Lowrie-Chin puts good spirit into 'Soul Dance'

At about the midpoint in Saturday afternoon's reading from her book Soul Dance: Poems and Writings, Jean Lowrie-Chin told the fair-sized audience at Bookland, New Kingston, that "I have some humour too. I know some crazy people".

Not that there hadn't been laughter before, as Lowrie-Chin started out with a poem about her genesis as a 'Jonkonnu Baby' on a night when the masqueraders came into her mother's yard "beating all sort of contraption/'til she start feel contraction". And there were the prose pieces, some of which came from Lowrie-Chin's newspaper column. The first one she read spoke about her mother raising four children singlehandedly after being widowed early (she later remarried), using the proceeds from a shop. One day, however, Lowrie-Chin and her sister filched 'truppance' from the till.

"That was our Armageddon," Lowrie-Chin read, outlining how each customer was told about the infraction and the ingratitude it signified.

"After that day of disgrace, Mom's children have been described as honest to a fault," she said.

Great reading

Lowrie-Chin read fluently with an obvious enthusiasm, at points holding the book open towards the audience to display a particular picture, among those, one of Wycliffe Bennett.

Bennett made Soul Dance: Poems and Writings through his rigorous rehearsal - and attendant encouragement - of a huge group rehearsing for a CARIFESTA staging.

And Icelyn 'Fanny' Ricketts was included via her kindness to Lowrie-Chin's family - and her reaction to a 10-year-old Jean's rudeness. Ricketts refused to leave the family after the man of the house's death and picked breadfruit and sent it with her husband to sell so she could pay herself. But when Jean was rude Ricketts packed up and left, and for 30 years it weighed on Lowrie-Chin's mind until she sought out Ricketts with her own children.

There was a heart-warming reunion and forgiveness, Ricketts' final words of forgiveness being "come make I give you something to drink. What a way your children nice!"

There was a light-hearted piece about the husband-and-wife team's experience in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, where Bolt and Jamaica were the rage, but the observations of the late Louise Fraser-Bennett, former head of the Sound System Association of Jamaica preceded Lowrie-Chin's reassurance that she has humorous pieces. The switch began appropriately on Life's Lighter Side, included in which was a father commanding a daughter heading out to the discotheque in skimpy clothing to "dis go take off dat skirt!"

A few personal poems on marriage, including separation ("he won't be late tonight/he simply won't be coming at all") and reunion ("I can smile in the dark/you love me again") came before one on the invisibility of ambitious persons who get no assistance, until they turn to crime.

The emotional opposites of death and joy in parenthood came at the end, "for our sisters we rise" read for four murdered women, including Madame Rose Leon. And Lowrie-Chin closed her Soul Dance of writing predominantly on the personal side with Pick-up Time, her day of business transactions heading towards the most important time, when she collects her children from school.

"Freeze the moment, stop the clock, I live for pick-up time," Lowrie-Chin ended.