‘Sisterhood’ was the word that echoed across Millennium Gallery on Friday evening, at the launch of Spit Out the Myth. The poetry anthology is itself an act of sisterhood, a collaboration between three Sheffield poets: Warda Yassin, Silé Sibanda and Danaé Wellington.
They were first brought together by the loss of Jamaican poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze. In life she was known for her powerful stage presence, but her death was – for novelist and curator Désirée Reynolds – a reminder of how quickly such voices can be silenced.
Spit Out the Myth is an act of remembrance, a call to sing and to tell stories: ‘Our sing-song voice a hymn for the living / and our stories a praise song for the departed.’ The stories it tells are of home and community, of the places and people that shape us. This is poetry with a voice. And it is a voice that sings.
This was literal in the case of Danaé Wellington, who began her reading with song and whose musicality shapes her writing. The rhythm of her poetry echoes the movement of its people: the mothers who ‘ketch a myal when drummer man start with a beat.’
It is women, their stories and their rituals, that hold mythic power in this collection. From Yassin’s makeup artist – ‘Jamaican alchemist’ – to the Poco women of Wellington’s childhood, relationships between women are important.
‘Let the spell move from under your finger,
chant a story of freedom to come.
Poco woman, sing.’
Pocomania is a spiritual group in Jamaica, where Wellington grew up. These poems are rich with memory, particularly of family and home.
Home is, however, unstable: encroached on by violence, or ‘torn’ away by force. Sibanda’s writing in particular moves between comfort – ‘held by the land she calls her own’ – and loss.
‘At dawn, evicted by bullets for our interpretation of God.
Beaten for the pigment of our skin, or being born woman,’
In spite of the half-empty audience (my only disappointment of the evening) this event was a reminder that Sheffield is a city humming with creative talent, a city with so many stories to tell.
‘This city is an open-palmed sanctuary, a realm
for wayfarers with henna-tipped fingers. This city
shines like flints of steel in the Maghrib light.’
Rating: ★★★★★
All quotations are from Spit Out the Myth: 3 Sheffield Poets, published in October 2023.
