Burnett’s Caribbean verse in English

There is no hiding the fact that I have a soft spot for Caribbean literature. Some of their literature like the novels, Masters of the Dew and In The Castle of My Skin, remind me of Africa and its tribulations.

My recent encounter with Paula Burnett’s Caribbean Verse in English caused lots of excitement. Published in 1986 by Penguin, this huge volume is extremely unique. It elaborately follows Caribbean literature from the oral traditions up to the literary traditions.

Rarely do bodies of literature include and publish works from oral traditions.

Caribbean Literature is a distinct body of narratives from the Caribbean islands, written by people who have descended from slaves and the slave traditions. Caribbean literature, like African-American literature, is a literature that reflects on the former slaves or their descendants as they seek to find a place in a territory where they first arrived as slaves from Africa.

Caribbean and African-American literature are important to serious readers of African literature, especially those who seek a broad understanding of the condition of the black people in Africa and those outside Africa.

The Caribbean islands were first called the East Indies by Christopher Columbus, erroneously thinking that by sailing westwards, he had arrived in the famed Spice Islands in the Far East.

In due course, these islands were rightfully renamed the West Indies.

As historian Eric Williams outlines in his seminal works, the Caribbean, like the mainland USA, were part of a territory where slaves from Africa were shipped and made to work on plantations for generations.

Because of the hot and wet conditions and very rich soils, banana and sugar plantations were opened up. This is why the islands are often called the plantation islands.

The Caribbean islands are also called “the archipelago,” a geographical term referring to a portion of the sea studded by islands. The more popular of these islands are Trinidad, Martinique, Tobago, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas.

They are in the vast blue Atlantic Ocean, only miles away from the USA coast and South American countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras and others.

The Caribbean region is also called the melting pot because people of many origins have co-existed here for centuries. They have intermarried and this has threatened the existence of clear cut identities.

There are the Caribbean who are the indigenous people of the whole American continent sometimes called the Red Indians. They were the first to be enslaved. We have the African descendants in the Caribbean.

They made the bulk of slave labour and still remain the majority in the Caribbean. Then we have some Europeans descending from the notorious slave masters, the settlers and colonial plantation owners.

There are Indians and the Chinese who came from the Far East as indentured labour, especially at the demise of slavery.

The Caribbean territory has gone through numerous experiences including slavery, settlerism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. In this territory, a proper sense of nationhood is weak. Each island tends to be too small to stand alone.

They speak different languages like English, French, Spanish and others. They look to Europe or America for leadership. Sometimes they look to Africa for identity and cultural inspiration.

No wonder the major themes in Caribbean literature tend to be slavery, belonging, being marooned, alienation, moving to Africa or America or Europe.

The Caribbean territory has produced poets of note, amongst them Aime Cesaire, Claude Mackay and George Campbell. The most prominent Caribbean writers have become classical and amongst them are the two poets; Edward Brathwaite and Dereck Walcott.

Their poetry is a window into Caribbean society and its complex nature. However, what you rarely find is a book that dwells on the oral literature of this region. That is why Paula Burnett’s collection remains critical.

The African people brought with them their music, dance, rituals, cuisines, and customs when they moved to the islands. These were then forged and shaped further by their experiences during slavery and colonisation.

They created dances, songs, and chants as a means of expression which reflected their lives in the plantation.

The song called “Guinea Corn,” recorded in 1797 by Robert Renny, is a song-poem. It also comes across as a work slave song sung during work by those slaves who had been brought from the African territory of Guinea. It exudes a deep sense of lodging for a far away Africa which the slaves would never ever connect with:

Guinea corn, I long to see you
Guinea corn, I long to plant you
Guinea corn, to mould you
Guinea corn, I long to weed you
Guinea corn, I long to hoe you
Guinea corn, I long to top you
Guinea corn, I long to cut you
Guinea corn, I long to dry you
Guinea corn, I long to beat you
Guinea corn, I long to grind you
Guinea corn, I long to turn you
Guinea corn, I long to eat you.

This is a powerful song full of nationalism. Through that song, the slave can locate himself within specific geographic location and with activities that give people an identity. In the Caribbean islands, the enslaved workers resisted their conditions by finding ways to keep a sense of identity that helped them to survive the system.

Historians have discovered that resistance took place from the 17th century until emancipation in 1838, which means there was hardly a generation of enslaved people that did not confront their enslavers, often in armed struggles in their pursuit of freedom.

The slaves also developed their own languages related that were totally different from the European languages of their enslavers. In America, new languages emerged and evolved. They were, again, pidgin or creole languages which emerged from the blending of African, European, and Caribbean-European languages.

Eventually, forms of pidgin, differing from colony to colony, emerged into fully-fledged creole languages of their own. All bore strong linguistic features of the dominant African group in the region.

Caribbean and American-born slaves grew up speaking these languages naturally. A similar pattern happened among Europeans and their American-born offspring. Pidgin is easygoing but titillating, as found in this slave song below:

Gal if yuh love me an yuh no write it
How me fe know!
Gal if yuh love me an yuh no write it
How me fe know!
Gal if yuh write it an me cyan read it
How me fe know!
Talk it ah mout!
Talk it ah mout!
Talk it ah mout!

Europeans and Africans across America in Cuba, Brazil, Suriname, or Martinique, for example, spoke with distinct local voices—accents, vocabularies, and intonations.

There is a popular Negro song recorded by Mathew Gregory in Jamaica between 1816 and 1818. It is based on a story in which a planter had become notorious for his cruelty in having sick slaves carried to a solitary place upon his estate called the Gulley where they were thrown down and abandoned.

The bearers were told not to forget to bring back his frock and the board on which he had been carried. One poor soul, who had been secretly rescued and nursed back to health, later met his master by chance in Kingston, whereupon the master seized him and claimed him as his slave.

But when the story passed into the region’s folklore, public indignation was so high in Jamaica, giving birth to the song:

“Take him to the Gulley!
Take him to the Gulley!
But bringee back the frock and board
“Oh! Massa, massa! Me no deadee yet!”
“Take him to the Gulley! Take him to the Gulley!
Carry him along!”

It is said that European slave owners deprived African captives of material possessions during the Middle Passage, but survivors throughout the Americas re-created variants of familiar instruments, if possible.

When resources were not available, they created new instruments. Materials found in diverse environments throughout the Americas varied from gourds, sea shells, wood, bones, and string. In their own time, enslaved people used available materials to construct musical instrument, such as drums, rattles, bells, banjars (an ancestor to the banjo), fiddles, and other instruments.

In the process, enslaved musicians created new forms of musical expressions.

It is from here, many generations ahead and long after slavery that reggae was fashioned out. In the traditional section of this collection, one finds the lyrics of such key reggae artists such as Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley.

Reggae as a musical form born in the Caribbean brings the harsh message from the streets and slums. Reggae music documents the struggles of the impoverished black race. The lyrics go on and on about the constant fight against oppression, joblessness, hunger, and the lack of opportunity on the island.

Informed by Rastafari, reggae is a music that shares the tales of the suffering in the ghettos, repatriation to Africa, worship of Haile Selassie as a deity, and the pressures of living with the shackles of slavery and oppression.

Central to reggae music are Rastas, members of a pan-African religion and way of life known as Rastafari that started in Kingston in the 1930s. The belief system preaches Judeo-Christian scriptures cantered on former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, believed to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Ethiopia carries a particular relevance: aside from Italy’s occupation of the country in the 1930s, it has never been colonised by a European power and therefore, carries an image of cultural continuity and steadfast resistance.

Rastafari sought a spiritual connection with Africa while discussing themes of Black empowerment in opposition to British imperial culture that dominated Jamaica’s colonial society

However, despite its mainstream viability and entertainment value, reggae music originated as a deeply political form of protest and contestation against the colonial and imperialist forces operative in the social context of Jamaican life.

Musical ambassadors like Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Rita Marley, and Marcia Griffiths along with many others can be credited with bringing reggae music to the world stage and giving it international recognition.

The Rastafari in Jamaica were among the first on the island to look to Africa as the source of their ancestry and identity, and were also among the first to use reggae music as a form of protest against the oppressive social conditions on the island.

Following in the revolutionary spirit of the Maroons (communities of runaway slaves who fought against British slave owners in Jamaica in the early 18th century), the Rastafari sought to distance themselves from slavery and colonial culture of the island both in appearance and in beliefs.

The lyrics of the song “African” are most touching. Peter Tosh emphasises that as long as you are a black man, you are an African. Whether you are from Clarendom, Portland, Westmoreland, Trinidad, Nassau, Cuba etc as long as you are a blackman, you are an African! Significant in this song is the view that black people are in most spaces out of Africa due to slavery.

There cannot be any meaningful solidarity of black people which does not recognise their long route through slavery. There is even an argument that the transatlantic slave trade was one of the cruellest experiences in the history of humanity.

Born in 1944 in Jamaica, Peter Tosh was a member of The Wailers reggae group from 1962 to 1973. Then he went on by himself and produced many albums and singles. His more well known album is called Equal Rights.

In this book, you find Jimmy Cliff’s lyrics from his song, The Harder They Come. He sings about the importance of being principled in the face of bribes. “I would rather be a free man in my grave than living as a puppet or slave,” Cliff sings.

You also find the lyrics of Bob Marley in this collection and of particular interest is the song Trenchtown Rock, in which he indicates that one good thing with music is that you feel no pain when it hits you.

Bob Marley is a revered musician up to this day. He was born is St Ann, Jamaica, but lived in Trench Town, an impoverished district of Kingston, as a child and young musician. With The Wailers, he brought a Rastafarian consciousness to his great musical talent and professionalism. He died of cancer in 1981.

This book also carries the writings of the iconic black activist Marcus Garvey and such poets of the literary tradition such as Edward Brathwaite and Dereck Walcott. However, it is the very wide sections on Caribbean oral traditions that is more breath-taking.

These verbal traditions were among the few but highly significant possessions brought to the Americas by the enslaved survivors of transatlantic slave trade.

Memory Chirere