By Rhony Bhopla

Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, including her forthcoming title, Behold (Alice James Books, 2026). Her works span from 1999, with the following titles: The Water Between Us, This Strange Land, The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems, Madwoman, La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room (a full-length anthology of selected poems translated into Spanish), and No Ruined Stone. McCallum is a tenured full-time faculty member at Penn State University and teaches in the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. Her literary work has been widely anthologized, translated, and published in Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch. McCallum’s awards include a Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Fellowships, and awards from 1996 to the present. She is a Penn State Poet Laureate Emerita and received recognition for No Ruined Stone with a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry in 2022, which places her literary work and art activism alongside extraordinary Black writers throughout the history of the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 35 years.

In a reading at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, in 2021, McCallum described the process of writing her sixth poetry collection, No Ruined Stone, as “active waiting.”[1] McCallum’s reflections on how poems emerge both extend the poems’ meanings and describe a metacognitive process by which an artist engages scholarly study. McCallum shared that after being invited by artist Calum Colvin to read with his exhibit at the Royal Academy of Scottish Art and Architecture in Edinburgh, she was inspired to write a poem that came to her in the voice of Isabella, who is the seminal character in No Ruined Stone. After a sustained period of years of research in Scotland, McCallum began writing the collection, which she has also labeled as a novel in verse. She described the writing as “active waiting, not passive waiting.” Active waiting alludes to a paradoxical cognitive process. McCallum’s self-reflection and critique of how the poems in No Ruined Stone began to take shape in her imagination models how awareness of the writing process is imperative to the formation of creative works. Active would be the writer’s concerted effort with intentionality toward writing that involves research and reflection; while waiting, on the other hand, appears to push against intentionality and adds the pressure of time.

Shara McCallum spent three years conducting research for her book, which took her to Scotland to study the places where Robert Burns lived, and where she immersed herself in archives and engaged with artists who were interrogating the life and works of Burns. This active waiting was also instrumental in widening the circle of appreciation for the history of poetry in Scotland. Subsequently, with what McCallum describes as an emergence of Isabella’s voice, she was led to create poems that traverse history and place, and those ultimately became a feminist articulation of what it means to be of the forced diaspora of the African continent.

Feminist theorist and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivers an invocation to practitioners of artistry in her book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present. Spivak declares that the essential practice of learning about the subaltern—those of social groups on the margins of history and who are the subjects of oppressors due to their marginalization from the mainstream—cannot be learned about “only by reading literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, sociohistorical documents…”[2] This process of living in the spaces of a character, rather than being a haphazard voyeur through media and study, is the essential practice of a multimedia artist. It is by this concerted approach that Shara McCallum has integrated her scholarly work throughout her career as a writer. Readers, in turn, are enriched with multitudinous and courageous movements on the page, which are achieved by McCallum’s thorough process of sustained phenomenology and qualia that usher artistic contemplation. McCallum’s active, slow visual thinking while reflecting during art observation, as well as her engagement with archived histories, models a deliberate approach toward exactitude in developing poems.

In McCallum’s author’s note for No Ruined Stone, she explains her discovery that Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, was on the verge of going to Jamaica as a “bookkeeper” and would have been an overseer of a plantation where by the “late 18th century, over a third of the whites in Jamaica were Scottish, and Scots owned 30% of the plantations and 32% of enslaved Africans on the island. Jamaica was the most valuable British colony during slavery, producing the greatest wealth for individual plantation owners and building the empire.” McCallum writes, “It was also the most brutal colony, and on Scots-owned Jamaican plantations the survival rate for Africans was the lowest across the island: less than four years upon arrival.” [3] This realization about the intentions of the revered poet, Burns, sparked the creation of the poetry collection, which is divided into two distinct sections. The first series of poems features dramatic monologues in the voices of the Bard and Robert Burns.

Notable connections can be made between the analysis of McCallum’s work and that of theorist Spivak’s section on literature in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak’s matter-of-fact critique of the conflation of the characterization of marginalization, such as gender studies, feminism, and racial grouping, informs the writer who grapples with having to tell the story but also wants to present the facts of humanity. The written page is an absolute place of ideas, on which dynamic inspiration is transformed into a two-dimensional artifact. However, contemporary poets such as McCallum are making way for a body of work by Anglophone writers whose ancestors endured colonialism and enslavement. In this process, there is a continual excavation of how the othering of people takes place as a result of racial hegemony in textual representation. Spivak contends, “…we tend to monumentalize something we call ‘margins,’ where the distinction between North and South is domesticated. Yet, for the sake of the daily work at the ground level, we must still raise the persistent voice of autocritique, lest we unwittingly fill the now unrecognizably displaced subject-position of the native informant.” [4] The native informant is the perilous liaison between the colonizer and the colonized, who repeats and reinforces the episteme of the subjugator.

Spivak’s assertion regarding autocritique offers a way to read the juxtaposition of Isabella and Burns. While historical Burns had made plans three times—all failed—to go to Jamaica as an overseer on a plantation, McCallum creates a Burns who does go to Jamaica and has an intact personhood—a man who reveals his humanity as well as his complicity through complex emotions. This evokes provocative dueling perspectives as readers have to work to parse out the instigator from the victim of harm in the brutality of colonial subjugation. For example, in the poem “For Promised Joy,” Burns describes intense emotional love for an enslaved woman named Nancy: Suffer me to want her. / Suffer me to ask for nothing / but laughter, hers filling / the drafts and breathing/hollows of my room…[5] In this poem, Burns is ascribed intense emotional love, and McCallum amplifies his feelings with the anaphoric repetition “suffer me”. For Burns, love and violence are co-embodied. The poem borders on obsession and is certainly ironic given the power dynamic between Burns and the enslaved woman who is the object of his passion. His bearing witness to the horrors of slavery adds a grotesque element to his emotions.

Furthermore, in response, Douglas, who is the Master at Springbank, admonishes Burns and brutally epitomizes the grave and inhumane epistemic violence by which white superiority spews hatred toward other races. Here is the beginning of “Douglas’s Reply”[6]:

This poem in Douglas’s voice uses erotesis (questions that require no answer), a figure of speech that has the effect of confrontation. Douglas’s aggressive tone and feverish hatred for enslaved Africans depict chilling and horrific sentiments of white superiority. Additionally, McCallum’s “Douglas’s Reply” demonstrates a mindset that serves as justification of exploitation of resources, physical violence, rape, and ultimately the teaching of generational hatred toward those who were historically colonized during the 18^th Century. McCallum’s transparent and courageous representations in this monologue elucidate her research, revealing that Jamaica was the most “brutal colony, and on Scots-owned Jamaican plantations the survival rate for Africans was the lowest across the island: less than four years upon arrival.”[7]

The complexities of human emotions are where poetry and truth trouble each other in the collection. On the one hand, Burns’s idea of love in the midst of violent debasement of humanity is idiocy; on the other hand, Douglas’s command to deny feeling is another manifestation of hatred. The characters wrestle against each other, pitting desperation, anger, provocation, and insult, which open a perspective on the undercurrent of imperial control. Its grip was maintained through rationalized deterrence of humanity for the purpose of exploitation and harm to the African people in this distinct and vulnerable part of the world, the Caribbean. Burns himself is no exception; his mind is arrested by pain and conflict. Could we have empathy for such a man, one who “came to Jamaica” to have a hand in violence against the enslaved, that time in history of abject destruction which ultimately led to the suffering and erasure of people, their land, dignity, language and had a hand in shaping a future of persistent inequity and racial oppression? The answer is encapsulated in the second half of the collection, as told through Isabella’s voice and her journey toward self-actualization.

In the scheme of No Ruined Stone, Burns has a child with Nancy. The child is Agnes, who is Jamaican “Mulatta” and who in adulthood is raped by Douglas. Isabella is the daughter of Agnes and Douglas, and she eventually moves to Glasgow, Scotland, as a free woman. Her grandmother, Nancy, accompanies her, first as her slave and then as her maid. Isabella, whose voice was first heard by McCallum, symbolizes feminist empowerment that sheds light on the truth of Jamaica’s history and colonization. Isabella initially passes for white. The poem “Passing” is a detailed encapsulation of the false garb she concocted to deflect her racial and class characterizations[8]:

Isabella is cognizant of how she is perceived and how she perceives herself. She is bold, but wary of sisterhood among her friends who might betray her disguise. It is hard to trust when she knows what she escaped. Though her memory gives way to fiction, the fiction is a fostering of her resilience so that she can survive. Memories are archived through storytelling and reveal the importance of generational sisterhood, as Isabella’s grandmother, Nancy, helps her come to the necessary revelations that free her to grapple with the stories of her ancestors, of her conception, and the question of how she is to shape her life ahead. From a poem of address to her husband to an apostrophe to Burns, Isabella speaks freely, questioning them while simultaneously discovering herself. In the final lines to Burns in “Ae Fond Kiss”, she asks the big question of worth and loss: “for whom / did fortune grieve” [9] It is a question to the colonial Empire: What is its worth? Unlike Burns (who falls ill and does not return to his home), Isabella claims her freedom.

In the poem “Inheritance,” Isabella describes her changed destiny with the help of her grandmother, Nancy. The poem’s form is like a twin cinema, two columns of short lines, but the lines are misaligned to guide its reading from left to right. Grandmother Nancy reveals her mother’s story of being taken across the ocean where her mother’s voice / lost her language / lost each lullaby / swallowed by the sea’s / cavernous din…[10]

McCallum brings Isabella from a life of enslavement on the plantations of Jamaica to the colonial metropolis. With her is a power of creative abstraction with which she “does indeed speak.”[11] WhileBurns’s voice fades away in the second part of the collection, what we read are the images, thoughts, and reflections that belong to Isabella and her grandmother, Nancy. Isabella speaks against the epistemic violence of erasure. In her speaking, she retrieves the usurped episteme that was her Africa, which is most felt in the poem “Voyage”[12]:

Isabella reflects on history, the stories her grandmother shared with her, the immense grief of losing her mother, the “faint reckoning,” and a definitive stance that there is the possibility of recovery from fracture on the voyage of history. This poem serves as a metaphor for triumph through self-reflection and the reclamation of dignity. No Ruined Stone is a collection that insists against the silencing of victims of the colonial empire. Isabella is not only heard in the context of the poems, but she is also audible in the present day as she demonstrates hope that is kindled by her curiosity, persistence, and fearlessness.

McCallum’s active waiting and experiential research in Scotland takes history, archival material, imagination, and her own real-life experiences and finds in them moments of reverie—i.e. sustained slow looking. The intimate, multi-dimensional poems in No Ruined Stone are the result of McCallum’s trust in the aesthetic imagination.

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[1] No Ruined Stone: A Reading and Conversation with Shara McCallum. Clark Forum for Contemporary Issues, October 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt7ohx16PL4

[2] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. (p.142)

[3] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.60)

[4] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999. (p.170)

[5] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.17)

[6] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.19)

[7] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.60)

[8] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.40)

[9] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.43)

[10] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.45)

[11]Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Wedge, 1985.

[12] McCallum, Shara. No Ruined Stone. Alice James Books, 2021. (p.53)

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Rhony Bhopla is a poet, book critic, and visual artist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, PRISM International, The Hopper, Notre Dame Review, Cherry Moon: Emerging Voices from the Asian Diaspora, The Good Life Review, and the Ekphrastic Review. Her book reviews can be read in Northwest Review and Harvard Review. Her artworks are a regular feature of the Big Names Small Art (BNSA) art auction for the Crocker Art Museum. Rhony is a Kwame Dawes Mapmakers Scholar and was awarded a Mapmakers teaching assistantship at Pacific University. She hosted two Mapmakers Alumni Institute webinars featuring Shivanee Ramlochan, Rajiv Mohabir, and Sudeep Sen on the topic of Global Perspectives: Ecopoetics and Eco-writing. Rhony Bhopla serves as the Vice-President of the Alumni Association Board of Representatives at Pacific University. She is a recipient of a 2023 Fellowship in the Anaphora Arts Emerging Critics Program. She received the Pacific University Alumni Association’s Emerging Leader Award in 2024. She presented her essay “The Blue Clerk: Bhāvika and the Literary Revolution” at the Popular Culture Association’s National Conference in 2022 and at the Furious Flower Conference IV: Celebrating the Worlds of Black Poetry in 2024. She volunteers for the Sacramento Medical Reserve Corps and works as a science educator with Sierra Nevada Journeys. When she is not writing or painting, Rhony enjoys cooking, gardening, and hiking.