While the two main strands of Caribbean poets have either tended towards a claim of a Western elitist literary affiliation or to a ‘low’, African-derived cultural tradition, the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison has developed a polyphonic voice allowing her to draw on the wide range of her literary and cultural influences. Her poetry spans from the performance of a prophetic voice which witnesses and denounces the wrongs and hardships of the marginalised people in Jamaica, to a more intimate tone celebrating everyday female resistance. Her commitment and her passionate denunciation draw as much from the language of the Bible as from Rastafarian discourses, and her poetic voice is equally nurtured by ancestral knowledge and classical literature. As she fashions herself as a present-day griotte freely travelling from one linguistic and cultural code to another, she crosses over categories, forms, and languages. In her powerful language, which combines touches of Jamaican creole and echoes from Dante and Brunetto Latini, through an ironical re-negotiation of Wordsworth and Keats, words are used to heal and provide a sense of social and political justice.
While she exposes the limits of a narrow division between creative and theoretical writing, she seems to suggest a theorizing at the crossroads, as a trickster constantly crossing borders and defying categorizations, deeply aware of the liberating, mystic power of the word. The aim of this paper is to explore the complexities of the poet’s refusal of strict cultural affiliations, proposing the ‘delivering of the word’ as a therapeutic rite to negotiate the impact of colonial heritage.