CELEBRATING A UNIQUE CULTURAL HERITAGE

SELECTED POETRY OF ROI KWABENA

INTRODUCTION

"A poem alone can expose a lie ”





          Anyone who meets Roi Kwabena or sees him in performance will recognize in the man the qualities that characterise his poetry- a restless energy, a wry wit and humour, a fervent commitment to egalitarian ideals and a real concern for the people of Trinidad.
       Just about all of the poems in this new collection are poetic commentaries on the flux and frustrations of life in modern Trinidad, written from the unique perspective of one who has seen how the political system works from the inside- during his tenure as a Senator in the nation’s Parliament- but who has stepped away from that role to reclaim the license of the folk-poet to s(t)ing those in power who do not live up to their own rhetoric.
        A strong sense of the region’s history underpins the poet’s responses to the vagaries of contemporary “politricks”. He is aware of the long shadow of colonialism that still affects Trinidadian society-from the legal retention of the condemned man’s right to appeal to the Privy Council in London, right down to the kinds of insecurity that characterise individuals who have internalised an idea of themselves as being ‘colonials’, in some ways only second class citizens of the world.
        Kwabena sees evidence of such neo-colonial mentality in some of his compatriots’ attitudes and actions and his poetry sets out to combat that pervasive distortion of values. By offering his audience a sense of their claims on wholly other cultural heritances-particularly through his informed awareness of the importance of Africa in the evolution of Caribbean culture-Kwabena’s poetry argues an alternative agenda.
 
 



“What is disturbing, is the level of cultural illiteracy”






        To invoke a not inappropriate echo, the poems in "A JOB FOR THE HANGMAN" represent a kind of ‘grounding’ between the poet and his audience: they serve, in performance, as occasions for debate and discussion rather than the invitation to applause  that the more conventionally literary poem seems to invite when read aloud. Kwabena, like other poets of this tradition across the Caribbean, seems to value the poem primarily as an agent of dialogue- whether directly, as in performance, or in terms of stirring his readers to debate among themselves.
        The poet’s vocation for Kwabena is understood within the broader context of cultural activism- not for him the luxury of emotions recollected and shaped in tranquillity- rather these poems are urgent messages from the front.  As such it is not surprising that the poetic, language he employs is direct and largely lacking in the ornaments of a more leisured idea of versification- there is little room for metaphor in this poetry of engagement.
         But like the work of the calypsonians- whose shadows inevitably bear on any popular poetry from Trinidad- there is much clever  wordplay here and Kwabena’s poems are characterised by a kind of rhythmic surge which invites enunciation and performance- Roi Kwabena writes in the anticipation that the words will come off the page and into the air, so the poems are written to be heard as much as to be read and that expectation very much determines their shape on the page.
 

          The language of these poems on the page is interesting too. As I have said, Roi Kwabena the poet is more concerned with directness and clarity than  the ornament  or literary affectation. While there are enough Trinidadian terms throughout the text to justify the useful glossary that ends the book, and the ‘voice’ of  the poems  is very  much a Trinidadian one, yet  the text is accessible to the non-Trinidadian reader.
        Only occasionally does Kwabena resort to the mutation of a word-as-print in order to suggest / convey its sound.  In this he is perhaps unusual among that tradition of poets who lay as much stress on the performance of a poem as on its existence as text.
        Although I’m not  sure he would entirely approve of the comparison, in this regard Roi Kwabena’s work reminds me of that strand in Derek Walcott’s poetry that attempts to speak in a popular voice on issues of current  political / cultural moment, perhaps best exemplified in “The Spoiler’s Return”. If  we compare “The Spoiler’s Return” with a poem like Roi Kwabena’s “Letter from Sea Lots”-albeit that it is not on the same grand scale as Walcott’s poem- we find that both poems address a very similar concern with the state of Trinidadian society, lamenting the corruption of its’ politicians and the cheapening of its culture.
        In many ways Kwabena employs similar kinds of word play and puns as Walcott. Both poems are rich in references to local events and issues that might not be familiar to the non Trinidadian reader but which give the narrating persona a certain credibility.
        That credibility largely depends on the reader’s conviction that the language employed for these respective lamentations is also ‘true’ and it is here that the comparison become interesting, for while the tone and measure of Spoiler’s Creole certainly convinces the non-Caribbean reader of it’s ‘authenticity’ yet -as several Trinidadian critics have noted- we are always conscious that it is part of Walcott’s marvelous artifice. There is always that distance.
        Kwabena’s usage however needs no embellishment, nor aspires to that kind of  distance  between  art and life;  coinages like the wonderful “cable an’ wireful”  or-more grimly- “sprangers” ring of that  inventiveness and rueful wit that we associate with the ongoing development of living  West Indian Creoles rather than  the mannered wit  of the ‘Great Tradition’.
        Kwabena is not  interested in playing those games, he  is clearly speaking to his contemporaries, in a language that   is intimately known, on matters that are too important  for that kind of literary niceties that win great prizes but arguably “change nothing”. Roi Kwabena seems to me to belong to an interventionist tradition in Caribbean poetry that goes back to the roots of calypso and found early  literary expression in the socialist / nationalist  writings of  the Beacon group in Trinidad’s 1930s.
      There are other interesting comparisons to be made between the barrack-yard poetry of that period and the kinds of  work Roi Kwabena and other younger Trinidadian poets are producing today.  Both groups of  writers  thought of  their own poetry in terms of a contribution to struggle rather than as ‘beautiful objects’ that were ends in themselves.  For Roi Kwabena   poetry   is a kind of surrogate  obeah, intended as he says in his poem “Obeah Man” in this collection:

but not for a noble prize, only to write the wrongs
to feed
the hungry children an’ poor people....

Dr. Stewart Brown
University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom
October 1996

SELECTED POEMS
FROM THE ANTHOLOGY:
"A JOB FOR THE HANGMAN"
by ROI KWABENA
PUBLISHED 1997
© COPYRIGHT 1997
RAKA PUBLICATIONS
port of spain - birmingham - omdurman

A JOB FOR THE HANGMAN

...now take your responsibility seriously....
hang with expediency
hang this legislation for its impropriety
hang the legacy of slavery an’ indentureship
hang high the ruling parasitic oligarchy
hang until dead the injustice of being
incarcerated for two decades awaiting execution...
hang the plan to abolish the privy council
hang (sic) the plan to empower the sterile
legal vultures of these plantation  economies....
hang the archaic state of prisons,
 be it  trinidad, jamaica or grenada
hang quickly the temptation to ignore
amnesty international...
hang the truth up high that the issue
is not only the death penalty but  human rights...
accept the reality that the causes of crime
must  be addressed
for the homeless, poverty-stricken, naked an’ hungry
cannot be overlooked...
hang the inability to protect the fishing industry...
execute immediately the notion of nationals
 (whether trini or guyanese)
have the right to pollute the orinoco delta
with their drug an’ gun runnin’ activity,,,

hang until dead this system of neo-colonialism
.....now take your responsibility seriously....
then we can begin to discuss
   NATIONAL UNITY....

---

LETTER FROM SEA LOTS

“........only five pounds yuh send?
bread, sugar an’ milk gone up.........
buses  doh run.... water still go
  now severe-threat in charge ah de water in maraval
so we looking out fuh poison...

money hard to come by....we down here suffering
sure..we have gas, oil, menthanol....
....steel, an’ sugar exporting..
buh mangrove still vamping...
factories not hiring.....even race horse protesting....
 crime rampant as jurors  hunted
laws improvising an’ english q-cees hustling..
buh teachers’ money still owing...

yuh ask for news? any news is sad news.....
doubles-man an’ market vendors still on de run
kidnapping an’ family murders add to dis shame
while  meh OLE gran still worried sick ‘bout she pension...

cable an’ wireful, wid sure-hell come back...
even powertake  an’ brit grasp follow fashion
buh maxi still accept short change
yet parts expensive..so only insurance profittin’
as sprangers still roam in de night

de only difference is de den opposition
must now salute for de independence parade...

  senator..ah sure yuh would ah like tha....”


---


OBEAH MAN

i wish i was an obeah man
better than papa niza or even shadow
to light a big mauve candle and throw light on
evils throughout the ‘global village’

i wish i was a  obeah man to write the wrongs
but not for a noble prize, only  to feed
 the hungry children an’ poor people...

i wish i was a obeah man to enable sight through the lies
an’ chase away the flies of broken promises

i wish i was a obeah man
to decide an end to austerity measures
establish a ‘real’ world order
destroying racism..and political debauchery
i wish i was a obeah man
an’ run foreign conglomerates
who exact profits
in a new wave of deception....

i wish i was a obeah man
to obliterate nepotism
while at the same time licking up drug barons
who pose as legitimate merchants

i wish i was an obeah man
to manifest and distribute spirit blows
as deals are secretly made
to devour the wealth of our people...

i wish i was an obeah man
to  manifest de
over due national theatre

i wish i was an obeah man
and stabilize the T&T dollar
...depose the plantocracy
to empower the landless...

i wish i was an obeah man
an’ stop police brutality

i wish i was an obeah man
an wok some true- true obeah

but it is difficult to be
an obeah practitioner
when even the patrons are fakes
while the deserving are chased
away by bureaucracy....

as some very important people
seek me out
in the dead of night.....



 
 

NEW SELECTED POETRY
 EXCERPTS + REVIEWS FROM THE NEW ANTHOLOGY:
WHETHER OR NOT
by ROI KWABENA
with an Introduction by Dr. Lauri Ramey
& an Afterword by Terrance Brathwaite

RAKA PUBLICATIONS
port of spain - birmingham - omdurman

No Hearts

gone
are the days
of puppets, robots
and bionic-men

these tales
are of nations ruled by
ones who appear as humans
with considerable intelligence,
yet show no emotions...

being manipulated from afar by
some who feign compassion
with plans for further destruction...

my son enjoys these comics.

---

  Forgive Us Our Debts

........wish we had  a father
not only in heaven
but also on earth.

we would forgive
our debtors
and all those who
trespassed against us

the genocide...
the chattel slavery.....
the indentureship.....
the religious conversion....
the plunder of our antiquities....
the economic deprivation....
the scientific exclusion....

could we expect
our debts to be forgiven
so that we may feed our people
we wont be led into
military aggression

we will uphold the ideals
of tolerance and equality
we will fair trade
all commodities

we will promote
sustainable development
and protect
the earth's environment

oh! can we expect
our debts to be forgiven
as we adhere to principles
that will be beneficial to all of humanity

we the rich-but considered poor nations
of the southern hemisphere.....

---


Courting new appeals

Lord Harris's statue
with fountain have escaped
many vicious assaults of vandalism
over recent years. This public square
in Port of Spain with stately trees
still shelter  white-collar labourers
on lunch break from
the sweltering sun at noon
alongside half naked vagrants
wary of clogged city streets. At night, here
becomes a sacred haven-
discreet
for persecuted transvestites. While

obliquely opposite towers
the impregnable stone walls
of the Royal Goal, constructed
early in the last century
by skilled artisans whose
descendants would serve time within
at her majesty's pleasure....

This monumental institution has restrained
common offenders and civil disorder :
water rioters, trade unionists,
black power radicals,military mutineers
an' even Islamic fundamentalists...

Royal Goal remains a treasure
to behold. An imposing vestige
of  a now compromised system
that ostentatious political cronies
are attempting to dismantle.

Behind these walls
faceless men, in white short trousers
with matching vests
sit precariously on Death Row
as their defense lawyers
seek to defy local verdicts
of state execution

Now in postulated affectation
of self righteous apathy
democratically elected
British trained legal advocates-once
defense lawyers to the highest bidders
now as regional Attorney Generals
assert it is time to abolish
a convicted man's right of appeal
to the Privy Council....

none of these licit opportunists
cloaked in the rainment
of tempered tradition
considered challenging
this patriarchal eighteenth century
method of castigation....

.....despite
the mature judgement of
the same Privy Council condemning
the barbaric tenure of incarceration
with cerebral trauma
of impending strangulation....



 
 
 

WHETHER OR NOT



 Poetry/ History
 Roi Kwabena
 Introduction by Dr. Lauri Ramey
 After-word by Terrance Brathwaithe
 110 pgs / B&W-PBK- Coloured Cover   Distribution Rights: World Wide
 RRP: £9.60
 Special rates
 USA/Canada/New World-Caribbean
 Wholesale prices available on request
 

Y42K

ABOUT THE POET

CLICK BELOW
TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE
OR OTHER  PAGES
RELATED TO THIS SUBJECT







AFROETS PRESS

ABOUT THE CARIBBEAN

TEMPLE OF ANKHKARA

EMAIL  THE POET


WEB PAGE BY
ANKHKARA
 ENQUIRES WELCOMED

 © COPYRIGHT 2001
UPDATED 2002