Caribbean Poetry: Exploring Identity and Heritage
Caribbean Verse: Exploring Identity and Heritage
Introduction
Caribbean literature possesses distinct characteristics. As Paula Burnett notes, it expresses a particular people’s experience—a journey of growth through a history of exploitation and prejudice—while also resonating internationally as a significant cultural expression in Europe and North America. Language plays a crucial role. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the vernacular thrived in the oral tradition, first sung, then spoken. In the 20th century, poets began integrating diverse dialects and vernaculars into the English literary tradition. This ingenious juxtaposition of various tones of voice, as Burnett observes, became a distinctively Caribbean literary device of great refinement and scope. These poets wield language as a tool of empowerment and subversion, simultaneously deconstructing the English literary canon. This new language emerges from the fusion of Standard English, regional terms, accents, and Creole learned at home—a language better suited to the Caribbean’s vibrant landscape than that of Great Britain.
Fred D’Aguiar
Like Nichols, D’Aguiar blends dialect and Standard English, exploring themes of childhood experiences and colonial marginalization. History is central to his work, particularly the slave trade between Africa and the Americas, the postcolonial struggles of Guyana, and the post-World War II arrival of Caribbeans in Great Britain. His first volume of poems, Mama Dot, garnered critical acclaim and prestigious awards. While renowned as a poet, D’Aguiar has also authored four novels addressing themes of slavery, political corruption, and abandonment.
Mama Dot
This collection, celebrated for its humor and irony, centers around the figures of D’Aguiar’s two grandmothers. The first part focuses exclusively on Mama Dot, employing the metaphor of her multifaceted persona. The image of mother and grandmother is central, portraying her as both god-like and familiar, practical and mythical, a part of daily existence and a unifying figure of childhood. In “Letter from Mama Dot,” the grandmother embodies Guyana itself, her letter to England focusing on the country’s economic and political state in relation to its colonizers. The tone is one of anger, describing interference with parcels, Guyana’s descent into a state resembling a South American dictatorship, food shortages, and the importation of rice that once grew wild. She asserts that independence has worsened conditions for everyone.
The second part conveys the wisdom of a grandmother reflecting on life on the margins of the Empire and now on the margins of England. She describes how the colonizers view Guyanese people as outsiders and “spongers,” their language remaining pidgin. The voice expresses the colonizers’ indifference and the suffering of the people, marked by hunger (“pot-bellied, bare teeth”) and fear (“cow-eyed”). Amidst the anger, there’s a sense of resistance (“more of us meet in our prime”) and a veiled threat alluding to the New Cross fire, a tragedy where 13 young Black people perished in a fire, met with apparent indifference and suspected racism.
Inspired by a Black writers’ workshop, D’Aguiar sought to incorporate African and Caribbean orality into a Black British poetic voice, often using percussion instruments. Mama Dot was intended for recitation accompanied by drumbeats. The poem employs strictly patterned stanzas, and the language of the final line suggests the narrator’s authenticity through its naturalness.
British Subjects
This volume explores the experiences of second-generation Caribbean families in Britain. Divided into three sections, the introductory poem of the first section evokes Mama Dot without naming her. The form here is more flexible, allowing shape and content to complement each other more freely.
Grace Nichols
Nichols’s poetry confronts various themes, including challenging Western beauty standards and racist and sexist stereotypes. In “Thoughts Drifting Through the Fat Black Woman’s Head While Having a Full Bubble Bath,” she mocks the vocabulary of official discourse—scientific, anthropological, historical, and theological—using her body to repudiate them and disrupt Western beauty ideals. She also addresses the immigrant experience and, like Benjamin Zephaniah, writes poems for children, such as “My Gran Visits England,” believing that Caribbean children should have access to literature reflecting their own lives and heritage. Her poetry carries a didactic purpose, moving fluidly between vernacular and Creole speech.
In Skin Teeth, from her collection I is a Long Memoried Woman, Nichols adopts a rebellious tone, expressing open distress, despair, and anger as the female speaker directly addresses the slave owner.