In relation to non-standard English in poetry, the poets I am discussing also perform their poetry in a way, where they incorporate West Indian stylistic methods of performance. For instance, the use of drums and singing words aloud helps to create an atmosphere for the audience/listener; this is known as ‘dub poetry’. Although its roots can be traced back to reggae and Jamaican popular culture, it does have a particular history within the British context, where it found a captive audience during the politicized years of the 1970s and early 1980s. Earlier British dub/performance poetry tended to comment on incidents which affected the black community directly (such as the injustices of stop and search policing), but these days, they are more indirect.
The contemporary poets I am discussing here were not born in the UK yet their poetry is primarily aimed at an English speaking audience. This is shown through the titles for one thing; ‘Listen Mr Oxford don’ and ‘Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while having a full bubble bath’. Immediately, the reader here acknowledges that their attention is required and as they read on, the poet’s use of non-standard English is established within the first lines of the stanzas;
Mi mudda did fine
Wit a likkle roots wine
(‘ARISING: for the youth of Azania’, 1998)
The aforementioned poem is by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who was born and studied in Jamaica. Known as a dub poet, she began to write poetry in the 1970s, performing and recording first in Kingston then in London. ‘ARISING: for the youth of Azania’, which is from her collection Riddym Raving and other Poems (1998), is a poem which has to be performed, like many of her other poems, it has a rhythm and beat to it, even when performed without drums.
The listener of the poem is instantly aware of the change in language style, although it is essentially ‘English’, it is actually not. It takes a little moment to those who are not used to listening, to get used to the words and pick it up. The poem is, like Breeze’s other work, different from conventional poetry, it is self conscious is about poetry as much as it is about the Caribbean or the black British experience. The structure of the stanzas is like in song form rather than usual poetry, you can almost hear, when performed, where the verses and chorus goes. The speaker of the poem is a child who ‘speaks’ in the colloquial tongue of their desire to get an education, and the fact they were discouraged by their teacher (‘But teacha buss mi finga wid a ruler/Ev’ry time I ask she ‘bout a scholarship’) shows that, the poet was showing the naive attitudes some West Indians held towards the benefits of a good education.
The overall structure of
John Agard’s ‘Listen Mr Oxford don’ draws out the politicization of language. In the first stanza, he foregrounds the image of the immigrant;
Me not no Oxford don
me a simple immigrant
from Clapham Common
(‘Listen Mr Oxford don’ lines 1-3)
There is no denial of who the speaker is here, it clearly states that he is not a university graduate, that he is simple. The play with words is used cleverly by Agard, he intertwines the famous Oxford English Dictionary with aggression by using words that are related to criminal activity such as ‘I have no knife/but mugging de Queen’s English/is the story of my life’ and ‘dem want me to serve time/for inciting rhyme to riot’. It suggested that society viewed immigrants as a danger or a threat simply because of how they spoke and the immigrant in this poem tells that the only danger he is to society is the influence he may have on the Queen's English. The ‘Queen’s English’ suggests that unless you spoke a certain way, then you will not be an accepted citizen because you are ‘foreign’. The term ‘riot’ conjures up images of the Brixton riots of 1981, media controversy which directly involved black Britons.
In Carlton E. Wilson’s essay, Racism and Private Assistance: The Support of West Indian and African Missions in Liverpool, England, During the Interwar Years ( ), he writes about John Harris, a man who Agard may be referring to as the Oxford don, Harris felt that immigrants were going to affect the British culture and possibly the English language.
Carlton E. Wilson writes about in his essay,
What is produced from this dub poetry is the creation of this sense of space. Britain is a nation made up of ‘regions’ and these regions all have their voices which are not accepted as the standard. The surge of vernacular verse over the last view decades means this space is now recognised and accepted; Romana Huk says of this;
Recovering some sense of the ways in which places map our selves rather than vice versa…one so critically fashioned by metonymic language and spatial metaphors that poetry’s figurative medium becomes, arguably, one of the best for exploring its design
Tom Paulin, in The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990), says of the Rastafarian voice in ‘Africa me wan fe go/Africa me wan fe go’;
…rejects the official order and seeks an alternative and juster society. It’s a communal speech which articulates the violent displacement of slavery and colonialism, the experience of losing language and homeland and having another language – or bits of other languages –imposed on you… (Paulin, 1990: xviii)
I think that the comment can be said of all the poems I have introduced as it is the precise reason which prompted much Caribbean poetry in the first place.
Bibliography
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Armitage, Simon and Crawford, Robert. 1998. The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. Great Britain: Penguin
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Mordecai, Pamela. 1989. From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry Since Independence. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications Ltd. 1987
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Nestor, Pam. 2003. General Introductory Notes on Oral Literature and Caribbean Performance Poetry. UK
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Paulin, Tom. 1990. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse. London: Faber and Faber Limited
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Sander, Reinhard W. 1978. From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing.
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Wilson, Carlton E. .Racism and Private Assistance: The Support of West Indian and African Missions in Liverpool, England, During the Interwar Years downloaded from http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316kunit4/studentprojectsspring/kimberly/wilson.html Accessed: 28/05/2003
