Sarah Venable (second from left) and Sonia Williams (second from right) and friends: celebrating the livity. Photo Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Venable.
SONIA WILLIAMS was the hyphen queen. As poet-writer-actor-director-mentor-speaker-educator-scholar, she lit up spaces across the Caribbean community. But as much as those hyphens trace the organic shape of her creative life, they also slashed it into parcels.
In almost equal measure, Sonia was endowed with imagination, intellect, spirit, and caring. She was an incandescent, opinionated, challenging, and love-driven human. After seeing her production of Odale’s Choice (2008), Kamau Brathwaite said, “It’s a miracle. I did not believe that such a person existed in Barbados.” He called her a treasure. Some even called her Goddess.
I called her friend. We talked like sisters. She was frank, intense, sometimes vulnerable, always brave. I was almost as impressed by her feet, soles pink and hard as conch shell, that carried her increasing bulk between buses and workplaces, and which seemed to channel a kind of geothermal energy. The woman was solid, primal. To borrow a phrase from fellow writer Sharma Taylor, who was also in awe of Sonia, she was a woman whose "laugh cracked the sky."
In early January of this year, she was exhausted, but her cobbled-together life often did that to her. From the prison to the university, teaching jobs had pulled her in different directions. Her overdue thesis demanded attention. She had recently tended and then buried her difficult mother, at great personal cost. Her two children still at home had needs. (The eldest has crafted a viable life.) Friends vied for a scrap of time, and to love her right back. She shaved her head.
Still, when she left this earthly plane, a departure that took from January 3rd to 6th, yet young at only 56, nobody expected it. I certainly didn’t. Having missed each other in person the day prior, we were about to have a video chat. Her last WhatsApp text was totally banal: “OK. Using bathroom.”
She leaves me awash in memories. On the beach we’d critique each other’s work. In the sea, she’d become an aquatic mammal, pausing to sing to Yemaya. Afloat in deep water, she’d tell me about her time in Nigeria on a fellowship, and about her even younger self as a barrel child. Raised by her granny in St Peter, she scoured the hills trying to find who her father was.
When Sonia was twelve, her aspirational mother returned to Barbados, but a warm relationship wouldn’t develop. At around seventeen, Sonia was sent to Brooklyn as a prodigy in—wait for it—organic chemistry! Instead, she snuck off to dance classes. Mother did not approve. She won a scholarship to Hamilton College in upstate New York, a small, elite institution where she was a dark, exotic bird among white folk. She plunged into theatre, and soared to success that presaged a bright future. Maybe if she had stayed up there, instead of homing back here, she’d have achieved it. Or at least stability.
We were colleagues as NIFCA judges in the literary arts, in the pre-pandemic days when we met in the National Cultural Foundation’s boardroom with our fat packets of printed submissions. With Sonia, the analytical became sensual. Her pages became works of conceptual art, the printed text overrun with big scrawls and looping arrows. She’d argue passionately for works in which she perceived promise.
“Hear the voice!” she’d say, and proceed to speak the work aloud. Even weak material sounded good when she did that.
*
THAT SAME COMMITMENT to beliefs and methods sometimes carried her into conflicts with colleagues and employers. Sadly, one such episode derailed a job, just at the point when her ever disparaging mother’s illness was racking up huge expenses. Sonia was torn between filial duty and saving her sanity. Besides, where would the money come from?
Financial instability was a theme, always, an unwelcome corollary to her brilliance. When she won third prize in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment competition in 2018, it was for a collection of poetry called On Livity. (Would someone please publish it?) You can see on YouTube her powerful reading of "The Last Embrace," a poem to her dear friend Louise Parris, who had died two years previously. In the interview afterwards, Sonia thanks the committee for acknowledging value in her work. Recognition helps you affirm your worth, she asserts.
The interviewer asks what else she is writing and when we might expect to see it. Sonia is the picture of dignity as she addresses the reality of her circumstances: She can’t just write; she must feed her family. It’s the teaching and theatre jobs that provide predictable income…and compete with her writing.
It is most artists’ dilemma everywhere, but one can’t help wondering how it can be that our Caribbean icons so often live hand to mouth. If only our theatre practitioners could do as some successful visual artists do—find a popular niche and keep filling it, uncovering supplementary markets online. If only recognition came with at least a side order of fries. (Thankfully, the FCLE awards do carry some cash.)
In late 2019, Sonia was flown to England to collaborate with Mags Chalcraft-Islam on a slavery-based play called Mother Country at the Norwich Arts Centre. It sold out and earned acclaim, but first there was the trip to the airport. Sonia was carrying almost nothing, not even a coat. How will you stay warm? I asked. With a creative solution: Mags will take her directly to a charity shop….
Two years later, in August, Sonia would tell me that her beloved friend Judah had been having headaches. He then died in his sleep at age forty-five from what was likely a brain aneurism. It was shocking. When I commented on how his positive spirit shone, she told me, “He was not of this earth. He lived on the plane of helper/supporter, and came briefly to serve.” Looking back, one could say the same of her. And it’s freaky that they both departed in this way.
*
OCTOBER 2021. Sonia was moving house again. Four people plus me piled into my car. (She was mothering a distressed young woman at the time.) The chassis groaned with our combined weight, but we got to West Terrace intact. Inside the new house, she happily discovered what the landlord had left for her, which included a cupboard full of pillows. The girls squealed and grabbed armfuls of them, running into the rooms they wanted to claim. The next trip was a carful of drawings and paintings, mostly by Makemba Kunle, and boxes upon boxes of books. The throne would arrive separately. Seriously. (I think it was from Odale’s Choice.)
The next day at the house, a man was standing on a chair placed on top of a table, so he could fix an overhead light fixture with a knife. He wore his bicycle helmet in case he fell. Sonia was wearing a striking, long dress made especially for her Big Lecture. She was a pyroclastic flow of excitement.
She’d made contact with an old auntie, a nurse who was visiting from Nigeria, who knew Sonia’s family history all the way back to the Middle Passage and beyond. “How rare is that?” From her mouth tumbled the names, occupations and global movements of her ancestors. I could see how huge this was for her, feel how much more rooted she felt.
A few months prior, she was flown to Sint Maarten to lead a segment of a World Bank conference on Caribbean women and diversity, which included tackling gender-based violence. I had no idea she knew so much about the subject, or that she identified so strongly as part of the LGBTQ community. I just assumed that, after producing babies, her orientation had subtly changed. It happens.
A simple airport run to pick her up afterward turned into a three-hour odyssey. She was wearing a perfectly tailored African print top in blue and orange, with a peplum waist. She looked sensational, even triumphant. She brimmed with new ideas on how to structure a career that combined her multiple competencies (during the pandemic, she began marketing developmental editing services online), and maybe even go into publishing, guided by Lasana Sekou, the prolific poet who founded Sint Maarten-based House of Nehesi Publishing.
Her sojourn started off well. The hotel provided big breakfasts and a pool. At the conference, they called her “wise.” But her reception cooled once she spoke about her rape(s.) It upset people.
“They were triggered. People kept crying,” she said. “They need to get beyond this, otherwise you can’t talk about anything.” I imagined her instructing them to breathe healing white light from their toes to the top of their heads, enveloping their entire, trauma-holding bodies.
*
SONIA CHECKED HER PHONE. Her kids had texted that they’d gone through all the cash she had left them, and there was no food in the house. In fact, Akasa was hungry right now, at work. Off we went to find vegetarian takeaway on a Sunday in Bridgetown, arguing about one-way streets and gluten’s protein content. We ended up at Chefette.
That mission accomplished, our next stop was Jordan’s supermarket. Navigating the familiar aisles, Sonia wasted no time tossing items into the trolley. Fruit reminded her of the hotel breakfasts that sustained her all day in Sint Maarten.
“What I feel really bad about is that I’ve never been able to take my children on vacation,” she said. “Not once.”
We now had an edible mountain on wheels. At the register, she extracted a packet of money from the depths of her huge, mud-cloth bag. It seemed odd to perform intellectual labour and get paid in cash, immediately, but if anyone could make it happen, it was Sonia. After the groceries, there wasn’t much left.
*
WAS IT ONLY LAST YEAR, last May, that she delivered that lecture at UWI? It was entitled “Growing Trees for Shelter: The Performance Praxis of a Brathwaitean Paradigm.” Huh? I teased her that the title begged for a translation. It came in the work itself. With typical Sonia livity, the so-called lecture tied together performance (accompanied on drum by a serenely feral looking Oneka Best, El Verno del Congo’s daughter) with generational memory and a retained connection to Africa. Sonia made it clear that we are connected like a forest and must shelter each other. This was no academic dehydration of a perfectly juicy idea, but a vitality-infused expression of it that left me reeling.
I am still reeling. From all our memories but mostly the last ones of her.
Sonia’s bedside draws a standing-room-only crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. She lies unconscious in the ward, face-harnessed to a machine that performs the role of lungs. Its tube enters her mouth beside a pink, protruding tongue. I always thought of her connection to the breath as spirit, as a route to the emotions, as support for the voice, as medium for shock waves of laughter. Now the machine does her breathing for her.
I stare at the complex contours of her shaved head, feel the cold stones of her feet. Friends crowd around, one or two reminiscing, most just contemplating, another too choked up to do anything except somehow stay vertical. A lot of eyes don't focus. Her daughter, Akasa, seems ambushed, afloat in a fog of grief. Stricken, none of us has the presence of mind to sing or talk to Sonia, just in case her hearing still works. They say its the last sense to go.
A nurse sits at a desk. I ask her what happens next. She is not allowed to say. Back at bedside, I wonder if Sonia’s spirit is floating right above us, by the hospital ceiling, like a snorkeler observing the reef life of our gathered heads. Or what if her body can’t release her spirit until…?
All of her hyphens were suddenly useless. They couldn’t connect body and mind. Now that her brain wasn’t braining, Sonia was inert matter. It was incomprehensible. She who was so conscious of one’s physical being as source and instrument was utterly absent from her own.
In all the ceremony and tributes that followed, her meaning and her worth were affirmed. But as writer-educator-publisher Robert Edison Sandiford would say, “Show me the money.” Where was it for Sonia?
Some of us are blessed with day jobs that are either steady, more frequent, and/or more remunerative than teaching one li’l course here and another term there, directing a theatre production or creating a ritual for some random celebration. Some apply their skills to commerce, while others just can’t do that.
Why must so many of our icons quilt their lives out of scraps held together with hyphens?
Over decades, Sarah Venable has had overlapping careers in several of the arts—visual, literary, culinary, and performing. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Poui and Bim; in the anthology The Truth About Oranges; and ArtsEtc. She has also contributed articles to local, regional and in-flight magazines. In 2020, her poetry collection The Tropic of Sweet and Sour received an honourable mention in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Competition. Three of her children's stories are soon to be released online through the National Cultural Foundation.
Last Modified: August 21, 2024
