Short Conversations with Poets: Kwame Dawes

What Kwame Dawes does in Sturge Town, his far-reaching new collection, is what he’s done book after book: create worlds in a music, and a music for the fleeting world. The first of five sections in the collection is “ … the rapid softening of light …” and then “ … all of light’s fruitfulness …”, which is followed by “ … slowly, from shadow to light …” and “ … I close my eyes to push / away the darting lights,” before the final section: “… Build me a house of light …” —and so the section titles themselves write a kind of tone poem, ending in a prayer for a house, a home. There are eighty-six poems in the book. Music is everywhere, poems like “Night Music,” or the poem called “Recall” with its traces of the reggae vibe that fuels the poet’s poetics, “Reggae’s insinuating bass,” he writes, which “cleaves to my bloodline.”

But it is language that at last Dawes must wrestle into form. And language that he forces to face its own paltriness. “I know,” writes the poet, “that the invention of memory, the silence before memory / is made— / the imagined comfort of language, though failing every time, / though betraying my inner head and liver—is what I have …” The words come from a “prodigal” returned—or only dreaming of return?—and speaking to the land itself.

This from a poet who was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, and has lived most of his life in the United States, at first in South Carolina and for a long time now in Nebraska. Of the high-minded centers of empire, he has this to say in “Human Rights,” invoking the greatest lyric sportswriter of all: “among those C. L. R. James / called the civilizations of moral turpitude, those that said: / Find a people weakened by kindness, / overwhelm them with lies, with betrayals …”—on this hierarchical pattern, the pattern of colonialism, all human relations are skewed and skewered. Against it, everything he writes, every poem, line, book, Dawes wields like a weapon tearing that pattern down, offering another. So that even a poem like “Rehearsal for Lovemaking,” “the cupping and coaxing, / the rough caress” is framed between a poem about birth and politics, and a poem about origins. And he returns, in the titular poem, to a ghost-village that was an early free village in rural Jamaica. It is the dream of going home thrown upon the reality of middle age. “For too long,” he writes, “I spoke of return, a kind / of prodigal fantasy, although, face / set against the sun, I had abandoned / the waywardness of the failed son.”

JESSE NATHAN: The book is full of a lyric understanding of home and homecoming—and I feel that’s long been a theme and a source of great complication in your work. What does home mean in this poem, in this book? What does the poetry say about homecoming? Is it possible? Is it a necessary “fantasy”? Something to be resisted in the self? How does the speaker of (some of) these poems negotiate the possibility of home, home-ness?

KWAME DAWES: In one of the poems near the end of the book, “Sturge Town Redux,” I think, I reenact a long-imagined conversation—one that I have had with myself. I ask a young woman who seems to have emerged from the broken-down ruins of my ancestral home in the village of Sturge Town—perhaps she is a squatter, or maybe a cousin, but she is a familiar stranger to me—I ask her “which part is home”—meaning, where does she live. She says, “Home is which part you want to bury.” She turns my pragmatic and pedestrian question of interrogation into a psychic rumination. Set inside a poem, this seems profoundly authoritative and powerful. And yet, in many ways, it is for me only part of the story, a story of my constant reflection on the meaning of home. “Home” has always been a focal point of my identity—the meaning of home, the question, if you will, of “where are you from?”

My name, “Kwame Dawes,” has always achieved this in the places where I have lived. In Ghana, in the UK, in Jamaica, in Canada, in the US, the name seems to carry multiple narratives of origin and place and belonging. Kwame is my Ghanaian name, but it is a name that can be borrowed, worn as a garment of political and ideological affinity as it connects with the once most famous “Kwame,” namely Kwame Nkrumah. But I come by it legitimately—I am Ghanaian, I was born on a Saturday. Then there is Dawes, which forces us to enter the conundrum and tragic narrative of survival, reinvention, and struggle: the transatlantic slave trade, the mountains of Jamaica, the horror of slavery, and the narrative of resistance. Dawes takes me to England, to the line of people largely responsible for the terror of enslavement, and it also takes us to a more recent defining of what Sturge Town represents—the enslaved black people, reforming their sense of self, reconnecting to their heritage and history. These are “homes” for me, and homes that keep repeating themselves in complex and meaningful ways.

But you will see in these poems that home is a great intimacy for me. Home is family, it is my siblings, my parents, and my wife, Lorna, and my children, and the communities that have shaped me by welcoming me and keeping me. Home and refuge seem to carry equal weight and meaning, so that home is at once where I want to find a purposefulness to living and to my role in the world. This collection, therefore, understands the private and public implications of home, and I have found it to be a work that has allowed me to discover the nuances of home. It does please me, in that sense.

I should say, finally, that the genesis of the collection may be the clearer way to address your question. Jeremy Poynting, my editor, casually observed in the middle of a conversation, “You have not had a Jamaica book in a while.” I knew what he meant—a book like Prophets or Wheels or Jacko Jacobus or Impossible Flying. So I got some help to start scouring all my new poems, for references, tonal connections, and linguistic echoings of Jamaica. We found a few hundred poems, and I had the pleasure of discovering themes and ideas that revolved around the idea of “light” which helped to shape the collection. Sturge Town, that village of mythic and historical significance, became the iconic totem for the collection. I believe that this has allowed me to write about my body as a product of Africa and the African Diaspora, and this has been a richly rewarding site for the aesthetic meaning of “home.” So, is home “which part you want to bury”? It is certainly a perfect meditative trigger, a concept that resonates with me—for in this conception of death lies the conception of pre-beginnings and post-endings. There is something in this, don’t you think?