Reading reggae between poetry lines: Kwame Dawes

He might not fit your common definition of a ‘star’, but every five-star rating Kwame Dawes gets for his work puts him right on a favorable path to becoming a galaxy on his own – literary speaking.

By Tumelo E. Phali | Posted: August 02, 2005

Few people, if any at all, could contest the portrayal of Kwame Dawes as the model of the post-colonialist poet.

Born 28th July in Ghana back in 1962, this poetic genius, whose full names read Kwame Senu Seville Dawes, grew up in Kingston, Jamaica in the Caribbean – a region which would form the seminal backdrop of his upbringing miles from the country of his birth.

Polished and genteel, most of this poetic messenger’s eclectic collection of writings locate their deepest root in reggae, a movement so intensely formative during his youthful years while studying in Jamaica, and so profound that it defied counter-influence during his wanderings all over the world, mostly personal travels and experiences in Africa, the rest of the Caribbean, Britain and the American South, as a reader and writer.

“I write poetry because my father stopped writing it - which I think was a tragedy.”

One of the hardest working writers of this era, Kwame’s literary work stretches across various genres; fiction, non-fiction, drama and short-stories but there’s no mistaking his passion for almost everything reggae. In fact, despite the fact that he has love for traditional English poetry, he is well known for his penchant for “finding the music of words through opulent use of assonance, rhyme and alliteration.” - something which has, so far, been his trademark.

But Dawes’ vocabulary is not rigid at all; he fuses a fluently flowing concoction of formal and street slang, a trick that has attracted literary enthusiasts, young and old and from all walks of life, to his performances at literary festivals across the world.

He has published eight collections of poetry, Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree 1994--Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, UK) Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane 1995), Prophets (Peepal Tree 1995). Jacko Jacobus, (Peepal Tree 1996), Requiem, (Peepal Tree 1996) a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist, Tom Feelings in his landmark book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, and Shook Foil (Peepal Tree 1998) a collection of reggae-inspired poems.

He walked away with the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, awarded by the Ohio University Press in 2001, for his collection, Midland. Added to this achievement he was awarded a Push Cart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001.

All this body of work reached far and wide and became the subject of discourse in journals like the London Review of Books, Bomb Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Poetry Review, Obsidian III, Calalloo, Shanandoah, the Mississippi Review, the Indiana Review, Ariel, West Coast, Mangrove, Wasafiri, Caribbean Writer, Poetry London, among others.

Onetime lead singer in Ujamaa, a reggae band, Kwame wrote a study of reggae's greatest figure, Bob Marley’s lyrics (Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius) in 2002.

In Bob Marley: Lyrical Poet, Dawes explores the poetry, intelligence, and spirituality of the great reggae figure’s lyrics. The reader is guided through all of Marley’s songs that appeared on the Island label. With the reggae ambience of the time fabulously painted in the background of this work Dawes puts Bob Marley’s songs into the larger context of the reggae legend’s work as a whole and what it meant to be a black man in a world struggling with integration then.

'The sound (of reggae) filled out lives. It was never approved of in the 1970s. It was never the mark of high culture but it was ubiquitous.'

But it is the tragic reality of the history of Africans under colonial powers and the experiences of the African Diaspora that Kwame draws his inspiration from: In his poems Kwame describes, in striking detail, the inhumane experiences marked by displacement, brutality, pain and suffering endured by victims of slave trade. Yet, in the same breath, he hails in a celebratory manner, their resilience, courage and their eventual triumphant survival.

An acclaimed playwright and storyteller, also founder of the Christian Graduate Theatre Company in the 80’s , his plays, showcased mainly in the Caribbean and North America, speak of this subject of displacement - he has acted and directed several of them and has seen not less than an outstanding fifteen of them produced. Friends and Almost Lovers, Brown Leaf, Charades, Even Unto Death, Charity’s Come, In Chains of Freedom, In the Warmth of the Cold, Dear Pastor and Song of an Injured Stone comprise the list of his major productions and One Love, a play motivated by the novel Brother Man by Roger Mais and directed by Yvonne Brewster, opened at the Bristol Old Vic in the UK and had a flourishing spell in London at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2001.

His play Stump of the Terebinth, directed by Roshini Twarie was the winner of Trinidad and Tobago’s National Schools Festival in 2001.

He has also edited Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Caribbean Poets (2000), published by University of Virginia Press 2000.

Dawes has also edited an anthology of reggae poetry, Wheel and Come Again, which was published by Peepal Tree Books in the UK and Goose Lane Editions in Canada in 1998.

His literary prowess continued with Mapmaker, a chapbook of poems which won the Poetry Business Contest in the UK in 2000.

Dawes is also author of a critical examination of reggae music and literature Natural Mysticism: Towards a Reggae Aesthetic (Peepal Tree 1999).

He also guest-edited a special issue of Obsidian III called Catch A Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Jamaican Writing in 2001. It represents a ground-breaking work in Post-Colonial studies.

Peepal Tree published his first book of fiction, a collection of stories titled A Place to Hide and Other Stories, while New and Selected Poems is a selection of poems published between 1994 and 2001 under the same publisher.

In 1987 Dawes was made an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa’s writing program. Ten years later in 1997 he was appointed an Associate Fellow of the University of Warwick.

Dawes is the co-programmer for the ever flourishing Calabash International Literary Festival held in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, each year.

Dawes is now awaiting the publication of a novel set in Jamaica (Bivouac) (Peepal Tree 2005)

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