lyric subjects 37riding the waves’ (p. 7 ). Nichols’s fat black woman is adaptive,
aphoristic and irreverent. She assumes a centralising focus in each
of the small lyric poems of this section, sitting on ‘the golden stool’,
refusing to move while ‘white-robed chiefs / are resigned / in their
postures of resignation’ (p. 8 ). In making her central to the action
of each poem, Nichols successfully creates a world where the black
woman is neither marginal nor unheard. The sheer physicality of
her presence in these poems adds spontaneity to the work. Some
critics suggest that this tactic of corporeality can provide prob-
lems of recreating stereotypes. Mara Scanlon fi nds a diffi culty in
situating ‘a reclamation of identity too resolutely in the body, that
material presence which is invoked in literature philosophy and
theory by feminists and non-feminists alike to counter the slippery
identity constructions of poststructuralists’.^21 The danger, accord-
ing to Scanlon, is that this focus on the physical body may just rep-
licate the language of racist and sexist discourses. Nichols herself
suggests that writing this way grants her ‘some control over the
world, however erroneous that might be. I do not have to accept a
world that tries to deny not only black women but women on the
whole.’^22
‘The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping’ draws attention to
idealisations of beauty and the refusal of fashion products to cater
to her own body. Shopping in London becomes ‘a real drag’ and
‘de weather is so cold’, with the shops displaying their ‘frozen thin
mannequins’. In response, the fat black woman ‘curses in Swahili
/ Yoruba’ and ‘nation language’ (p. 11 ). Apparent in these poems
is nostalgia for warmth and community but Nichols is also at pains
to point out the idealisation of Caribbean living. In ‘Two Old Black
Men on a Leicester Square Park Bench’, in response to the men’s
memory of a ‘sunfull woman you might have known’, a voice chides
‘It’s easy / to rainbow the past’ (p. 35 ). She acknowledges migra-
tion in fi scal and economic terms: ‘the sun was traded long ago’
(p. 35 ). Most compelling in this volume is Nichols’s use of ‘nation
language’, a challenge to the imperial ‘correctness’ of English
that acknowledges the infusion of different languages, idioms
and dialects into spoken Caribbean-English. Importantly, Kamau
Brathwaite – in his cornerstone examination of the development
of nation language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry – states that: