The abundance of arrows that pierce and meet in the heart of Una Marson could inspire dozens of thoughts of who she is without a single one landing close to the mark.

So I won't attempt to define her.

Una Marson (February 6, 1905 – May 6, 1965) was born in Jamaica, where she practiced both journalism and poetry at a young age and even edited a national publication. She moved to Great Britain in 1932 (until 1936), where she continued to write poetry and feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial essays.

18th-century map of the colonization of Jamaica and the Caribbean, using colored lines to highlight the areas controlled by Spain, England, France, and Holland. Source: The British Library

After two additional years in Kingston, Marson settled permanently in London and launched the careers of many Caribbean writers with her BBC Radio Programme Caribbean Voices.

Marson continued to publish varied poetry, as Alison Donnell articulates in her Introduction to Selected Poems.

This collection of Marson's poems consciously rejects the categorization of her work according to oppositional poetic and political modes: either sentimental or polemical, feminine or feminist, resistant or complicit. Instead, the poems selected here aim to set these seemingly competing archives of her work alongside each other in order to foreground and invest positively in what might be seen as Marson's poetic unevenness.

If any selection of Marson's poems suggests unevenness, then my 'selection of selection' is even more so. But let's not trouble ourselves with that; we're not trying to define her.

At The Examined Life, we celebrate complexity, not answers. Understanding a person is a life-long (longer if they reach immortality) journey of discovery, just as it is a life-long journey to be a person. Marson is worthy of our attention because she contains multitudes and shoves them all in her verse.

Photograph of Una Marson, taken from her first collection of poems Tropic Reveries in 1930. Source: The British Library

Like the following self-examination, which contains a deep awareness of race coupled with a bright competence of being;   Marson's verse reminds me of Billie Holiday's memoirs in which she details her complex existence:    
"In the early thirties when Mom and I started trying to kick and scratch out a living in Harlem, the world we lived in was still one that white people made. But it had become a world they damn near never saw.     
    
Sure, some of them patronized the after-hours joints; they came to the Cotton Club – a place Negroes never saw inside unless they played music or did the shakes or shimmies. But these were just side shows specially set up for white folks to come and pay their money for kicks. These places weren’t for real. The life we lived was. But it was all backstage, and damn few white folks ever got to see it. When they did, they might as well have dropped in from another planet. Everything about it seemed to be news to them. It was rugged. Sometimes I wonder how we survived."

I am black
And so I must be
More clever than white folk,
More wise than white folk,
More discreet than white folk,
More courageous than white folk.
I am black,
And I have got to travel
Even farther than white folk,
For time moves on -
I must not laugh too much,
They say black folk can only laugh,
I must not weep too much,
They say black folk weep always
I must not pray too much
They say black folk can only pray.
From "Black Burden" published in 1937

When she first arrived in London, Marson stayed with the founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr. Ronald Moody, and edited the League's journal, The Keys. Source: The British Library

“The Black female," wrote Maya Angelou in her debut memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, fixing on the same metaphor Marson mentions above, "Is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate, and Black lack of power.”

Although Angelou directed her gaze at American Black females, the pain and injustice need not be geographically exclusive, as Marson's experience in a colonial power like Britain demonstrated.

Marson's "There Will Come a Time" spoke to the hypocrisy and tyranny of a prejudiced, colonial society.

Each race that breathes the air of God's fair world
Is so bound up within its little self,
So jealous for material wealth and power
That it forgets to look outside itself
Save when there is some prospect of rich gain;
Forgetful yet that each and every race
Is brother unto his, and in the heart
Of every human being excepting none,
There lies the selfsame love, the selfsame fear,
The selfsame craving for the best that is,
False pride and petty prejudice prevail
Where love and brotherhood should have full sway.

When shall this cease? 'Tis God alone who knows;
But we who see through this hypocrisy
And feel the blood of black and white alike
Course through our veins as our strong heritage
Must range ourselves to build the younger race.
What matter that we be as cagéd birds
Who beat their breasts against the iron bars
Till blood-drops fall, and in heartbreaking songs
Our souls pass out to God? These very words,
In anguish sung, will mightily prevail.
We will not be among the happy heirs
Of this grand heritage - but unto us
Will come their gratitude and praise,
And children yet unborn will reap in joy
What we have sown in tears.
From "There Will Come a Day," published in 1931

In 1935 Marson wrote an essay in The Keys publication of League of Coloured People, arguing that the advancement of individual "Negroes" did little to reset a racist society.

We fool ourselves into believing that a handful of Negroes who have attained can be turned into a race. Individual Negroes attain, they become world famous in medicine or music, literature or law and they feel that they have done all that there is to be done.

They expect the white world to believe that the Negro race has "got there." They live up to a standard warranted by their position and the white world looks on in wonder and admiration at the miracle that has made it possible for a Negro - a member of a servile and dull race to excel.
From "The Keys," published in 1935.
See full edition here.

We should not be astounded that such an intelligent voice existed in a Black female in the 1930s (this was barely the same decade that brought us Virginia Woolf's conditions for creating art). Still, we can be in awe that such a voice was exercised through radio, stage, poetry, publications, and even autobiography.

Marson, as you can see, wrote brilliantly on race, feminism, colonialism, and nature   Yes, nature. In fact in the introduction of her first published book of poems, Tropic Reveries Marson write: "Of their worth it is not for me to speak, except to say that they are the 'heart-throbs' of one who from earliest childhood has worshipped at the shrine of the muses and dwelt among the open spaces and the silent hills where the cadences of Nature's voice tempt one to answering song." and I've only done this unworthy edit. Among all the things that met in this beautiful woman's fierce mind and tender heart, her words on poetry, on the nature of the poet instead, shout the loudest on who she is.   These lines attempt to harmonize the melody of Marson's tenor in a manner that reminds me of Joy Harjo's pronunciation “It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.”

It is in the poetry that the poet is most bare, most visible, and most found:

Think not that those who spend their time
In building up the lofty rhyme
Are often of another clime
Than those who pass them by.
They differ not but in degree:-
More deeply feel all that they see.
They hold to nature the great key,
And ope' the portals wide.
What some will pass and scarce admire
Just sets the poet's soul afire;
In praise of it he ne'er can tire,
In rapture he is lost.
He knows that many hearts are sad
That need someone to make them glad;
They would be happy if they had
A sympathising friend.
His poet's heart goes out to these,
Their sorrows and their woes he sees
By words of comfort oft he frees
The weary burdened heart.
From "The Poet's Heart"

"What some will pass and scarce admire/Just sets the poet's soul afire," I mentioned autobiography; in 1937, Marson indicated that she wrote it, but sadly, it no longer exists.   Or it cannot be found, but the same was true of Nan Shepard's glorious The Living Mountain which appeared decades after originally written so who knows. I wonder what could be gleaned about this woman that cannot be wrought from her poetry.

Accompany Marson's abundance of energy and mission in Selected Poems with the contemporary essays of James Baldwin, who, although never used poetry as a medium for expression, wrote similarly to Marson on the almost unknowable reality of being Black in white society. You'll find Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and Dark Days in the Examined Life Library; imagine them dog-eared and much-loved.