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Each author has a different poetic sensibility and means of getting
at the very thing that makes him/her a whole person. For many, this involves
throwing off the constraints of colonial powers and education in favor of something real
and local. Others push farther back and embrace Africa as the origin of the true,
emerging Self.
Some, like Kamau Brathwaite, react with great anger towards
the oppressive colonial culture that has controlled the islands for so long.
Brathwaite says:
"Slowly, ever so slowly . . . I was coming to an awareness . .
. of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe. Slowly,
ever so slowly, I came to a sense of identification with these people, my living
diviners. I came to connect my history with theirs, the bridge of my mind was
linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland" (qtd. in Bobb 9).
Brathwaite looks to Africa as the progenitor of his consciousness
and ultimately rejects the European colonial power as an influence. He throws off
any connection to a European past with a certain amount of anger and violence.
Others, like Derek Walcott, are much less aggressive in their
approach, but no less vehement in the drive to assert the Self as a voice the world must
reckon with. Walcott embraces his African heritage and his European
heritage: the issue of history concerns him more than the question of which was more
important. He says:
"I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the
monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed
by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder
of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift" (qtd. in Bobb 13).
But, at times, Walcott seems very ambivalent about the issue of
history and who he looks to as his progenitor (or even whether he looks to anyone, or
simply rejects both sides as unsatisfactory):
"I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor
who bought me I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you,
black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper 'history,' for if I attempt to forgive you
both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expatiates,
and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your
features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon" (qtd. in
Bobb 11-12).
Another Caribbean poet, James Berry, reacted to the need for
a Caribbean voice by looking back to Africa (as Brathwaite, did, but without the same
extremely violent tendencies). Once he affirmed the strength of Africa, he managed
to pass that strength on to his own Caribbean heritage and voice. In the
introduction to Hot Earth Cold Earth, he says:
"Personal discoveries, from when I was young at school,
gradually revealed a sense that as a black child I was born into an imprisoned
people. I began to see I suffered the lacks of my family. From about eight or
nine years old I began to notice how the ex-slave owners' descendants of my village
treated my father automatically as an inferior. And my father accepted his position,
as if it was all in the way of things. A terror settled in me that I was placed to
grow up into my father's position. Inward, thoughtful, anxious, desperate to read
books nobody had, I lived with the dread that lack of money and education and opportunity
would condemn me to repeat the same design of life impressed upon my ancestors up to my
father.
"Shelley's line 'I fall upon the thorns of life! I
bleed!' could describe the silent state of mind in a continuing pain that gathered itself
and became 'Letter to Mother Africa.'
"I had seen and understood that nobody liked Africa. Yet,
it was much later I realised I knew and understood nothing positive about Africa and
Africans. At school Africa embarrassed us and stirred us with a sense of shame, like
slavery did. Our feelings for Africa aroused more horror and dread and hatred than
any curiosity.
"An impelling need grew in me. Mentally, I needed to go
back to my African roots with my hurt, anger and a complaining voice. My state of
mind became fixed on addressing my ancestral country, continent and rulership, as to a
child-abandoning mother.
"Equality meant shouldering a share of responsibility. I
wanted Mother Africa to voice acknowledging a share of responsibility for the under-human
and outsider status that was allowed to be implanted into the life and being of African
descendants in Western society" (Hot Earth... 9).
Kwame Dawes looks to Reggae for asserting a Caribbean
voice. In his anthology of Reggae poetry, Wheel and Come Again, he asserts:
"Before reggae, it was possible for writers working in Jamaica
to speak of themselves as spokespersons for what George Lamming called the peasant
experience [. . . .] These writers were serious about speaking for the voiceless because
they had concluded that it was in the world of this voiceless mass that the true Jamaican
identity was located. They would turn to it while eschewing the ideologies of their
education. For them, the folk sensibility was the closest thing to an indigenous
Jamaicanness. But the divide remained and the imposition of the educated middle
class imagination on the philosophies of the working class highlighted how wide it
was. The middle-class writer was constantly embracing the role of the medium -- the
one called to give voice to the voiceless. A noble pursuit, no doubt, but one that
resulted in a strangely bastardised set of ideologies and contradictory perceptions of
self that sent writers scurrying to The Tempest for some poetic rationalisation of
a dilemma that manifested itself in questions of language, religion, race and
politics" (18-19).
"The problem was that many of the writers who wanted to speak
on behalf of the folk were in fact pretenders to the title Caliban. They had learned
too well Prospero's wishes and only half-heartedly protested when they were asked to use
his language. Their affinity was more to Ariel. Caliban was elsewhere
formulating his own unorthodox rebellion. If Shakespeare's Caliban had to fail --
for Shakespeare understood that Caliban would never truly capitulate, would never learn to
play Prospero's game -- Caliban, in the context of Caribbean society, was busy creating
his own masque, his own play, a sideshow for Shakespeare, but a full-blown drama for and
about himself" (19-20).
"Reggae's emergence has changed much of that dilemma of seeking
to find models of poetic construction in the culture of the working class community.
Reggae has ensured that the middle class artist no longer feels the burden to speak for
the voiceless, for reggae is that missing voice. Reggae, moreover, could not be
dismissed as quaintly folkish or subcultural. It has always been a form of
expression that embraces contemporary technology, has developed its own business
organisations [. . .] and has become a truly international music form. Above all, it
is a music which is heard throughout the society. Reggae is, like Rastafarianism, a
Jamaican creation -- a thoroughly Jamaican creation and it has, in that sense, a quality
of authenticity that is appealing to the writer. Reggae has allowed the middle-class
artist to listen and learn from a poetics which has emerged out of working class
culture. Reggae provided an aesthetic that crosses cultural, racial and class
divides" (20-21).
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