Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet and literary critic. Ramlochan’s poetry has been featured in the 2015 anthology Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets From the Caribbean (Peekash Press), and she was shortlisted for the 2015 Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize in Poetry. Her first full-length collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in 2017.
Latest posts by Shivanee Ramlochan
‘A girl with a Hindu heart’
"I have what I have, which is as much as so many daughters and sons and children of Lakshmi have in the diaspora [when] they lack community ... I have my heart."
A present and enduring fat
"My entire life, I do not believe I have ever felt I needed to take up less room, except in the fact of my body."
Caribbean virgins, Caribbean whores: Unlacing goodness/dismantling perversion
"Maybe in some world, an even more distant and improbable one, there are no virgins and no whores. No Good or Bad Girls. Only survivors."
‘You are more than good enough’
"I find I cannot be silent about the expectations, dim and punitive and repressive, we place on our nation's youth."
In the grip of pandemic, ‘the time is now’
"I don't know, but I want to be here, persisting. Intemperately. Ridiculously. Maybe even foolishly. And the difficulty has been in believing I deserve that grace. Maybe you feel the same way."
In Trinidad & Tobago, where women are under siege, sometimes even words feel futile
'I want an island where we wake up and board taxis with the certainty that we will not be abducted. I would like to live here and not be afraid.'
Old statues, new maps
"It's not an action that Columbus' local devotees ever imagined enacting: for them, the old map not only rules, but should always rule, no matter how much blood drenches it."
‘To speak of George Floyd, it is necessary to speak of my own failures’
"I think of. . . all the times I've bitten my tongue while my uncles raged on about the grotesquerie of blacks, their laziness, their ineptitude, their savagery."
‘The bars will spill over to songs of you': A Caribbean farewell to Kenny Rogers
"Depend on it, Kenny Rogers, when coronavirus leaves the long gambling-table of life, having taken too many of us with it, the bars will spill over to songs of you."
Queer as quantum joy
"You deserve to be proud of yourself, you rare, riotous beauty. Go on, give yourself a huge, rafter-rattling cheer."
On displacement
"Displacement has no particular citizenship. It comes on a slow, malarial boat, or dropped from the sky on small islands buffeted by storms in the Caribbean, our common sea."
After Planting the Caribbean in Our Collective Imagination, Sir Derek Walcott, ‘One of the Great Poets of All Time’, Has Died
"He showed that even the most humble village on a tiny island on the fringes of the world could be a place of epic beauty and significance."
