Rasaq Malik Gbolahan
In Sturge Town, the vestiges of colonialism/slavery are explored in some of the poems. There is a recollection of the stolen things, which is your father’s village. Here, I am thinking about how places shape history, or how history becomes a map that guides us to places rendered uninhabitable by the brutality of colonialism. What would you say about the pivotal roles of history in this collection, and what does it mean to you as a poet bearing its enormous weight?
Kwame Dawes
I honestly do not consider myself, “as a poet”, bearing an enormous weight. One of the things that keeps coming back to me in conversations about writing is that much of what I might consider a burden or a responsibility or even a certain pressure as a poet only makes sense if I admit that I write out of my lived experiences. I have said to writers that I am skeptical of poets who claim to be political poet but who, themselves are not political. Maybe skeptical is not the word. Perhaps what I mean is such circumstances cannot make sense to me given how I write and given what I believe poetry means in my life. Poetry is a means by which I come to both understand and articulate experience. In other words, it makes sense to me to consider poetry as a vehicle in the way that language or song are vehicles. This vehicle is occupied by me, my baggage, my history, my discourse, my experience with poetry and with art and with life. And this is a long way of answering your quite reasonable question. I do not feel burdened as a poet when faced with the knowledge of the history of colonialism, slavery, and their attendant effects on those I call “my people” as well as the world in which I live. Poetry, in fact, is a shelter for me, and a kind of answer to that burden for meaning and understanding that comes with facing this “history”, this reality. In Sturge Town, there are poems that seem to express anger, sorrow, regret, indignation, and so on, but they are the end of the process, and they are a process that begins with living through these difficult encounters with the repercussions of the history to which you are referring. I do not come to poetry, then to present these histories, but to express the ways in which I respond to and process this knowledge, this history. Poetry does this work and does it meaningfully for me. In a sense, by sharing these poems, I believe I am enacting a conversation with those who have valued this function of poetry—that is poetry as the chronicling of the sentiment of our time, through the body and imagination of the poet. One of the benefits of being at this stage of my writing life is that I have the opportunity of hindsight, or of the ability to look back at my work and to discover something about my own growth, my obsessions, my preoccupations and my development as a poet and as a human being. This hindsight allows me to say that Sturge Town feels consistent in concerns with the rest of my work, and where there are departures, the come blessedly because I have seen more, felt more, and lived in this world some more. History is important to me because I have found myself able to make sense of the present through my knowledge of history. I think there is a truly liberating relationship between history and truth, and as a poet, I have found history, told in books, in archives, in oral accounts, in images, in films, in art, to be truly powerful for. It is, therefore, inevitable, I think, that my poems are someone how defined by whatever idea of history is occupying me in the world. The last thing I will say here is the most obvious thing, I think. History as construed in our world, is a profound privilege. History creates a dynamic relationship between who we are now and where we are coming from. Sadly, the great power of political control and imperialist authority has mean the harnessing of history, by so doing, the emotive, psychic and sentient denial of history for those people who are oppressed, denigrated and in the down cycle of their civilizations. Denying a people’s memory is a weapon of power and control. For me, the art of making poems is a part of the recording of history—the defiant statement that we are here, that we were here.
RMG
It’s interesting to reflect on your appraisal of ancestral dead and familial figures in this collection. For example, “Travelling” captures powerfully the life of Sister Amelia Clarke, your grandmother and her wealth of experiences as a traveller (through books and physical journeys). What do you think about bearing witness to her life and the remembrance of forebears in this collection? What can you say about the roles of poetry in voyaging us to the past, to the memories of our ancestral dead?
KD
In about 1993, I was beginning my career as a university professor in Sumter, South Carolina. My first collection, Resisting the Anomie had been accepted for publication by Goose Lane Editions, but was slated for publication in 1995. When I submitted that collection for their consideration I had already amassed enough poems to shape four volumes. The two and a half years previous to that had found me in a wave of poetry writing—intense, satisfying, and ultimately successful. I had grown confident in my poems. So while I waited for the first publication, I felt motivated to see if I could place the other collections. I have looked back at those manuscripts recently, and of course they were uneven, but much of the work was clearly stronger than all the poems I had been writing before that period. I do think I had been so immersed in reading of a full range of poets, writing imitations, teaching myself to write in meter, and much else, that I think my work became technically more assured. But as I have said in other contexts, I think something more fundamental was happening to me and to my work. I suspect that the greater technical confidence combined with a sense of purposeful direction in my writing and the “discovery” of a “subject”. The subject, as it were, was broad enough to push back any skepticism I might have had, and more importantly, broad enough to allow me to consider my source of ideas inexhaustible. I became interested in writing in dialogue with the work of poets like Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison. They were writing a lyric of place and belonging, and they were also writing out of the peculiar circumstances of their times and their lives. I was away from Jamaica, and so my vision of Jamaica was sharper, hungrier, and thrilled about the possibility of replicating it in verse. This was to be the Jamaica of the last twenty years—the Jamaica I arrived at in 1971. Where my plays had been wrestling with polemics and the didacticism of ideology and doctrine, I was coming to poetry without that pressure, that demand. I wanted to re-see. I wanted to re-member. I wanted to mythologize a world that was decidedly mythic in my imagination, in my consciousness. Two decades— the 1970s and the 1980s offered me the convenience of narrative. There was a beginning, there was a pivotal center—the 1980s General Elections and their aftermath, and the 1980s during which three deaths would perhaps unfairly, serve as the lowest consequence of the death of the dream of the 1970s. First, Marley would die in 1981, my father in 1984, and Peter Tosh in 1987. A great deal more happened in those years, but I am trying to offer a sense of the clear narrative and emotive construct that had shaped my sense of this period of my life that had seen so much. I knew that there was space for the writing of that period—not as an accounting of history, but as a poet seeing and writing into poetic meaning, the complex of that time. I understood that my own journey had a convenience that lent itself to offering me a subject. Ghana, England. Jamaica, Canada, America—and not just America, but the southern states of America, South Carolina that I quite quickly appreciated as representing the fulcrum of African in America. My point is that I was bloated with myth, or at least with the need to consider experience as myth. I also knew that I was the person in the position to do so. However, when I got to Sumter, I quickly became known as a writer, and I had opportunities to read my poetry. I did not have a book, and I wanted to be able to leave something for the audiences as a kind of calling card. During that time, I had been thinking a great deal about writing poems that tracked my mother’s history in the way that many of the poems in Resisting the Anomie tracked my father’s. I started writing those poems in earnest based on stories my mother told me about her family. The sequence that emerged I called Amelia Clarke. I collected those poems and created a chapbook/pamphlet, using an old photo of my grandmother as the cover art. I never published any of those poems in any of my consequent collections, but I always imagined that I would publish them properly. This has not quite happened yet, but there are several poems in Sturge Town that come from that chapbook. What has been especially interesting to me about this is that these poems have held up well despite the time. You should be forgiven for reading “Traveler” as a “true” history of my grandmother Amelia Clarke. It is true in the way that poems can be, without being explicitly factual. Amelia Clarke never traveled outside of West Africa. She read, of course, but I have no evidence of just how much she read. So I have invented a capaciousness in her imagination in the poem, so that she is haunted with the knowledge in her blood of the people in her history who would have been part of the great forced migration of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to all the places that I have been. It is her finding access to travel through my body that I am seeking to capture in that poem. She has access through me to the complex legacies of the black historical experience—an African from Africa and an African in the Caribbean. Slavery is the anchor, and it is there with Amelia Clarke as it is with me. Accessing this ancestral legacy is one of the opportunities that the poetic imagination has given to me. This effort to access it, though, is also marked by a certain sorrow, the sorrow of not knowing, of not having the artifacts of their legacy with which to draw upon. I feel very fortunate that my mother could tell the stories of her mother, and her grandmother. While I am honoring them, I am also doing what I believe they would want—I am using them to find a way to the meaning of my presence and the presence of my children and so on. So, you are right, Sturge Town is peopled by ancestors, by those that I am connected to by blood and memory, and this is why the title of the work feels viscerally correct.
RMG
In “The Prodigal Converses with the Land,” there is a haunting recollection of colonial trauma anchored by the loss of the native language and the naming by the white people. There is the loss of the native language on the tongues of those who returned without understanding “our language of centuries.” The poet also addresses those standing at the gates of his village, to tell his grandmother to let him in. This reminds me of Christopher Okigbo’s poem, “The Passage (Heavensgate).” In the poem, the poet returns to the river goddess of his town, Mother Idoto as a prodigal son questing for the goddess’s forgiveness and reunion after years of alienation. I would like to know your thoughts on the function of poetry in conversing with the land or how poetry, despite the atrocities committed by the colonialists, helps you to reclaim your voice or the voices of the ancestors in your work.
KD
I will admit that this poem is in the tradition of the dramatic argument—a kind of essay on origin and place. What moves me most in the poem is my effort to capture a sense of place in details like the scent of gutters, the smell of baking bread, and the teeming energy of this place of my memory of Cape Coast. We spent stretches of time with our grandmother in Cape Coast, but my recollections are in unconnected images—moments—all retrieved as reconstructions. The poem, though, seems to make the case of a certain cultural alienation, a troubled desire to be accepted in a culture, and this is part of the “argument” as it were—the argument of history, of the effect of migration, and of the quite real intrusions of colonialism, imperialism and the fact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Needless to say, I have read a great deal about the politics and the social fact of the business of trading in the bodies of African people as part of a larger and quite monumental history deeply relevant to my time. I remember a few years ago finding a diary of a British merchant who had invested greatly in the slave trade. He was deeply involved with the representatives of his company who were assigned to Cape Coast, and in this book, there are his diaries, his letters to these representatives and the letters written in turn by those representatives. There were curious stories about the ordinary horrors of this business of trading in humans, and the thing that struck me most was the manner in which the humanity of these players who had the privilege of telling their story rather than diminish the horror of the business, made it more disturbing and haunting. This poem carries a lot of that sense as part of it, and it does express this need for an accounting of the relationship between those who were forced to leave, and those who stayed. What the poem stands in danger of doing is equating my more recent departure from Ghana to the Caribbean and the US with the slave trade, while still recognizing the parallels of that dynamic and continuous sense of history. Cape Coast is granted a voice. I am granted a voice. Emotionally, however, the sentiment of the poem is the simple connection between me and my grandmother. I am, therefore, engaged in a conversation with the dead, and as it happens, such conversations are, at least in some ways, best understood as acts of the imagination. And here, the imagination is not a fancy, not a counter to reality and “history” but indeed another kind of reality. In a poem in the collection, I present an imagined narrative of running to a woman who might be a relative outside the cottage in Sturge Town. I ask her where is home, and she says, “home is which part you want to bury”. I am exercised by this motion. The entire collection is exercised by it, not because I am convinced of its truthfulness, but because as a vehicle of the imagination and the emotive ways towards meaning, it is extremely useful. My Cape Coast poem is directly tied to this idea, and the Kwame who is speaking in this poem is best understood as a Kwame who is dead and who must now contend with return. It is, I suspect, the same “death” that Kamau Brathwaite creates in his book, Masks where he begins and long and painful conversation with his Ghanaian gods and his ancestors; and it is the same death, I think, that Walcott invokes in Omeros, when his hero embarks on a journey to Africa and enters a dialogue with the gods and ancestors. It is a song of belonging and longing, it is a construction in which memory converges with history and a certain kind of philosophizing. I think I am started to understand more about the poem.
RMG
You have written books that explore your penchant for music. Also, music permeates the sinews of your poems. In Sturge Town, some of the epigraphs to your poems reference Bob Marley. In your book, “Bob Marley: Lyrical Genuis,” you write, “At 13 I was arguing word politics. This was not at all an act of precociousness; it was, quite simply, the way the world came at us all through reggae at that time.” Here, it’s incontestable the presence of reggae and its unmistakable influence on you during your formative years and your passion for engaging it in your work. In Sturge Town, there is a line that clings to my mind. It begins, Reggae’s insinuating bass cleaves to my bloodline/. Here, I am thinking about bloodline. What does it mean to grow up in a time when reggae came to you all, and how does it impact your visions and goals as a poet?
KD
As I said in an earlier response, I carry in me a series of defining myths of time that undergird my work. These are accidents of the time of my birth and the places where I lived. I do suspect that I would be a different poet were I to have spent the second ten years of my life in a place other than Jamaica or maybe the Caribbean. This is a truism and not a profundity. But it is worth saying that given my view that our times make us as artists and poets—the thing we have no real control over—and then what should become a conscious vocational sensibility is that our art, our poetry functions as a chronicling of our time. Of course, one need not be conscious of this to become a part of the engine of historical record that constitutes writing and publishing and archiving. I mean were I to visit a small village in Jamaica and found slivers of paper with poems written during the 18th century by and enslaved person, I would read that work and consume that work fully willing to consider the work part of the fabric of the time. It has its uses. Artifacts, if you will. But for me, the knowledge that this way of accounting for presence—this act against erasure—has made me more deliberate about the act of writing. I want to pay attention, pay attention and chronicle, chronicle, chronicle. Even as I lived through the seventies in Jamaica, I knew I was living through a historical period for Jamaica. I was young, admittedly, but I could tell that the socialist experiment, the emergence of Rastafarianism, the assertion of Black consciousness on that island was a new and transformative reality altering even the most mundane elements of our life. I attended the same school that my father attended in the 1940s. Thirty years later, the elite school, that prior to then was peopled predominantly by white and light skinned Jamaicans and the rare black child like my father, was changing. The year I entered the school, the socialist Government had implemented a system they called free education. The educating of the population was to be a right of every citizen, and the elite schools would have to open their doors to a wider cross section of the population. This is a crude accounting, and I am sure a good Google search will identify the policy details of that time and the chronology of the actions taken by the government. But as a child, I knew that my generation represented a new kind of student for the school and it made us conscious of the political realities around us. I saw boys wearing locks and espousing Rastafarianism, and some boys espousing a new a more aggressively radical Christianity. In class, we were studying anti-colonial literature and our text books were explicitly looking at slavery, colonialism and imperialism, even as we read the western classics and studied the geography of .places far from us. But we were being asked to ask about the relevance of what we learned to who we were. Jamaica’s national motto is Out of Many, One People. It was a motto that sought to mute the fact that 90 percent of the population were black people of African descent. By the time of the seventies, the very light-skinned Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley, was referring to Jamaica as a black nation, and was embracing the elements of Rastafarianism that made useful sense to him as anti-imperialist and liberating. Rasaq, try and understand that everything I am writing here and saying here was something I understood to be happening when I was eleven and twelve years old. We arrived in Jamaica in 1971, and during the first few years we faced a tremendous amount of racism and tainting for being African. Within the space of four years, the country had changed in its attitude to Africa. The Black power movement in the US and the UK, the pro-independent movements in Africa, television shows like Roots and the Autobiography of Jane Pitman that we got to watch along with Manix and The Rockford Files, was part of this change. But there were explicit actions in Jamaica, political and cultural acts that were affirming this. And that work was happening close to home. My father’s role as the first black person to serve as the Director of the Institute of Jamaica gave him the chance to correct the problems of anti-black sensibility in Jamaica that emerged out of slavery. He was central in the establishment of the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica whose mandate was to give attention to and record the historical present of Africa in the Caribbean and in Jamaica. I know you are asking about reggae and my poetry, but I think I have to offer this context as a way of explaining why everything I have written has been shaped by the context of my life in my teens and my early twenties, and at the heart of this was the emergence of reggae music. When I speak of reggae music, especially as it relates to my poetry, I am not speaking of music, except in the way that the music embodies an ethos, an aesthetic, the zeitgeist of a time, a cultural force, and much else. I won’t go over all of it here, because I have written about it, and there have been many who have done the same. I am suggesting that while it is possible to identify some specific poems that explicitly reference reggae songs, one is best served to consider that the full body of my work is shaped and influenced by reggae. I think among Black poets in America, this is not a strange thing to propose. It would be impossible to consider Langston Hughes without considering the blues, Yusef Komunyakaa without considering Jazz, Michael harper without considering Jazz, Lucille Clifton without considering soul music and so on. I think that is the best way to think about it. Not so much that I write reggae poems, but that reggae is a productive framework with which to understand my work. There are other such frameworks, as well, but I consider the unique opportunity of having an aesthetic that derives not from the imposition of a cultural alien to my own, as the legacy that I carry. Like Nicholas Guillen did with Son music in Cuba, I think I found this connection to be a delightful “discovery” in my work. None of this is rigid, none of it is prescriptive, all of it is descriptive, a way to understand self, a way to understand the ways the events of history have had on my art.
RMG
In conclusion, I discovered that there is a constant return to “ritual” in your poetry. While reading Nebraska, I counted more than 14 poems where you mention “ritual.” In Sturge Town, “ritual” dwells in some of the poems. Reflecting on this perpetual appearance of “ritual” in your poetry, I think about African poets like Okot p’ Bitek, Gabriel Okara, Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Kofi Awoonor, and others who, in their poetry, celebrate the Africans’ way of life despite the whirlwind of colonial encounter. Is your deployment of “ritual” in your poems an invocation or homage of/to African’s cultural beliefs or are there certain rituals in Akan tribe that returns you to ritual always?
KD
Well, I have to allow that I may need to be more inventive with my vocabulary in my poems. “Ritual’ is a word I do turn to in search of something else. It may well be that I am predisposed to ritualizing things, ritualizing experience. I believe that rituals, repeated, have a way of valuing the thing being repeated and the thing represented by the ritual. People close to me, I think, will recognize that I am a creature of habit. Of course, what they are seeing is the way in which I ritualize my life. I am not rigid about it, but I know that I find comfort in some of these rituals. And these rituals will change if my life does change. I create rituals to support the work I do. If ritual allows me to be inventive, industrious, free to improvise and be actively and surprisingly creative, the ritual is the stability that sustains such flights. I like and work for that combination. I do know that Yeats and I would not agree on everything, but his proposition that form (meaning meter and rhyme, largely) are the “ice and salt” of poetry, is close to what ritual is for me. I like to have the discipline of ritual, which then allows for the imaginative, the surprising, the revelatory. The other day, I was in a café on campus—it was a classically brightly lit day in a very cold Lincoln. I overheard a young woman explaining to her friends how she had lost weight. “Fasting,” she said. “I fast”. I stopped listening to them as they contemplated the pros and cons of fasting, and the relationship between fasting and starvation. I walked out into the light and begam to remember when I used to fast once a week on a Wednesday. For years this was something I would do. In my case, I was not seeking to lose weight, but to find an anchoring place for my spiritual life. I could feel my body being drawn to the familiarity of that anticipation of the day of fasting. I remembered that time fondly. I think what I was remembering was the comfort of ritual, the reliability of it. I believe that humans thrive on ritual, we can’t help ourselves. So, I do not think that there is anything distinctively African about ritual and its practice. But what I have found in the work of the poets that you mention, is exactly the way in which they have found a through line to their spiritual sense of self through the inherited acts of ritual that are core to their families, their tribes, their nations. I believe that those poets have found in those rituals a way for them to think about their poems rhetorically and stylistically, and it all makes complete sense. There are two books of mine that have offered me a ground-laying framework for my own engagement with ritual, that without my announcing it, might serve as a solid basis to understand what I am doing as a poet. The two books are the long poems, Prophets and Jacko Jacobus, works that I wrote in fairly quick succession, even though they are quite different works. I would say, for instance, that one might start to understand what I have done in the books City of Bones, Wheels, Wisteria and Requiem, because their anchoring would be those two works. Every one of my books teaches me something that helps me think about my other books. This is not an exaggeration. And those two books taught me the relationship between ritual and the poetic practice, and the way my poems emerge out of ritual.
