By: Jaxon Lee
To migrate is to rebuild the theater of one’s imagination. For a writer deeply rooted in the physical and cultural soil of their birthplace, crossing borders is not merely a logistical shift from one hemisphere to another. It can become a profound translation of the senses.
In the poetic journey of Marcia Badal, this translation unfolds across a wide geographical and emotional arc, tracing a path from the media landscapes of Guyana to the quiet, moonlit valleys of Owego, New York. The resulting text acts as a bridge between two distinct worlds, creating an immigrant poetics where the memory of tropical warmth remains in conversation with the crisp, historical air of a new American home.
Every jewel writer carries an initial blueprint of belonging, a primary landscape that shapes how they perceive light, shadow, and community. For Badal, this blueprint was formed along the coastlines and riverways of Guyana. Her professional life within the media landscape of the National Communications Network in Georgetown, alongside corporate tenures in Berbice, provided her with a close view of the rhythms of her homeland.
This background in capturing public narratives appears to inform her poetry, giving her an eye for the shared textures of human life. Yet, when she turns her gaze to her birthplace, the corporate distance of media work gives way to a personal reclamation of space.
In her verses dedicated to the Essequibo region, the landscape is not merely a setting. It becomes a declaration of identity. The text paints the region in celebratory strokes, conjuring a world of gold suns, ancient rainforests, the force of Kaieteur Falls, and deep indigenous roots.
Here, the poetry captures a sensory environment defined by abundance and intensity, where the rain is tropical and heavy, and the land feels vast, untamed, and deeply tied to heritage. This is the landscape of youth, memory, and foundational belonging, a place where the self is closely connected with the soil, and where loss, when it arrives, feels as disruptive as a storm breaking over the coast.
The true test of the immigrant poetic consciousness often occurs when that primary landscape is left behind. The transition marked by a physical move to the United States introduces a clear shift in the writer’s internal geography.
A suitcase filled with dreams replaces the familiar horizons of Berbice and Essequibo, and the writer faces the task of finding poetry in an unfamiliar climate. The tropical rains and dense rainforests give way to the changing seasons of Upstate New York, requiring a new vocabulary and a new way of seeing.
It is within this transition that Badal’s work finds a careful equilibrium, locating a second poetic sanctuary in the historic village of Owego. Rather than allowing the memory of Guyana to fade, or treating her new environment with cold detachment, she allows the two worlds to enrich one another.
The resulting “Owego Suite” within her collection represents an adaptation of place. The vastness of the South American wilderness is replaced by a localized, intimate mythology of a historic American town.
Through poems that explore the “Whispering Pines of Owego” and the “Echoes beneath the Bridge,” Badal maps emotional survival onto the landscape of the Susquehanna River. The sensory details shift dramatically. The heat of the gold sun is replaced by moonlit valleys. The architectural memory of stilted coastal homes gives way to cobblestone streets. The roar of distant waterfalls transforms into the quiet murmurs of a river flowing beneath historic bridges.
Even the local fairgrounds and seasonal traditions become markers of a newly claimed home.
This transition highlights the dual nature of immigrant identity. The writer does not erase the past to fit into the present. Instead, she layers her experiences.
When Badal writes of the Susquehanna, the river carries the emotional weight of the Essequibo. The quiet devotion of a father weathering storms to shield his family, or the heavy grief of losing a brother named Prem, is mapped onto these new northern coordinates. Through this layering, the poems suggest that sorrow, resilience, and devotion can remain recognizable across distance and geography.
Ultimately, From the Corentyne Coast to the Susquehanna presents the anatomy of a dual landscape that is both divided and made whole through writing. By serving as a local newspaper poet and volunteering with the Tioga Arts Council, Badal bridges the gap between her media past and her creative present.
Her poetry suggests that a writer’s internal geography can continue to expand. The tropical warmth of Guyana and the pastoral beauty of Owego do not have to exist as opposites. Instead, they become two vital parts of the same creative life, showing that home is not only a single point on a map, but a landscape continuously built through memory, adaptation, and verse.
