Osbey, Brenda Marie (b. 1957), poet. Brenda Marie Osbey, born in New Orleans in 1957, has roots in Creole culture that run deep and give her work a haunting sense of place. No one since Walker Percy has made more memorable music out of the names of the city's streets and the people who throng them. Her poetry offers more than a slice of local color, however, for the metropolis she summons up quickly and magically becomes a backdrop for a display of the ambiance of the black feminine mind. Her women lead lives that often erupt in violence and sometimes end with madness. But alongside all this-and often because of it–we find a riveting poignance and searing beauty.
Osbey has said that her poetry forms a kind of cultural biography and geography of Louisiana, but one finds influences from her travels and sojourns elsewhere. She attended Dillard University, Université Paul Valéry at Montpélliér, France, and received an MA from the University of Kentucky. She has taught at Dillard and the University of California at Los Angeles, and currently teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans. She has received several awards, including the Academy of American Poets' Loring-Williams Prize, an Associated Writing Program Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Osbey has been a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute, Harvard University. She has published three volumes of poetry, Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983), In These Houses (1988), and Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (1991), and has just completed All Saints, a tribute to mythic New Orleaneans and a rich tapestry of the city's history.
Osbey's stunning first collection of poetry offered up the voices and visions of women through a series of vignettes, each framing and telling a story. One sees a fusion of incidents, remembrances, and details that uncoils in a disciplined way, yet somehow remains shrouded in mystery. Accordingly, these poems possess a kind of uncanny tension, as she navigates between the rational and unexplainable. Her saturation in the Afro-Caribbean ambiance of New Orleans's Faubourgs (neighborhoods)-especially Marigny and Tremé-enables Osbey to plunge the reader into the eerie world of the Bahalia women, with their roots and tamborines, to introduce African Gods on the ban-kettes of the city. The central story of Lenazette of Bayou La Fouche and her Choctaw lover, as narrated to her daughter Minneconjoux, produces a murder; in another poem a woman writes letters to a man long dead; Ramona Veagis “falls off the world” and sits in a chair that erupts from a bathtub full of water. These tumbles into madness arrest and amaze, but also provoke a discomforting set of queries about the relation of madness and beauty, sanity and lies.
Osbey's next collection, In These Houses, continued her exploration of these women called “Madhouses,” often merging them with swift “easy” women who Circe-like lure men into disaster, men like Diamond, who hangs himself out of desperate love for careless Reva. But there is also Thelma Picou, who runs out naked to eat dirt, crazed with the oppressive dominance of “Darling Henry”; Little Eugenia's Hispanic lover kills her when he mistakes her for lost diamond mines. Over and over again, characters end up in “infirmary” or Jackson, the state institution for the insane. Osbey appends a glossary of Louisiana ethnic expressions and place names, in part an indication of her growing awareness of herself as a kind of Virgil leading the Dante-like reader into “unknown realms.” In many of these spectral poems the narration shifts without warning, from the man to the woman, the mother to the daughter, the sane to the insane. But if the reader sometimes loses his or her mooring, the author never does.
Osbey has been influenced by the work of Jean Toomer in particular, but also by Robert Hayden, the relatively unknown New Orleans poet Marcus Christian, and the music of Buddy Bolden, Dinah Washington, and Sarah Vaughan.
Her women reflect all ages: “Consuela” grows out of a girl's ring–game song, while “The Old Women on Burgundy Street” hymns an ode to learned resignation. “House of Bones,” however, operates in the realm of abstractions, putting forth a recipe for a spiritual dwelling whose construction nevertheless proceeds, in Osbey's alchemy, visibly before you.
Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman: A Narrative Poem was a new departure for Osbey, a single, long, richly evocative story. Ms. Regina, the hoodoo woman of the earlier collection, reappears here, ministering to the magnetically attractive narrator Marie Calcasieu (‘Screaming Eagle’), who can “walk” in men's blood, especially Percy's. The Faubourg Marigny setting provides a tale for everything, as we gaze at the life of the quarter and see the bits of history in the debris of the daily. Every detail of life here is ritualistic, spiritual, and embued with meaning, even the empty rooms of Marie's house. The patterns of hoodoo assist here; Osbey sees them as a series of life principles. Generational influences intersect; Marie's life seems linked to the old story of her parents, to the old place out in Manchac swamp, and to the maroon people who live nearby.
Osbey's work in the mid–1990s, All Saints, continues her exploration of Louisiana's Creole–African American culture and features a number of meditations on historical and legendary figures. Osbey won an American Book Award for All Saints: New and Selected Poems in 1997.
Bibliography
- Violet Harrington Bryan, “Evocations of Place and Culture in the Works of Four Contemporary Black Louisiana Writers: Brenda Osbey, Sybil Kein, Elizabeth Brown Guillory, and Pinkie Gordon Lane,” Louisiana Literature Review
4.2 (1987): 49–80. - Brenda Marie Osbey, interview by John Lowe, in The Future of Southern Letters, 1995, pp. 93–118
John Lowe
