Dub Poetry

Dub poetry is usually taken to refer to a particular type of “performance poetry”, a brand of oral poetry performed to the accompaniment of reggae music. The term “dub poetry” itself is thought to have been invented by the Jamaican poet Oku Onuora to describe a form of oral art that had been developing in Jamaica since the early 1970’s.

Oku Onuora defined the term in an interview conducted with the poet and critic Mervyn Morris in 1979. Oku said that a dub poem was “a poem that has a built-in reggae rhythm - hence when the poem is read without any reggae rhythm ( so to speak) backing, one can distinctly hear the reggae rhythm coming out of the poem”. So a dub poem is a poem that relies on a reggae rhythm that can be felt/heard even when there is no musical accompaniment. Oku Onuora later extended that definition to cover all kinds of musical backing, so that dub poetry would include any type of music-influenced poetry.

The term “dub poetry” has not always found favour with all the practitioners of  the genre. For instance Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka have consistently rejected it. In an interview conducted in 1994, Mutabaruka told me that he found the term too “limited”. Linton Kwesi Johnson has repeatedly stated that the term “dub poetry” put poets “in a bag”  and defined only one facet of their work:” I think it’s putting you in a bag really. I just like to be regarded as a poet who writes a particular type of poetry. I think it’s dangerous to categorize you into this “dub poetry” bag”. By the mid-1980’s, the term had obviously run its course and the Jamaican poet Jean Binta Breeze had pleaded, in her poem “Dubbed Out”, for a type of poetry that would not “break” words but let them live.

Thus “dub poetry” may not after all be a valid term for the reggae-influenced poetry produced by the likes of Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and  maybe this term should be applied to the people it was originally meant to refer to, that is Jamaica’s first deejays. Indeed, in a Race and Class article, Linton Kwesi Johnson himself had written about the “dub lyricists” and had called them “poets”:” The dub lyricist is the dj turned poet. He intones his lyrics rather than sings them. Dub lyricism is a new form of (oral) music poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on to the rhythm background of a popular song. Dub lyricists include poets like Big Youth, I Roy, U Roy, Dillinger, Shorty the President, Prince Jazzbo and others”. So the dub poetry tag was originally meant to describe the art form of Jamaican “toasting” or deejaying, a brand of popular poetry produced by and for the Jamaican masses. In fact a case could be made for the recognition of Jamaican deejaying as a form of oral poetry.

The Impressionist of Imperialists: Hari Kunzru

At first glance, Hari Kunzru wildly entertaining debut novel, The Impressionist, looks like a disjointed collection of novels with enough of a unifying theme - race and colonialism in India - to justify a masterpiece of exquisitely done theater four parters lots of elephants and helmets assertive spinal sad. Each of the major centers of book sections, after all, a completely different character, all have some connection to the subcontinent. There Pran Nath Razdan, a pampered and well Indian child born in the century that grows just downstream of the Taj Mahal, Rukhsana, an exotically beautiful hijra, or eunuch transvestite, who is forced by his teacher to perform sexual favors for influential English an official, the lovely white boy, Pretty Bobby, the flag of a Scottish missionary couple in Bombay, which is also a capo demimonde and finally, Jonathan Bridgeman, an aristocratic Oxford student who reluctantly accompanies famous anthropologist Africa on a mission to study African tribes - the black people who hates Jonathan.

What connects the four wildly divergent characters and tales, is much more constant and corrosive confrontation between English and India, between white and black. The surprise of the expert Kunzru and ambitious book is that all these disparate characters are, in fact, the same person: the "impressionist" title, half-Indian, half-English boy who has the uncanny ability to impersonate any two white or black.

The plot follows the chameleon Pran idyllic childhood in his expulsion from the house (after the revelation that he is the son of English lover of his mother) to the street, from his days as a street beggar to his years as sex slave catering to the tastes of their customers extravagant white (one of which opens masturbates while Rukhsana to recite Kipling), from his apprenticeship as a kind of lab assistant for the fanatic missionary (who collects skulls members of "inferior" races and measures its cranial capacity) passing as Jonathan. Through all this, Pran realizes that identity can be much more fluid than many of the people who find how to think - a fabrication own benefit of the powerful. It is no little shock one day he sees how easy it is to make their way into "white" institutions: "You hear a tone and see a face and a set of clothes, and put them together in one person."

That reality exposes the hypocrisy in touching the heart of the racist imperialist. With great enthusiasm and a wonderful light touch - Kunzru tone is always one of amused detachment - the author uses the hybrid nature of its protagonist to show the intellectual, moral and politically unstable structures of colonialism were. In each of the environments through which you travel, the ability to cross borders Pran is pointedly contrasted with the manic energy of a character who is desperate to maintain order. Pran adoptive father, a distinguished lawyer of high caste, is an obsessive-compulsive insanely dedicated to "maintaining impervious boundaries", posing as Jonathan, Pran attends a boarding school in England, where its director, a botanist , teaches his student, a hybrid if ever there was one, of the dangers of cross-fertilization: "The flowers lose their identities in a hybrid swarm, and nature would be in a hopeless muddle."

The more desperate mess we find in this book is inevitably Pran himself, a person whose (totally understandable) interest and experience of the cases, the manipulation of superficial appearances comes at the cost of an authentic personality. Impressionism is often so full of interesting incidents and fine details that can sometimes lose sight of the larger issue, but not so much towards the end, when you see how expertly Kunzru has manipulated his plot to demonstrate moral corrosion that is the greatest legacy of imperialism. For as Pran get the latest in "pass", successfully posing as a well-to-English Oxford University, who have been deprived of what he craves most: the daughter of his mentor, who represents everything English ", Elgar and tea roses. " At the very moment he tries to consummate his love for her, he realizes that his English rose flower prefers black men. When Jonathan dismisses as "the most conventional person" she knows, and he desperately tries to tell the truth about who is exotic, his situation is beyond the poignant tragedy.

The book is not perfect: In all cases, shares some of the defects of his hero. It is likely that buzz through 400 pages Kunzru in a wave of pleasure, and only then might wonder, as I did, why did not affect you more - why I remember is his pleasure in craftsmanship of the author and not the heartbreaking tragedy of the story, he says. The reason, in the end, has to do with Pran himself, a character whose belief that the surfaces are not only does everything "himself fully available", but is not available, ultimately, to the reader. If you were able Pran worry more, to feel with him (instead of just for him), this remarkable debut would be great instead of good. However, if the impressionist is best on surfaces that deep, is an extraordinary book that will leave a lasting impression.