Poetry in Motion: Linzey Corridon + West of West Indian

Linzey Corridon on West of West Indian:

The collection is written in free verse, paying close attention to curating the brief yet critical individual and collective experiences of Queeribbean (queer Caribbean) and diaspora lives. These lives appear via invocations of the ephemeral figure of the Bullerman, the Chi Chi man, the Funny man, and the Anty man. In each instance, the once derogatory language meant to undermine queer Caribbean lives is a device that reveals new perspectives into how the seemingly hostile language entangles queer Caribbean worlds and people with broader social, political, and cultural genealogies. The lyric and the elegy sew three sections of verse into one. I mourn a Caribbean queerness that once was in the “Portraits” section, I ruminate on what is Queeribbean and diaspora in the “Diary” section, and the collection closes with articulations of Queeribbean and diaspora futures—what will be— in the “Musings” section. The result is a work steeped in rituals of honesty and the visceral. A work of psychic and fleshy cartographies.

I wanted to trace some of the affectual and material maps governing bodies associated with Queeribbean lifeworlds. I felt that this mapping-work would best thrive in the space of poetry. I felt a sense of urgency to add to the burgeoning body of Queeribbean literature sustaining lifeworlds beyond the more popular understandings of our experiences. I wanted to tease apart some of the complexities that tied my life to other lives around me, many of them queer and queered because of their West Indian ontologies. The collection slowly came together as I attempted the work of mapping the ever-transforming space of living my iteration of a Queeribbean life. I take inspiration from the people who shaped my experiences of island and diaspora living, whether these individuals intended this is unclear to me, and I map one boy-turned-man’s coming to terms with muddied themes such as love, loss, and longing.

The book is a project that attempts to transform conversations about how we create, deploy, and sustain muddied identity. The work also cultivates a theory of materialism and the quotidian which highlights how our simplest, often taken-at-face-value relationships to the material world informs micro and/or macro sociocultural and political structures governing queer and queered life on a local, regional, and global scale. Our understandings of a particular category like queer or Caribbean are usually tied to how we position ourselves within these political structures. West of West Indian attempts to generate a space in which we might further contemplate the usefulness of the language of categories and role that the individual continues to play in the (de)construction of frameworks governing queer Caribbean and diaspora living.

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Linzey Corridon is a writer, Vanier Canada Scholar, and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His critical and creative research can be found in, among other venues, The Ex-Puritan, Wasafiri, Montreal Writes, Canada and Beyond, Journal of West Indian Literature, and more. Born and raised in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he resides in Canada. West of West Indian is his debut book-length project.

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West of West Indian is available now, here or from your favourite indie bookstore.

For more Poetry in Motion, click here.