We spew ourselves up, but already underneath laughter can be heard.
– Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
In the chapter ‘On National Culture’ of his 1963 book, The Wretched of the Earth, the Martiniquan author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argues that within a colonised nation, the artistic output of the native writer evolves through three distinct phases. In the initial phase Fanon suggests, that the writers output reflects his assimilation of the occupuying culture, the literature produced in this period corresponding to concurrent trends and styles in the literature of the colonising country.
In the second phase Fanon suggests that the writer becomes ‘disturbed’ and ‘decides to remember what he is’. The writer attempts to write about his people, but since he is not, as Fanon points out ‘ a part of his people’ (Fanon, 1982:179) he observes the people externally. During this period, the writer attempts to reconstitute himself by incorporating childhood memories and the mythologies of the ‘native’ culture into his work. But the aesthetic tools and techniques he uses are those borrowed from the coloniser. The writer looks to the past for inspiration, unable to fully engage with the ‘now’ of the people. As a result his writing becomes melancolic, a literature of longing. This transitionary phase can be traumatic for the writer, as Fanon suggests,
Sometimes this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humour and by allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and difficulty, where death is experienced, and disgust too. We spew ourselves up, but already underneath laughter can be heard. (Fanon, 1982:179)
As a result of this internal struggle, the writer eventually re-emerges with a deeper nationalistic conviction, as ‘an awakener of the people’, stirring them into action, becoming a spokesperson for the revolution and validating the potency of the national culture by joining with the people in their struggle against the occupying forces. The third phase of the indigenous writer’s artistic evolution, which Fanon calls ‘the fighting phase’, (ibid), is therefore characterised by a revolutionary or national literature.
This essay will focus on this revolutionary impulse as it manifests in Caribbean poetry and attempt to show how innovation in Caribbean poetry reflects this idea of revolution. I will also discuss the work of a selection of Caribbean poets in an effort to show how innovations like Negritude, Surrealism, nation language and Dub poetry are all results of this revolutionary impulse. Using Fanon’s analysis as a framework, I intend to show how innovation in Caribbean poetry cannot be separated from the socio-political history of the region.
The history of the Caribbean thus far, has been a history of flux and mutability, diaspora, exile and colonialisation. Centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived in what he mistook for the West ‘Indies’, indigenous Indians - the Tainos, Arawaks and Caribs had transversed the arc of islands that form the Caribbean, from the tip of Florida in the north to Trinidad in the south, at the top of mainland South America. These indigenous societies were destroyed with the coming of the Europeans. And in their wake came millions of African slaves. After the abolition of slavery in the mid 19th century, Chinese and East Indian indentured labourers were drafted in to support the colonial economies. This kaleidoscopic array of imported cultures has given the Caribbean its particular, unique character where Europe seems to blend with the ‘new world’.
But this blending has come at some expense. The break up of the colonial empires during the mid 20th century precipitated a period of political and economic instability in the Caribbean. During and after World War two, several thousand West Indian men and women arrived in the UK to help rebuild the British infrastructure. The benefits were mutual.
Writers from the Caribbean, at least those who wished to make a living from writing, have also in most cases been forced to leave the Caribbean for the US or Europe where their chances of having their work published or finding work were greater. This urge to leave has always played an important part in Caribbean ideology.
As the poet and social historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite wrote in the literary journal Bim in 1957,
‘I want to submit that the desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of West Indian sensibility, whether that migration is in fact or by metaphor.’
Whilst in personal conversation he has suggested that a Caribbean person only becomes a Caribbean person when they leave the Caribbean.’ .
During the period immediately after the abolition of slavery precious little, if anything, existed of what can be called Caribbean writing, at least not as we know it today. It must be remembered that at this time, slavery was still a recent memory and the literature of the Caribbean was produced by Europeans, and at least in the British Caribbean - by the English landowners and educated creoles. Although much of this work was set in the Caribbean, it was not a Caribbean literature but what Brathwaite calls a ‘tropical English’ .
Many of the writers who published fiction and poetry during this period were white English, born in the Caribbean, but educated in England and so intrinsically removed from the experience of slavery, and from the life of the African slave that the work they produced for the most part merely used the Caribbean as an exotic backdrop for their stories and poems. Very few were able to give a convincing picture of life in the islands, often attempting, unsuccessfully, to transpose the plantation experience to the English shire whilst using the models of Dryden, Pope and Byron.
During the 1930s and 40s there were a few scattered literary journals, like Bim in Barbados, Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana, Focus in Jamaica and The Beacon in Trinidad which published poetry and prose from local writers. But even at this stage no clear Caribbean character had emerged in poetry. The Beacon for example- considered a controversial left wing journal at the time- published poetry that was very English in character, even if the setting was tropical and sprinklings of dialect were incorporated.
The editors and contributors to the journal were, apart from a few exceptions – one of them being the Marxist philosopher and novelist C.L.R. James - of a minority group of well educated or at least wealthy descendants of ‘near-white’ or Creole land owners. This ‘petit bourgeois’ of early 20th century Trinidad, sought to align themselves with what they thought were the literary trends of the ‘mother country’, producing a poetry which bore pale imitation of the masters of pentameter they sought to emulate. Very little of the poetry collected in these journals was revolutionary enough – either in content, attitude or style – to reach Fanon’s third ‘fighting’ phase of ‘native’ intellectual evolution, remaining set in the first, assimilative phase and what the Black British academic Homi K. Bhabha calls ‘mimicry’.(1994)
Ralph De Boissiere – himself a mixed race middle class Creole- and along with Albert Gomes one of the editors of The Beacon, outlines the problem quite frankly,
They (the whites and ‘near whites’) attached themselves to British culture without becoming cultured. British education was designed to black out negro culture and inculcate a deep sense of one’s inferiority to foreign whites, with whom culture was supposed to originate.
The poetry that The Beacon published is for the most part only of historical interest. The work is flagrantly derivative and neglects the everyday life of Trinidad in favour of an archaic English verse,
The day is up: up rides the sun and we
must out into the sun at sound of horn.
The day is up and some of us must be
dungeoned in offices where webs are born.
For me another task: to stand and see
a maenad wind dancing through a field of corn.
(Mendes, 1932:22)
A revolution in Caribbean poetry occurred eventually, when during the 1930s and 40s, ordinary people decided that their voice should be heard and when writers began to integrate the native folk culture and language into their work, to speak for the people.
One of the first recognisable signs of this came via Martiniquan students based in Paris in the thirties who aligned themselves with Andre Breton’s Paris Surrealist Group.
Two distinct black surrealist groups developed around this time. Firstly, there was the group of Martiniquan intellectuals attached to the Sorbonne which included Etienne Léro, René Menil, J.M. Monnerot and Simone Yoyotte. In 1932 they published a single issue of a journal: Légitime Défense, in which they declared their support for communism and surrealist revolution, celebrated Jazz, denounced slavery, acknowledged their African ancestry and celebrated the cultures of the African Diaspora. They also criticised the black bourgeoisie and published surrealist poetry by several members of the group.
Légitime Défense was immediately suppressed by the French authorities who were anxious not to let any copies reach the colonies. The poetry they published in the journal has been criticised for being in the style of the French movement rather than in the colloquial voice of colonised peoples, but, Défense was nevertheless an historic and highly influential document that gave warning of things to come. As the ‘Declaration’ that opens the journal warns,
This little journal is a provisional tool, and if it collapses we shall find others. We are indifferent to the conditions of time and space which, defining us in 1932 as people of the French Caribbean, have consequently established our initial boundaries without in the least limiting our field of action.
Another black surrealist group developed among students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, which included the Guyanese poet Léon Gotran Damas, Leopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal and the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire. This group established their own journal in 1934 entitled L’Etudiant Noir, which like that of the Sorbonne group, was limited to one edition.
It is in this March 1935 issue of the journal that Aimé Césaire first coined the term, ‘Negritude’ as a way re-appropriating and empowering the word ‘negre’ which the group felt held negative connotations. Although Negritude as a concept can be criticised for being essentialist in nature, it would have far reaching influence and become one of the integral ideas of black liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.
All three members of this second group were exemplary poets. And in 1937 with the publication of his collection, Pigments, the Guyanese poet Léon Damas became the first francophone poet from the colonies to forge a distinctly ‘black’ poetic sensibility that went beyond European literary models. And Aimé Césaire, in a 1939 issue of the literary review Volontés published what would be Negritude’s manifesto and what Andre Breton called ‘nothing less than the greatest lyric monument of our time’ – the long poem Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), from which, this excerpt:
Partir.
Comme il y a des homes-hyénes et des homes-panthéres, je
serais un home-juif
un home-cafre
un home-hindou-de-Calcutta
un home-de-Harlem-qui-ne-vote-pas
(To leave.
As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I shall be a Jew-man
a kaffir-man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta-man
a man-from-Harlem-who-does-not-vote) (Césaire, 1995:84-85)
Cahier examines the impact of colonialism on Césaire’s native Martinique.
But while Cahier is undoubtedly experimental in form and controversial in its subject matter and imagery, Césaire’s language is not the creolese of the colonies but that of the black francophone intellectual. In this way, while it qualifies as a revolutionary work – it can be seen as falling short of being a work of ‘Caribbean’ poetry. Surrealism’s influence on Cesaire has also been questioned. But in questioning Cesaire’s Surrealism critics have sought to apply a rigid definition of what surrealism is and as Robin D.G. Kelly argues in Freedom Dreams -The Black Radical Imagination,
‘The question of his surrealism, however, is generally posed only in terms of Andre Breton’s influence on Cesaire. In this view, surrealism is treated as “European thought” and, like Marxism, is considered alien to non-European cultural traditions.’
Surrealism is by nature, notoriously difficult to define. In ‘Andre Breton- What is surrealism’ Franklin Rosemont of the Chicago Surrealist Group offers the following,
Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances. (Rosemont, 2001:6)
Surrealism and politics are intertwined and cannot be separated. In fact in can be argued that rather than being an artistic or literary movement it is in fact a political one. The French surrealist were staunch ant-colonialists and supported revolutionary movements throughout the world. They saw surrealism as a necessary insurrection against the empires of Europe and drew much of their political and inspiration from the cultures of colonial Africa and the Diaspora. Many so-called surrealist techniques – automatism, bricolage and the use of dreams for example are found in shamanistic and religious practices of indigenous or ‘primitive’ cultures not only in Africa, but in the Americas, Asia and Oceania.
Andre Breton himself has emphasised surrealism affinity with colonised or oppressed nations and with indigenous or ‘primitive’ cultures.
'Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first because it has sided with them against all forms of imperialism and white brigandage and second because of the profound affinities between surrealism and primitive thought. Both envision the abolition of the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory emotion.'
In many ways Surrealism came late to Europe. The revolution of the mind that in the west was called surrealism had been an integral facet of African thought, and one that was brought with the slaves to the Caribbean and the Americas, one which found expression in dance, religious practices and in music. It can also be suggested that Surrealism, like Jazz, and the Science Fiction written by blacks during the Harlem Renaissance was also a way of distancing the past and coming to terms with their state of exile by forging a new, alternative vision of the world.
.
The affects of another kind of exile are strikingly evident in the poetry of the Bajan poet and social historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Braithwaite’s work is central to Caribbean literary innovation. Brathwaite’s poetry is a significant example of poetry as revolution, and can be seen as being situated in Fanon’s third ‘fighting phase’.
Brathwaite was born in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1930 and had written poetry since childhood. At school in Barbados he received what the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott has called, ‘a sound colonial education’ (Walcott, 1996:346). However, by Braithwaite’s own testimony this period was not a fulfilling one.
‘Poetry and teaching had no connection. I mean teachers had nothing to do with poetry. They had Palgrove's Golden Treasury and made us learn these nonsense poems by heart. The whole concept was that of the English establishment. That is what poetry was in school—"The Ancient Mariner," that sort of thing.
Brathwaite had published his poems since 1950, most significantly in the quarterly Caribbean literary journal Bim, edited by Frank Collymore in Barbados. During this period he also became interested in Jazz, and like the Beat writers in America at the time, began to incorporate the phrasings and rhythms of be bop into his poems. After winning a national scholarship, he left for the UK in 1949 to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating four years later with a BA in history.
Brathwaite lived and worked in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) between 1957 and 1962. And he has said that living in Ghana – ‘in the villages, hearing the drums and the festivals’ gave his poems a certain rhythmic complexity.
One of the Caribbean’s most prolific poets, Brathwaite has published a dozen over collections of poetry, two plays and several essays and lectures. Braithwaite’s work is idiosyncratic and is not easily characterised. His poetry fuses European literary techniques with an African/Caribbean sensibility and use of language. His lines are rich in the rhythms of the spoken word, incorporating onomatopoeia, one word lines, neologisms, intentional miss-spellings and unexpected line breaks. He also uses dot matrix typefaces of his computer to graphically illustrate the movement and sound of his poems. As he says,
I think that oral traditions do have a very strong visual
aspect. In the African tradition, they use sculpture. Really,
what I'm trying to do is create word-sculptures on
the page, but word-song for the ear.
By using the computer to distort and complexitise the word Brathwaite is also challenging preconcieved notions of linguistic heiracies. He is also affecting meaning and readability in the text. Considering the subversive motive behind Braithwaite’s poetics, it may be no coincidence that he calls this technique Sycorax, after the mother of the slave Caliban in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Tempest’.
By actively aiming to destabilise the colonially imposed language in this way, Braithwaite has forged a unique, experimental poetry in which the roll and wave of the Caribbean Sea resonates. Central to Brathwaite’s aesthetic philosophy is the need to highlight the historical links and psychological connections between Africa and the Caribbean, in a search for the roots of the Caribbean soul.
all down yr neck
along the spine now welt
-ing w/ the busha blowes
yr back a modern mural of dis
-tress
. the whip of auctioneers
gold
bangle blink. in in yr ear. a nugget
in yr nostril
it is this other eye that blows my mind
wind in a torch. you blaze
upon me from yr baleful stare
(Brathwaite, 2004:p82, 43-54)
Braithwaite’s trilogy : Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969), reissued by Oxford University Press in one volume in 1973 as The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy is perhaps his most celebrated work.. It is an epic work in which Brathwaite attempts to make sense of the Africa’s relation to the Caribbean and in which he examines the tyrannies of the slave trade and plantation system and the possibility of an African inheritance. He also addresses the psychological effects of displacement and diaspora and how it contributes to the socio-political situation of Caribbean people.
It is in The Arrivants that Brathwaite truly forges a radical Caribbean experimentalism in verse. At times this takes the form of subversion, as in the poem ‘Folkways’ from Rights of Passage
I am a fuck-
in’ negro,
man, hole
in my head,
brains in
my belly;
black skin
red eyes
broad back
big you know
what: not very quick
to take offence
but once
offended, watch
that house
you livin’ in
an’ watch that lit-
tle sister.
(Braithwaite, 1996:1-18)
While in poems like ‘Rites’ from Islands, Brathwaite writes in a rich Bajan vernacular,
this isn’t no time for playin’
the fool nor makin’ no sport; this is cricket!
but Gullstone too deaf:
mudder doan clean out de wax in e’ear!
Firs’ ball from Cass an’ he fishin’;
secon’ ball an’ he missin’, swishin’ (43-48)
Brathwaite was not the first Anglophone Caribbean poet to write in ‘dialect’ - as early as 1912 the celebrated Jamaican poet Claude McKay had published two books: Constab Ballads (1912) and Songs of Jamaica (1912) both in a Jamaican vernacular that utilised English pentameter. But Brathwaite was perhaps the first poet or academic to assemble a comprehensive study of the use of vernacular in Caribbean poetry. In his seminal History of the Voice, published in 1984, he distances and differentiates ‘dialect’ from what he would hence call ‘nation language’, seeing dialect as a somewhat derogatory term and arguing that only ‘caricature speaks in dialect’. He then goes on to describe ‘nation language’ as
‘…the submerged area of that dialect which is more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be English’ Brathwaite says, ‘but often it is an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time.’ (13)
In History of the Voice, Brathwaite suggests that nation language represents the ‘total expression’ (18) of Caribbean peoples, that is, a language of experience, an expression that comes from the realities of everyday life and speech rather than from books or education. To Braithwaite, nation language is birthed in the oral tradition and as such is flexible and pliable, amendable according to what is being expressed. It is the sound of the people, the language of those who were brought to the Caribbean through the middle passage, ‘the language of slaves and labourers’ (5)
Brathwaite sees nation language as a revolutionary device. In his PhD dissertation The development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820, published in 1971, he argues that:
‘It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled. Within the folk tradition language was (and is) a creative act in itself’
As Frantz Fanon argues at the beginning of this essay, the ‘fighting phase’ of a ‘native’ writer’s evolution, gives rise to a revolutionary work; a national literature. This literature then, can be seen to posses an empowering potentiality or unifying effect.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, nation language was met by strong critical and academic resistance. Verse and fiction written in nation language was deemed inappropriate for serious literature. In fact some questioned whether it could be considered literature at all.
A good example of this resistance can be observed in the case of the late Jamaican poet and broadcaster Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennet. As early as the mid 1930s, Bennet was writing and performing poems and monologues in Jamaican dialect to packed village halls throughout the country. Yet Bennet would have to wait until 1945 before her poems were accepted for publication by the islands largest and oldest newspaper, the Gleaner - then one of very few outlets available to writers.
By 1962 Bennet had published nine books which were hugely successful in Jamaica as well as with the West Indian community in Britain. Yet, opposition continued. In the landmark Independence Anthology of Jamaican Poetry published in 1962, her poem does not appear in the poetry section but at the rear in the miscellaneous section, almost as an addendum. In fact it was only in the 1970s that Bennet began to be officially recognised and honoured for her pioneering work.. Here is a brief excerpt from one of her most famous poems, ‘Dutty tough’, from her collection Jamaica Labrish (1966)
Sun a-shine but tings noh bright,
Doah pot a-bwile, bickle noh nuff,
River flood but water scarce yaw,
Rain a-fall but dutty tuff!
De price o’ bread gan up so high
Dat we haffe agree,
Fe cut we y’eye pon bread an all
Tun dumpling refugee!
(1-8)
During the early 1970s, another, more explicitly militant form of post-colonial literary rebellion emerged with the development of Dub poetry, its growth coinciding with the rise of Black Power movements in the Caribbean.
One of the genre’s most acclaimed performers Oku Onuora defines Dub poetry as:
‘a poem that has a built-in reggae rhythm - hence when the poem is read without any reggae rhythm ( so to speak) backing, one can distinctly hear the reggae rhythm coming out of the poem’
Influenced by reggae DJs who would ‘toast’ or speak rhythmically over the b-side instrumental versions of songs, Dub poets recite or record their poetry to ‘dubwise’ accompaniment. Unlike the DJ’s toast however, which is generally improvised, most Dub poetry is pre-written. Dub poetry draws heavily on biblical language and the black liberation rhetoric of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. Another important element of Dub poetry is its use of Rastafarian language with its radical reassessment of semantics. In Rastafarian vernacular the first person singular- mostly spoken as ‘me’ in Jamaican patois – is seen as subservient and replaced with ‘I’. The plural ‘we’ thus becomes ‘I-n-I’ in an effort to re-establish the individual as centre of their experience.
Another interesting aspect of Rastafarian linguistics; and consequently dub poetry, is the reaffirming of ‘negative’ words. Rastafarians place great emphasis on the power of words, believing that the ‘Queen’s English’ contains ‘negative connotations in the spelling and pronunciation of certain words’. As Millard Faristzaddi explains in Itations of Jamaica and I Rastafari
Within the words “be(lie)f”, “bles(sin)g”, and “(sin)cere” we can perceive the word vibrations of “sin and “lie”. In the case of “sin”, the “s” is dropped reaffirming the “word, sound and power” positively as “Incerely” or “Icerely” (Faristzaddi, 1987:76)
The controversial Jamaican British based poet-activist Linton Kwesi Johnson is seen as Dub poetry’s figurehead and is one of the most successful poets of the genre, with seven collections of poetry and several albums of Dub poetry set to music. Johnson is also arguably one of the few dub poets along with Jean Binta Breeze, Bongo Jerry and Michael Smith whose work survives the transition from stage to page.
In Johnson’s work poetry becomes a tool for militant expression. His words are crafted with a poet’s fine eye for nuance and drama, while his deep sonorous voice and stern demeanour have made him an iconic figure on the world poetry stage. While much of his work is overtly political and concerned with issues of injustice and pan-African liberation, it is often introspective and tender at the same time, as in this excerpt from ‘Story’ (2002):
wance upon a time
jus like inna nursery rime
before piggy tun swine
mi did wear
mi fear
pan mi face
like a shiel
like a mawsk
an evrybody tink mi cool an deadly
nottn yu coulda seh
woulda mek mi tek it awf
an if yu get mi nervos
ah voulda jus lawf it awf
an evrybody tink mi cool an deadly
(1-14)
In personal conversation Johnson has stated that his decision to write consistently in dialect came about because he wanted ‘to give the black British youth a voice’ . But Johnson’s appeal and relevance is no longer limited to one segment of the population, his work has been widely anthologised and is taught at universities worldwide as an example of contemporary British Literature. Once, the enfant terrible of black Britain Johnson has now become a part of mainstream culture. Yet he still retains his provocative edge. At a reading in Los Angeles in 2005, organised and funded by the British Council and which I attended, Johnson confided in me how amused he was to be performing one of his most controversial poems ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ in the presence of the head of the British Council.
While Dub Poetry, certainly has its limits, much of it falls flat on the page for instance, Dub poetry with its aesthetic grounded in revolt represents one of the true revolutionary and original forms of Caribbean poetics and can be suggested as an example of poetry that has reached Fanon’s third fighting phase of native literary evolution.
In the Trinidad carnival the midnight robber is one of the most distinctive characters. These individuals, with diabolical masks, dressed all in black, with doublet and breeches, wide exaggerated hats with fringed brims, capes adorned with skull and bone signs and armed with wooden pistols, whistles and daggers confront spectators on the streets on carnival days. As part of their ‘act’ they recite long, complex speeches, rich with bravado and boasts of their abilities, seeking revenge for their ancestors who were enslaved.
These characters began to appear on the streets of Port of Spain, Trinidad as early as 1906. Whilst originally thought to be influenced by western movies and cowboy characters like Jesse James, recent studies have suggested roots in African griot traditions and the literature of the Mississippi basin. Robber talk also has affinities with other African derived word and speech games, such as ‘the dozens’ and freestyle or ‘battle’ rap.
The following is an excerpt from a much longer speech as performed by Brain Honore, a legendary midnight robber from Belmont, Port of Spain.
"For the day I was born, the sun refused to shine
Hurricanes smashed the citadels of the city,
Atomic eruptions raged in the mountains.
Philosophers and scientists said the world had come to an end.
But NO! , It was I, Cangaceiro who had come forth.
What manner of man are you,
Who would stare your own death straight in the face?
What is your name, your claim to fame and from whence you came?
Talk Robber man!
As in Dub poetry, the influence of the Bible is evident in the midnight robber’s art, as is the extravagance of the English Victorian theatre, colonial school text books and Shakespearean monologues. The midnight robber’s speech is usually pre-written and memorised, lasting as long as half an hour depending on the situation or challenge. Several new speeches might be composed for each carnival season which are then recited at locations throughout Port of Spain as the carnival progresses.
In robber talk there is an interesting contradiction. Here is an art form that stretches the language of the English coloniser to exaggerated limits, within the contexts of a Caribbean Carnival. Robber language satirises the master, the land owner and the bourgeoisie. Thus robber talk, which at first appears to fall within the first phase of Fanon’s theory actually goes beyond mere mimicry and could be seen to correspond more to the third ‘fighting’ phase. It is by nature a fighting language in which language is used in an exalted, heightened form, but for the benefit of drama, laughter, ridicule and ‘picong’ . Indeed, as Fanon says, ‘We spew ourselves up, but already underneath laughter can be heard’ (Fanon, 1982:179)
It was my intention in this essay, to suggest that there is a revolutionary impulse within Caribbean poetics that manifests itself in innovative forms such as nation language, Dub poetry and robber talk. I also wanted to show how this impulse evolved chronologically. Taking into account the political complexity and turbulent history of the region, such a movement has to exist. According to the Guyanese novelist and essayist, Wilson Harris,
The constitution of history as it affects the Caribbean and the Guianas is one which the creative writer is profoundly qualified to explore, I believe, provided he can suffer again through his work the ancestral torment of finding his tongue seized again as if he had become a dumb thing without voice or language…
I hope I have also shown that a diffusionist view of literature which places Europe at the centre of innovation is not a suitable model with which to approach the Caribbean. There appears to be stereotypical notions of what Caribbean poetry is and should be. More often than not however, what is observed is not the true culture of the people but what Fanon refers to as ‘mummified fragments’ or ‘outworn contrivances’ (Fanon, 1982:180)
It is in taking a stand and going beyond the limits of the adopted language that innovations were made in Caribbean poetry. This is evident in the nation language poetry of the late Louise Bennet, the African musicality of Kamau Brathwaite, the Dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka and in the Midnight Robber’s speech. These innovations were pioneering, clearing a path where none existed before; they were indeed the avant garde, the advance guard. Because these innovations and experiments occurred outside of academia or a tradition that is familiar to western critics, they were relegated to the category of folk art or cultural artefact.
But like African art, which is rooted in functionality, Caribbean poetry, that is, poetry with the ‘deep feeling’ of Caribbean people, serves a purpose. That purpose is revolution, both physical and spiritual. Language becomes a tool with which identities are forged and freedom is won. That language has to be the language of the people, with the ability to express the reality of their lives and surroundings. This does not mean that all Caribbean poetry has to be written in vernacular, but it does suggest that in the same way that the English sonnet expresses a certain Englishness, so too, appropriate meters and devices may be needed, for as Kamau Brathwaite says,
‘The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.’ (Brathwaite, 1984:10)
NOTES
1 Kamau Brathwaite quoted in Bim, 1957 and available at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brathwa.htm, accessed 9.12.06
2 Personal conversation with Kamau Brathwaite, London, 2005
3 Kamau Brathwaite has done a comprehensive study of this period’s literature in his essay ‘Creative Literature of the British West Indies during the period of slavery’, 1970. Collected in Roots, University of Michigan Press, 1996
4 Ralph De Boissiere from an interview quoted in The Trinidad Awakening, Reinhard W. Sander, 1988:5
5 This is reiterated by the French anarchist writer Daniel Guerin who writes ‘A Caribbean culture only started to come into being when a minority split from away from the middle classes and made contact with the people, turned its attentions to their problems, studied their customs, their beliefs, what of the african inheritance the people have kept alive, and voiced the people’s aspirations and anger.’ (Guerin, 1961:80)
6 Etienne Léro et al. quoted in Refusal of the Shadow, (ed) Michael Richardson, Verso, 1996:42
7 Andre Breton quoted in Refusal of the Shadow, (ed) Michael Richardson, Verso, 1996:6
8 André Breton, in a 1945 interview with René Bélance, originally published in Haiti-Journal and quoted here from Franklin Rosemont’s What is Surrealism, 2001:336
9 In personal conversation with Kamau Brathwaite Bajan is the preferred term rather than Barbadian.
10 Interview with Kamau Brathwaite by Erika Smilowitz,, St. Croix, Virgin Islands on February 26, 1991 available online at : http://www.thecaribbeanwriter.com/volume5/brathwaite.html
11 Interview with Kamau Brathwaite by Erika Smilowitz,, St. Croix, Virgin Islands on February 26, 1991 available online at : http://www.thecaribbeanwriter.com/volume5/brathwaite.html accessed on 9.12.06
12quoted at http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=95705369
13In the play, Sycorax, who is mentioned but never seen, is referred to by Prospero as a ‘foul witch’ from Algiers who ‘with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop’(Shakespeare, The Tempset)
14Quoted in The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, ed Stewart Brown, Seren Books, Mid Glamorgan, Wales, 1995:15
15 Oku Onuora quoted by Stewart Brown, "Dub Poetry: Selling Out", Poetry Hales 22.2, 1987:51.
16 Personal conversation with Linton Kwesi Johnson, California State University, Los Angeles, April 2005
17 Ibid. Inglan is a Bitch is also collected in Johnson’s 2002 Selected Poems
18Camille Grainger, http://www.visittnt.com/ToDo/Events/carnival2001/Mas/traditional/robber.html accessed 9.12.06
19Brian Honore quoted by Camille Grainger and available at http://www.visittnt.com/ToDo/Events/carnival2001/Mas/traditional/robber.html accessed 9.12.06
20In Trinidad ‘picong’ originally related to a verbal battle between calypsonians in which a contender’s wit and skill at improvisation determined his/her success. It has evolved to refer to any sustained verbal teasing. The word is possibly derived from the Spanish ‘picón’- mocking, or ‘picar’ – to prick or peck. It is also possibly influenced in pronunciation by the French ‘piquant – spicy.
21Wilson Harris quoted in Nathaniel Mackey Discrepant Engagement, 1993: 167
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