What the leaves hear
By Nicholas Laughlin

The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, ed. Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt (Oxford, ISBN 0-19-280332-8, 405 pp)

First, the statistics: The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse manages to accommodate 220 poems by 153 poets from 18 territories, arranged chronologically by birth date over 342 pages (the other sixty-odd pages are given over to an introduction, indices, and other apparatus). The first poet here, Guadeloupe’s Saint-John Perse, was born in 1887; the last, Haiti’s Mirlande Jean-Gilles, 86 years later. If you go by sheer numbers, this makes the OBCV the widest-ranging anthology of Caribbean poetry yet published.

The editors, Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt (both of them practicing poets as well as literary scholars), open their introduction with a proud claim. “A hundred years ago,” they write, “it would have been inconceivable that the Caribbean, for centuries the site of some of the worst atrocities of human history, would produce what is arguably the most life-affirming and spiritually uplifting body of poetry of the twentieth century.” And fifty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that Oxford would consider adding a book of Caribbean poems to the celebrated series that began in 1918 with The Oxford Book of English Verse and which has gone on to anthologise the poetry of many nations and languages. (For that matter, fifty years ago you could have searched wearyingly and still found barely enough Caribbean poems to fill even a slim anthology — and most of them would have been written in Spanish.) So the parade of names and dates in the OBCV testifies again to the remarkable surge of literary talent in the postwar Caribbean, charged by rapidly growing populations and a rapidly evolving sense of national identity, especially in the Anglophone territories.

Brown and McWatt explain how they began their selection:

British colonialism provided . . . some degree of shared cultural values, some parameters within which it is possible to compare the achievement of individual writers from places as otherwise distinct as Jamaica and Trinidad, Barbados and Guyana. We decided then that we would try to let the anthology tell the story of that one linguistic tradition while including major poets and poems from the other languages in the general chronological sequence of the selection, so that readers would be continually alerted to those other strands in the Caribbean experience

About a third of the poets in the OBCV, therefore, a healthy quota, are chosen from Spanish, French, and Dutch territories. Their poems hint at the variety of styles and traditions and influences that thrummed across the wider Caribbean in the 20th century, the background music to which emerged the literature we conventionally call “West Indian”. (Brown and McWatt use “Caribbean” and “West Indian” interchangeably in their introduction, but the custom among scholars has been to keep the latter for the Anglophone territories and the former for the region in its widest geographical, historical, and cultural sense—no?) Oxford clearly believes this quadrilinguality is the book’s key selling-point, trumpeting it on the back cover.

But the English-speaking Caribbean is the OBCV’s main interest, and the contents pages read like a census of 20th-century West Indian poets. Every major poet and many minor poets are here, including some who have been rightly forgotten except by scholars of curiosities. (The “index of contributors by country” suggests that Antigua, St Kitts and Nevis, the Bahamas, and the Virgin Islands are yet to produce any poets of even the briefest note; and there are no Belizeans — perhaps the publishers don’t think Belize Caribbean enough?) With so many names to squeeze in, most of these poets are represented by a single poem each, and even the most indisputably major talents have just a handful of poems — five by Saint-John Perse; eight by Nicolás Guillén; five by Aimé Césaire, including an excerpt from Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; four by Martin Carter, including “University of Hunger”; four by Édouard Glissant; five by Kamau Brathwaite; from Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” alone.

An anthology of Caribbean poetry of this scope that doesn’t include Walcott’s “The Castaway”, “Homecoming: Anse La Raye”, “The Sea Is History”, “The Spoiler’s Return”? Carter’s “I Come from the Nigger Yard”, “This Is the Dark Time My Love”, “Death of a Comrade”? At least an excerpt from A.J. Seymour’s “Over Guiana, Clouds”? No M.G. Smith or H.D. Carberry, among the deceased, or James Christopher Aboud, among the living? Una Marson’s weak poem “Cameo”, remarkable only because of its unconventional cascading layout? Well, that’s the trouble with anthologies: we find them inadequate inasmuch as they fail to match up to our own tastes; we pounce on a single omission as evidence of the editors’ ignorance or poor judgement.

Every anthology is a balancing act. Across the tightrope of the reader’s patience, the editor inches forward while juggling his own enthusiasms and prejudices, his publisher’s expectations, and the influence of previous anthologies; while round his head swirls a vague cloud that might be called a sense of posterity, or might be called a sense of the canon.

And the OBCV does raise, however obliquely, that question of the canon, the body of works that the consensus of readers and critics declares worthy of study and preservation in print. A major anthology (especially an anthology, the world being what it is, bearing the Oxford imprimatur) necessarily both takes its shape from and helps shape the idea of what is and what isn’t canonical, which poets are worth reading, which poems are essential to the body of West Indian literature.

As the OBCV reminds us, it is a young literature. Samuel Johnson said a century is “the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit”, long enough for contemporary fads and feuds to be forgotten and the enduring value of a literary work to reveal itself. It may yet be too early to talk about a West Indian canon — and, as a matter of fact, I’ve heard very few West Indian critics use the term — but at the same time any astute student of the islands’ literature can probably guess which authors will still be read two generations hence. Look at the authors who have stayed in print, the ones who have found a secure place on the reading lists of school and universities, the ones even mediocre bookshops stock, the ones who get quoted by newspaper columnists; look at the authors subjected to monographs and biographies and included in anthologies, and the ones whose work seems to have an inexorable influence on their contemporaries and successors.

By casting their net so wide, choosing poems by such a broad range of writers, you might say Brown and McWatt decline to engage in the subtler quibbles over canonicity. In other words, everyone’s in (well, except Smith, Carberry, and Aboud). But inevitably, in deciding on each poet’s quota of poems (or of pages), they suggest opinions on who is major, who might be major, and who’s almost certainly minor. One-poem poets: H.A. Vaughan, Vera Bell, George Campbell. Two-poem poets: Eric Roach, Ian McDonald, Edward Baugh. Three-poem poets: Dennis Scott, Olive Senior — and Kwame Dawes? Walcott may be a one-poem poet here, but “The Schooner Flight” takes up all of 14 pages, which by OBCV standards makes him major-major.

In their introduction, Brown and McWatt identify various important streams in Caribbean poetry, streams of subject and style, and also the poets who they believe stand at the heads of those streams: chiefly Perse, Walcott, Claude McKay, Césaire, Guillén, Brathwaite. Here again is a hint at canonicity, and these names largely coincide with those given the most generous page space.

Though the editors single out Brathwaite’s influence on younger dub and performance poets, and though they mention the fruitful interactions between Caribbean oral and literary traditions, the OBCV does not actually include any song lyrics — unlike Paula Burnett’s Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, newly reprinted in the Penguin Modern Classics series, and unlike the groundbreaking Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean, of which Stewart Brown was co-editor, with Gordon Rohlehr and Mervyn Morris. Both these anthologies offered traditional folksongs, Rasta chants, calypsos, and reggae songs as examples of West Indian verse worthy to share pages with “real” poems. Even Kenneth Ramchand and Cecil Gray’s West Indian Poetry makes space for the lyrics of David Rudder’s calypso “The Hammer.” Scholars can argue whether the boundaries of “poetry” should be drawn to include or exclude them, but lyrics set to music are the verse forms best known to most West Indians. And I could point to a half-dozen poems in the OBCV that I’d delightedly discard in favour of certain songs by Sparrow, Kitchener, Rudder, Toots Hibbert, Jimmy Cliff, and Bob Marley.

Yet — statistics, quotas, “canonicity”: is this any way to talk about a book of poems? Perhaps the jaded reviewer’s reaction on picking up a new anthology is indeed first to count up names and next to wonder what effect these editors’ choices will have on future readers’ ideas about Caribbean poetry. But, before and after all, we read poems for the unpredictable pleasure of their sounds and images, and because the best poems manage to do something which ought to be impossible: they express the inexpressible, they find a way to create sensations and apprehensions and emotions out of words, vibrations of the vocal cords and ink-marks on paper.
A.J. Seymour’s “Sun Is a Shapely Fire”, Basil McFarlane’s “Arawak Prologue”, Shake Keane’s “Soufrière (79)”, the benedictory final section of “The Schooner Flight”, E.A. Markham’s “A History Without Suffering”, Lorna Goodison’s “Praise to the Mother of Jamaican Art”, Jane King’s “Fellow Traveller”, and, near the book’s close, Vahni Capildeo’s astringent “In Cunaripo”, just to choose a handful: poems like these — whose light lingers long not merely in the memory but somehow in our very nerve cells, changing the way we experience the world — spangle the pages of the OBCV and startle the reader as he pushes his way through the thickets of verses and lines.

“Caribbean” is not a simple word; it means so much about history and landscape, freedom and despair, language and silence, home and exile, power and love. It is a word that surrounds us like the air, and still we ask ourselves what it means. These 153 poets have all tried to answer, and their cumulative reply is a polyrhythmic Song of Ourself, without end. Or as Martin Carter puzzles it in “Proem”:

Inexhaustibly,
being at one time what was to be said
and at another time what has been said
the saying of you remains the living of you
never to be said.