Snow on Sugarcane
Snow on Sugarcane:
The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Britain
By
Ian Dieffenthaller
Snow on Sugarcane: The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Britain, by Ian Dieffenthaller
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Ian Dieffenthaller
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0355-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0355-7
FOR M.J.D.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................... ix
INTRODUCTION...................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1
1920- 1966: Tentative Definitions............................................................ 17
CHAPTER 2
Theory and Practice .................................................................................. 48
CHAPTER 3
John La Rose and the CAM Poets ............................................................ 79
CHAPTER 4
Linton Kwesi Johnson and the rise of ‘dub’ ........................................... 107
CHAPTER 5
News for Babylon and the role of the anthology .................................... 143
CHAPTER 6
Berry, Agard and D’Aguiar .................................................................... 161
CHAPTER 7
The Hinterland of E. A. Markham.......................................................... 203
CHAPTER 8
Amryl Johnson to Grace Nichols............................................................ 233
CHAPTER 9
Conclusion: Into a new Century ............................................................. 255
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................. 282
INDEX.................................................................................................... 297
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For starting me on the trail of West Indian poetry and why it matters,
thanks are due to my mother. For introducing me to poetry as culture,
thanks to Ian Starsmore, George Szirtes and Peter Scupham.
When I was embarking on this project, many gave generously of their
time in order to direct its course. Thanks to Ken Ramchand, Gordon
Rohlehr, Kamau Brathwaite and Anne Walmsley.
During the shaping of the project, several willing souls gave time, rare
documents and nourishment. Respect to Melanie Abrahams, Kadija Sesay,
Sandra Courtman, Denise deCaries Narain, Paula Burnett, Louis James,
Mervyn Morris, Eddie Baugh, Kwame Dawes and Wilson Harris.
A few were always available at the end of a telephone or computer line
and happy to be targeted for disquisitions on mongrel poetry. Thanks to
Amryl Johnson, Archie Markham and John La Rose who did not see the
finished result and to James Berry, Joan Anim-Addo, Maggie Harris,
Jacob Ross, Bénédicte Ledent and my comrade Cy Grant.
For technical issues beyond my comprehension I turned to Robert
Young’s Postcolonialism, Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse and Freda
Volans’s and Tracey O’ Rourke’s Festschrift, especially the excellent
essay on Archie Markham’s disguises. If I have naturalised any of their
ideas, I apologise. For time spent physically producing the work and for
logistical and general support, I am grateful to my father, Joan O’Shea,
Victoria Bacon and Hazel Lezama.
I am grateful for permission to reproduce long sections of poems from,
David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, James Berry, Sarah White at New
Beacon, Rudi Kizerman, Cy Grant, Maggie Harris, Grace Nichols, John
Agard, Anthony Joseph and Archie Markham whose letter of support dates
back to 1994. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to trace some
copyright holders. I shall be glad to hear from anyone who has been
inadvertently overlooked or incorrectly cited and will make the necessary
corrections at the first available opportunity.
This book though, is mainly the fault of Stewart Brown, the West
Indian poet from Hampshire, exiled in Brum and still anchoring the West
Indies innings in England after all these years. Thanks and keep on…
INTRODUCTION
Most readers of poetry will be familiar with the work from the English
speaking Caribbean which comprises West Indian poetry; few will be
aware of its adventure in the former motherland. In a 1983 article1 James
Berry referred to the emerging poetry as “West Indian British,” a
description he adopted a year later for his anthology News for Babylon.
The name has never achieved general currency, overshadowed instead by
the problematic, but media-friendly epithet “black British,” yet it remains
a workable empirical description for a body of poetry written in and about
Britain by West Indian authors who have settled here. Berry’s earlier
anthology, Bluefoot Traveller (1976), was subtitled “poetry by West
Indians in Britain,”2 even though many of the authors were common to
both compilations. He attributes his change of terminology in News for
Babylon to a paradigm shift in cultural identity, clearly evidenced in the
social climate of Britain in the early 1980s where the self-mockery
common to much West Indian poetry could no longer “find the indulgence
of a collective audience” in Britain: West Indian folk poems divorced from
their immediate context would now be seen as sexist and racist.3 He
asserts that this “unconscious self-contempt…is now seen…as the worst
kind of a sick joke.”4 With the publication of more and more poetry in the
manner of that collected in Berry’s News, a new type of cultural
interaction is confirmed,5 suggesting that the parameters of Berry’s
designation be broadened to include those poets born in Britain whose
work mirrors lives lived here but is always informed by a vicarious West
Indian heritage. The cultural base of this literature is continually shifting,
thereby allowing the reader to trace and validate its various roots whilst
denying the ability to ascribe any poem fully to one or another root: a new
cross-cultural aesthetic is emerging.
What Berry described as “West Indian British,” is now generally taken
to be part of “Black British” culture. “Black British” poetry originates in
1
James Berry, “Westindian British Poetry,” Poetry Review 73,2 (June 1998): 5-8.
My emphasis.
3
James Berry, ed., News for Babylon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), xxiii.
4
Ibid.
5
Berry envisages an acculturation but c.f. Chapter 2, 72 on transculturation.
2
2
Introduction
the early 1970s in ground first tilled by the black power movement in
America and “at home” in the West Indies and is centred around the
search for a new aesthetic that runs counter to the dominant Western
tradition, focussing on discovering roots in Africa. The JamaicanAmerican poet and academic, Kwame Dawes, has pointed out that a
similar search in the West Indies, led to the conceptualising of Africa as a
homogeneous body, the resultant essentialism only serving to perpetuate
the binarism of its inherited colonial system.6 Yet the poets associated with
the British movement have been able to progress towards a cross-cultural
accommodation that the media and many critics fail to recognise in their
continuing description of the poetry they write.7 The argument for a
plurality of discourse in a truly cross-cultural aesthetic is one that Wilson
Harris has championed throughout his lengthy writing career. Whilst he
expresses doubt that the West Indian situation has moved on sufficiently
from the multicultural8 to the cross-cultural, I want to suggest that it is in
West Indian British poetry that this sea-change may be so readily observed
and that any conception of the Africa (or for that matter the Europe) within
must be viewed in this context.
There is evidence for this mode of expression at least as early as 1919
but it was only in the twelve years immediately preceding News for
Babylon that publication really took off. Many first-timers have fallen
away since then but writers such as James Berry, John Agard, E. A.
Markham, Amryl Johnson and latterly Maggie Harris, have all established
themselves as poets, producing new collections at intervals. Thus it is now
feasible to talk of a body of poetry which may be viewed variously as
West Indian, British or black by some but which may now be identified as
a distinctly new “way of saying.” It is this voice that this book explores in
order to suggest ways of reading that will allow the potential of this crosscultural literature to be realised.
Naming is important to any literature but only insofar as it identifies a
set of core features and frames their relationships to one another and to
other literatures. West Indian poetry itself has only been confidently
identified in the last thirty years where previously it had been designated a
sub-set of English Literature.9 This has allowed scholars to examine its
key mechanisms and to trace a recognisable discipline back at least to
6
Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1999).
See books that adhere to “Black Britain” in Chapter 9, 256.
8
That is, distinct cultures under one umbrella.
9
Lloyd Brown, West Indian Poetry (London: Heinemann Educational Books,
1984) and Laurence Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
7
Snow on Sugarcane
3
1912. Laurence Breiner reveals its themes, ideology and language in An
Introduction to West Indian Poetry. He proposes that the evolution of the
new literary tradition parallels the creolisation of English and follows the
sequence “Imitation ⇒ Uneasy difference ⇒ Asserted difference,”
difference, that is, from English poetry. Readers of West Indian poetry are
thus made aware of its origin in and commonality with English poetry and
at the same time understand why, what may look like English poetry, is
undeniably, a new phenomenon: a way of saying rooted in its own
language community. West Indian British poetry follows a similar
trajectory but progress is often cyclical as the common ground is with
West Indian literature, itself only a recent hybrid.
West Indian scholars have long argued for their own poetic voice and
language. “West Indian English” is the result of the contact of English and
several African languages from the seventeenth century onwards. It is
further modified (in Trinidad and Guyana especially), by Indian, Chinese
and other European languages. Kamau Brathwaite thus suggests in
History of the Voice that West Indian language is “not English; English it
may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its
rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions it is not English, even though the
words as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree.”10
Linguistically, “West Indian English” is a problematical term, the
ambiguities of which Brathwaite manipulates in his book. Linguist Peter
Roberts identifies West Indian English as just one dialect of English along
with Australian English, American English, British English and so on. The
term “dialect” is used to denote a variety and not in its pejorative sense.11
Like the circles in a Venn diagram, all the dialects overlap, producing a
large language set common to all. Some only overlap with one or two
others, say for example, West Indian, and British English, while crucially,
they all have some features which are shared with no other dialect. These
are generally the spoken varieties of the language – in the West Indian
situation, Trinidadian English, Jamaican English and so on. Linguists are
divided as to whether they are “Creoles” or “Creole English” but agree
that these varieties contain identifiable features and patterns: a grammar
can be shown to exist. Importantly then, their use by Standard English
speakers does not indicate a lapse into “bad grammar.” On the contrary,
because these creoles have language rules different from Standard English,
10
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the voice (London: New Beacon, 1984),
13.
11
Peter A. Roberts, West Indians and their language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 11-12.
4
Introduction
Victor Questel can accuse Derek Walcott of employing “bad Creole.”12 It
is this “English to a greater or lesser degree” that Brathwaite seeks to
validate – a West Indian “Nation language” distinct from any other
English. He famously asserts that “the hurricane does not roar in
pentameters.”13 In practice, the West Indian adopts a range of language
registers from Standard through to Creole: one’s position on the so-called
language continuum varies according to context. Such writing or speaking
which alternates between one or more forms has been dubbed “code
switching.”
The literary tradition that Breiner describes is also informed by a
search for identity which explores the issues arising from a collision of
cultures under a colonial system. In the West Indies, the overriding factor
is that of the cultural duality imparted by centuries of colonialism. In
trying to formulate ways of exploring West Indian poetry, West Indian
critics have begun to look beyond received critical models – those that
focus on structure, style and imagery – to formulations that interrogate like
Berry, the ideological stance of the author and recognise the complicit
function of the audience, real or inscribed, in exploring cultural identity. In
this regard, the employment of the “plantation” model has proved
especially useful. The “Great House” of the colonial master and the
plantation on which his slaves lived, have been transposed to represent the
adversarial culture of the pre-independence West Indies; the resultant
“House/folk” figure is used by Joyce Jonas to describe all the binary
oppositions of a colonial world view. In addition to the commonly
occurring “black/white,” she lists exploiter/exploited, male/female and
First world/Third world: the “Great House comes to represent unyielding
authoritarian assumptions of every kind.”14 Jonas points out the inherent
paradox in the search for a reconciliation of opposites that history has left
the West Indian author: to be defined by another is to be misconceived and
thus equivalent to a movement into “non-being”15 but to retreat to the
darkness outside of the perception of the other is similarly a retreat into
non-being.
Much has been written on the absence of history in the “folk:” the
Great House can claim physical evidence of rootedness through a long
tradition of written texts and ancient buildings in Europe; the folk have no
place to locate a communal history – there are no ruins with which to
12
Victor Questel, “Blues in Caribbean Poetry,” Kairi 78, 51-4. Questel suggests,
“Poopa da was fete” rather than “Poopa da was a fete” as Walcott had written.
13
Brathwaite, History, 10.
14
Joyce Jonas, Anancy in the Great House (Westport, Ct: Greenwood, 1990), 12.
15
Ibid., 62.
Snow on Sugarcane
5
identify. Derek Walcott recognises the dilemma in “Ruins of a Great
House,” embodied for Stewart Brown in the figure of Raleigh who, both
ancestral murderer and poet, mirrors Walcott’s struggle “to reconcile a
patriot’s natural outrage (against slavery) with a sensibility nurtured by the
very culture against which that rage must be directed.”16 Walcott’s
position, as illustrated in What the twilight says, is between the received
literary tradition and the streets and fishing communities of his native St.
Lucia. He attempts to find his poetic voice, Dawes says, in the use of
“twilight as a metaphor for that middle ground of hybridity in much of his
work.”17 Critic Homi Bhabha confirms that resistance is not necessarily an
oppositional act. There is often a kind of subversiveness within
hybridisation. “Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial
identity… it unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial
power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that
turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.”18 West
Indian poetry, then, is a hybrid being, constantly redefining its state of inbetweenness.
Whilst Walcott most readily approaches West Indian identity through
received texts, others have sought a creative retrieval of history primarily
through the strategy of the “backward glance.” Through the examination
of what folk “ruins” there are – music, drumming, religious ritual, the oral
tradition of story telling and proverbs – writers such as Brathwaite have
attempted to derive a native tradition. Brathwaite’s “literature of
reconnection” looks out for the “elements of the past alive in the
present.”19 The use of African values and traditions to interrogate the
dominant culture is a strategy that carries on into West Indian British
poetry as will be seen later, although its operation is generally different as
it is mediated by its receipt through, and the more immediate concerns of,
West Indian literature as a whole. The recovery of folk memories, for so
long submerged by colonialism, is potentially a liberating situation but
critic Renu Juneja points up the reverse possibility of denying the potential
or need for change: celebrating the folk signifies difference but
institutionalising it merely perpetuates the cultural binarism identified by
Dawes. Ironically, while both Brathwaite and Walcott were instrumental
16
Stewart Brown “Unit 11 Derek Walcott: Poems,” in A handbook for teaching
Caribbean Literature, ed. David Dabydeen (Oxford: Heinemann, 1984), 96-103.
17
Dawes, Natural Mysticism, 38.
18
Homi K. Bhabba, "Signs taken for wonders” in The post-colonial studies reader,
ed. Bill Ashcroft et al (London: Routledge, 1995), 29-35.
19
Renu Juneja, Caribbean Transactions (London: Macmillan Educational, 1996),
50-51. The term “backward glance” comes from Lamming’s Season of Adventure.
6
Introduction
in defining a West Indian voice through their poetry, it was often the
direction of approach – house or folk – that was headlined by critics. This
results in a popular misconception of there being two traditions in the
West Indies (or more if the Asian elements are considered), and denies the
truly cross-cultural voice which lies beneath the rhetoric. Dawes writing in
Natural Mysticism, refers to the polarisation that resulted from the
common view of Brathwaite (as Afrocentric) and Walcott (as Eurocentric)
in direct opposition.20 The very premise of this debate, he notes, is
gainsaid by both writers – one finds much of T. S. Eliot in Brathwaite
whilst the Afro-centric evocations of Brathwaite are matched in Walcott,
especially in his plays, Dream on Monkey Mountain being a notable
example. Dawes reaffirms both writers’ dialectic approach to cultural
identity, thereby eschewing the duality that for years had suppressed and
silenced the true West Indian poetic voice.
Dawes himself locates his search for voice in a “reggae aesthetic.”
He dismisses the notion of the alignment of reggae with a solely African
heritage, insisting on its capacity to be both public and reflective, local and
international. For him it accomplishes what both Walcott and Brathwaite
do, in defining a voice that speaks through art to both the history and
present of the West Indies. He laments the limitation of the potential of
reggae by the narrow interpretation in books21 and the positioning of
reggae poetry as antithetical to “conventional writing.” Citing Linton
Kwesi Johnson, he points to the creativity that can derive out of the reggae
aesthetic by utilising its rhythms, language and religious base in
conjunction with Marxism and European politics. Johnson of course is
living in the UK and whilst not typical of the older West Indian migrant is
crucial to the concept of exile as it relates to the West Indian. Wilson
Harris, like Dawes, is open to the potential of African roots but rejects out
of hand any aesthetic formulation that has its emphasis in Africa or any
other culture. As Jonas says, he “resists homogeneity in any form insisting
that the ground of creative potential in the West Indies lies in a cultural
heterogeneity. Potential growth-points in a diversified Caribbean cultural
landscape…. are the crossroads where various cultures meet.”22 Harris has
claimed that a state of exile is native to the Caribbean poet: the poet needs
to stand outside the polarised world, “beyond ideologies of conquest and
protest.”23 Jonas has thus characterised Harris and writers in the same vein
20
Dawes, Natural Mysticism, 80.
In this regard, he cites Pam Mordecai, ed., From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry
Since Independence (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1987).
22
Jonas, Anancy, 13.
23
Jonas, Anancy, 114.
21
Snow on Sugarcane
7
as trickster figures operating on the margins of society or at the meeting
points of the house and the folk. Whilst the trickster is a universal figure,
his incarnation in the West Indies is as Anancy (or, Anansi), god of the
market place, derived from West African folklore. Jonas describes him as
someone who “gives birth to a dialectic whose aim is not synthesis but a
never-ending juggling of thesis and antithesis.”24 His importance as
marginal figure is also of importance when discussing West Indian British
poetry as another instance of a body of work lying between two cultures.
The notion of “exile” is thus crucial to the West Indian sensibility.
Parallel physical exile to Britain began in earnest in the 1940s and this
served both to reinforce the incipient West Indian tradition and to mark the
start of a new one, that of West Indian British literature.
A significant event in the development of West Indian poetry was the
1943 recasting of Una Marson’s BBC radio programme, “Calling the West
Indies.” It was expanded to include a section devoted to the broadcast of
West Indian poems and short stories and its title was changed to
“Caribbean Voices.” Marson, a pioneering Jamaican poet and playright
had come up to England in 1932 and struggled to carve out a niche for
West Indians at the BBC. By 1945 she had ceased to present the show
because of illness; she returned to Jamaica in 1946 whereupon Henry
Swanzy became programme editor. The programme went out at 11:15
p.m. GMT, timed to catch the West Indian evening audience if not the UK
one. By 1948, it had been extended to include criticism: key West Indian
poets and novelists were not only encouraged to send their work for
broadcasting but to become involved in reading and discussion at the
BBC’s London studios. For the first time as John Figueroa notes, West
Indian writers and critics were given a voice from the metropolis that
spoke from conviction rather than status.25 They were joined by a growing
number of West Indian university students (Brathwaite was at Cambridge
from 1950 and Stuart Hall a year later) and an academic pool soon built
up. The West Indian presence was strengthened by the “ordinary” people
who came to make their livelihoods in the UK. Their arrival is marked by
the June 1948 docking of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury, with 430
West Indian men on board. The ship has become the symbol of post-War
im/migration. As the Daily Express put it, “the Jamaicans are fleeing from
a land with large unemployment. Many of them recognise the futility of
their life at home (21st June 1948).”
24
Ibid., 52.
John Figueroa, “The flaming faith of those first years” in Tibisiri: Caribbean
Writers and Critics, ed. Maggie Butcher (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1989), 72.
25
8
Introduction
By the early 1950’s “West Indian poetry” had begun to cohere. It is
evident from reviewing Swanzy’s papers at the University of Birmingham,
that its poets, from Harold Telemaque in Trinidad to George Campbell in
Jamaica, felt part of a local network, encouraged and informed by
compatriots abroad. Caribbean Voices had also engendered fierce debate
on how West Indian poetry should sound, with readers like John Figueroa
being singled out for praise and damnation in equal measure. Quality in
literature, code switching between Creole and Standard and an emphasis
on West Indian culture and situations, soon grew in acceptance among the
listening public, whilst the authors, for commercial reasons turned to the
novel; George Lamming, Wilson Harris and Sam Selvon, all noted poets,
switched to the investigation of West Indian identity in this form, thereby
fulfilling A. J. Seymour’s prophecy that all West Indian poets left for
England with a novel in their suitcase.26 Harris has said in interview that
he was unable to write a novel like Palace of the Peacock (1960) whilst in
the Guyanese interior;27 British life certainly provided the distance from
the West Indian situation to allow the creation of Lamming’s In the Castle
of my Skin (1953) and Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956). All three were
able to step out of the containing metaphor of the house/folk situation.
This focus would also have been sharpened by the increased hostility and
marginalisation faced by the West Indian community in Britain. Lonely
Londoners, written entirely in Creole, was a major breakthrough for West
Indian literature in terms of its construction but may also be viewed as the
taproot of the literary expression of the survival mechanisms of all West
Indians in Britain.28 Whilst exile facilitated the means by which West
Indian literature could be fully validated, no writer could divorce himself
from his immediate surroundings. So it was that in creating one voice,
Selvon especially was unexpectedly nurturing another in the form of a
West Indian British sensibility.
If we accept that it is impossible to sound a West Indian poem for its
“voice” without considering the nuances of West Indian identity, it follows
that any defining characteristic of a West Indian British voice must have a
similar clearly identifiable base: this was provided early on in the form of
performing rather than literary figures. Lord Kitchener, Trinidadian
calypsonian and social chronicler, arrived on Windrush and soon
established a presence in London clubs while James Berry, later to become
26
Kyk over al 9, 26 (December 1959): 79.
Wilson Harris, interviewed by Lawrence Scott, 28th March 2000, “The Voice
Box,” South Bank, London.
28
The early efforts of McKay, Marson and Allfrey are also notable and these are
examined in Chapter 1.
27
Snow on Sugarcane
9
West Indian Britain’s poetic elder, was aboard the second of three migrant
ships to dock in Britain in 1948, The Orbita. By 1957, Cy Grant, who had
fought in WW II and had been called to the bar in 1951, had secured a
nightly slot on BBC TV’s Tonight show, singing the news in calypso. This
was to last for four years. Berry himself had been appointed the “West
Indian Voice,” as he puts it, on Woman’s Hour, also in the 1950’s and on
into the early 1960s.29 He performed sketches of West Indian lives in
London and read stories derived from his Jamaican childhood.
1958 saw the demise of the Caribbean Voices programme and the loss
of a popular meeting place for West Indian writers yet the West Indian
account in Britain continued to accrue. West Indies cricket had opened the
decade with a win at Lords, its first ever. The West Indian Students Union
had opened at Earl’s Court in 1955 and the West Indian Gazette had been
started by Claudia Jones in 1958. Migration to the UK had been stepped
up as a result of restricted access to the USA. All this occurred against a
backdrop of increasing racial tension: in 1953, Beresford Craddock, MP
told Parliament that West Indians’ “sanitary habits are not all that could be
desired….their views and practices are due to the psychological make-up
of those primitive people from time immemorial;”30 in 1958 mass street
protests occurred in what came to be called the Nottingham and Notting
Hill “riots.” Eight years later, another public face of the community came
to the fore when poets John La Rose, Andrew Salkey and Kamau
Brathwaite founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) to “get
noticed among ourselves as West indians in Britain and others to notice
us.”31 Salkey was concerned that while there continued to be a substantial
presence of intellectuals, students and working folk in Britain, the artistic
and literary element had by 1966 disappeared from public view: “we don’t
hear from them, they’re not in the bookshops, I don’t see anybody giving
talks in London.” Smaller scale poetry readings continued to take place
such as the “Black Voices Forum” organised by Cecil Rajendra at the
Troubadour club in Notting Hill while La Rose set up a publishing
business and bookshop, New Beacon Books from which he launched his
and CAM’s first poetry collection appropriately titled Foundations.
CAM was to be a community of artists and an intellectual forum to
debate and define a West Indian aesthetic. As Anne Walmsley makes
29
James Berry, interviewed by author, 3rd March 1999. “Woman’s Hour” was a
BBC Home Service radio show.
30
Cited in Peter Childs, The twentieth century in poetry – a critical survey
(London: Routledge, 1999), 193.
31
Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972: a literary and
cultural History (London: New Beacon, 1992), 46.
10
Introduction
clear in her book The Caribbean Artists Movement, Braithwaite had
always wanted to “go public” as an audience would of necessity be part of
the community. Whilst the leadership were from the postgraduate and
intellectual communities, audiences were inevitably “ordinary
immigrants.”32 They levelled accusations of elitism at the organisers and
heckling them from the conference floor, challenged them “directly to
relate to and identify with the immigrant community.”33 Although
intellectually La Rose and Salkey were about resurrecting the “submerged,
forgotten memories in the sub conscious of the Caribbean people,”34 they
were also residents within that community and inevitably aligned
themselves with it. Their stated aim was achieved in large part in only five
years but during that period, the relationship of art to community was
increasingly highlighted in its British context: La Rose’s Foundations is
the first poetry collection to exhibit literary strategies throughout the text,
that include other than West Indian ones or those that modify the received
strategies of European texts. The identity of the inscribed author in many
of the poems is that of Brathwaite’s getting “noticed among ourselves”
and anticipates the rise of the autonomous West Indian Briton. La Rose
has begun the journey from West Indian exile to British resident and the
collection provides the first insight into the poetic space that exists
between West Indian and British conditions.
In “Not from here” La Rose seems to accept that he has left the West
Indies and that while he may not adapt fully to Britain,35 his son will be
defined by the challenges of “no promised land.” He asks him though to
remember his heritage: “Yet what we leave / we carry. / It is no mud / we
dry / On our boots.” There is a parallel working out of what it is to be West
Indian, caught between an African and Indian past and a British heritage:
“We remember / who fell forward / in the dust / writing the rueful story /
of our redemption // And breasted the humanists’ bullets from ’35 to’38 /
from Guiana to Jamaica / to cleanse the air. // Yet our remembrance is
more stately / for those that died in 1914 / in a cause less dear.”36 It would
be unreasonable to expect the poet to “undefine” himself at the same time
as working to define himself but there is an identity in transition.
A similar persona exists in the early work of James Berry. In
“Thoughts on my Father” he writes “but I must go over you again and
again / I must plunge my raging eye / in all your steady enduring. // I must
32
A term attributed to Donald Hinds in Walmsley’s Caribbean Artists.
Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 305.
34
Ibid., 310.
35
That is, he is not “from here.”
36
John La Rose, Foundations (London: New Beacon, 1966), 47.
33
Snow on Sugarcane
11
assemble material / of my own / for a new history.”37 Berry is also in
transformation: although based in England, the West Indian voice is still
ascendant. In both Berry and La Rose there is that “backward glance as a
self-conscious part of a project which is forward looking in its attempt to
define cultural possibilities.”38 Berry had been introduced to the “literature
of reconnection” by Brathwaite, his mentor in CAM and in reconnecting
with Africa, sought to redeem a crisis induced by the “deligitimization of
the dominant culture,” as Renu Juneja says. It might be said that Berry is
thrice deligitimized: by Brathwaite’s “West,” by his father’s acquiescence
to European dominance and by the resurgence of colonial attitudes in his
new home Britain. Writing at the same time although published much
earlier,39 La Rose in “Me as well – the Black Man” bears similar witness:
“For all who cross fertilised / That are chained in this prison / I paint this
picture: // To free a continent / We liberate not only Indian / and workman
/ But me as well – the Blackman.” Both poets expose cross-cultural
possibilities and unresolved dualities, yet both reach out beyond the exiled
West Indian, typified by Figueroa, whose British existence is curtailed by
a longing for home: “I miss celebrations but I miss most / the people of
faith / who greeted warmly every year / the Christmas breeze.”40
It is difficult to characterise the poetry of either Salkey or Brathwaite
in a similar way to La Rose’s, perhaps because their commitment to the
“reconnective” element of West Indian history casts them more as
pioneers of West Indian literature. Nonetheless, their connections with the
universities, publishers and the BBC contributed in no small part to the
nurture of younger or new poets. Linton Kwesi Johnson was a school
leaver when he joined CAM: he was directed to read Brathwaite by John
La Rose and was inspired by Salkey’s reading of Bongo Jerry’s “Mabrak.”
For James Berry, CAM was important because he did not come from an
academic background. Coming into contact with people who were
informed by and had contact with Caribbean cultural roots and were
motivated politically helped to give him “focus and direction.”41 Faustin
Charles, Marc Matthews and T-Bone Wilson were others who benefited
from the radical tradition engendered by CAM and their use of local
language, music-derived rhythms and culturally relevant situations forms a
broad base for the continued development of West Indian British poetry.
37
James Berry, Fractured Circles (London: New Beacon, 1979), 26.
Juneja, Caribean Transactions, 51 (See 50-86 for a general discussion of the
concept).
39
Berry’s 1960s work was not collected until 1979’s Fractured Circles.
40
Berry, News, 171.
41
Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 317.
38
12
Introduction
With the closure of CAM in 1972, immigration reduced to a trickle and
the literary pioneers largely returned home or to North America, the
community of West Indian heritage Britons stabilised into what came to be
called “black Britain.” As polarisation along racial lines increased
dramatically, the West Indian community rallied behind a number of
“black” voices, chief of which in literary terms was Linton Kwesi
Johnson. When in 1978 Johnson recorded his work to a reggae backing, he
entered the realm of musical superstar. His term “dub poetry” for the
“toasting” (spontaneous ranting) of Jamaican DJs came to be applied to all
poets who worked in the reggae idiom. Although adopted as black
spokesman and black poet laureate, Johnson claimed he had merely set out
to “relate the Fanonist ideas about violence in the process of decolonisation to my particular situation here….”42 He prefers to see himself
as giving a voice to oppressed people and as a recorder of the experiences
of his generation. He rejects the notion of black British identity fitting in
with an African Diaspora experience: “we had to accept that we’re a part
of Britain and that we had to build our own independent institutions here –
cultural, political and social institutions.”
Johnson’s popularity encouraged many lesser imitators in the reggae
idiom while a flowering of would-be “poets of the page” was boosted by
the rise of the small press and journal. Drawing on Brathwaite’s CAM
work, poets began to question whether there could be poetry which was
suited just to stage rather than page. Consequently, matters concerning the
craft of poetry and the nature of a West Indian British aesthetic came to
the fore. Johnson’s Voices of the Living and the Dead (especially the poem
“Five Nights of Bleeding”) was instrumental in broadening for West
Indian British poets, the language range established by CAM and for the
first time language gained precedence as a subject for poetry. A British
Creole has developed out of the Englishes of the West Indian territories
and this is employed to avoid circumscription by the majority language –
Standard English. The story of the “voice” that emerges from this
language base is in no way a chronological one, for Johnson, pivotal to its
departure from its West Indian parent, is at the forefront of its
development today. This book traces the evolution of this West Indian
British voice and its attendant poetry, from tentative beginnings around
1920, through CAM, to the present day.
42
Burt Caesar “Interview: Linton Kwesi Johnson talks to Burt Caesar,” Critical
Quarterly (Winter 1996): 64-77.
Snow on Sugarcane
13
Chapter 1 examines the early years of West Indian poetry in Britain,
illustrating the change into West Indian British mode that is made concrete
through the work of La Rose and the CAM poets; the literary and cultural
journey only outlined above, is illustrated through the poetry. It looks at
the role played by Salkey, Lamming and Selvon, whose influence was
great despite their being recognised primarily as novelists, the importance
of the Caribbean Voices programme, Bim and Kyk over al (the main
literary journals of the period), and the impact of Lord Kitchener and other
calypsonians. Some early features of the poetry are identified – for
example, the introduction of music (calypso primarily) as a medium – and
the role of West Indian survival mechanisms in fashioning new cultural
identity and literature is examined. The work of Una Marson and Phyllis
Allfrey, two largely ignored poets is revisited and the brief UK sojourn of
Claude McKay, pioneer of the Harlem Rennaisance is discussed. Tentative
literary strategies are identified as the basis for the voice that only sounds
fully in the work of the next generation of poets.
Chapter 2 focuses on the theorising of West Indian and thus West
Indian British literature, especially through the criticism and poetry of
Kamau Brathwaite. The main critical bases and literary strategies touched
on above are fleshed out in their West Indian context in order to show how
West Indian British critical practice might develop. The importance of
West Indian literary theory to West Indian British literature is examined,
especially in the context of the increasingly popular methods of
Postcolonial studies. McKay, Marson and Allfrey are re-examined briefly
in the light of the theoretical structures set up in the Chapter.
Chapter 3 rereads the work of the CAM poets in detail and traces the
re-emergence of poetry as a literary form where previously West Indian
British culture had been dominated by the novel. The case for John La
Rose as “founding father” is also scrutinised. Other CAM era poets
including Faustin Charles, Edward Lucie Smith and Frank John are read in
the light of the coming generation of British born writers.
Chapter 4 charts the increasing politicising of CAM which finally led
to its demise in 1972 and the rise of a younger generation who took up
literary cudgels against an increasing cultural exclusion; citing Johnson as
the catalyst for the break with West Indian identity and a new engagement
with being British, it asks what it is that allows the reader to perceive
viable West Indian British strategies in his work. The focus of the chapter
is on Johnson’s work but the emerging dub poets are also scrutinised and
14
Introduction
the debate over “performance poetry” rehearsed. The poetry of Jean Binta
Breeze is best reviewed in tandem with that of Johnson. Its obvious
similarities – the use of reggae rhythms and the reliance on a specifically
Jamaican base – often obscures the fact that both poets draw heavily on
British culture for their writing and are instrumental in widening the range
of the new “voice.” Breeze, having arrived in Britain eleven years after
Johnson’s first book was published, may be seen to be expanding his
legacy. Equally the tradition that she advances is furthered by Johnson’s
later work. Through Breeze, Johnson can be seen as moving out of the
frame of reference of “Five Nights of Bleeding” and into that of the 1998
collection More Time – the early poem could not be written now, in the
reconceptualised “nation” it helped bring about.
Chapter 5 explores the role of the anthology in developing and
disseminating the new voice, starting with James Berry’s Bluefoot
Traveller and News for Babylon. The results of Johnson’s work as
unofficial “black poet laureate” may be seen in the latter collection, a
general roundup of the poetry available in 1984. The anthology is reread in
the light of Johnson’s development of the new voice and accusations that a
number of its contributors remain locked in the binary mindset of the
colonial. If this phase of development is equated with Breiner’s “uneasy
difference” phase in West Indian poetry, attempts to “write back” to an
empire that has receded noticeably under the pressure of Johnson, Berry
and by this time John Agard, are perhaps not as anachronistic as they first
appear. What is evident however, is that the language community becomes
split by age as the concerns of the settler generation are often very
different from those of the second generation: if the former are more
accommodating in general to their “hosts,” the latter set out to claim
Britain as their own. Additionally, the notion of “self” begins to equate
with, if not dominate that of “community.”
Chapter 6 deals with the work of three poets, James Berry, John
Agard and Fred D’Aguiar. It is in the mid 1990s that West Indian Britain
emerges in their poetry for the first time as a definable network of
strategies. Both Berry and Agard had been writing earlier than Johnson so
it is useful to see in what ways their work overlaps and develops his.
D’Aguiar perhaps best defines the new territory for exploration in his
“sense of knowing two places without actually belonging fully to either.”
This new creative space is typified by Berry’s Hot Earth Cold Earth,
D’Aguiar’s British Subjects and Agard’s Weblines and From the Devil’s
Pulpit. Former notions of nation are dispelled as West Indian culture is
Snow on Sugarcane
15
absorbed into the grass roots of British culture. It is not that West Indian
culture is denatured, for the tradition of Walcott and Brathwaite is sound
enough and expanding in its own direction. Rather, my proposition is that
Britishness is redefined by their new voice, which both aligns with it and
proclaims independence from it. A new language community and cultural
base arise, drawn from all sectors of Britain, black and white.
Berry is particularly interesting in that his poetry spans all the
generations of West Indian Britain. Even in his late work, he can be seen
to retain a West Indian voice alongside his West Indian British one, yet the
command of both is absolute. D’ Aguiar bears all the baggage of this new
British subject exemplified by his perception of the contemporary British
carnival as neither a traditional bank holiday release, nor a fully-fledged
West Indian festival. This sense of drawing upon two traditions
simultaneously and in varying measure is perhaps most fully realised in
Agard. The trickster figures that traverse his last three collections quite
clearly control the crossroads of his parent cultures.
Chapters 7 and 8 offer poets such as David Dabydeen and Grace
Nichols as examples of identities that constantly evolve through
displacements of language and culture, remaining always on the margins
of this new aesthetic. Where ultimately La Rose is exiled, Nichols
especially inhabits the condition of nomad. Where we can detect a finetuning of the work of Agard, Nichols is a migrating voice, her literary
identity defined only by the point in her journey. There are a number of
these voices that enrich West Indian Britain. These include Amryl
Johnson, E. A. Markham, Valerie Bloom and John Lyons. The first two
are important in that their acquisition of a West Indian sensibility is late in
life although both were born in the West Indies. Chapter 7 is wholly
devoted to the work of Markham – a prolific writer who made a unique
contribution to the new voice – because of the longevity of his career and
this aspect of his poetic identity. His work serves as a useful base from
which to explore the other poets identified here. Both Markham and
Johnson had to relearn Creole and remake the West Indian culture in what
were British identities. Bloom exemplifies the poet who adopts a voice of
her country of domicile, Britain, despite her insistence on preserving her
West Indian heritage. John Lyons in his Lure of the Cascadura is
captivated by the myth that all who eat the fish must return to die in
Trinidad. Yet, in a collection that springs from the country of his birth are
a few poems that might sit well with early Berry in their tentative
accommodation of Lyons’s parent cultures.
16
Introduction
Chapter 9 updates the story of the voice by looking at the published
work of emerging poets. There have been several anthologies published
since the recent turn of the century, including Kwesi Owusu’s on “black
British” culture, and Newland and Sesay’s collection of poetry, short
stories and essays.43 Ferdinand Dennis’s Voices of the Crossing records the
personal testament of writers of this dual heritage while Karen McCarthy
collects contemporary black women’s voices, many of which are British.44
Many of the writers are third generation “West Indians” and profess no
affinity for, nor any firsthand knowledge of the West Indies. Many claim
an affinity with second and third generation Africans or South Asians.
Several African British poets – Patience Agbabi primarily – can be shown
to work in a West Indian British mode. At the same time, a new first
generation of West Indian Britons is publishing for the first time – Maggie
Harris and Joan Anim-Addo for instance. Also, there are those concerned
mainly with marrying influences of the Classical world with their West
Indian roots in order to come to terms with their Britain; Marc de Brito
and Andrew Bundy are good examples in this regard. The concluding part
of the study analyses these trends and weighs the case for a new voice
accordingly. It looks at whether any viable critical tools can be devised to
read these multi-vocal poets and whether the new voice developed in
Agard et al still survives in the new millennium. It asks if these are
uncertain voices or the radical creativity of a family of voices building on
a now established tradition.
43
Kwesi Owusu, ed., Black British Culture & Society – a text reader (London:
Routledge, 2000) and Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay, ed., IC3: the Penguin
book of new black writing in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).
44
Karen McCarthy, bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry (London:
The Women’s Press, 1998).
CHAPTER ONE
1919-1966: TENTATIVE DEFINITIONS
The notion of a West Indian British poetry presupposes the existence
of a West Indian poetry, clearly discernable from “English literature” and
the introduction of a West Indian poetic sensibility thus derived into
British culture.
It might be argued that James Grainger’s “The Sugar-Cane” is the first
West Indian British poem. It is of the British canon yet in some ways
“writes back” to Empire from the colonies. Grainger, a Scottish doctor,
wrote this lengthy work in 1764 as a “West-India georgic” in the manner
of Virgil, as was the fashion of the time. Jamaican critic Lloyd Brown
cites it as the precursor of the Caribbean pastoral, a tradition in poetry
from the West Indies that survives well into the twentieth century.1 He
ascribes to the poem a legacy of unrelieved, uncritical and simplistic
poetic landscape painting, with its heyday in the nineteenth century, whose
form derives from a recognised European model. This “hackneyed nature
verse in the Romantic mode alternates with the colonial’s embarrassingly
sycophantic verses in praise of the British Empire”2 says Brown, yet John
Gilmore argues that “the Caribbean reality is being imposed on the
European model, on a scale to which there is nothing earlier which is
comparable in English.” We begin to discern for instance, a sense of the
West Indian carnival in these lines from “Sugar-Cane:”
On festal days: or when their work is done;
Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance.
To the wild banshaw’s melancholy sound.
Responsive to the sound, head feet and frame
Move aukwardly harmonious; hand in hand
Now lock’d, the gay troop circularly wheels,
And frisks and capers with intemperate joy.
1
Bk IV 582-588
Lloyd Brown, West Indian Poetry (London: Heinemann Educational Books,
1984), 20.
2
Ibid. Note, however, the rebuttal in John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire
(London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 64-5.
18
Chapter One
The poem certainly made its mark in Britain: whilst it produced a
measure of hilarity amongst Dr Johnson and his circle,3 it remained in
print until 1836 and is known to have been the inspiration for other works.
Earlier poems written in the West Indies, such as Nathaniel Weekes’s
“Barbados” (1754), have been unearthed but as Paula Burnett notes, these
poems received little critical notice at the time.4 “The Sugar-Cane” and all
these other works are undoubtedly important as cultural artefacts but as
poems they display, in the words of Laurence Breiner, “an almost
automatic troping of Caribbean experience with British figurations…
pastoral, epic and satire, from odes, heroic couplets and blank verse. This
is true even of the most knowledgeable native authors, even of those
poems which incorporate criticism of slavery and other colonial policies.”5
Francis Williams for instance, composed “Ode to Governor Haldane,” the
earliest recorded poem by a black West Indian (1759) in which Lloyd
Brown sees the roots of the protest tradition of West Indian poetry.6
Equally, the poem was written in Latin as a social marker – to exhibit
Williams’ mastery of English poetic tradition and to crave acceptance by
those within the rarefied circle who subscribed to that tradition. Like
Grainger, in order to be read, he had to write in a manner identifiable to
his readers in Britain. Identifying with the common man was an alternative
tradition rooted in poets such as Chaucer who had “made a crucial
contribution to English literature in using English at a time when much
court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman or Latin;”7 for Breiner and
Brown, a similar West Indian tradition was still some way off.
Paula Burnett makes a claim for an established Caribbean literary
tradition in English by 17768 but Breiner argues that this is merely an
extension of the British canon9 and even though West Indian scholars
continue to identify these isolated publications throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, it is not until the 1920s and 30s that any
continuity of indigenous poetic effort occurs. Because of the nature of
British colonisation, no substantial creole colonies developed in the way
3
See Gilmore, Poetics, 38 and Paula Burnett, Penguin anthology of Caribbean
Verse in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 393.
4
Burnett, Caribbean Verse, 393.
5
Laurence Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105.
6
Brown, West Indian Poetry, 21.
7
Ian Ousby, The Cambridge guide to literature in English (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 169. My emphasis.
8
Burnett, Caribbean Verse, 395.
9
Breiner, Introduction, 105.
1919-1966: Tentative Definitions
19
that French and Spanish settlements had. “Until very recently, the
Anglophone territories had nothing to match the intellectual atmosphere of
Port-au-Prince or Havana,” says Breiner; the issue “is something like
critical mass, the need for a certain minimal number of writers who in
some loose sense work together, are aware of one another’s work and as a
group are able to sustain the interest of an audience.”10 The British West
Indian literary tradition, then, was “not as a habit of activity but as a heap
of books – all of them published abroad.” 11 Indeed, Trinidad and British
Guiana did not have printing presses until the nineteeth century.
The idea that a West Indian literature might exist free from the “filter”
of Europe, based on West Indian language and cultural situations, begins
to take shape in the readers’ clubs and poetry societies in the British West
Indies in the 1920s (the Jamaica Poetry League, for instance, was founded
in 1923). Several anthologies bolstered these activities, beginning to
recover a past and so provide a footing on which to build a home-based
literature. Norman Cameron’s 1931 Guianese Poetry collects work from
1831 to 1931 when previously only 8 poems had been published in the
colony in that hundred-year period.12 Lloyd Brown is as dismissive of the
content of the collection as he is of Grainger and most of the work of
Thomas MacDermot, Jamaica’s “poet laureate” and the Jamaica Poetry
League, giving credence it seems, only to those poets who display a
measure of colonial resistance via black subjectivity and agency.13 As
Denise de Caries Narain points out, however, the placement of such
strictures upon qualification as “West Indian” denies the critic the
opportunity to engage with the earliest efforts in the fields of female
subjectivity14 and the ambivalence of the white West Indian and thus
create a more nuanced approach to the emerging West Indian sensibility.15
For many, the mere act of writing poetry was a political act, for this was
the preserve of those in the mother country. Narain acknowledges the
importance of the poem as cultural artefact as distinct from literature, good
or bad, in that the identity and time of a writer often sheds light on textual
strategies and masks that inform the criticism of later work. With the
advent of the literary magazine, the first West Indian criticism followed. A
10
Breiner, Introduction, 60.
Ibid., 61.
12
Ibid., 77.
13
Brown, West Indian Poetry, 23-5.
14
She detects that a “maleness” always seems to be attached to blackness in the
criticism.
15
Denise deCaries Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making
style (London: Routledge, 2002), 7-8.
11
20
Chapter One
1933 article in The Beacon16 may be the earliest reference to the
possibility of West Indian literature replacing the incipient collection of
national literatures or the canon of English Literature. By then, Claude
McKay was established as an important international Negro poet (only
reclaimed as West Indian after Jamaican independence in 1962) and Una
Marson and C. L. R. James had migrated to England (both in 1932) to
provide a West Indian voice from the literary centre.
In the Introduction, reference is made to the significance of West
Indian exile to Britain in the 1950s and the literary culture that grew up
around the BBC at that time. Brathwaite goes as far as to call the
Caribbean Voices programme “the single most important literary catalyst
for Caribbean creative and critical writing in English.”17 However, there is
ample evidence to suggest that a small but thriving community of West
Indians, including artists like Marson and James, had formed in England
two decades earlier. Whilst March 1943 remains a critical date for this
study, marking the inauguration of Caribbean Voices, it will be useful to
look at poetry in the nineteen thirties. Further, it is known that Marson was
encouraged to seek her fortune in Britain by the exploits of her compatriot
Claude McKay.18 As the latter spent eighteen months in England from
1919 to 1921, it is also important to cast an archaeological net back that
far.
Claude McKay’s British Sojourn
In 1912, Claude McKay published Songs of Jamaica and Constab
Ballads, the first recorded collections of West Indian poems in Creole.
Consequently, he is granted the status of literary forefather by many West
Indian scholars, a status that needs to be viewed critically, for McKay’s
work exhibits complexities and ambiguities that grant him credentials in
several other poetic histories. Considerations of primacy notwithstanding,
Lloyd Brown makes a strong case for the formative qualities of McKay’s
poetry.19 John La Rose, arguably the forefather of West Indian British
poetry, confirms this when he says “McKay’s ‘Flame-Heart’ is the West
Indian poem that first really made an impact on me as a West Indian
16
“A West Indian Literature,” The Beacon 2,12 (1933) is cited in Jeannette Allis,
West Indian literature: an index to criticism 1930 - 75, (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981)
as the first reference to the term “West Indian Literature.”
17
E. Kamau Brathwaite, History of the voice (London: New Beacon, 1984), 87.
18
Delia Jarret-Macauley, The life of Una Marson (Kingston: Randle, 1998), 44.
19
Brown, West Indian Poetry, 39-62. Michael McTurk, Edward Cordle and James
Martinez are other lesser-known early “dialect” poets publishing as early as 1899.