The context of this poem is quite complicated, because it involves the poet's own history of moving between cultures - Caribbean and English - and the wider history of both those cultures.
Grace Nichols grew up in a small country village on the Atlantic coast of Guyana, in the Caribbean. Guyana used to be a British colony, so English literature has always been part of her personal background. In the 1970s she moved to England, and now lives on the coast of Sussex.
In 1987, the southern coast of England was hit by what was known as The Great Storm. Hurricane-force winds are rarely experienced in England, and the effect on the landscape, particularly the trees, was devastating. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, hurricanes are a regular occurrence, and had been a part of Grace Nichols' childhood.
Grace Nichols said about the 1987 hurricane: 'It seemed as though the voices of the old gods were in the wind, within the Sussex wind. And for the first time I felt close to the English landscape in a way that I hadn't earlier. It was as if the Caribbean had come to England.'
- A woman, living in England, is woken by a hurricane.
- Addressing the wind as a god, she asks what it is doing creating such havoc in this part of the world (stanzas 2-5).
- She then speaks of the effect the storm has on her personally. She feels somehow unchained, and at one with the world.
- She feels that the hurricane has come with a message to her, perhaps to tell her that the same forces are at work in England as in the Caribbean
Hurricane
The Carib Indian God of the winds. The Carib Indians were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands, until the European settlers destroyed them.
Oya and Shango
Oya and Shango are both storm gods - one female, one male - belonging originally to the Yoruban people of West Africa. When, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the people of Africa were transported to the Caribbean to be sold as slaves, they carried their old religion with them. At first the gods were worshipped secretly, but in the 20th century they have emerged as symbols of the African side of Caribbean identity. Ogun, in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's poem, is also a Yoruban god.
