Author: Isabelle

Source: Sunday Stabroek
Date: Sunday, 25th March 2012

Some years ago, David Dabydeen did a presentation on the close historical relationship between British art and sugar, articulating the association of art with the financial gains of African slavery in the West Indies. He spoke specifically to the history of Booker Tate in British Guiana, and ironically titled the presentation ‘Art of Darkness’.

Of equal significance are Dabydeen’s close studies of British art, the history of blacks in Britain in the eighteenth century, abolition and African slavery in the Caribbean. The work of English eighteenth century artist William Hogarth provided the source of his interest in blacks in British eighteenth century art and of at least two of his major works Hogarth’s Blacks (non-fiction) and A Harlot’s Progress (fiction). The great English landscape (and seascape) painter JMW Turner, and in particular the famous Turner painting Slave Ship (1840) inspired Dabydeen’s best poetic work so far – a long poem called Turner (1994).

‘Art of Darkness’ is a pun on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which has served Dabydeen very well as source of inspiration and intertextual engagement, a literary strategy that has been a major part of his work and artistic interest.

As a matter of fact, intertextuality is one of the main themes in Talking Words (University of the West Indies Press, 2011) edited by Lynne Macedo, “New Essays on the Work of David Dabydeen” with ten chapters by different critics. Even the title—Talking Words—seems to go into double entendre. It is most likely taken from “Ma Talking Words”, a poem in Dabydeen’s Coolie Odyssey. But it also suggests a play on words with reference to Dabydeen’s own use of language. The book could be various critics talking about words, the major tool of Dabydeen’s trade, and the words he has produced. But it could also be about talking words, meaning words that talk, and a reference to Dabydeen’s use of standard language and non-standard Creole, and what he can dramatically do with words. It might also be a reference to this artist’s latest novel Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) in which a talking walking stick becomes a major ‘character’.

Lynne Macedo explains that the volume “contains the most recent collection of critical writing that is focused exclusively on the fictional output of this acclaimed poet and novelist. Its publication has been designed to coincide with that of Pak’s Britannica: Interviews and articles by David Dabydeen, and to offer a fresh but complementary look at all of Dabydeen’s major works by Caribbean scholars from across the world. […] The range, scope and originality of these chapters clearly demonstrate the continuing interest in critical appraisal of all of Dabydeen’s writing.” Pak’s Britannica (UWI Press, 2011) is a companion volume to one also edited by Macedo, an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick where Dabydeen is Professor of Literature. Macedo herself is a leading scholar of West Indian literature who in 2010 was one of the coordinators of a Warwick conference on – Art and the Environment held in Guyana. An earlier volume of critical papers appeared in The Art of David Dabydeen edited by Kevin Grant.

This collection of essays takes special interest in language and intertextuality. As Macedo points out in her discussion of the contribution of Jenny De Salvo, there is discussion of intertextuality although her “interest is … from a linguistic perspective”. She gives “a detailed exploration of ‘the variety of registers and languages’ that Dabydeen employs in The Intended” (his first novel, 1991), while, “by highlighting his numerous allusions to canonical works … she clearly demonstrates the subversive qualities of Dabydeen’s novel”. anguage and intertextual allusions are also leading subjects in the other chapters, which are grouped under Part 1: Poetic Reappraisals focusing Dabydeen’s poetry, and Part 2: (Re)Reading the Novels. In Part 1 Monica Manolachi discusses “Cultural Hybridity”, Anjali Nerlekar analyses what she calls Dabydeen’s “Poetry of Disappearance”, while Nicole Matos examines ‘Audience, Authenticity and the African Imaginary’ in both poetry and prose in her study of Turner and A Harlot’s Progress. In the other chapters devoted to prose, Russell West-Pavlov deepens the intertextual explorations of “Conradian Journeys” in a reading of Disappearance, while Abigail Ward’s interest is in “The Slave Narrative Genre”, which Dabydeen “Re-presents” in Harlot’s Progress. Like Matos, Erik Falk overviews the poetry in addition to the early novels and the latest, Molly and the Muslim Stick, in which he finds an “exoticist aesthetic”, while Jutta Schamp sees in that same fiction “Trauma, Literary Alchemy and Transfiguration”. A reading of the two later novels interest both Liliana Sikorska and Michael Mitchell, as Sikorska discusses “Re-scripting Genealogies in Our Lady of Demerara and Mitchell focuses “Magic and Realism in Dabydeen’s Recent Fiction”.

The book, as a whole, presents its readers with critical discourse of very high quality, with many incisive revelations about some of Dabydeen’s most interesting preoccupations, not only opening windows to new approaches to his work and devices, but heaping high praise upon them. Mitchell, for example, quotes Kevin Davey in suggesting that one should “turn to Dabydeen if you want to know where (Black writing in Britain) could and should be going”. That is indeed a compliment of the highest order, to which Mitchell adds his observation that in his recent fiction Dabydeen moves away from straight realistic fiction into absurdism and magical realism, preoccupations that disappoint those critics who were looking for normal English fiction in Our Lady of Demerara and a child abuse case study in Molly. They both, however, operate “outside of the logic of realism”.

Like West-Pavlov, Manolachi, Macedo, Nerlekar and other contributors, Mitchell highlights the allusions and stylistic delving into other texts in which Dabydeen takes an often serious but sometimes mischievous delight.

There are numerous citations as he carries on an infinitely intriguing discourse with not only the painters Turner and Hogarth, and the novelist Conrad, but with Shakespeare, especially The Tempest, in a manner that renders his work that much more profound. In some cases he wishes to pay homage to great West Indians Wilson Harris and VS Naipaul. While he treats them with reverence in Disappearance and Our Lady, it is hardly the same in his presentation of the character Vidia in The Counting House, a novel that does not get very much attention in Talking Words. But several other works to which Dabydeen alludes are cited: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Harris’ The Secret Ladder, Lamming’s Water With Berries, a parody of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, Dante, Wordsworth, Blake, inter alia.

Dabydeen’s language is another area of major interest in Talking Words. There is his versatile use of Standard English in his appropriate stylistic variations, in addition to his very keen ear for Guyanese Creole. The contributing critics give very good account of the linguistic preoccupations in their close studies of the poetry in particular. That is why the errors in the collection are surprising. They contend that while Slave Song is mostly written in Guyanese Creole, “by contrast” the use of Creole in Coolie Oddysey is “moderate”. This is not the case. It is true that Slave Song achieves a certain fierceness and violence in the brutality of its language, complete with sexual explicitness. But the language in Coolie Odyssey is hardly more reticent. What happens is that much of the crudity in the earlier volume comes from the fact that the Creole is a non-standardised language that can pose challenges when rendered in writing. Despite Dabydeen’s keen ear he sometimes struggles with this task in Slave Song. In his second collection, however, his writing of the language is more efficient and is set down with greater fluency. But it is the language that Dabydeen would have heard in Canje in Guyana’s County of Berbice, hardly outdone by the sexual references in Slave Song. Secondly, there seems to be some amount of confusion among the critics about the identity of the personae in Slave Song, which is basically about African slaves. Quite often in Talking Words there is reference to the Indo-Guyanese or the Indentured Indians when it should be about the black enslaved.

There is little doubt about that because Dabydeen has related in interviews that his interest was in the blacks both in his research and in that first volume. He related how he was confronted after a public reading from the book by a hostile member of the audience who in accusatory tones suggested that he should stick to writing about his own people.
He felt affronted and sufficiently angered to think about writing Coolie Odyssey. It is true, however, that Dabydeen’s major concern was the plantation, which was the hostile habitat of both race groups, so the experience that he writes about in Slave Song could well refer to both Africans and Indians.

To date Dabydeen has published three books of poetry and six novels. He already had two collections of poems before his first novel in 1991, but since Turner in 1994 all his work has been fiction.

Manolachi comments in Talking Words about his emphasis on hybridity in Turner, and the way he turns a painting about a slave being thrown overboard from a ship in the ocean to a poem that encompasses the whole trans-Atlantic experience for Africans, Indians and Europeans alike. It is a poem enriched by the subject of slavery, mythology, Hinduism and other cultures, and is Dabydeen’s best work of poetry to date, despite the two prizes won by Slave Song.

Dabydeen steadily progressed into the circle of leading Caribbean and post-colonial authors, and is among the foremost celebrated writers of whatever background in Britain. The appearance of yet another volume of essays on his work indicates the rise in critical attention that plays its part in establishing him as a major writer.

Source: Sunday Stabroek
Date: December 18th 2011

http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/features/12/18/the-moray-house-trust-and-martin-carter/

“Two recent events brought Caribbean and Guyanese poet Martin Carter once again into focus.  On December 13 a new cultural foundation, The Moray House Trust, was unveiled at Moray House, the de Caires residence in Georgetown, as a new venue for programmes and a promoter of activities in the arts and culture.  The date of the launching was deliberately fixed since it was the fourteenth anniversary of the death of Carter, whose work and position as a major cultural icon and Guyana’s greatest poet the Trust wished to honour.

Two months before that, the 30th Annual West Indian Literature Conference was held at UWI St Augustine in Trinidad under the theme I Dream to Change the World: Literature and Social Transformation, taking its title from one of Carter’s many famous lines, “

Martin Carter

I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world” from the poem ‘Looking At Your Hands‘ (1950s).  That is the foremost international conference on West Indian literature, and the Carter line easily allowed papers on social transformation and the literature of the Caribbean.  Not only is the man often described as Guyana’s “National Poet” associated with social transformation in his many works, but the world has found his poetry to be very quotable, and there are several lines that have been quoted and sloganeered for diverse causes.

His work was featured in performances attached to the conference, and many past editions of the meeting have had papers read by various scholars on Carter.  Very appropriately, the definitive book on Carter in which Stewart Brown collected and edited the major critical publications on him, was launched at the 20th meeting of this same Annual Conference at the University of Guyana in 2000.  This authoritative text, All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter (Peepal Tree, 2000) took as its title one of those oft quoted Carter phrases from the poem ‘You Are Involved‘ (“all are involved / all are consumed”).  Both literary and political interests have found this particular line very attractive because of its reference to popular involvement in a political or social process; the concept of belonging to a community and accepting responsibility for its fate.  Involvement means commitment, and participation suggests belonging and inseparability from the outcome.  The notion of ‘consumption’ is Carter’s characteristic concern for the inevitable.  Brown attaches the line to the volume as a typical Carterian concept as well as the fact that several different critics have contributed and are therefore involved in the publication, as much as they are in the making and completion of Carter’s poetry.

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

Like a jig
shakes the loom;
like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!

Intertextual engagement with Carter has resulted in many other uses of his famous lines from which other titles have been framed because of this quotable quality and wide applicability. To all of those may be added the fact that the lines are striking poetic ways of expressing so many ideas relevant to human existence.  They are profound, but also seem to speak for many political causes.  Critic Gordon Rohlehr used ‘A Carrion Time‘ as his title in an article first published in Tapia (now known as Trinidad and Tobago Review) in the early 1970s as a response to the initial negative reaction to the rise of new unconventional and radical poetic forms in the Caribbean.  Rohlehr turned to Carter again for the title of his collection of essays My Strangled City (Longman, 1992).  The film by Rupert Roopnaraine, The Terror and the Time, was inspired by ‘The University of Hunger‘ (“the grave of pride / the sudden flight / the terror and the time”); and Grace Nichols looked to ‘Black Friday 1962‘ when naming her novel Whole of A Morning Sky (1986).  Both novel and poem reflect on the violence and riots of 1962 in Georgetown which Carter expresses in one of his subtle uses of Creole syntax.

Was a day that had to come,
ever since the whole of a morning sky,
glowed red liker glory,
over the tops of houses.

Nichols draws on that haunting image of a “strangled city” on fire with its tragic scarlet reflection on the wide arch of the firmament painted in Carter’s grim lines.  Endlessly have other lines been borrowed and repeated like proverbs: “but a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live”; and “death must not find us thinking that we die” (from ‘Death of A Comrade‘).

The Moray House Trust is as much a dedication to the memory and work of David de Caires as its launching was dedicated to Martin Carter.  de Caires probably loved the arts and culture more than law, and published, edited, read, studied and promoted poetry.  Carter was among his chief comrades in arms, a poet whom he deeply admired, and together they were among the usual conspiratorial suspects in many years of poetry readings and literary discussions.  Doreen de Caires, a trustee of Moray House, read from her husband’s notes which included a tribute to Carter.  Actually, the notes contain the same material either published or orally presented by de Caires about the now legendary readings and discussions of poetry in sessions sanctified by the libations of gallons of Demerara’s finest rum.  Both the spirit(s) and the quality of this rum have been famously confirmed by good authority.  Such sessions must have been going on for many decades since Edgar Mittelholzer has immortalised them in poetry since the 1930s; and they continued in contemporary times since Stewart Brown has canonised them with similar immortality in Tourist, Traveler, Troublemaker (Peepal Tree, 2008).

Carter’s involvement in the discussions may be regarded as a part of his contribution to the national literary development.  There is evidence that that kind of activity had its part to play and continued with the involvement of other poets – Donald Trotman, AJ Seymour, the PEN Club and Syble Douglas.  The Irish, and indeed international, poet WB Yeats has been repeatedly mentioned as an inspiration to Carter and Wilson Harris, who was also a member of the discussion groups, and has written of the importance of Yeats to Carter.  de Caires’ accounts have named him as Carter’s favourite poet and his ‘Among School Children‘ as, according to Carter, the best ever written.  That claim is dubious, but it is not difficult to recognise the quality in Yeats that would have appealed to Carter, and this quality with its startling Yeatsian images and phrases is contained in the closing lines from the poem.

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
(WB Yeats, Among School Children)

This kind of spiritual involvement ponders the inseparability of leaf, blossom and tree, which define each other.  The same interdependent symbiosis is transferred to the dancer’s body and the music; the dancer and the dance.  The last line contains a pun: how can we tell the difference between the dancer and the dance; but also, how can we know anything about the dancer by looking at the dance?  Carter’s poetry is much involved in this kind of integral questioning.  The sentiments of the 60-year-old Yeats as he moves among the children recall Carter’s on his encounter with a 12-year-old girl on a road in rural Guyana in ‘The Poems Man,‘ a poem that has now become so very popular that Carter is known by the name.

Look, look, she cried, the poems man,
running across the frail bridge
of her innocence.  Into what house
will she go?  Into what guilt will
that bridge lead? I
the man she called out at
and she, hardly twelve
meet in the middle, she going
her way; I coming from mine:
The middle where we meet
is not the place to stop.

The poem contains something of Carter’s subtle use of the syntax of the Creole language in the girl’s use of “poems man” for “poet” and Carter’s own “I the man she called out at”; “I coming from mine” and “the place to stop,” which includes the Guyanese usage of “stop.”  There is that proletarian quality in the poem, which includes the poet’s surprise at being recognised in these unlikely circumstances.  But there is also the concerns which the poem shares with Yeats: the meeting of age and youth on a symbolic bridge with suggestions of distance, links, time and continuity.

The other Yeatsian connections include the work of both poets in national developments in their own times and places.  Yeats was in sympathy with and had friends among the rebels in Ireland’s war for independence against the British in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  He was  also a statesman, serving as a Senator in the Irish government.  Carter’s history in Guyanese politics is well known as a rebel imprisoned for his war against the British occupation in 1953, as a member of the PPP in the fifties, as a Minister in Burnham’s cabinet 1967-1970; his resignation from that post and his demonstrations against the PNC which led to him being beaten in the streets.

But an important part of that history is the contributions he made to cultural and political consciousness while working closely with Janet Jagan and his prose writings in Thunder.  When he was later employed by Bookers, he secretly continued under the pseudonym ‘M Black.‘  In these writings may be found some of Carter’s profound thoughts on culture and nationhood, two short stories and (separately) his contemplations on poetry, form and metaphysics in the group Poems of Shape and Motion (1955).

His contribution to nation-building is deep and varied in public, private and artistic capacities.  It has often been said that a poet of this depth and quality should have had wider international acclaim, and for several years his books were out of print and access to his work limited.  Included in the tributes paid to him since is the way this work has been several times reprinted and spread abroad.  Among these re-publications have been Selected Poems (1989) by Demerara Publishers, reprinted by Red Thread in 1997; collections edited and republished by the University of Warwick with Spanish translations, edited by Gemma Robinson and published by Bloodaxe;  with yet another edition by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald, published by Macmillan Caribbean in 2006.”