The Tribune

By SIMON

IN LIFE and death Patti Glinton Meicholas was luminescent. She refracted and reflected light. With her passing last spring, Patti is fully one with the Light. To her beloved husband, Neko, her family, friends, admirers, students, and readers, Patti expended the gift of life wondrously, joyously, chasing a galaxy of light.

Glinton Meicholas was author, poet, editor, academic, cultural entrepreneur and advocate. Above all, however, she was a bearer of light in its myriad forms, who sought to understand and interpret many shades and shadows, while seeking to expose and struggle with darkness in its many disguises.

Patti’s third book of poetry, Chasing Light, was a finalist for the International Proverse Prize 2012. 

A Shift in the Light, was a “semi-autobiographical novel in response to the long struggle and eventual death from cancer of a beloved cousin.” The novel also explored the theme of decolonisation.

In these and other writings, talks, and interviews, Patti taught us how to live in the fulcrum, complexity, and often absurdity of the interplay of light, darkness, pain, suffering – and love.

In Patti’s hands and imagination words were seeds that she carefully planted, nurtured, and curated into a fallen Eden or orchard of fruit, some forbidden, some sweet, some bitter, some of flavoured nuance, like guinep, soursop, tamarind, or mango uncontrollably dripping down one’s cheeks.

Patti knew that as a seed or plant require light to grow and to flourish, we need light to nurture our capacity for growth, a photosynthesis of the soul.

The orchard of her fecund imagination was not a pretty or manicured garden for sightseers. She invited us to joyously grab the fruits of her words and bite into them, like her poem, Spring Cleaning:

Today, I’ll clean house; /scrub windows/ long grimed with gloom, /sweep away cobwebs/of ponderous care, /air closets choked with secrets/ and dread of condemnation.

Spring cleaning done, /’I’ll throw open the doors. /And welcome the flood of life. /Just once, I will /plunge naked into its turbid stream. /chase joy, fleet-foot/ through corridors of freedom, /luxuriate in the lightness of being, /open soul shutters, /surf the wind, /slide laughing/down sunbeams of morning.

Patti used words like colours. Having mastered primary colours, she spent most of her 75 years dazzling us in an array of hues that were as inexhaustible as “a rainbow [containing] a continuous spectrum of millions of colours, with distinct bands representing different wavelengths of light that our eyes perceive as separate hues.”

Patti was uncomfortable with the manufactured dichotomies of black and white. She revelled in the exuberant paradoxes of rainbows. She glimpsed, gleaned in even dark skies, myriad colours, subtleties, mysteries, enchantment.

Born in 1950 on Cat Island, Patti was a participant in and observer of the country’s emergence into majority rule and independence. She sought to articulate the promise of both, as well as the failure to adhere to the values of democratic life, including those of equality, freedom, and opportunity.

She worked to decolonise and demythologise colonial mindsets still hobbling the Bahamian imagination decades after the attainment of sovereignty.

Glinton Meicholas championed women’s rights. She demanded justice for the vulnerable and the poor. She loathed discrimination and assaults on the dignity of gays and lesbians.

In her poem, Bent Light, she shone light and grace on the diversity of human sexuality:

They do not know. /as he didn’t know, /our Creator is /First Bender of Light, /Sire of the Platypus. /High Lord of Refraction, /the God. Whose prismatic will / split the womb of our mother blackness /with fiery seed, /fathering his rainbow children.

Show these saints that love and mercy /are many-gendered things, /and their tight white beam /is but an imprisoned ray, /offspring of your infinite light / awash with jewels of rainbows denied.

Her patriotism did not entertain tribalism of any form, including that of politicians who sought to prioritise one tribe over another. She mocked, satirised, and deconstructed discourse, images, and cliches which sought to defend and uphold various fundamentalisms, religious, political, and other narrow mindsets and straitjackets.

Patti’s Bahamian consciousness was cosmopolitan, inclusive, inventive like Junkanoo, eclectic like Bahamian cuisine, diverse like our archipelago of accents and histories, spirit-filled like the best of our religious practices. She was collaborative, ever promoting, and enthused by the creativity of others.

Glinton Meicholas best described her lifelong work, which included writings on topics ranging from religion to Bahamian dialect to sailing and regatta:

“I am driven to preserve the folklore of The Bahamas. All my life, I have been passionate in writing about, my country, its history, heritage and culture and the importance of connecting all these strands through our relations with the Americas, the Caribbean and the wider world.

“I have combined these loves to produce many publications to share what I have discovered with others. My relationship with words has been an undying romance; I love to learn about their etymologies and connotations, and my constant goal is to tease them into images and sentences that stimulate productive thought and worthwhile action.

“Above all, I drive to create lithesome and memorable pictures and songs to delight.”

A woman of the Caribbean and Bahamas islands and archipelago, she was never insular. Patti ventured in travel and intellect, way beyond the region’s and the nation’s physical and other borders.

While The Bahamas archipelago was the foundation of her writings, she employed the particularity, colloquialisms, and indigeneity of Bahamian culture to express broader human longings and experience.

Dereck Walcott, the St. Lucian-born and Trinidadian Nobel Laureate in Literature, in whom Patti was well-versed, lyricised in his Nobel address, Fragments of Epic Memory:

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape...

“This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places.

“Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”

Like Walcott, she too lovingly gathered fragments of epic memory that constitute out Bahamas, using palettes of words and light, and the colloquial and the highbrow, in her poetry and stories.

Like a priestess she offered ancient wisdom and contemporary insights in her mythological and spiritual offerings including in An Evening in Guanima, and Lusca and Other Fantastic Tales, a collection of short stories featuring folk characters and lore of The Bahamas.

In her funeral program beautifully crafted and produced by Neko, her partner and artistic collaborator, he wrote: “My heart is shattered. In time, I will have to dry my eyes, pick myself up and set to completing the many tasks she has left for me to finish.”

Almost a year later, our hearts still ache. There are still many tears. But Neko has told us to pick ourselves up and to complete the many tasks she left for us.

Given Patti’s prodigious work and capacity, it will require a host of creatives and patriots to continue her work and to tend the garden of the Bahamian imagination she cultivated.

Like a brilliant Bahamian sun at the end of a long day’s journey – with a rainbow of dazzling shades of red, orange, tangerine, deep blues, purple, and pink, – that has come to rest in the ocean, like a soul entering eternity, Patti has left us with brilliant memories.

May we find solace, succour, and inspiration from our departed sister, Patti, this columnist’s Person of the Year.