36 contemporary poetry
section the poem indicates that the lost sister, as her mother, will
leave ‘no footprint’ (p. 53 ), no major historical testimony of her
life. But Song suggests that the extensive passage travelled over the
Pacifi c is proof enough of ‘the unremitting space of your rebellion’
(p. 53 ). As a whole Picture Bride enables a space where biographies
erased by the major narratives of history can be granted articulation
and expression.
Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems ( 1984 ) also details
an experience of migration.^17 Nichols states that the volume came
initially ‘out of a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman
doing exactly as she pleases... taking a satirical, tongue-in-cheek
look at the world’.^18 Born originally in Guyana, Nichols immi-
grated to England in 1977 , but her poetry is resolutely informed
by her identity as a Guyanese-Caribbean. Yet Nichols warns that
even this identifi cation as a Caribbean poet must be read in terms
of hybridity, infl uences upon her work come from ‘the different
immigrant groups who came out to the Caribbean: East Indians,
Chinese and Portuguese. My voice as a writer has its source in that
region’ (p. 283 ). Nichols also states that ‘Difference, diversity and
unpredictability make me tick.’^19 The Fat Black Woman’s Poems
present a speaker who negotiates the problems of everyday living in
London. Its discrete lyric mediations on family, sexual encounters
and landscapes of Guyana frequently interrogate the legacies of
slavery and colonialism. More recently Nichols has asserted that
she does not specifi cally want to be read as a postcolonial poet but
as a writer in a community of other immigrants:
... living now in London, who had a past from which they
have been uprooted and they were addressing an audience
as uprooted as themselves, and not any one particular kind
of audience. I suppose that in a way is a bit more appealing
than postcolonial, because not just black writers have been
uprooted.^20
Nichols prefers instead to be identifi ed as a ‘trans-cultural writer’,
a term which embraces a range of immigrant experience.
The fi rst section of the volume presents a larger-than-life char-
acter described in the fi rst poem ‘Beauty’ as ‘a fat black woman