence, the perpetual grief, the uprooting, we will always be here.

Purchase West of West Indian at this link.