John Agard and The Poetics of Immigration

November 27, 2002
by Ayanna Gillian
Self Empowerment Learning Fraternity, Trinidad and Tobago

The URL of this article is:
www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/27112002.html



In response to V.S Naipaul's controversial assertion that "Nothing was created in the West Indies" (Naipaul), Derek Walcott in his 1973 work 'Voice of St. Lucia' countered that "Nothing will always be created in the West Indies for quite a long time, because whatever will come out of there is like nothing that one has ever seen before" (Walcott) Indeed West Indian literature and particularly, West Indian poetry has found its own unique voice out of a history of cultural marginalization and displacement and in turn gave a voice and a sense of place to West Indian people at home and in the Diaspora. The Guyanese poet, John Agard, has long been hailed as one of the most effective and celebrated oral poets of the Caribbean region. His unique brand of poetry has been called everything from 'poemsemble', 'jazzoetry' and even something akin to Calypso. Reaching back to ancestral traditions of the shaman and the Griot while striding forward to create new traditions, Agard's poetry encapsulates a particularly important element of West Indian poetry, that of the creation of an identity and space and of the struggle to reconcile oneself with ones history and origin.

In his two works "Limbo Dancer at Immigration" and "Listen Mr. Oxford Don" Agard creatively explores the mass immigration of West Indians out of the Caribbean to the metropoles, invading the land of the former colonizers and leaving their own unique stamp of culture; what Lousie Bennet termed "Colonization in Reverse" (Bennett). His use of the Creole vernacular, symbols, African mythology, rhythms and subject matter firmly grounds his poetry in the Caribbean. These two poems masterfully manifest the plight of the Caribbean people in their attempt to create their own 'worldscape'.

Both poems are firmly rooted in the tradition of oral poetry. This tradition, rising out a of a need to firmly anchor a West Indian sensibility used not only Caribbean images, symbols and landscape, but for the first time used West Indian Creole in an opulent, reverential sense, glorifying the Creole tongue, reveling in it in a way that had never been done before. The poet Kamau Brathwaite has stated that " It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was (mis) use of it, the he perhaps most effectively rebelled" (Braithwaite) If so then the genre of oral West Indian poetry has indeed been an effective form of rebellion and resistance to European ethnocentrism.

The poem " Listen Mr. Oxford Don" opens with a bold assertion, rich and lyrical in the style of Caribbean Creole:

"Me no Oxford Don
Me a simple Immigrant
From Clapham Common
Me no graduate
Me immigrate"

The unique cadence of the dialect not only sets up a firm image of the nature of the character but also lends musicality and innate rhythm to the stanza.

While Agard does indeed employ traditional rhyme structures he also uses a rhyme scheme that flows with the natural music if the Creole tongue. The rhyme structure is not fixed and is informed by the natural rhythm of the dialect. For example, while the second stanza uses an a,b,b,a rhyme scheme:

"But listen Oxford Don
I'm a man on the run
And a man on the run
is a dangerous one"

he breaks away completely from the traditional scheme in stanza six, employing the natural Creole rhythms and the singsong fall of the voice to carry the stanza. Even though within it, individual lines may indeed rhyme there seems to be no discernable traditional pattern to the scheme. By both flirting with, and breaking the traditional rhyme scheme of the stanza, Agard sets a new poetic standard, as well as gives a specific voice to the poem which contrasts to the unnamed and unheard addressee, the "Oxford Don"

In "Limbo Dancer at Immigration" Agard uses a more standard English lexicon but yet still maintains a distinctly Caribbean rhythmic structure to his stanzas. Here the rhythm is informed not by the natural lilt of their Creole dialect but the driving beat of the drums of the limbo dancer. As a master of oral performance poetry this piece would be extremely effective performed with drums. The short, sharp, regular lines:

"The same hassle
from authorities

The same battle
with bureaucrats"

mark the distinct drumbeat that underlies the rhythm and forms the real structure upon which the poem is anchored. The use of slashes in stanzas one: "... at every border/at every frontier/
at every port/at every airport/"
then become not just a means of stressing the points of encounter and the predictability of the encounter between a black Caribbean immigrant and a white immigration officer, but highlights the drumbeat points of each line and stresses the familiar Caribbean limbo dance drum sequence.

With this distinctive use of rhythm informed by both the natural musicality of the Creole lexicon and the ancestral drumbeat of the limbo dance, Agard creates a sort of undercurrent of rebellion that runs throughout most of his work. While he maintains a tongue-in-cheek, comic, satiric tone, his strong, elemental use of rhythm so informed by Afro-Caribbean ancestry and resistance of the plantation system sets the stage for his own unique brand of rebellion.

Both poems deal with the experience of West Indians in the Diaspora, away from their roots in the Caribbean. A recurring theme in West Indian poetry has been to determine not only a sense of self but also a sense of place for the people of the region. While poets and writers such as Braithwaite and Naipaul in their own ways both speak of the consequent rootlessness of the Caribbean person as a result of years of cultural displacement, Agard treats with the same issue through his triumvirate of symbols- Anansi the spider, Legba, the Yoruba God of the crossroads and the Limbo Dancer. While the incarnations of these traditional Afro- Caribbean archetypes may differ throughout his work, these motifs are representative of not simply Caribbean people set adrift in a world struggling with issues of identity, but of a people able to then transcend the boundaries of space and culture and create something whole and new, not despite, but because of their hybrid nature.

In 'Limbo Dancer at Immigration', the point of encounter is an airport, a place of arrival and departure. This is indeed significant. The use of slashes and repetition separating each point of arrival and departure, "... at every border/ at every airport/" plays out, not only the rhythmic pattern of the piece but it is also symbolic of its otherworldly space that features in much of Agard's poetry. The Limbo Dancer is a symbol of the Caribbean person whose ancestry of slavery, colonialism and self abnegation has given him the ability to bend backwards like the limbo dancer, shift and trick like Anansi, and master the points of intersection and crossroads of life like Legba. It is thus natural that this space of arrivals and departures, this point of encounter, would also reflect not only the crossroads of Legba but also reflect the point where the three archetypal symbols intersect in the form of the character in the poem.

The common thread of these three symbols is their trickery, versatility, their survival instinct and their transcendence, the qualities that Agard seems to assert are instrumental to the West Indian immigrant trying to not only escape through the crack of the immigration system but to be accepted in a world not of his own origin while not losing himself in the process. The ancestral struggle of the Limbo dancer who: "showed them sparks of vision in eyes that held rivers" and who, "offered a neck that bore the brunt of countless lynchings" did not move the authorities who show no sympathy and have no common link to his experiences. The subsequent dancing then becomes a means of escape, a means of weaving an illusion through which he can slip through the cracks of a system constructed to exclude him. It is in this double 'space' of encounters and crossroads that Limbo Dancer can weave this magic and "to the sound of a drum disappear(ed)"

In "Listen Mr. Oxford Don", while the same symbols are not directly employed, there are still shadows of the God of the Crossroads, the trickster Anansi and the versatile Limbo Dancer. Here the battlefield is one of intellectual and verbal acrobatics- the appropriation of the 'Queens English'. While many West Indian poets such as Walcott and Mc Kay used traditional literary styles and shied away from dialect, Agard glorifies and revels in the sound, rhythm and cadence of his Creole tongue. It is said, "…language in some sense precedes, creates or conditions thought and shapes our perception of the world" (Chamberlain). If this is indeed so then the crafting of this poem attempts to re-shape perceptions of West Indian dialect and to glorify this new 'language' that reflects the self of Caribbean people in the Diaspora.

Agard interestingly molds two elements of West Indian marginalization in the metropoles. He not only dramatizes the inherent difference brought about by the language barrier between the Creole and Standard English, but also plays on the stereotype of the violent, criminal black immigrant. In this poem he inverts the crime from one of illegal violent criminal activity to one of language appropriation, thus" robbing the Queen's English". The Anansi archetype is applied to the West Indian person attempting to 'make' his own language and dialect, dodging the penalties of its misuse and with bold cheekiness, threatening to "make the Queen's English accessory to (my) offense".

Just as Legba is the God of the crossroads and communication, Agard's Anansi-like voice in the poem opens the way and becomes the point of intersection between the Creole and the Standard English with the sort of mock violence stereotypically attributed to the immigrant community, "inciting rhyme to riot", "slashing suffix" and "bashing future with present tense". Out of the tongue-in- cheek, miscreant character, a new view of language is created.

Both poems underscore Agard's own migration to England from his home in Guyana and explore the experience of making a self in the face of history that has always sought to deny the self of Caribbean people. For Agard, this vehicle for self-discovery lies in the musical heritage of the Caribbean as well as the natural musicality of the language. The poems do not underscore the bitterness of rootlesness but revel in it. Agard does not hate himself because of his ancestral history but indeed through the Anansi archetype points a way for us to transcend our history. From smiling slyly and stating innocently " I have nothing to declare" and asserting boldly that "human breath is a dangerous weapon" Agard not only embodies the sentiments of West Indian poetry but lays bare an underlying element of the nature of the West Indian psyche. Like Walcott who stated that what would come out of the West Indies would be like nothing anyone had seen before, Agard dramatizes the versatility and changeability of the West Indian in a world in which others are:

"...no longer sure
whether to interpret
bending over back wards
a position
of supplication/or aggression"

If indeed " difference is the root of metaphor", then Agard's celebration of this different and unique Caribbean culture is indeed significant of a people coming into their own, creating new metaphors, new worlds and a new West Indian consciousness.


Works Cited:

• Agard, John, Weblines, (Bloodaxe Books Ltd; April 2001)
  
  
• Agard, John, Mangoes and Bullets: Selected and New Poems 1972 – 84 (Serpents Tail July 1991)
  
  
• Braithwaite Edward Kamau, Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (Oxford Clarendon Press 1971 pp237
  
  
• Brown Stewart, Morris Mervyn, Rohleur, Voiceprint: An anthology of Oral and Related Poetry From The Caribbean (Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex, England: Longman, 1989)
  
  
• Chamberlain J Edward, Come Back To Me My Language, Poetry and the West Indies (Urbana : University of Illinois Press ; Kingston : Ian Randle)
  
  
• Naipual, V.S, The Middle Passage; Impressions of Five Societies British, French and Dutch- in the West Indies and South America (New York: Vintage Books, 1981, c1962.)
  
  
• Walcott, Derek Voice of St. Lucia 1973
  

Homepage | Articles

---