Sugar From Salt: Review of Natasha Ramoutar's Bittersweet
Natasha Ramoutar, Bittersweet
Mawenzi House, 2020. $19.95 CAD.
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Natasha Ramoutar, a self-described Indo-Guyanese writer by way of Scarborough, is descended “from women whose voices herd clouds and conjure storms” (47). Her debut poetry collection Bittersweet (Mawenzi House, 2020) illustrates how superbly she intends to live up to that ancestral destiny. The theme of interconnectedness resonates in every poem as Ramoutar examines whether homelands can be imported, how their people and stories can travel across earth and ocean to live in the minds of their descendants.
Her seventy poems cast a wide net across the space-time continuum and succeed in giving voice to stories and ideas that might otherwise go unheard. From her grandmother who read “faces like fresh-inked pages” (4) but found a colonial alphabet incomprehensible, to her sister with a fierce opinion about skin ink (18), Ramoutar writes with fondness and wit of the many women who surround her, both in person and as ghosts.
She explores how “Diaspora Daughters” reanimate the spirits of their grandmothers in contemporary form as teenagers squeezed into urban McDonalds booths, as “comforter wrapped slugs on warm basement carpet” (45), or as women who try to speak their mother’s mother tongue and find that their Canadian mouths fail them.
She considers the voiceless, the foremothers known only through photographs: “their mouths in tight lines because smiles were too laborious to keep” (65), family lore: “the grandmother of my grandmother’s grandmother must have arrived on a ship that rolled through tempestuous waves” (3), and that which they left unspoken: “how many of our parents walked on eggshells to raise us?” (60).
Ramoutar takes readers from the cane fields of Guyana – “Cane is raw; just long stalks, unbridled, wild, and free” to Brimley Road in Scarborough, Ontario – “all the way south to the place where the water meets the land” (33). In so doing, she shows us how these lands are connected by the people who have shared them. Those who have ventured from one to the other, and back again.
Maps are a common image in Ramoutar’s poems and, when reading them, one can almost envision her with a pencil in hand, trying to sketch out the multitude of paths that can lead to the ultimate destination of a complex cultural self. Some maps are conventional: “on a frayed embroidered map, where I pulled at the gold threads, searching for the first stitch” (40), while others are drawn atop the line of “bittersweet” women who came before her (Cartography I, 2). In some poems, Ramoutar seems to see herself as both a tourist and a local resident in the final destination of her own identity. It is that sense of almost “familiar detachment” that makes Ramoutar’s poems so effective. She demonstrates an uncanny ability to look at her intimate world from outside of its arbitrary borders whilst still feeling the heart that beats within it.
This is especially felt in “Rewind” (55) when she questions, “What if time did not move forwards but backwards?” almost as if it were a fervent wish. Ramoutar’s interweaving of the intangible, sometimes out of reach past and the very recognizable present illustrates how time is irrelevant, and that it is not the pathways travelled but what lies beneath them — places where true meaning can be found. In less adept hands, the book may have become a simple, sentimental journey across time and oceans but Ramoutar, with her honesty and aptitude, has rather created a reckoning of how cultural ideas can be both generative and isolating as life histories are forged in a “city of travelers” (32).
Ramoutar’s love for all things Scarborough is undeniable. In addition to Bittersweet, she is also an editor of the upcoming Feel Ways: A Scarborough Anthology (Mawenzi House, 2021). Readers who have passed through that great borough will feel right at home as Ramoutar directs them through Kennedy Station, Scarborough Center, and The Rouge. But the familiar, she shows us, is not always comforting and can sometimes leave us as “childish drifters looking for life in an abandoned mausoleum” (51). Ramoutar is unflinching as she examines the trauma that can live within those who grow up in a place that is, in many cases, geographically and culturally “other” from the various forces that formed them.
In many of her poignant prose poems, Ramoutar shows readers how it is often impossible to separate the bitter from the sweet, but more importantly, she proposes that we should not seek to try. As even the most amateur of chefs knows, it is only the salt that allows us to truly savour the sugar of the dish, and the gentle sting of Ramoutar’s words are what make the truth in her poems resonate and save her true messages from being lost beneath the powerful waves of her expert wordsmithing and cutting humour.
It is fitting, then, that one of the book’s sweetest poems stands out as its highlight. “Like Makeshift Crowns” is a joyful celebration of a Scarborough childhood: “Joy is not a whispered story/but a wailing manifesto,” which ends in the perfect, single line that is arguably at the conclusion of all great poetry: “I am here.” With the release of this superb collection, it is clear that Ramoutar has spoken true. She has most defiantly arrived.
Kate Felix (She/Her) is a writer and filmmaker living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Split the Lip, and Cream City Review, among others. She recently won Pulp Literature's Bumblebee Flash Fiction Prize.