Care Living

Abstract

My inquiries into the poetics of Jamaican women’s aliveness enter through the space of care ethics and the dimensions of my own poetry. In my work, I syncretize Caribbean feminist praxis, resistance, creativity, collective catharsis, spirituality, imagination, community, friendships, kinships, and knowledge. In this crucible of being, care ethics and aliveness are not simply experienced as forms of decolonial resistance. Nor are they reduced to a mere disruption of intersecting oppressions. Rather, they are resources, continuously connected within and around each of us, forming the basis of our flesh, blood, spirits, and dreams. While aliveness and care ethics challenge inter alia, our most chaotic, tense, and violent experiences, they also go beyond these forces to become deep expressions, of what I call, the poetics of Jamaican women’s existence, healing, and release. To develop this framework, I draw on Kevin Quashie’s (2021) exploration of “Black aliveness” (p. 1), to argue (in poetic form) that Jamaican women’s aliveness is not simply the antithesis to death, but that which can address vital questions about the ethos of Caribbean feminist theory and praxis. As Quashie explains, Black aliveness is “the invocation of a black world [and] is the operating assumption of black texts, a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness. This black world is not one where the racial logics and harming predilections of antiblackness are inverted but one where blackness is totality, where every human question and possibility is of people who are black…. Since blackness cannot exist fully, humanly, in the world, we will imagine a world where the condition of being alive is of us. In a black world, the case of our lives is aliveness; not death, not even death’s vitality, but aliveness” (p. 1-2 &12). Guided by the above statement, I articulate this concept in the context of Jamaican women’s lives, illustrating how, through a poetic reflection on care ethics and Jamaican women’s aliveness we can “imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary,” (p. 1). I argue that we can experience this through the, as Quashie puts it, “quality of aliveness notable in the worldmaking aesthetics of poems…in how those poems…can be read for what they tell us about our being: about how we are and about how we can be” (p. 2). The questions guiding my poetic inquiry are as follows: 1) What is the role of care ethics in the context of Jamaican women’s multiple acts of living? 2) How can the concept of “care” support and/or challenge our efforts to analyze the role of religion, ancestry, motherhood, land, and food in Jamaican women’s lives? 3) What are the possibilities of studying this association between care ethics and aliveness through poetry?