Narasimhaiah, C. D.;
An Anthology of commonwealth poetry
Macmillan India, 1990/2010, 264 pages
ISBN 0333920805 9780333920800
topics: | poetry | india | africa | south-asia
This is an uneven selection of poets from both white and non-white parts of the commonwealth. It is marred by several errors, including two instances where a poem has been attributed to the wrong poet. Nonetheless, many of the voices are hard to find, and reflect cultures removed from the mainstream. To me, it was well worth going through ...
p.50
[was active in early Indian literary circles. like many others, emigrated
to the US and despite one volume of poetry (The age of female eunuchs,
1974), largely faded from the literary scene.]
no i don't want to be
a hotchpotch of culture
a confusion of language
a nullity of imagination
an abortive affair between an indo and an anglo
i hate hyphens
the artificial bridges
between artificial values
in the name of race religion n language
i damn all hyphenated minds
prejudiced offsprings of unenlightened souls
i denounce all labels and labelmakers
i refuse to be a moonrock specimen
to be analyzed labelled n stored
for a curious gloomy fellow to
reanalyze reclassify me
for shelving me again
they call me indo-anglian
I don't now what they mean
cauvery flows in my veins
chamundi hills rise in my mind with stars afloat
eyes of the goddess smiling on the slain demon
brindavan fountains sing in my soul
but i am not tied down to my childhood scene.
i have led languages by their ears
i have twisted creeds to force the truth out
i have burned candles in the caves of prejudice
i have surged in the oceans of being
i have flown across the universe on the wings of my thought
they call me indo-anglian
the mistaken misinformed folk
n class me with a small group of writers
cloistering me
crippling me
i would rather roam with kalidasa n kabir
or go on a spiritual journey with dante
meditate with khayyam on the mathematics of existence
or sing with ghalib the anguish of love
or drown with li po kissing the moon's reflection in the river
they call me indo-anglian
it's true i write in english
dream in the language of shakespeare n keats
but I am not an anglo my friend
i am a POET
i have lived forty centuries under various names
i am now amanuddin
for Don Anderson p.104 When I was ten my mother, having sold her old fox-fur (a ginger red bone-jawed Magda Lupescu of a fox that on her arm played dead, cunningly dangled a lean and tufted paw) decided there was money to be made from foxes, and bought via the columns of the Courier Mail a whole pack of them; they hung from penny hooks in our panelled sitting-room, trailed from the backs of chairs; and Brisbane ladies, rather the worse for war, drove up in taxis wearing a G.I. on their arm and rang at our front door. I slept across the hall, at night hearing their thin cold cry. I dreamed the dangerous spark of their eyes, brushes aflame in our fur-hung, nomadic tent in the suburbs, the dark fox-stink of them cornered in their holes and turning. Among my mother's show pieces — Noritake teacups, tall hock glasses with stems like barley-sugar, goldleaf demitasses— the foxes, row upon row, thin-nosed, prick-eared, dead. The cry of hounds was lost behind mirror glass, where ladies with silken snoods and fingernails of chinese laquer red fastened a limp paw; went down in their high heels to the warm soft bitumen, wearing at throat and elbow the rare spoils of '44; old foxes, rusty red like dried-up wounds, and a G.I. escort. links dozens of poems from The year of the foxes and other poems at the Australian poetry library analysis: see 60 Classic Australian Poems, Geoff Page, 2010 gbook
p.124 Escape to parasitic ease disgusts; discreet expensive hushes stifled us the plangent wines became acidulous Rich foods knotted to revolting clots of guilt and anger in our queasy guts remembering the hungry comfortless. In draughty angles of the concrete stairs or seared by salt winds under brittle stars we found a poignant edge to tenderness, And, sharper than our strain, the passion against our land’s disfigurement and tension; hate gouged out deeper levels for our passion a common hate enriched our love and us. p.124
p.125
In your ears my song
is motor car misfiring
stopping with a choking cough;
and you laughed and laughed and laughed.
In your eyes my ante-
natal walk was inhuman, passing
your 'omnivorous understanding'
and you laughed and laughed and laughed
You laughed at my song,
you laughed at my walk.
Then I danced my magic dance
to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your eyes
and laughed and laughed and laughed
And then I opened my mystic
inside wide like the sky,
instead you entered your
car and laughed and laughed and laughed
You laughed at my dance,
you laughed at my inside.
You laughed and laughed and laughed.
But your laughter was ice-block
laughter and it froze your inside froze
your voice froze your ears
froze your eyes and froze your tongue.
And now it’s my turn to laugh;
but my laughter is not
ice-block laughter. For I
know not cars, know not ice-blocks.
My laughter is the fire
of the eye of the sky, the fire
of the earth, the fire of the air,
the fie of the seas and the
rivers fishes animals trees
and it thawed your inside,
thawed your voice, thawed your
ears, thawed your eyes and
thawed your tongue.
So a meek wonder held
your shadow and you whispered;
‘Why so?’
And I answered:
‘Because my fathers and I
are owned by the living
warmth of the earth
through our naked feet.’
[This well-known poem by the Nigerian poet Okara is unfortunately
attributed to the South African apartheid poet Dennis Brutus by
Narasimhaiah]
from http://online.missouri.edu/exec/data/courses/2270/public/lesson02/lesson02.aspx
Okara's poem, "You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed," serves to
introduce the clash of Western and African cultures from a Nigerian
perspective.
Addressed to a Westerner, Okara's poem begins by describing the lack
of communication brought about by the way the Westerner hears things
in technological terms:
In your ears my song
is motor car misfiring
stopping with a choking cough
and the way the Westerner, through his laughter, dismisses what the
native African speaker is trying to reveal:
You laughed at my song,
You laughed at my walk.
Even when the speaker dances his "magic dance" and completely reveals
himself to the Westerner—"And then I opened my mystic / inside wide
like / the sky", the Westerner continues to laugh and climbs into his
car, secure in his technological superiority.
The laughter of the Westerner becomes related to ice, a potent
metaphor; it "freezes" the Westerner and keeps him from understanding
or progressing. Yet the speaker's own laughter, he tells the
Westerner, "is not / ice-block laughter. For I / know not cars, know
not ice-blocks". Instead, the speaker's laughter is "fire" and
related to natural forces: the earth, air, seas, and rivers. Such
laughter, the speaker indicates, is far stronger than the Westerner's
laughter, and indeed "thaws out" the Westerner, leaving him meek and
chastened, finally speaking instead of laughing.
p. 129 Once upon a time, son, they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes; but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow. There was time indeed they used to shake hands with their hearts; but that’s gone, son. Now they shake hands without hearts while their left hands search my empty pockets. 'Feel at home'! 'Come again'; they say, and when I come again and feel at home, once, twice, there will be no thrice— for then I find doors shut on me. So I have learned many things, son. I have learned to wear many faces like dresses — homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface, cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles like a fixed portrait smile. And I have learned, too, to laugh with only my teeth and shake hands without my heart. I have also learned to say, “Goodbye”, when I mean “Good-riddance”; to say “glad to meet you”, Without being glad; and to say “It’s been nice talking to you”, after being bored. But believe me, son. I want to be what I used to be when I was like you. I want to unlearn all these muting things. Most of all, I want to relearn how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs! So show me, son, how to laugh; show me how I used to laugh and smile once upon a time when I was like you.
p. 132 The mystic drum beat in my inside and fishes danced in the rivers and men and women danced on land to the rhythm of my drum... But standing behind a tree with leaves around her waist she only smiled with a shake of her head. Still my drum continued to beat, rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the quick and the dead to dance and sing with their shadows -- But standing behind a tree with leaves around her waist she only smiled with a shake of her head. Then the drum beat with the rhythm of the things of the ground and invoked the eye of the sky the sun and the moon and the river gods - and the trees began to dance, the fishes turned men and men turned fishes and things stopped to grow -- But Standing behind a tree with leaves around her waist she only smiled with a shake of her head. And then the mystic drum in my inside stopped to beat - and men became men fishes became fishes and trees, the sun and the moon found their places, and the dead went to the ground and things began to grow. And behind the tree she stood with roots sprouting from her feet and leaves growing on her head and smoke issuing from her nose and her lips parted in her smile turned cavity belching darkness. Then, then I packed my mystic drum and turned away; never to beat so loud any more.
p.123 (tr. from French) The bird of iron, the bird of steel that rent the morning clouds and wanted to snatch the stars out beyond the day is hiding shamefully in an unreal cave. The bird of flesh, the bird of feathers that thrust a tunnel through the wind in quest of the moon whom he saw in his dreams hanging in the branches plunges like the evening into a thicket of brambles. But the bird that has no body enchants the warden of the mind with his stammering aria, then opens his echoing wings and rushes away to pacify all space and only returns immortal.
The bell wakes me at 6 in the pale spring dawn with the familiar rumble of the guts negotiating murky corridors that smell of bodies. My eyes find salutary the insurgent light of distances. Waterdrops rain crystal cold, my wet face in ascent from an iron basin greets its rifled shadow in the doorway. They walk us to the workshop. I am eminent, the blacksmith of the block: these active hours fly like sparks in the furnace, I hammer metals with zest letting the sweating muscles forge a forgetfulness of worlds more magnetic. The heart, being at rest, life peaceable, your words filter softly through my fibres. Taken care of, in no way am I unhappy, being changed to neutral. You must decide today, tomorrow, bear responsibility, take gaps in pavement crowds, refine ideas. Our food we get on time. Most evenings I read books, Jane Austen for elegance, agreeabless (Persuasion). Trees are green beyond the wall, leaves through the mesh Are cool in sunshine among the monastic white flowers of spring that floats Prematurely across the exercise yard, a square of the cleanest stone I have ever walked on. Sentinels smoke in their boxes, the wisps curling lovely through the barbed wire. Also music and cinema, yesterday double feature. At 4 pm it’s back to the cell, don’t laugh to hear how accustomed one becomes. You spoke Of hospital treatment – I see the smart nurse Bringing you grapefruit and tea – good luck to the troublesome kidney. Sorry there’s no more space. But date your reply. p.134
M. J. F. Chapman, English in Africa, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 60-71 Published by: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238447 Arthur Nortje's death eight years ago robbed South African literature of a poet of considerable promise. His two posthumous collections, Dead Roots (1973) and Lonely Against the Light (1973), though they include much that is unfortunately self-conscious, reveal a powerful imagination receptive to mythic patterns and symbolic images. The poetry charts the painful quest of a young man (a Coloured, in South African terminology) for personal and political roots; but, unlike the archetypal young hero who attains either crown or cross, Nortje is doomed to isolation and, at the age of twenty-eight, to a tragic death from an overdose of prescribed drugs. Born in Oudtshoorn in 1942, he knew poverty as a child in a Port Elizabeth township. Described by his teachers (of whom Dennis Brutus was one) as an outstanding student, he won a scholarship to the University of the Western Cape, completing his degree in 1963 prior to teaching for two years at a Port Elizabeth high school. During this time he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford, and left South Africa in 1965. He has remarked about his practice as a poet: Let the emotion find its own direction, and trust to that inner voice testing and hearing new sounds and phrases. [Equally, poetry] should be more rigorous, disciplined .... You don't wait for inspiration: you make it. His poetry is characterized simultaneously by an element of bold experimentalism (the experience is created in daring ways), and by a strong awareness of traditional form, of the necessity of coping with a deeply personal, often distressing, subject. "Waiting", in fact, strikingly embodies the idea of disintegration precariously contained in an aesthetic whole. Even as he talks logically, employing formally correct syntax, the poet is plunged into a nightmarish world: The isolation of exile is a gutted warehouse at the back of pleasure street: the waterfront of limbo stretches panoramically - night the beautifier lets the lights dance across the wharf, I peer through the skull's black windows wondering what can credibly save me. The poem trails across the ruined wall a solitary snail, or phosphorescently swims into vision like a fish through a hole in the mind's foundation, acute as a glittering nerve. The waterfront sights undergo a surreal transformation, with the "gutted warehouse" emerging as a hollow skull which seems to mock the poet's attempts-by his recourse to the ordering activity of art -to find relief from the pain of alienation. Yet, merely "waiting", brooding, is self-destructive. The poet - Nortje implies - has no option but to explore the origins of his torment, even at the risk of intensifying his despair. And, in "Waiting", the exploration is a wide one: South Africa cries out, "Come back, come back, mayibuye"; but, although he feels a pang for the "lost beauties at Cabo de Esperancia, Table Mountain", the poet does not consider returning to the troubled land of his birth. Instead, his search shifts abruptly to a vast waste of Northern snows (the woman whom Nortje addresses here lived in Canada), and the cause of his loneliness is located in failed love: You yourself have vacated the violent arena for a northern life of semi-snow under the Distant Early Warning System: I suffer the radiation burns of silence. It is not cosmic immensity or catastrophe that terrifies me: it is solitude that mutilates, the night bulb that reveals ash on my sleeve. This poem is marred by superfluous images and phrases: the line, "under the Distant Early Warning System", for instance, offers neither significant thematic nor visual reinforcement and could well have been omitted. Yet, the occasional weakness of expression, while it might seem large in a less vigorous poem, is relatively small when seen on Nortje's wide canvas: "Waiting" succeeds by its very boldness. Nortje is fascinated by, yet severely critical of, the events and the sub-culture of the sixties. ... As he says in "To John, Paul,*George and Ringo", his aim is to write poetry that is "but the deeper breathing of an age". Once again, however, it is difficult to find any one poem which is wholly successful at exploiting these utterly new images. Rather, one is left with memorable fragments: tantalizing evidence of an imagination which has an impressive, if erratic, metaphor-making capacity. In "Sylvia Plath II", for example, the poet in three dramatically visual lines acknowledges man's amazing, yet seemingly futile, exploration of space: I admire our doings, yes, the shiny calyx holding the platinum petals report the desert: transmitters bleep in the dry gardens of the moon. But alongside these original lines we find such prosaic and bathetic statements as "giving the age what the age requires, a purgative". "Message from an LSD Eater", too, is uneven (its enthusiastic descriptions of drug-induced fantasies, for example, do not always contribute to a controlling purpose in the poem); yet at times Nortje does boldly picture the damaging effects of an impersonal technology on man's emotional life: The soul dangles like a butterfly mashed against a stainless flywheel. It is depth that inevitably hurts, and regrettably one must be broken open to find it is the relationship that fails as therapy: the heart's worn cogs, the mind's snapped links. In his use of technological, and particularly urban, imagery Nortje anticipates the increasing urbanization of South African English poetry in the seventies. While his poems are mostly set in the cities of England and America, he also employs the sights and sounds of the Coloured township, not simply to evoke a sense of place, but as the correlatives of his anguished memories. In "Sylvia Plath II" (in which he blames the "stigma" of his "mixed blood" for his lack of confidence with women) the interior of a township hovel yields suitably sensational metaphors of sexual betrayal and jealousy: I stand in a kitchen of poetry - scorch-black, cracked, and broken. The soot sifts down to fill my channels, perhaps to choke them that would be more kindly than silken tresses, as he called them, sulking inside an iron chamber, the green eyes glowing orange in the gas rings. After taking his degree at Oxford, Nortje went to Canada in 1967. This was a particularly traumatic period of his life: a failed love affair, a depressing teaching position, and rejection by the literati of Toronto, who thought his style "dated" and his subject-matter not "relevant".6 The poems written in Canada frequently evoke the horror of insomnia, with recurrent allusions to devils, beasts and inquisitors. In "Nightly", for example, the lurid transformation of common surroundings suggests the poet's pathological state of mind: The clock is torture, Torquemada equipped with an electric whip plugged into this ageing century: the rack has gone the way of the pterodactyl but the freezer that stops pumping through its circuit resumes startlingly quite at random: this is the horror of insomnia . . . In his attempts to express states of acute mental crisis Nortje is often self-indulgent and perversely obscure; but, in this instance, his bizarre imaginings are recorded in an icily coherent way: Here come the Job afflictions that reduce the man to ash: it is almost sabotage to fash- ion thought into a moody architecture, in the small hours push a probe through the pus into wounded flesh . . . . . . . . . . . expel the black-toothed beast. Throughout the night, until "the devils flee their stations / and birds start to wake the universe", the poet feels compelled to articulate his anguish, thereby punishing himself for what he considers to be his own moral weakness, at the same time as he asserts his tenuous hold on sanity. As I have suggested, Nortje died before he could fully realize his undoubted poetic potential, and a great deal of his work is frankly juvenile. Yet, his poetry is intensely interesting, his contribution to South African literature an adventurous one. The combined effect of his social circumstances and his inherent rootlessness results in a poetic journey outside the world of traditional community values favoured by most South African English poets writing before him in the fifties. Instead, Nortje confronts a garish and robust technological age, at once exciting and depressing; his mythic imagination transforms the city into a terrifying labyrinth, a motif of metaphysical exile.
p.137 If you want to know me examine with careful eyes this bit of black wood which some unknown Makonde brother cut and carved with his inspired hands in the distant lands of the North. This is what I am empty sockets despairing of possessing life a mouth torn open in an anguished wound huge hands outspread and raised in imprecation and in threat a body tattooed with wounds seen and unseen from the harsh whip strokes of slavery tortured and magnificent proud and mysterious Africa from head to foot this is what I am. If you want to understand me come, bend over this soul of Africa in the black dockworker's groans the Chope's frenzied dances the Changanas' rebellion in the strange sadness which flows from an African song, through the night. And ask no more to know me for I'm nothing but a shell of flesh where Africa's revolt congealed its cry pregnant with hope. [Makonde: traditional crafts group from Tanzania & Mozambique known for their artwork] [Changanas: ethnic group within Mozambique]
p. 143 Listen more to things Than to words that are said. The water's voice sings And the flame cries And the wind that brings The woods to sighs Is the breathing of the dead. Those who are dead have never gone away. They are in the shadows darkening around, They are in the shadows fading into day. The dead are not under the ground. They are in the trees that quiver, They are in the woods that weep, They are in the waters of rivers, They are in the waters that sleep. They are in the crowds, they are in the homestead. The dead are never dead. Listen more to things Than to words that are said. The water's voice sings And the flame cries And the wind that brings The woods to sighs Is the breathng of the dead Who have not gone away; Who are not under the ground, Who are never dead. Those who are dead have never gone away. They are at the breast of the wife. They are in the child's cry of dismay And the firebrand bursting into life. The dead are not under the ground. They are in the fire that burns low, They are in the grass with tears to shed, In the rock where whining winds blow. They are in the forest, they are in the homestead. The dead are never dead. Listen more to things Than to words that are said. The water's voice sings, And the flame cries, And the wind that brings The woods to signs Is the breathng of the dead. And repeasts each day The covenant where it is said That our fate is bound to the law, And the fate of the dead who are not dead To the spirits of breath who are stronger than they. We are bound to Life by this harsh law And by this covenant we are bound To the deeds of the breathings that die Along the bed and banks of gthe river, To the deeds and the breaths that quiver In the rock that whines and grasses that cry. To the deed of the breathings that lie In the shadow that lightens and grow deep In the tree that shudders, in the woods that weep, In the waters that flow and the waters that sleep, To the spirits of the breath which are stronger than they That have taken the breath of the deathless dead Of the dead who have never gone away Of the dead who are now not under the ground.
p.153 Africa my Africa Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs Africa of whom my grandmother sings On the banks of the distant river I have never known you But your blood flows in my veins Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields The blood of your sweat The sweat of your work The work of your slavery Africa, tell me Africa Is this your back that is bent This back that makes under the weight of humiliation This back trembling with red scars And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun But a grave voice answer me Impetuous child that tree young and strong That tree over there Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers That is your Africa springing up anew springing up patiently, obstinately Whose fruit develop, bit by bit, The bitter taste of liberty.
for Louis Arnaud Reid p.195 A man builds better than he knows. The cathedral, stone before floodlight's invention, Through floodlight's shimmering reflection On matted water long after renews perfection A man builds better than he knows. What he seeks is not hereafter But everlasging now well done The answer in stone or images Built for the now that is forever With every invention finds further perfection He makes the poem, the cathedral The image, the tune, the stone. So sweetly stretched the tension — That is perfection — in stone He cuts stone's dreams, and the world's and his. A man builds better than he knows. A poet at the crossroads In a strange land, Caught by his long forgotten song As it falls from a curained window, Suddenly hears it as I see This night's reflection Steady in the moving stream Knowing that he builds well Who builds better than he knows. [May 1960] links: obituary: the guardian my page on Figueroa
p.196
though our longest sun sets at rightdeclensions_
and makes but winter arches, it cannot be long
before we lie down in darkness, and have our
light in ashes
- Browne: Urn Burial
Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House,
Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust,
Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws;
The mouths of those gate cherubs streaked with stain.
Axle and coachwheel silted under the muck
Of cattle droppings.
Three crows flap for the trees,
And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs.
A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose
The leprosy of Empire.
‘Farewell, green fields’
‘Farewell, ye happy groves’
Marble as Greece, like Faulkner’s south in stone,
Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone;
But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees
A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone
Of some dead animal or human thing
Fallen from evil days, from evil times.
It seems that the original crops were limes
Grown in the silt that clogs the river’s skirt;
The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone,
The river flows, obliterating hurt.
I climbed a wall with the grill ironwork
Of exiled craftsmen, protecting that great house
From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent,
Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.
And when a wind shook in the limes I heard
What Kipling heard; the death of a great empire, the abuse
Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.
A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone
Dipped to a rivulet, and pacing, I thought next
Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,
Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed
In memory now by every ulcerous crime.
The world’s green age then was a rotting lime
Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text.
The rot remains with us, the men are gone.
But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind,
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.
Ablaze with rage, I thought
Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,
And still the coal of my compassion fought:
That Albion too, was once
A colony like ours, ‘Part of the continent, piece of the main’
Nook-shotten, rook o’er blown, deranged
By foaming channels, and the vain expense
Of bitter faction.
All in compassion ends
So differently from what the heart arranged:
‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s ...’
Ever since it was first published in an anthology of New world writing in 1956 “Ruins of a Great House” has become one of Walcott's most well-known poems. It is one of the earlier poems by Derek Walcott, written around 1953, at the age of 24. As a student of Education at the University of the West Indies, one of his professors was the poet John Figueroa, who later became the first non-British Dean at the University. Once, on a walk with Figueroa along Guava Ridge in the Blue Mountains, he saw the ruins of this house, which dominated the landscape. It had been a plantation house in the slavery era. Worldwide, from India to Africa to the Antilles, it was the period of the twilight of empire, of widespread anti-colonial sentiment. Against this background, the very presence of this ornate house with its gate cherubs and greek marble recalls "evil days, from evil times". The thought of injustices committed once flashes anger: Ablaze with rage, I thought Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake... And he lashes out against men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. And yet, raised under the colonial education system, this strong anger against the colonial master raises deep conflicts. How can he reconcile his hatred with his love for English poetry? In fact, the language of this very poem, its structure and prosody - are all very English and its allusions seems to echo Shelley and Milton. At one point he cites Donne, referring perhaps to his ideas of how "No man is an island... send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee." (Meditation 17, 1624). In the end, the poem reconciles the conflict by easing into compassion, recognizing that Britain itself had once been a part of an oppressive empire, one against whom the natives raged: "nook-shotten isle of Albion" (Shakespeare, Henry V). That oppression, the "the leprosy of Empire", is a part of every history, it is a part of man's cyclic process of rediscovery.
In her scholarly and detailed textual analysis, Helen Goethals reconstructs the poem as a memory as a site of resistance, noting that such houses appear in early caribbean novels, and also a number of texts from the Irish rebellion, that focused on ruined houses as symbols of oppression. (see http://perso.univ-lyon2.fr/~goethals/caribbean/walcott_notes2b.html). Goethals suggests that like these novels, Walcott’s poem can be read as a miniature bildungsroman, in which the historical reality and persistent patriarchal presence of the Great House of colonialism are transformed into an extended metaphor for a life-and-death struggle between the old and the new. Goethals notes how Walcott was criticized for writing in the language of the colonizer, for talking "to and with the enemy". She cites Walcott's defence: the fact remains, the masterpieces of the language in which I work are from a white literary history. That must not prevent me from mastering the language; it is not a matter of subservience, it is a matter of dominating. One becomes a master, one doesn’t become a slave. - [William Baer (ed.), Conversations with Derek Walcott, p. 204]
Writing in the colonial language is a conflict familiar to all colonial
literatures. African writers including Achebe, Ngugi, Marechera, and others
have talked extensively on it.
In independent India, the tension between Indian english writing and the
regional literatures persists to date. Around the same time as this poem was
written, the Bengali poet-critic Buddhadev Bose wrote:
Indo-Anglian poetry was a blind alley, lined with curio shops,
leading nowhere.
But a later generation of poets started writing verse that was
indian in sensibility and content, and english in language. it is
rooted in and stems from the indian environment, and reflects its
mores, often ironically.
(r. parthasarathy, introduction, Ten 20th Century Indian Poets)
But the criticism kept dogging Indian poets writing in English:
Don’t write in English, they said,
English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernessess
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see?
(Kamala Das, An Introduction,
from Summer In Calcutta, 1965)
This conflict lies at the heart of the postcolonial debate, as
reflected in hundreds of scholarly treatises being written today (see,
e.g. Bill Ashcroft's The Empire writes back, 1989). For the Indian
context, see the noted Indian English poet AK Mehrotra's
History of Indian Literature in English, 2003.
As one of the pieces that stirred this debate in the West Indies, this poem
deserves its place along with other postcolonial writing emanating from
this period. Later writing, such as in Rushdie or Naipaul, has left the
colonial scars behind, though the legacy of colonialism; indeed, Rushdie
and Naipaul reflect on it from opposite viewpoints - but that is another
story.
p.200 A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: "Waste no compassion on these separate dead!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? links: review by E R Higinio
p.201 I would have words as tenacious as mules to bear us, sure-footed on the mountain of night to where, at daybreak we should shake hands with the sun and breathe the breezes of the farthest oceans and, as we descended, in sunlight, We would be amazed to see what hazards we had passed. links: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=14978
p.203 [Guyana, Amerindian heritage] The Watcher in the Heights looked down Upon the bare earth with a frown. He caused the great Kumaka tree to grow until it touched the sky And picking twigs and leaves He threw them down from high. Those that fluttered turned to birds, even the little wren, And others touching earth below became the animals and men. Fish and other creatures swam in the waters wild And sitting in the Heights above, the Watcher smiled.
p.203 Spirit fighter, sacred rattle -- Fashioned by me from a perfect calabash -- Four mouths to face in all directions, A crown of brilliant feathers, carrier of crystal fire To fight the evil ones. I, only, hold the power To shake the rattle, chant the song To use the instruments ancestors left me To guard, protect and heal the people of my tribe. Ages ago it seems since first I learnt this lore Understanding secrets, spirit growing ever stronger, Bitter years of fasting, self-denial -- a child when I began To walk this testing road, for I am piaiman. And now true testing time has come Feathered, fierce-eyed, painted warriors await My word for a successful hunt. For first I must go down to underworld To parley with Earth Mother for the souls of animals Now gather round, my people help me, Bear me up with song and dance and ritual As I embark upon my perilous journey. Drink the 'kari, beat the drum, move in sinuous rhythms Rattle shaking ever faster, tobacco juice, my long cigar; Ancient incantations rising, falling, chanting endlessly. Earth shackles break, as I rise up my spirit now set free. I ride weightlessly upon enchanted bird. Come guardian helpers lead me through, Come hawk and eagle, snake and lizard, Jaguar, alligator, shield me round. Up steep mountains, through deep lakes, Down long rivers winding dangerously. Through treacherous swamps and fetid forests The demon ones are kept at bay Until at last deep in the underworld I face Earth Mother with my plea. Majestic, threatening, there she stands Her animals enfolded in her outstretched hands. [piaiman : medicine man, respected shaman of Amerindian tribe] links: British Guiana Writers' Association, Kyk-over-Al http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00080046/00028
p. 211 [this poem is incorrectly attributed to Shirley Lim] now you are ill the body has broken down after the hot decades of labour now is sudden time to rest with restless muscles to close the eyes of responsibility. fate is not kind generosity made you no rich man not too much kindness a healer for heartbreaks. after the year, the hot sun over the dry whitening head the evenings that drained life out of you the debts of duty you are home, on a hard bed out of sleep, when you need sleep most. the sons and the daughters are young, you have married late and we are young to an old father i have pulled out my wet roots to follow a dry road the way home is a long lane lost in the undergrowth. home was not the kind of love i seek, not knowing its doors and windows being left only with a fragmented past which unwise affairs broke through the brittle centre i was too broken to care though i know that not to care was the sin of the rootless runner. your eldest daughter married she does not understand the web of male worries the other children are too young to know your circular chase of disappointment. now you are ill the good God return to you the breath of your youth for you have been born to be young to stand and fight through the days and the rude elements sickness that lay you down is your traitor in the blood but father, it is time to rest now to close your eyes on the world, to feel the luxury of the holidays that you never took that have collected into one sickness. now that you are ill. leave the worries to the young, the world is too difficult now, too fast against the slow blood of an old man close your red eyes now and go to sleep. this illness will go with the heat when you wake up we shall be around to see the youth in your eyes and body and voice.
p.216 I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to this island The bounty of these seas, Built towers topless as Ilium's. They make, they serve, They buy, they sell. Despite unequal ways, Together they mutate, Explore the edges of harmony, Search for a centre; Have changed their gods, Kept some memory of their race In prayer, laughter, the way Their women dress and greet. They hold the bright, the beautiful, Good ancestral dreams Within new visions, So shining, urgent, Full of what is now. Perhaps having dealt in things, Surfeited on them, Their spirits yearn again for images, Adding to the dragon, phoenix, Garuda, naga those horses of the sun, This lion of the sea, This image of themselves.
Toru Dutt (1856-77) 1. Sonnet - The lotus 13 2. Our Casuarina tree 14 Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) 3. The pilgrim of the night 16 4. The stone goddess 16 5. Surreal science 17 6. Despair on the staircase 17 Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) 7. Indian Weavers 18 8. Song of Radha, the milkmaid 18 Shiv K. Kumar (1921- 9. Indian women 20 Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) 10. Enterprise 20 11. Night of the scorpion 21 12. Goodbye party for Miss Pushpa T.S. 23 Jayanta Mahapatra (b. 1928) 13. A monsoon day fable 24 14. The lost children of America 26 A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993) 15. Love poem for a wife 30 16. Small scale reflections on a Great House 33 17. Obituary 36 18. Allama Prabhu (trans) 38 Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) 19. The bus 38 20. An old woman 39 21. Chaitanya 40 22. Makarand 40 R. Parthasarathy (1934-) 23. Exile from homecoming 41 Kamala Das (1934-2009) 24. My grandmother's house 45 25. Words 46 26. Spoiling the name 46 27. An introduction 47 28. Someone else's song 49 Syed Amanuddin (b. 1934) 29. Don't call me Indo-Anglian 50 Keki N. Daruwalla (1937-) 30. Pestilence in 19th c. Calcutta 51 Dom Moraes (1938-) 31. A letter 53 Gopal Honnalgere (1942-) 32. Grass words 55 33. Of crows 55 34. The donkeys 58
[..] Anonymous 73. The wild colonial boy 110 74. Dunn, Gilbert and Ben Hall 111
Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906- 75. New York 119 Bernard B. Daddie 76. I thank you God 121 I thank you God for creating me black. White is the colour for special occasions Black the colour for every day And I have carried the World since the dawn of time And my laugh over the World, through the night creates The Day. Rabearivelo (1901-19337) 77. Three birds 123 Richard Ntiru (Uganda) 78. The shapes of fear 123 Like an arrested breath when breathing makes silence imperfect and the ear cannot differentiate between the conspiratorial whispers and the winds singing. ... a twig in the courtyard snaps and report of a gun is understood. Dennis Brutus (1924-) 79. A common hate enriched our love and us 124 Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) 81. Heavensgate 126 Gabriel Okara (Nigeria, 1921- 80. You laughed and laughed and laughed 125 82. Once upon a time 129 83. Were I to choose 131 84. The Mystic Drum 132 David Rubadiri (1930-) 85. A Negro Labourer in Liverpool 133 Arthur Nortje (South Africa, 1942-1970) 86. Letter from Pretoria Central Prison 134 Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin 87. Home-coming son 135 Noemia DeSousa (1934- 88. If You Want to Know Me 137 Tehicaya U. Tamsi (1930-) 89. Agony 137 Chinua Achebe (1930-) 90. Refugee mother and child 140 Lenrie Peters (1932-) 91. On a wet september morning 140 On a wet september morning when vultures hate themselves on the beach, against the flooded moorage along the rock shelves. Birago Diop (1906-) 92. Breath 143 John Pepper Clark (1935-) 93. The casualties 146 94. Olokun 146 95. Night rain 147 Wole Soyinka (1935-) 96. Agbor dancer 148 97. Telephonic conversation 149 98. Dedication 150 99. To my first white hairs 151 100. Fado singer: For Amalia Roderiguez 152 David Diop 101. Africa 153 Flavien Ranaivo (b. 1914, Madagascar) 102. Song of a Young Girl 154
Charles Sangster (1822-'93) 105. The thousand islands 163 [...] Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) 122. Journey to the interior 184
E. Mc G. Keane (1930-) 123. The age of chains 190 Isn't history amazing? One time it is gold, or a basket of fish; Another time it is a woman. Sometimes it is oil, or perhaps a disagreement With a pope. But mostly it is a stranger on the road to Emmaus. We recognise it gone. Edward Braithwaite (1930-) 124. Tizzie 192 125. So long, Charlie Parker 193 John Figueroa 126. On seeing the reflection of Notre Dame 195 Derek Walcott 127. Ruins of a Great House 196 128. A sea chantey 197 129. A far cry from Africa 200 Edward Baugh (1936-) 130. Elemental 201 Mervyn Morris (1937-) 131. Literary evening, Jamaica 201 In a dusty old crumbling building just fit for rats And much too large for precious poetry circles The culture fans sat scattered in the first ten rows Listening for English poetry. 132. Judas 202 Stephanie Correia 133. Arawak creation 203 134. Chant to the earth mother 204
Shirley Lim 135. Sonnet 208 136. Sonnet 208 137. The painter Munch 209 Muhammad Haji Salleh 138. Words for Father 209 139. Blood 211 E E Tiang Hong 140. On writing a poem 212 Edwin Thumboo 141. The exile 213 142. Gods can die 214 143. Words 215 144. Ulysses by the Merlion 216 Kirpal Singh 145. To a visitor in Singapore 217 146. Change 218
Yasmine Gooneratne 147. On an Asian poet fallen among American translators 218 148. There was a country 220 Lakdasa Wikkramasinha 149. Don't talk to me about Matisse 221 Patrick Fernando 150. Elegy for my son 221 Jean Arasanayagam 151. In the month of July 222 Kamala Wijeratne 152. On seeing a white flag across a by-road 223 153. To a student 224 Ashley Halpe 154. The boyhood of Chittha 225 155. From the new world of William Hull 227 Chand K. Sirimanne 156. The uncrossed bridge 228 no birthdates for none of the 12 poets
Gordon Challis (1932-) 165. The postman 240 166. The thermostatic man 241
Kishwar Naheed (1910-) 167. I am not that woman 244 Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-84) 168. Nowhere, no trace can I discover 245 169. My guest 245 170. Loneliness 246 Fahmida Riaz (1946-) 171. Voice of a stone 247 Ahmed Ali 172. On the tenth night of the tenth moon 247 173. Dialogue with Lee San 248 174. The year of the Rat : 1984 250 Maki Kureshi 175. The kittens 251 Alamgir Hashmi 176. Tankas out of time 252 Razia Khan 177. My daughter's boy friend 253 178. The monstrous biped 252 Daud Kamal 179. Hurricane lamp 253 180. Resilience 255 Zulfikar Ghose (1935-) 181. The monument to Sibelius in Rio de Janeiro [many missing birth dates, more so in the non-western sections]