Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 109

Although initially associated with poetic performance in front of
an audience, the poets affi liated with dub poetry turned to the dis-
semination of their work through audio media and the printed page.
Leading dub poets include Michael Smith, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze,
and Levi Tafari. Mutabaruka’s famous work ‘Dis Poem’ questions
the placing of his own work within a canon of literary endeavour;
the poem becomes a site for the intersection of history, cultural
upheaval, political unrest and insurrection.^26 The ongoing process
of the poem is stressed, with an emphasis placed upon a poetics
of spontaneity and responsiveness. Mutabaruka emphasises the
poem’s responsibility to respond to colonial history – ‘the wretched
sea / that washed ships to these shores’ – as well as bear a chroni-
cle and testament to names of black challenge and endeavour. The
poem will ‘call names’ which include black radical activists, politi-
cians and campaigners of the twentieth century: Jomo Kenyatta,
Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile
Selassie. The immediacy and intimacy that the poem establishes is
evident from the way it performs as speaking and calling to its audi-
ence. Mutabaruka uses Jamaican English, often referred to as patois,
which the critic Kamau Brathwaite addresses as an affi rmation of
Caribbean speech or ‘nation language’. His description illustrates
nation language as a potentially defi ant force infl uenced strongly by:

The African model, the African aspect of our New World/

Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its

lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its

sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words,

as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser

degree.^27

Rather than viewing Caribbean English as a variant of ‘correct
English’, or as a dialect, Brathwaite asserts that Nation Language
has its own status and sound modulations.
Anger is apparent in ‘Dis Poem’ with the speaker ‘vexed / about
apartheid / racism / fascism / the klu klux klan / riots in brixton’.
As a vehicle of revolution and a verbal weapon, we are told, ‘dis
poem is revoltin against / fi rst world / second world / third world
/ division’. Not unlike Baraka’s early vindication of ‘assassin