September 2024. 81 pages. 

Publisher: Variant Literature, Inc.

https://variantlit.com/product/earthly-gods/

(888 words)

 

In Jessica Nirvana Ram’s debut poetry collection, Earthly Gods (Variant Literature, Inc., 2024), I located much of myself and my own journey navigating the complexities of culture, legacy, and personal growth as an Indo-Caribbean part of the Guyanese community. In Ram’s collection, she writes of the expectations placed upon Guyanese daughters: to caretake, to marry, to mother, especially as an eldest or only child. At times these responsibilities take precedence over our self-actualization and we are left wanting. Ram speaks into the silence of these yearnings, the consuming force of becoming.

 

Earthly Gods plants us first in Jamaica, Queens and then traverses a legacy of cuisine rooted in culture—for which Ram portrays so much love in this collection. In “Unripe Child,” a green tomato is not just on the cusp of ripening, but also a soon-to-be canvas for spices, a medium to hold all of the ingredients together: “. . . ripe child lives tangled in the back of my throat / . . . & I want to hold her, let her out of this barren body, / but I think we’re both scared of who we’d become / if we were set free.” (3) Turmeric and ghee are meant not only for a warm pan in “Wedding Night,” but also a new bride rendered aglow and auspicious: “. . . dress her / like a doll between my hands until she is beautiful / & red & everything her mother dreamed of.” (22) Over multiple poems does Ram find herself in the kitchen “dressed in garlic & onion & oil,” as in the poem, “On Good Tongues,” in which Ram speaks on inheritances and the isolation encountered when we are descended from migrations (26). There is evoked a nascency, in the sesame seeds, in the pineapple consumed in the hopes of inviting blood, resonant of the change that begins to occur with the shedding of an old skin no longer comfortable to fit within and the subsequent evolution into a new sense of selfhood.

 

Ram is luminous in embracing the marrow of the turmoil involved with these necessary transformations, her own desideratum, all the grit and grisly, and every flowering and pungently nurturing thing that results from this cycle of the self. On the one hand, she is the bearer of bruises made divine in “Notes on Being Purple”: “. . . a place to leave offerings, / where purple prayers press into purple-girl flesh, / & my skin turns amethyst, crystalline, permanent.” (6) She is the soft-fleshed creature, first the jellyfish, touch-averse and vulnerable in “Jellyfish Girl” and then the octopus in “When I am in Sixth Grade a Boy Calls Me Octopus Hair” embodying the strength newly discovered in her own fragility. In this collection, Ram is not averse to plumbing the depths of that which is tender, inflamed, uncomfortable. She excavates the body down to the bone, laying out each raw piece for examination, then re-purposing all in the re-assembling of a new form, a new skin, transformed and ready to be stepped into. In “my heart is a slippery fish," one of Ram’s most visually compelling poems, the heart is cleaved wide open, slaughter-house style, yet in its undoing, becomes nourishment for another. She does the same thing in “river woman” where “. . . you pry open my ribcage, release a stream / of salmon, silver spilling steadily towards sky // one leaps into your palms & you split it / along the spine, it’s pink flesh beckoning you.” (37) Which echoes her poem, “i am unfit to raise daughters,” where Ram offers “chambers of my heart / sliced into thirds / laid atop red hibiscus & lentils / if they press into tender muscle / their fingers will stain with / me.” (13) All of the carnage in this stylistic play upon images, this destruction of the self to nurture something new, puts me in mind of Ross Gay’s poem, “last will and testament,” from their 2015 poetry collection, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, in which he outlines the parceling and deliverance of his body to fertilize the garden the body tended while alive, continuing to spread love in such a fecund place upon its death.

 

Love, really, is then the central theme of Earthly Gods: of the self, of culture, of the roots we Guyanese are especially so intrinsically tied to. In the third section of Ram’s collection, we find the titular poem, “earthly gods,” and here she speaks upon the holiness of ancestors, both deceased and living, like her mother: “. . . i watch as she bathes her mother / bowed at her feet / & suddenly / i imagine my mother / myself bowed at her feet.” (60) The connections Ram draws between the carnage of the body and the divine in Earthly Gods reflects the necessary shedding that must occur in order to attain the status of an earthly god: someone who has loosened all illusions enforced upon them, actualizing in-depth understanding of themself.  For what really is divinity but the embracing of the truth we can only find deep inside ourselves. In Ram's collection, I see myself, in the grandmother first considered to be a religion and the destruction and re-creation of the self, all while an entourage of spirits ever circle (sometimes) unseen.