WRITING GENRE, WRITING RESISTANCE: UPTAKE, ACTION AND GENERIC

DISSENT IN ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN POETRY

A Dissertation Presented

By

Dania Annese Dwyer

to

The Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the field of

English

Northeastern University

Boston, Massachusetts

August 2018

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Writing Genre, Writing Resistance: Uptake, Action and Generic Dissent in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.

A dissertation presented

By

Dania A. Dwyer

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science

in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University

August 2018

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Abstract

This dissertation looks at the strategies that have been undertaken by Anglophone Caribbean poets

seeking to revise the history of the Caribbean through genre. I consider how texts written in literary

genres respond to particular historical and social exigencies by co-opting antecedent colonial genres

in ways that transgress them. In doing so, I take up questions from Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS)

that ask whether a theory of social action might be applied to literary works, and place Caribbean

history and cultural studies in conversation with sociolinguistics and genre theory in literature and

RGS. Using the poetry collections of Olive Senior, Kei Miller and Linton Kwesi Johnson as case

studies, I argue that West Indian poetry pushes the theoretical envelope of literary analysis and

invites an approach that incorporates rhetorical genre theory — specifically Carolyn Miller’s theory

of genre as social action and Anne Freadman’s theory of uptake—to unearth the full potential of the

text.

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Table of Contents

Abstract 2

Table of Contents 3

Dedication 4

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 6

Chapter I: Writing Genres, Literary Genre, and Genre as Resistance 24

Chapter II: “Remembered Contents, Changed Contexts”: Revising History through Generic Uptake in Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics 42

CHAPTER III: Mapping Generic Immapancy: Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion 75

Chapter IV: Language and Generic Resistance in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren 108

Conclusion 131

Works Cited 138

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I dedicate this project to my mother, Ivorine, whose incredible sacrifice helped me complete

this project; and to my children, Danielle and Duke, for whom my every sacrifice has been

worthwhile.

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Acknowledgements

Completing a dissertation is no easy feat and I am indebted to many individuals for helping

me bring this to fruition. I want to thank my mother, Ivorine, who first saw my abilities and

recommended I pursue studies in English, and later put her life on hold to help me take care of my

daughter, Danielle, as I prepared the prospectus for this project. I must also thank my father,

Kenneth, who came to my rescue when my son was born in the midst of my trying to finish the

dissertation, defend, and move states to take up a full-time faculty position. Without their love,

sacrifice, and confidence in me, I could not have finished when I did. I am immensely grateful for

husband, Dave, who helped me throughout my program by providing a sense of security at home

and by giving me frequent assurance that I was pursuing the path meant for me. My daughter

Danielle, whom I had during the first year of doctoral studies, prayed not only for this project, but

also for umpteen A+’s throughout my program, and looked to me as her ultimate role model — this

pushed me to make her and my son, Duke, proud.

I am also indebted to my mentor and former lecturer, Dr. Nadi Edwards, whose mentorship

has served a guiding hand at pivotal moments in my career, and whose feedback on my project in its

early stages helped me revise my ideas and point them in productive new directions; and to Dr.

Michael Bucknor, whose encouragement and scholarship have always motivated me to be better.

Finally, I must express gratitude to my committee members, Professor Mya Poe (Chair),

Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Professor Nicole Aljoe and Professor Neal Lerner, who

provided excellent suggestions as I wrote. I am particularly grateful for Professor Poe, whose

incredible generosity and insight carried me through my darkest moments and propelled me onward

to completion. She is an example for me as I seek to build my career in higher education.

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Introduction

The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), the premier examinations body in the English-

speaking Caribbean, in its Caribbean Examinations Council Teacher’s Guide for the Teaching of

English B makes a compelling case for poetry that it does not make for prose fiction and drama.

Poetry is described, perhaps idealized, as the genre of the people. It is the genre that they live.

According to the guide:

Caribbean people are characterised internationally by our innate capacity to be

creatively expressive in speech, music and movement. This creative expressiveness is

manifested in our common daily lived encounters on the streets, as much as they are

exhibited by the finest exemplars of Caribbean artistes who have earned international

acclaim. West Indian children live poetry (CXC Guide).

In contrast, for drama, the guide highlights the genre’s distinction from poetry and prose,

and the need for it to be taught in a way that attends to the dramatic elements of a given play.

Drama “reflects attitudes, values and beliefs that are portrayed in a way to develop a student’s sense

of empathy as they see their own humanity reflected in literary characters and situations” (14). While

there is an acknowledgement of the alignment of the genre with the expressive nature of Caribbean

people in the language from the guide, there is not a case made for drama as the generic

embodiment of the people. In like manner, the section on the teaching of prose does not forge an

implicit connection with Caribbean society and collective identity. Instead, with prose fiction, the

focus is on the effect of the genre on readers: “Every line of prose is consciously chosen to create a

particular effect or effects. Very often writers revel in the tensions between the mind and the heart

of the reader, sometimes even more so than their fascination with that tension between the minds

and hearts of their characters. Diverse interpretations are possible because each reader brings

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something unique from his/her own experience to interpret or understand what the writer writes”

(28).

While the explicit connection to Caribbean identity and poetry is obvious in the guide,

implicit in this statement on poetry is a hierarchical understanding of genres in the Caribbean

context with poetry most closely aligned with what people in the Caribbean live. In fact, poetry in

the Caribbean enjoys an esteemed stature in the hierarchy of literary genres and Caribbean people

view it as the “real” embodiment of the fragmented and complex reality of Caribbean existence.

Laurence Breiner, in his seminal work on Caribbean poetry, notes the very prominent status that

poetry holds in post-independence Caribbean culture and society owing to many factors like the

closeness of poets to political figures, the inherent dramaticality of Caribbean society and the small

scale of that society. Breiner argues:

It is frequently observed that poetry seems to play an unusually prominent role in

West Indian society since Independence. The implied comparison is with the

English-speaking world, and perhaps underestimates the role of poetry in Ireland or

Anglophone Africa, but the observation remains valid. To some degree this

prominence has to do with preexisting conditions: the small scale of the society, the

close links of many individual poets with political figures, a culture of dramaticality...

the openness to popular culture, especially music (reggae and calypso), the appeal of

public performance, the enthusiastic acceptance of overt social responsibility” (3).

At very key moments in Jamaican history and politics, for example, poems are written and

recited any and everywhere from small makeshift stages in rural community centers to formal state

functions such as the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence Ceremony held yearly. News items of

varying degrees of importance routinely serve as material for poems written and recited with many

going “viral” on social media. Poetry is understood (by both the poets and the communities they

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serve) to be the trusted expression of the people and the genre that reveals who we are to ourselves

and helps direct us to where we would like to be as a people. Brathwaite and others, too, in thinking

of “a literature that addresses a whole society, are thinking of poetry and drama more than fiction,”

Breiner contends. Caribbean poet Nourbese Philip concurs, theorizing in her essay “The Habit of:

Poetry, Rats and Cats” that poetry in general is “risk taking of the highest order, otherwise known as

working on the edge...reintrojecting forgotten histories.” It is a dynamic genre:

[It is] constantly changing depending on who is reading it. The polyvocular.

The multiplicity of voices. That is the New World… Here: first the

Caribbean, then the Americas. Site of massive, traumatic and often fatal

interruptions - for aboriginal peoples, for the African, the Asian, and even

the European. To “write” about it in a logical, linear way is to do a second

violence. To the experience, the memory - the remembering (Philip 116). [1]

In this sense, the poetry of the Caribbean has been conscious of itself as the genre of the

masses, and the one that should function as the voice of the people. One case in point is Mervyn

Morris’ assessment of the poetry performance of dub poet Mutabaruka at the 1989 Anti-Drugs

Concert in Jamaica as more than a mere poetry presentation but a performance that set the genre in

a very clear context that attends to specific social and economic factors.

Although Caribbean poetry may be conscious of itself as the genre of the masses, it is also

conscious of its colonial legacy. Caribbean writing is situated in the legacy of colonialism, and many

scholars like Bruce King, Laurence Breiner, and Edward Baugh have traced literary endeavors by

Caribbean writers since independence as first wrestling with imitating Western linguistic and formal

conventions, but then becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the inherited medium of the

colonizer, and therefore gradually shifting to a more postcolonial aesthetic. Colonial history is

constantly engaged, if not quarreled with in the poetry of the Caribbean. Seen in this way, the CXC

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guide indicates a shift in how literary genres are taught, not only in Jamaica but also in all West

Indian contexts. In doing so, it moves away from colonially inherited ways of knowing genre.

Nowhere is the colonial legacy of learning poetry more apparent than in educational

contexts. In acquiring literacy, the student learns to assimilate the values of the oppressor in the

language, form and genres sanctioned by the oppressor. Excerpts from Olive Senior’s poem,

“Colonial Girls School” (1985) perhaps sums up best the colonial orientation toward education in

the West Indies:

Borrowed images

willed our skins pale (1-2)

……………………….

lowered our voices (4)

………………………..

harnessed our voices to madrigals

and genteel airs

yoked out minds to declensions in Latin

and the language of Shakespeare

Told us nothing about ourselves

There was nothing about us at all (10-13)

……………………………………

(For our language

– ‘bad talking’ –

Detentions)

Finding nothing about us there

Nothing about us at all (37-41).

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Here the poet uses phrases like “declensions in Latin” and “language of Shakespeare” to

symbolize a foreign educational paradigm. Learning to read, the very foundation of this kind of

education, is therefore accepting written textual forms as superior, and oral forms as unworthy of

scholarly inquiry. While such “forms” do not encapsulate the totality of genre, they possess what

Carolyn Miller calls first-line evidence of a genre and are important in making conclusions about a

genre and its actions. What the poem highlights is that education in the Caribbean, and the genres

used to impart that education are fraught, and cannot be separated from colonial ways of knowing:

“genteel airs,” Shakespearean language” and borrowed images of self and surroundings.

The impetus to deviate from what has long been taught as unquestionable and superior

begins to be seen in writings emerging from the Caribbean in the wake of independence, coinciding

with political moves to break away from the colonial motherland and forge self-governed nation

states. Caribbean writers in the aftermath of independence showed increasing discomfort with these

Western genres and a gradual shift to more performative expression. In the years since the period of

independence, they come to realize that imposed genres do not fit the social and cultural realities of

a post-independence Caribbean society. This realization is akin to what Paulo Freire describes as

critical literacy, which understands reading and writing as enveloped in socio-historically constructed

structures of power.[2]

If, as the CXC contends, Caribbean children, and by extension its people, essentially live

poetry, it behooves us to examine what is being invoked in and through West Indian poetry that

elevates it to a kind of social action, stylistically and substantively responding to “perceived

situational demands” and involving “situation and motive, because human action, whether symbolic

or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and through the attributing of

motives” (Miller 152). Thus, while there has been engagement with poetic form and deviation from

inherited literary conventions, there is still much room for genre to be explored as its own means of

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levying critique and resistance not only to slavery and colonialism but also to the literary and non-

literary genres associated with them. Indeed, while the latter defies strict generic classification,

unpacking them for the rhetorical and social actions they accomplish provides a new trajectory for

understanding genre and the poetry of the Anglophone Caribbean.

It is against this background that I use a Rhetorical Genre Studies framework to consider

how Caribbean poetry responds to particular historical and social exigencies. I use this framework as

it offers a “reconception of genre as social action” and “unlike the traditional approaches to genre

that view genres as stable text types characterized by their textual regularities, Rhetorical Genre

Studies considers genres as ‘typified symbolic actions in response to stock sets of situation types.

Such a notion of genre allows for dynamism and change, given the inherent fluidity of the

sociohistorical context to which genres respond” (Artemeva & Freedman in Artemeva 2004). I use

this Rhetorical Genre Studies approach as a viable complement to literary genre theory that has

traditionally hinged almost entirely on a formalist conceptualization of genre. Literary genre studies,

say, before the mid to late 1980s are largely defined by particular formalist prescriptions of genre —

a kind of agreed upon set of features and conventions that could be applied indefinitely both as the

standard by which existing texts are assessed for their compliance to or deviation from a blueprint

from which texts would be composed in a genre. Importantly, while literary studies have

acknowledged the role of sociocultural variables in our understanding of any genre, there is the

underlying conception of genre as possessing certain universal qualities that allow them to be applied

across and despite different social and historical contexts.

Of course, current literary genre theorists have accepted a more nuanced view of genres,

primarily by acknowledging that genres are situated, dynamic, and influenced by the unique interplay

of writers, readers and texts. Indeed, one cannot dismiss the contributions that the literary field has

made to studies of genre. As Amy Devitt (2000) concedes in “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary

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Theories of Genre,” both literature and rhetoric fields are reconceptualizing genre in various ways

and often in ways that complement each other. “Were genre to be defined as static categorization or

static textual features, genre would hold little significance for today’s theorists, whether from

literature or rhetoric and composition. Instead, genre can be redefined, in all these text-based fields,

as a dynamic concept created through the interaction of writers, readers, past texts, and contexts”

(699).

Various theorists contribute to reconceptualizing newer ways of thinking about genre.

Jacques Derrida’s Law of Genre attends to this assertion by focusing on on participation of texts in

one or more genre, whether knowingly or inadvertently. Derrida writes: Every text participates in

one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre…yet such participation never

amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and

unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself . . .” (230). Derrida’s notion

of participation allays the rigid connotation of a taxonomy that sees texts belonging to a single genre.

Postcolonial theorist Steven Monte best captures newer ways of thinking about genre in literary

studies. He argues, in his overview of theories of genre, that the examination of genre from an

“aesthetic perspective”, with the view that “genre should arise organically or through the poet’s

sensibility...was largely a reaction against prescriptive notions of genre, especially neoclassical rules.”

Indeed, this suspicion that genre was “something more than genre - continues into the twentieth and

twenty-first centuries, albeit from a more skeptical and academic viewpoint… For many theorists

genre is more imaginary than real - a metaphor, if not something ideologically more suspect” (Monte

in Habib). Additionally, Benedetto Croce and Maurice Blanchot would also argue in varying ways

for the indeterminacy and uniqueness of individual texts, whose inherent nature resist rigid

classification, the latter arguably a reductive endeavor in logic on works that defy the same.

Blanchot’s fairly well-known assertion that “the book alone is important, as it is, far from genre,

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outside rubrics . . . under which it refuses to be arranged and to which it denies the power to fix its

place and to determine its form” stands in clear defiance of the neoclassical understanding of genre

and offers another perspective from the formalist approach as well (Blanchot in Todorov).

As can be seen in the work from Monte and others, in this moment, both literary and

Rhetorical Genre Studies fields agree that genres are situated, dynamic, and influenced by socio-

historical, ideological and institutional realities. Indeed, “to develop these common perspectives

from disparate theories does not require simplifying or stretching either literary or rhetorical genre

theory” (Devitt 702). Still, there is a way in which literary genre theory does not sufficiently account

for how literary genres operate in various contexts, specifically the “dynamic relationship to

exigencies, situations, and social motives” and that is the focus of Rhetorical Genre Studies

(Bawarshi & Reiff 69). As Devitt concedes, the fields of literary genre theory and Rhetorical Genre

Studies still have “a more essential disagreement about the nature of genres.” Based on a

“functional, pragmatic theory of textual meaning,” Rhetorical Genre Studies examines the ways

“genres help users achieve certain aims, fulfill certain functions, perform certain actions, do things

with language” (Devitt 169). She asks: “Can literary genres be understood as functional and

pragmatic in the same way? Do literary genres ‘exist’ and operate on readers and writers in the same

ways?” (702). I argue that it does, but this dissertation only scratches the surface of what is possible,

and acknowledges that the case of Caribbean poetry provides evidence of this. I am guided by

Bawarshi’s statement:

Although we often recognize genres by overt features of form and content, genres

are more than a series of conventions regulating form and content… They embody

understandings of situations, relationships, stances, moods, strategies, appropriate

resources, goals and many other elements that define the activity and shape means of

accomplishment. Genres are ways of doing things—and as such embody what is to

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be done and carry traces of the time and place in which such things are done, as well

as the motives and actions carried out in those locales…. Genre may also help us

know how...writing fits within historically evolving situations (24).

Methodologically, my project is in keeping with the trend in Caribbean criticism at the turn

of the twentieth century to engage in non-traditional modes of analysis and texts. Indeed, there has

been a sense over the past decade that explaining Anglophone Caribbean culture involves

experimenting with new critical frames; a complex and dynamic scholarship that takes on, among

other things, the oral/scribal binary and literary antecedents in the form of colonial accounts that

have previously been dismissed. That such accounts have largely been written from the

condescending and hegemonic point of view of the colonizer is arguably the most prevalent

observation among scholars. My project forges a link between contemporary postcolonial texts and

these problematic antecedent texts through the former’s uptake of the latter. As Tim Watson

highlights in his introduction to the Oxford Bibliography on early literature of the British Caribbean,

“Caribbean literature in English before 1850 has received relatively little attention from critics and

historians of British and American literature—and even from critics of 20th- and 21st-century

Caribbean literature, who have tended to reject an affiliation with a set of texts that, for the most

part, were written by Creole (Caribbean-born or resident) whites who either took slavery for granted

or positively endorsed it” (Watson, “Introduction”).

This sentiment, I would argue, also applies to Caribbean critics as well. Kenneth Ramchand

is reluctant to promote such texts beyond their social relevance in understanding colonial anxieties

regarding decolonization, on the basis that they were either “the production of planters and planter-

types, government officials, visitors, missionaries and other birds of passage writing from alien

perspectives, [or] the writing of a small group or class either pursuing its own narrow interests or

committed to the idea of Europe as home and center (95). Perhaps equally as dismissively, Gareth

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Griffiths (1987) discounts early texts as embodying views of the “colonizing center” whose writings

“have been born hand in hand with the Imperial enterprise” (13). Many of these texts, Anthony

Boxill (1995) argues, bear varying degrees of condescension, with a work like Anthony Froude’s The

English in the West Indies (1888) “so offensively ethnocentric and so convinced that the black West

Indian’s only hope lies in being looked after by the Mother Country that it is difficult to see what

contribution his writing could have to the growth of West Indian literature. In Roots, Kamau

Brathwaite also makes an argument for moving away from these texts (130).

My project also is consistent with more recent work in Rhetorical Genre Studies that has

moved beyond the analysis of academic and professional writing, such as Charles Bazerman’s

seminal study of the Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665-1800, or Devitt’s study of accounting

genres. Recent scholarship in Rhetorical Genre Studies has included analysis of public genres, such

as Genre and the Performance of the Publics by Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi. While the study of

literary genres has traditionally remained of little interest to Rhetorical Genre Studies scholars, a

point made by Laura Wilder in Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and

Writing in the Disciplines, the study of postcolonial texts is of interest to Rhetorical Genre Studies

scholars who have long had an interest in questions of ideology in relation to social action, such as

Anthony Pare’s study of social work genres or Janet Giltrow’s research on legal genres. It also takes

up Dylan B. Dryer’s charge about using uptake as a site of resistance: “I ask those interested in genre

uptake and the spatial turn (in RGS) to help fashion physical and discursive spaces where people can

work together to develop resistant knowledge” of genre (527).

My project aims to use a Rhetorical Genre Studies framework in tandem with literary

analytical topoi to examine how the texts of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers transcend

mere literary generic categorization (in this project, “poetry” or the “poem”) and perform various

kinds of social action attributable to certain motives and responding to particular situational

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demands. Specifically, in this dissertation, Caribbean poetry serves as the case studies for uptake and

genre as social action. As Anne Freadman contends in The Trap and Trappings of Genre Theory, “we

cannot, I think, reflect productively on uptake outside of discussions of genre, nor is it productive to

theorize the action of genres without uptake. Genre is destabilized by uptake even as it asserts its

powers” (560). The concept of uptake is essential to this project, because, as Anthony Pare

maintains, genres unfold in automatic, ritualistic ways. They “appear normal, even inevitable; they

are simply the way things are done. And their status as historical practice within institutions or

disciplines makes them appear immutable and certainly beyond the influence of the transitory

individuals who participate in them, and who become implicated in the subtle ideologies they enact”

(59). Uptake, defined by Anne Freadman in two seminal papers, “Anyone for Tennis” and

“Uptake,” allows for the unpacking of those seemingly immutable features of genre that keep

hegemonic ideologies intact. In “Anyone for Tennis,” Freadman uses the game of tennis as the

analogy to frame her conceptualization of two texts’ relation to each other. She makes the

distinction between a ball and a shot, noting that the ball is the material object that only gains

importance when played and is given meaning once it becomes a shot. Players use the balls in

service of shots : “Each shot is formally determined by the rules of the game, and materially

determined by the skill of the players, and each return shot is determined by the shot to which it is a

response” (44). What helps to give shots meaning is the rules of the game, understood and agreed

upon by the players, and importantly, by those who also view the game of tennis. The spectators

come to know what the shots signify, what actions they accomplish by how the ball is played. A

missed serve begets a second serve; a ball that bounces twice results in a player missing a point and

so on. The rules make sense within the “ceremonial” of the game as “ceremonies are games that

situate other games: they are the rules for the setting of a game, for constituting participants as

players in that game, for placing and timing it in relation with other places and times. They are the

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rules for playing of a game, but they are not the rules of the game” (“Anyone” 46-47). In “Uptake,”

Freadman further refines her definition of the term, asserting:

I have argued that “genre” is more usefully applied to the interaction of, minimally, a

pair of texts than to the properties of a single text, and I have used the term

“uptake” to name the bidirectional relation that holds between the pair; that is,

between a text and what Peirce would call its “interpretant” (Peirce, 1932-58); the

text is contrived to secure a certain class of uptakes, and the interpretant, or uptake

text, confirms its generic status by conforming itself to this contrivance. It does so,

by —say— “taking it as” an invitation or a request. By the same token, however, the

uptake text has the power not to so confirm this generic status, which it may modify

minimally, or even utterly, by taking its object as some other kind (40).

Freadman here espouses what I will argue in my first chapter is a more pronounced and

traceable understanding of intertextuality. More than simply the relation of two texts to each other,

uptake helps literary scholars establish the nature of the relationship and the ideology informing the

decisions a writer makes about whether to confirm or challenge generic status, and the process of

doing so. Numerous scholars in Rhetorical Genre Studies (and outside of it) have expounded on

Freadman’s notion of uptake. Angela Rounsaville (2012), in expanding the concepts of high-road

and low-road transfer (originally coined by David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon in 1988), looks at

the very specific and intentional movement of generic strategies and skills — a genre’s contents —

to different contexts determined by learners as dissimilar (high-road transfer) and more seamless

transfer of contents to contexts determined to be more closely aligned (low-road transfer). Such

nuancing of uptake has influenced my own thinking of Caribbean poet’s response to the exigence of

history and the ways they transfer the contents of colonial antecedent texts to postcolonial contexts

in accomplishing the social action of revising history and coining a distinct Caribbean identity.

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Further, no study that addresses social action in Caribbean literature can ignore the impact

of language in levying resistance. Through the lens of translingualism, I examine in my third chapter

the role of language in uptake and the social action of genre.

The following key questions guide this study:

● What rhetorical theories of genre do the Caribbean literary examples engage and

complicate?

● How does uptake mobilize a distinct kind of resistance to colonial ways of knowing

in Caribbean poetry?

● How does the Creole continuum work to mobilize genre? How does language help

genre accomplish social action, and for what communities (readers/writers)?

● How might a Rhetorical Genre Studies approach reorient Caribbean literary

analyses?

Methodology

Bawarshi and Reiff maintain that Rhetorical Genre Studies’ sociological conceptualizations

of genre provide a robust analytical tool for understanding academic environments. Further, studies

of uptake in the workplace have been undertaken by scholars like Berkenkotter; Freedman and

Smart; Schryer, and uptake research in the classroom is documented most notably by Artemeva;

Fuller and Lee; Johns; Nowacek; and Soliday. According to Bastian, “much of this research has

focused on regularities, observing how readers’ and writers’ uptakes of genre work to normalize and,

in some cases, formalize sets of texts, writers’ practices, readers’ practices, and social roles.”

There is still room for more studies of uptake in a literary context. As Tosh Tachino notes

in his chapter on intertextual threads and (un)likely uptakes in a Canadian public inquiry, “most

studies of multiple, interconnected genres have been conducted on academic and workplace genres.

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While genres do sometimes interact with external genres, the interactions are typically confined

within the genre systems of a single disciplinary or workplace community” (178). Similarly, Devitt

notes that the extent to which writers “break” or “challenge” the conventions of genre is attended to

less in Rhetorical Genre Studies than in literary studies (706). One task I undertook here is to use a

genre-based analytical framework to perform textual analysis of the poetry in question. I perform

close readings of poems, but also go beyond the traditional literary topoi of poetry analysis. Focusing

on literary elements such as imagery, versification, and fig ures of speech, I look at the generic

features of the poem, how they function beyond their material reality of poetry, to dynamic

metageneric uptake texts that pay credence to and resist the antecedent genres they take up. The

features I examine begin with what can be observed with the naked eye — more formal, aesthetic

elements like poem titles and structure that tell a reader a text belongs to one genre over another.

My methodology is taken, in part, from Devitt, Bawarshi and Reiff’s heuristic for genre

analysis in Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres and Tosh Tachino’s work on (un)likely

uptakes. Other researchers look at genre change (Bazerman) or use interviews to understand how

writers negotiate genre (Pare). In conducting my genre analysis, I gathered one poetry collection

from each of the four authors included, which span different language registers and sub-genres of

Caribbean poetry. In collecting a corpus of 149 poems across three poetry collections I was able to

understand the complexities of the genre and identify recurring patterns among poems and between

genres and antecedent genres. Second, I perform close readings of poems and ask questions

surrounding rhetorical function and social action, and the features of each text that help it

accomplish particular types of social action and perform uptake.

Through reading colonial texts through my work with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive

(ECDA), I started noticing patterns and filial relationships between colonial texts and contemporary

postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean texts. I completed a table of what I called “colonial antecedent

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texts” and their “uptake texts” and noted the ways in which the uptake texts borrowed from,

manipulated and co-opted colonial antecedent genres in a larger project of resistance. I spent

considerable time analyzing the form of the poems. By form, I apply Carolyn Miller’s definition as

“the ways in which substance is symbolized… Form shapes the response of the reader or listener to

substance by providing instruction...about how to perceive and interpret; this guidance disposes the

audience [or reader] to anticipate, to be gratified, to respond in a certain way”(159). In this way,

“form becomes a kind of meta-information, with both semantic value (as information) and syntactic

(or formal) value” (Miller 159). I analyze the form of poems as entities in and of themselves, and

conduct comparative close readings of poems as iterations of the antecedent non-literary genres they

take up. I look at “substantive [and] formal similarities”-- what Miller calls “first-line evidence” in

making a genre claim, as well as a genre’s deviation from the conventions and attendant expectations

of the genre based on differences in the actions they set out to accomplish (163). Form is important

because it helps to constitute, though not entirely define, genre. It is part of what assists genre to

accomplish social action.

Third, I sought to “identify and describe patterns in the genre’s features” using Devitt’s

recommended questions for doing such analysis:

What recurrent features do the samples share? For example: What content is typically

included? What excluded? How is the content treated? What sorts of examples are

used? What counts as evidence (personal testimony, facts, etc.)? What rhetorical

appeals are used? How are texts in the genres structured? What are their parts, and

how are they organized? In what format are texts of this genre presented? What

layout or appearance is common? How long is a typical text in this genre? What

types of sentences do texts in the genre typically use? How long are they? Are they

simple or complex, passive or active? Are the sentences varied? Do they share a

21

certain style? What diction (types of words) is most common? Is a type of jargon

used? Is slang used? How would you describe the writer’s voice? (94)

Finally, I looked at what rhetorical patterns reveal about the genre and the social action it

accomplishes: “What do these rhetorical patterns reveal about the genre, its situation, and the scene

in which it is used? Why are these patterns significant? What can [one] learn about the actions being

performed through the genre by observing its language patterns? What arguments can [one] make

about these patterns? What do participants have to know or believe to understand or appreciate the

genre? Who is invited into the genre, and who is excluded? What roles for writers and readers does it

encourage or discourage? What values, beliefs, goals, and assumptions are revealed through the

genre’s patterns? How is the subject of the genre treated? What content is considered most

important? What content (topics or details) is ignored? What actions does the genre help make

possible? What actions does the genre make difficult? What attitude toward readers is implied in the

genre? What attitude toward the world is implied in it?” (Devitt 93-94).

Chapter Overview

Chapter 1: Writing Genres, Literary Genre, and Genre as Resistance outlines what

definitions of genre will foreground my discussion and I offer my own definitions of them. As Brian

Paltridge (1997) concedes, numerous definitions have been put forward for genre. The differing

ways Swales, Miller and Campbell and Jamieson each define the term, for instance, show that there

is no consensus on what genre should mean, but rather that “there are many ways in which the

approaches to the descriptions and definition of genres described in….particular areas overlap, and,

at times, ways in which they are quite different from each other. Much of this is due to the different

goals of each of the approaches to analysis and the differing theoretical positions, and concerns,

which underlie the various approaches” (Paltridge 5). I find Peter Knapp’s definition of genres as

“ways of using language” particularly useful in this regard. Knapp suggests that genres “not be

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reduced to simply semiotic systems or codes but also need to be understood as a means of deploying

language that are acted as much as they are represented” (20) Knapp’s definition is similar to

Paltridge’s response to the question of how one might define genre: “Genres are ways in which

people “get things done” through their use of language in particular contexts” (Paltridge in Johns).

Of course, “getting things done” implies some degree of action, and echoes Carolyn Miller’s

assertion of genre as social action, which also informs my argument, but which I qualify with what

Anthony Pare offers, that is, genre as social and ideological action. Indeed, I want to think of genre

as more than just form, a classification of sorts, and more on “on the action it is used to

accomplish” (Miller 151), but revise Miller’s definition to include situations that might necessarily

recur, but that are pervasive and invite artistic response and rhetorical action.

Chapter 2: Remembering Contents, Changed Contexts: Revising History Through Generic

Uptake in Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics examines how West Indian poetry might function

rhetorically. Here I perform close readings of Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics and, using the

methodology outlined above, I consider how these texts written in literary genres also function

beyond the literary and respond to particular historical and social exigencies as they coopt

antecedent colonial genres in ways that transgress them. Specifically, I examine her uptake of

colonial non-literary texts, as uptake, purported by Anne Freadman, allows for this kind of

discursive guerilla activity. Female poets perform uptake in differing ways that at once invoke and

repeal Western standardized forms of the same class or name, ultimately deploying a strategy that

helps to “void the genre it invoked” (Freadman 47). In unpacking the ways this is done, I make a

case for how a hybrid theoretical analysis is allowing me a fuller and more productive interpretation

of the texts.

Chapter 3: Mapping Generic Immappancy: Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to

Zion reads Miller’s poetry collection alongside imperial narratives whose generic features he co-opts

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in a way that mimics imperial social action, but to different ends. While Senior’s uptake challenges

patriarchal historiography, Miller’s complies with it in a generic mapping exercise that still challenges

imperial ways of knowing, but looks quite differently when compared to Senior.

Chapter 4: The Language of Generic Resistance hinges on Carolyn Miller’s theory of genre

as social action to examine works whose generic resistance is mobilized primarily through language.

I look at the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and ask: What social action is the poetry doing?

What is the exigence that occasions the poetry and do the current topoi of literary analysis account

for it? How does the Creole continuum work to mobilize genre? Linton Kwesi employs a kind of

transgressive poetics of breaking the master’s English tongue upon which they also rely as a means

of communication, and infusing the master’s medium with its perceived oral opposite. Importantly, I

am not merely making a case for the Creole or dub poetry as mediums of resistance; this has already

been done by scholars like Velma Pollard and Mervyn Morris respectively. In this chapter I examine

these oral genres as they present themselves in print, and suggest that the hierarchical relationship of

written English and the oral Creole- that sees the latter as inferior to the former-- is manipulated on

paper to transgress the master’s tongue and valorize the bastard variety. Though Johnson is not

based in the Caribbean, his work shows the power of genre to transcend the temporal and to still

embody the concerns of Caribbean writers.

The conclusion proposes responses to the questions my project asks and briefly looks at the

potential for further research of its kind. I offer a summary of the major arguments I develop in

each chapter and examine what they mean in this moment of Caribbean historiography and the

implications for pedagogy.

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Chapter 1: Literary Genre, Rhetorical Genre Studies and Genre as Resistance

In this chapter, I outline the definitions of genre that foreground my discussion and define

key terms that I apply across subsequent chapters. I begin with a description of genre in literary

studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies and then explain how I extend and complicate these

definitions of genre to serve the purposes of my argument in this dissertation. In framing this

discussion, it should be noted that in this moment, there is no consensus on what genre should mean,

but rather, as Brian Paltridge concedes, “there are many ways in which the approaches to the

descriptions and definition of genres described in….particular areas overlap, and, at times, ways in

which they are quite different from each other. Much of this is due to the different goals of each of

the approaches to analysis and the differing theoretical positions, and concerns, which underlie the

various approaches” (Paltridge 5). It should also be noted that the fields of literary genre theory and

Rhetorical Genre Studies look at genres in different, though not entirely oppositional ways.1

Although literary genre studies, Rhetorical Genre Studies, and other schools of genre have

developed along two different paths, scholars today are interested in looking at the synergies across

those schools, a project best captured in the Genres Across Borders project whose goal is to “to

offer a comprehensive overview of the multiple strands of genre scholarship and their relationships,

in order to catalyze intellectual exchange and pedagogical innovation and to help us understand the

processes and motivations of genre development, evolution, and circulation

(https://genreacrossborders.org/).” This chapter marks the beginnings of a larger conversation on

how a more complementary framework might better serve literary and rhetoric and composition

scholars.

1 While conceptualizations of genre in literary studies are far less unified, rhetoric has developed a more unified sense of genre. As Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff explain in Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy in which they review different schools of genre criticism, rhetoric scholars working in the area often signal a shared identity under the term Rhetorical Genre Studies.

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Genre in Literary Studies

Studies in genre have a long history. Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff’s comprehensive

study on genre studies, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, notes the

complex undertaking of defining genre in literary studies, conceding “literary approaches to genre

have traditionally maintained culturally-widespread, bipolar attitudes toward genre as either an

exclusively aesthetic object or as a constraint on the artistic spirit” but “more recent literary genre

scholarship...challenges bipolar attitudes and offers a larger landscape for genre action that can

include linguistic and socio-rhetorical studies of genres” (14).

Literary genre studies has played a key role in establishing a definition of genre. “Renaissance

and neoclassical writers tended to recognize about seven or eight principal genres in some sort of

hierarchical order. A typical ranking might be epic, tragedy, satire, epigram, ode, elegy and pastoral”

(Steven Monte). In the over 2,000 years following Aristotle, Linnaean and Darwinian categorizations

in science arguably helped cement the kind of classificatory thinking and rhetoric that what would

come to inform conceptualizations of genre in the literary sense.2 Of course, well intertwined with

such classifications was always the establishment of hierarchy. In Linnaeus’ General System of Nature

(1735), for instance, what masquerades as mere classification clearly begins the establishment of

superior and inferior races -- the Europeaus being deemed “changeable clever and inventive” and

the Africanus “inattentive, and ruled by impulse” -- what many argue is a kind of precursor to racism

as it would later be known in modern rhetoric on race. This tendency to order the world, and to

name the types of concrete compartments into which the world could be divided -- much like the

field of botany “divides the realm of flora into varieties of plants” --carried over into studies in

2 Ferdinand Brunetière’s Evolution of Genres in Literary History (1890) is one case in point, though this kind of thinking would prove to be increasingly problematic, erroneously implying “a ‘scientific process” as Chandler (1977) maintains (1).

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literature for the larger part of its 2,000 years (Robert Allen 44). Similarly, ideas about the superiority

and ubiquitousness of certain genres, like written over oral ones, would also follow suit.

Frow (2014) concurs, noting that “neoclassical accounts of the literary genres that prevailed

in Europe in much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries approached them… as normative

rules with universal validity rather than as ad hoc, changing, and inherently fuzzy practices” (57).

Northop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is often cited as one of the seminal neoclassical texts that

helped generate this kind of theory concerning genre. In Anatomy, Frye organizes literature according

to certain thematic archetypes he deems as key to establishing universality among genres, and more

importantly, to set standards that would help one identity that which is literary from that which is

not. Frye acknowledges the beginnings of genre with the Greeks, to whom our ability to distinguish

between tragedy and comedy in drama, and to whom the terms “drama, epic and lyric” may be

credited. Of course, this would be disputed by numerous scholars, like Gérard Genette who

maintain that attributing this triad to Aristotle is inaccurate, and is “actually more the product of

Romantic and post-Romantic poetics” (Genette in Bawarshi and Reiff 15). For Fyre, categorizing

literature would constitute for Aristotle the first necessary step in criticism, though Aristotlean

generic theorization beckoned for further categorizations that would cover the broader range of

literary expression, like in prose fiction, for instance (13). Frye’s focus is not on the situatedness of

genres and the exigencies to which they respond, but rather on the intelligibility and generalizability

of generic forms within a virtual universe of literary genres. The notion here of ordering things for

the sake of mutual intelligibility has value, but is arguably problematic as well.

The Neoclassical approach to genre, while critically appreciated for its contribution to genre

theory and literary criticism, is also criticized for its typicality and ahistoricity. By suggesting that

genres have certain universal qualities that allow them to be applied across and despite different

social and historical contexts, this approach ignores the role of certain socio-historical and political

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variables in the formation of generic taxonomies. It also empties genres of ideological influences, by

intimating that one can truly be objective and apply theoretical standards neutrally. Ian Watts’

seminal 1957 work chronicling what he deems “the rise of the novel”, for instance, claims to provide

an account of the novel’s emergence into literary and cultural consciousness. In doing so, however,

in the specific manner that Watt does, the novel is constructed as a legitimate genre, coherent and

unquestionable in its history and key players -- from where it begins and with whom -- to what

works define the genre and set the standards by which others may abide. The ideology that belies

Watt’s account is not readily apparent, and only in recent years has been taken to task for its

essentialist and exclusionary approach to effectually constituting a genre, rather than simple

recounting its rise.

Conversely, the Structuralist approach to the study of literary genre takes as its focus the

ways “socio-historically localized genres shape specific literary actions, identifications, and

representations” (Bawarshi 18). That genres help to form their own literary reality influences the way

one comes to interpret a particular text. Käte Hamburger’s exploration of how genres help order

temporality through textual representations and Heather Dubrow’s examination of the ways generic

framing influence how a text is read and/or deciphered provide useful and concrete examples of this

approach applied to text. In the same vein, genres are social institutions and artifacts, existing in

relation to other genres in a given field (David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in

Genre Theory), and according to Todorov, are “the meeting place between general poetics and event-

based literary history” (Todorov 19 – 20).

This approach would be challenged by some Romantic and post-Romantic approaches,

which engaged with the status and singularity of texts in relation to generic convention. The work of

Freidrich Schlegel on Romantic poetry in the late eighteenth century and later that of Benedetto

Croce and Maurice Blanchot would argue for the indeterminacy and uniqueness of individual texts,

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whose inherent nature resist rigid classification, the latter arguably a reductive endeavor in logic on

works that defy the same. Blanchot’s fairly well-known assertion that “the book alone is important,

as it is, far from genre, outside rubrics . . . under which it refuses to be arranged and to which it

denies the power to fix its place and to determine its form” stands in clear defiance of the

neoclassical understanding of genre and offers another perspective from the formalist approach as

well (Blanchot in Todorov). Jacques Derrida’s Law of Genre attends to this assertion through its focus

on participation of texts in one or more genre whether knowingly or inadvertently.

In this overview of the various theories of literary genre studies thus far, there is

undoubtedly a movement from a kind of theoretical discourse that is characterized primarily by the

placement of texts into categories that can be identified, discriminated among and hierarchized; to

understanding texts as not entirely void of historicity, but situated in particular temporal and

sociohistorical realities that influence their relation with other similar texts; to more dynamic notions

of texts, their individuality and indeterminacy. Though “movement” suggests a clean, teleological

narrative of progress from one, more archaic way of thinking to another more relevant and inclusive,

we know it is never that simple. Still, the strand that provides the best segue into the strong social

elements of genre that would come with Rhetorical Genre Studies is perhaps the Cultural Studies

approach to literary genre. According to Todorov, a cultural studies approach considers genres as

unearthing “the constitutive features of the society to which they belong...” (200). In this way, “a

society chooses and codifies the [speech] acts that correspond most closely to its ideology; that is

why the existence of certain genres in one society, and their absence in another, are revelatory of

that ideology ...” (200). Further, theorists in this school consider the ways genres, from their very

moment of classification, bear the imprints of certain ideologies that cannot be overlooked in any

interpretation or application of that genre. In Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to

Milton, for example, David Quint highlights the ideology of empire in the genre of the epic, where

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the victors of history have the luxury of shaping it into a teleological, seamless narrative of progress,

while the losers inherit a history that is fragmented and chaotic. Here, the very notion of a narrative

is inextricably intertwined with power that universalizes this version of history as legitimate.

There are various strands in literary studies that do acknowledge “text and context” and

genre as socially constructed and situated within specific sociohistorical realities. Ian Watt, for

example, in his seminal work on the novel genre peaks of it alongside the rise of the middle class

and the ways both processes inadvertently helped shaped each other. This, Peter Hitchcock opines,

was a response to an emergence of novel subgenres in newly decolonized nationstates (309). The

rise of the novel genre in the Caribbean, for instance, coincided with nationalist movements that

helped shaped that genre in specific ways.3 That genre in literary studies has long moved beyond

mere categorizations of types of texts does not equate to a complete movement away from

classifying texts into genres. Hitchcock asserts that “the classificatory ambition in literature is

indissoluble from a particular history of self and society” (308). Just glancing through numerous

literary textbooks and glossaries for the definition of “genre” shows that there is still a reliance on

the classification element in the field.

As it stands, literary studies is attending more to a variety of genres from places and contexts

not traditionally attended to. Paul Jay asserts in his 2010 study of the transnational turn in literary

studies, that literary studies has made a turn to the global, “reorganizing areas of study in global

rather than national contexts defined by conventional historical periods” (5). Jay calls into question

“the default narrative for historicizing English, one in which the history of English and American

literature is studied through the lens of conventional national histories, guided by the sometimes

unconscious assumption that the history of these literatures began with the history of nations and

with relatively little attention paid to the transnational forces at work in their production” (5). Genre 3 See Bruce King’s introduction in West Indian Literature. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.

30

in literary studies is, in this moment, better understood in relation to such forces, largely because of

globalization and because the makeup of English departments has also changed, Jay contends.

Rhetorical Genre Studies

The emergence of Rhetorical Genre Studies as a field was synonymous with a turn in how its

practitioners have hitherto conceived genre in traditional literary studies, composition studies and in

rhetoric. Numerous scholars speak of this shift in genre conceptualization as occurring in the 1980s,

when the movement from accepting genre as fixed, organizing entities to considering them as

socially active and constitutive, and ideologically charged revolutionized genre scholarship and broke

ground for a whole new field devoted to these approaches. Conceptualizations of genre in literary

studies are seen as precursors to the Rhetorical Genre Studies’ more serious engagement with genre

as social and ideological. Anis Bawarshi (2000) attributes the “dramatic reconceptualization of

genres” to “scholars in functional and applied linguistics (Bhatia; Halliday; Kress; Swales),

communication studies (Campbell; Jamieson; Yates), education (Christie; Dias; Medway), and, most

recently, rhetoric and composition studies (Bazerman; Berkenkotter; Coe; Devitt; Freedman; Miller;

and Russell)” (335 “The Genre Function”). That these scholars come from fields outside of

literature is noteworthy, and might erroneously suggest that Rhetorical Genre Studies and literary

studies are implicitly antagonistic. Bawarshi is not alone in this suggestion. Natasha Artemeva, in her

overview of key concepts in Rhetorical Genre Studies, writes:

The reconception of genre as social action proposed by Carolyn Miller in 1984

provided a foundation for the development of a new discipline, Rhetorical Genre

Studies. Unlike the traditional approaches to genre that view genres as stable text

types characterized by their textual regularities, RGS considers genres as "typified

symbolic actions in response to stock sets of situation types. Such a notion of genre

allows for dynamism and change, given the inherent fluidity of the sociohistorical

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context to which genres respond" (Artemeva & Freedman, 2001, p. 166). The new,

rhetorical approach to genre conceives textual regularities as socially constructed

(Miller, 1984/1994) and brings together "text and context, product and process,

cognition and culture in a single, dynamic concept" (Pare, 2002, p. 57). RGS views

genres as much more than simple organizers and regulators of human social activity

(Bawarshi, 2000; Devitt, 1996, 2000; Miller, 1994a); genres are now seen as

constituting human activity by "making it possible through its ideological and

rhetorical conventions"(Bawarshi in Artemeva 3-4).

In fact, the work of Russian literary theorist, M.M. Bakhtin, has been important to both

literary and Rhetorical Genre Studies scholars. “Discourse in the Novel,” for instance takes issue

with exactly the notion of “genres as stable text types characterized by their textual regularities,” (of

which Artemeva speaks. Bakhtin writes:

The separation of style and language from the question of genre has been largely

responsible for a situation in which only individual and period-bound overtones of a

style are the privileged subjects of study while its basic social tone is ignored. The

great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of

stylistic modifications, which in their turn are linked with individual artists and

artistic movements. For this reason, stylistics has been deprived of an authentic

philosophical and sociological approach to its problems; it has become bogged down

in stylistic trivia; it is not able to sense behind the individual and period-bound shifts

the great and anonymous destinies of artistic discourse itself. More often than not,

stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of "private craftsmanship" and ignores the social

life of discourse outside the artist's study, discourse in the ... 'open spaces of public

cities and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs (269).

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Bakhtin is integral to literary genre studies and represents a turn to the social ahead of

Carolyn Miller and Rhetorical Genre Studies. Miller, in proposing we look at genre as social action,

provides a more nuanced theoretical framework within which to analyze literary work from the

Caribbean in this moment. Her 1984 article, “Genre as Social Action” is quite possibly the most

frequently cited text (it has been cited more than 2,000 times) in any conversation on Rhetorical

Genre Studies and its origins. But as Coe and Freedman (1998) note “the beginnings of this

movement in relation to non-literary writing can be marked by Michael Halliday’s Language as Social

Semiotic (1978) and the publication in English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and

Other Late Essays (1986)” (41) in addition to Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” (1984). In

fact, what Miller would describe as genre’s response to recurring social situations bears echoes of

what Bakhtin theorizes in “The Problem of Speech Genres,” where writing responds to or addresses

prior utterances or social situation within a particular realm of communication. While Bakhtin allows

for the appreciation of individual style, even these are always generic, and particular exigencies

determine how genres function in “relatively stable, thematic, compositional and stylistic” ways in

response to certain conditions (Bakhtin 64).

Miller argues for a definition of genre that is “rhetorically sound” and that does more than

categorize discourse, but sees genre as “typified rhetorical action” in response to recurrent situations

(151), a definition that echoes Bakhtin’s notion of how types of genres function in response to

corresponding and related types of communicative conditions perceived as similar. Miller’s text weds

genre to the social action(s) it accomplishes. Her argument in this paper “elaborate[s] the approach

taken by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson and support[s] their position that

genre study is valuable not because it might permit the creation of some kind of taxonomy, but

because it emphasizes some social and historical aspects of rhetoric that other perspectives do not.'”

(Miller 151).

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This definition of genre upon which Miller bases her argument is not entirely new. That

genre responds to the demands of a particular situation perceived as or actually recurring is a theme

that resonates in the works of numerous scholars, a fact Miller herself acknowledges. Lloyd Bitzer,

best known for his seminal work on discourse and the rhetorical situation, suggests that discourse

responds to the "complex of persons, events, objects, and relations" that present an "exigence" that

constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence

through genred discourse (“The Rhetorical Situation” 6). Though Bitzer’s 1968 piece doesn’t engage

with genre by that name, iterations of what would later define genre in Rhetorical Genre Studies run

throughout his article. Those “responses, or recurring forms” that “become a tradition which then

tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form” (13) are genres. Similarly,

Jamieson and Campbell’s understanding of genre, though more closely resembling Kenneth Burke’s,

see it as not merely consisting of “a series of acts in which certain rhetorical forms recur. . . . Instead,

a genre is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal

dynamic" (p. 21), which they describe as a fusion of various formal and stylistic elements and

situational demands. Gunther Kress similarly speaks to recurring situational elements in genres,

asserting that genre is “kind of text that derives its form from the structure of a (frequently repeated)

social occasion, with its characteristic participants and their purposes” ( 183).

So what Miller essentially does in “Genre as Social Action”, then, is not entirely redefine

genre, but rather open genres up “as complex social actions and cultural objects” (Bawarshi and

Reiff 78), as almost all theorists acknowledge that some element of typification, classification or

categorization of form is useful in conceptualizing genre. For Miller, a useful definition of genre is

not bereft of genre as “form,” but goes beyond this to include genre as it accomplishes meaningful

social action, considering substantive and contextual variables and “mediating private intentions and

social exigence; [and] by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent”

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(163). Shryer (agreeing with Baktin and Miller) contends, “utterances are not simply instances of a

category,” as “each occurrence of a genre is addressed to a different context, audience, and time,

[and] evokes a different set of strategies within an acceptable (to participants) range” (35), though,

admittedly, how a text categorizes itself or the category that is invoked in experiencing the text can

be quite telling. “In effect, genres are abstractions or ever changing sets of socially accepted

strategies that participants can use to improvise their responses to a particular situation” (Schryer

35).

Miller’s repositioning of genre would have a profound influence on subsequent scholarship

in the field of Writing Studies and become part of an international conversation on Rhetorical Genre

Studies that included Canadian and Australian threads with Canadian interests being most

prominent. The shift in genre theory also had wider implications for methodology of how genre

would be defined, researched and documented. As Rhetorical Genre Studies has matured, it has

developed a lexicon of terms to define genre, including antecedent genres, uptake, meta-genre fuzzy

genres, occluded genres, among others. For the purposes of my project, Freadman's notion of

uptake is most valuable.

Toward a Redefinition of Genre as Social Action and the Role of Uptake

To this point, I have not defined the term genre, but have outlined the ways that it has been

understood in traditional literary approaches, and more recently in Rhetorical Genre Studies. I

accept genre as more than classifying discourse or utterances into recognizable categories but

acknowledge, as Jamieson does, that in some sense, a genre “is composed of a constellation of

recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic” (21). Indeed, my analyses of some of

the genres taken up by the writers in this study hinges on their manipulation of these expected

internal dynamics that they then use to challenge antecedent genres and force their own to operate

in different ways. It also hinges on the notion of “action.” Anne Freadman contends in “Anyone

35

for Tennis” that “genre is either being modelled on, or thought through, the concept of the speech

act” (45). Considered as a kid of “extension of the speech act,” we might think of genres ― as

“historians of what we are wont to call ideas” ― in more practical terms, assuming that all discourse

in a form of social action that “contest[s] formal models of textuality (cf. Pratt 1977).” Instead, we

might think of discourse as “doing things with words and terms like ‘perform’, ‘function’, ‘act’,

‘action’, ‘moves’, ‘strategies’, ‘tactics’...figure large in such theories” (Freadman 45). What is done

with words is then mutually intelligible to a group who is able to decipher the act through agreed

upon rules and expectations that come with identifying the genre as its attendant features and

mannerisms. While Miller suggests that genres act based on recurrent social constructions, my work

suggests that genres may indeed act on constructions that might not recur (or be seen as recurring)

but that are ever-present in the consciousness of a people and that permeate various social situations

that occasion rhetorical and discursive response.

To this end, the concept of uptake is crucial to this study. Uptake, or what Anne Freadman

describes as that “bidirectional relation... between...a text and its interpretant, is where decisions are

made about how to “select, define and represent an object” for translation into a different context,

relying upon “‘memory’ and the adaptation of remembered contents to changed contexts”

(Freadman 41). Uptake, Freadman contends, brings two genres together and articulates the

bidirectional interaction between them. Uptake is what occurs when an individual or text accepts an

“invitation or request” from an antecedent to either “confirm its generic status by conforming itself

to this contrivance...or to not so confirm...generic status, which it may modify minimally, or even

utterly, by taking its object as some other kind” (40). Freadman’s theory of uptake has slight echoes

of Bakhtin, who notes that no utterance is ever really new, and can never enter the system of

language “without having traversed the long and complicated path of generic-stylistic testing and

modification” (65). What is particularly compelling about Freadman’s theorizing of uptake is her

36

acknowledgement of the power of the uptake text, and the one performing the uptake, to not

conform to a particular contrivance of a genre, and to “modify minimally, or even utterly, by taking

its object as some other kind” (40). There is a certain power that must be drawn upon to make

decisions concerning what to select, discard and co-opt in any act of generic boundary crossing.

These decisions motivate an uptake that at once “turns back, then turns forward” and are what

ultimately determines the outcome of that uptake (40).

The outcome of any uptake has just as much to do with the antecedent genres that are being

taken up, as texts might “bear the chromosomal imprint of ancestral genres” (Jamieson 406). In

“Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint” Jamieson offers this definition of antecedent genre:

“In an unprecedented rhetorical situation, a rhetor will draw on his past experience and on the

genres formed by others in response to similar situations.” The rhetorical forms of a genre’s

antecedents impact, to varying degrees, the properness of one’s response to the perceived exigence

(Bitzer’s term) in a new situation. It would seem then, antecedent knowledge influences the very

perception of recurrence and observes a certain resemblance to which a similar genre may be

applied. What we cannot assume, though, is seamless congruence between antecedent genres and

unprecedented situations. Indeed, it is quite problematic, Jamieson contends, when a rhetor’s

response is controlled by an “inappropriate antecedent genre” and its accompanying constraints,

coupled with the pressures of the rhetorical situation itself (414). Additionally, antecedent genres,

like uptake, relies on memory and recall at various junctures. Here, the ideology of genre is particularly

pertinent: antecedent genres always pay homage to certain values and disregard others.

Freadman’s notion of uptake lends itself to the analysis of poetry, a genre that is auguably a

mashup of uptakes. Jahan Ramazani argues in Poetry and its Others that poetry has a certain

ambivalence between itself and its “others” in genre. Because poetry is itself a porous genre, it

invites a revisioning of the term “genre” itself to be less limiting but also not so expansive that it

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becomes a parody of itself. The ambivalence in conceptualizing poetry begins from the very act of

defining it. Indeed, “the difficulty of crafting a precise definition of poetry that could include high-

art formalism and creole performance poetry, sonnets and collage poems, W. B. Yeats’s line ‘A

terrible beauty is born,’ Gertrude Stein’s ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’ and Louise Bennett’s

‘Jamaica oman cunny, sah!’ should not be underestimated” (Ramazani 1). Definitions like that which

the Oxford English Dictionary offers become vexed by what they inadvertently exclude, like “poems

that avoid patterning or intensity, free verse poems without mnemonic structures” and “poems

written not in “elevated diction” but in a vernacular” end up including, “such as sermons and

political speeches, jingles and James Joyce’s or Virginia Woolf’s novels,” Ramazani argues. The

writer’s description of the generic peculiarity of poetry acknowledges that “genres vary across time

and space, and because individual works both activate and press against the genre assumptions

brought to bear on them, critical use of the term ‘poetry,’ as of the terms ‘elegy,’ ‘sonnet,’ ‘ballad,’

‘sestina,’ ‘epigram,’ ‘ghazal,’ ‘pantoum,’ and the like, requires a pragmatic awareness both of the

power of genre terms and of their unavoidable overreach and imprecision” (4). Arguably, then,

poetry pushes generic boundaries with conventions that are “unfixed” (5):

A major reason for poetry’s ineluctable messiness as a concept is that genres are not

sealed off from one another, transmitted in isolation through the centuries, but

responsive, in A. K. Ramanujan’s words, “to previous and surrounding traditions;

they invert, subvert, and convert their neighbours”; “a whole tradition may invert,

negate, rework, and revalue another.” Poetry and other genres are “processes,”

“open systems,” in Ralph Cohen’s words, and “each genre is related to and defined

by others to which it is related.” Genres change as they absorb and resist other

genres. Hence, all genres are ineluctably intergeneric, and all genres are genera mixta .

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Poets are constantly enlarging...and narrowing... the intergeneric scope of what is

understood to be “poetry,” “lyric,” “sonnet,” “elegy,” “ballad,” and so forth (5).

What Ramazini here describes hints at what, in other literary words, is called “influence,”

“citation,” “allusion,” or, to sum it all up, “intertextuality.” Intertextuality is the term used to

summarize a text’s relation to other texts. According to Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, “In

literary theory, a text's quality of interdependence with all previous and future discourse. Literary

critic Julia Kristeva in the 1960s introduced the term to express the idea that every new literary text

is an intersection of texts--that it has absorbed and transformed previous works and that it will be

absorbed and transformed by future texts” (Merriam Webster, “Intertextuality”). The definition is

not entirely dissimilar from Rhetorical Genre Studies’s description of genre and its influences. As

Amy Devitt concedes in Writing Genres, “a genre constructs and is constructed by cultural values,

beliefs, and norms as well as by material culture. A genre constructs and is constructed by the set of

existing genres surrounding it, genres used and not used by fellow participants in the society. These

contexts of situation, culture and genres act simultaneously and interactively within a genre, and

genre sits at the nexus of such interactions…” (29).

Literary skeptics might look at uptake, then, and ask, “How is this different from

intertextuality?” and I must address this question to justify my use of uptake for this study. My

response is that the relationship between intertextuality and uptake is not one of distinction, per se,

but one of qualification. While intertextuality speaks to the interconnectedness of texts more

broadly, uptake offers me the specific theoretical lens through which to identify and define the kind

of relationship between an uptake text and its antecedent. I acknowledge that poetry, including the

poetry analyzed here, bears the imprint of various influences that inform them and to which they

allude. Intertextuality helps us look at the uptake text and what might influence it, but the

bidirectionality inherent in uptake helps us look at the antecedent texts that might invite uptake to

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begin with, but that may not control how they are taken up. Intertextuality is also usually apparent in

the text itself, while uptake may occur in the rhetorical moment, and there is power and choice in

such moments. This is particularly crucial to this study in writing resistance in the work of these

Caribbean poets whose work responds to hegemonic historiography that invites uptake, but not by

those who have chosen to perform uptake on them. This is what I find particularly compelling about

the cases I have chosen. The writers of history do not wish for their work to the taken up for the

purposes of resistance and revision, which is exactly what is accomplished through the actions of the

revisionist poetry that these poets write. And since poetry is implicitly porous as a genre, it gets to

also embody the generic qualities of the non-literary texts that precede them. Uptake is the

mechanism through which I can describe the kind of relationship such texts share, and therefore

offer intertextuality a less abstract model for defining connectedness among texts.

Importantly, uptake allows for the specificity of analysis of the finer elements implied in

intertextuality. In this sense, the two operate in more of a complementary than antagonist fashion.

Any instance of uptake involves memory, recall, choice and transfer. It involves knowing the genre

before knowing how to take it up (Freadman, “Anyone for Tennis,” 63). For one discursive act to

be translated across systems, temporal boundaries and contexts, there must exist sequential memory,

“for without that memory, the sequence of acts would be unintelligible as a sequence… Each

discursive act in the process marks its place in the sequence by recording the previous stage in a

narrative report or description, and only then does it perform an act: it turns back, then turns

forward” (Freadman, “Uptake,” 42). Further, uptake involves negotiation of generic boundaries, as

“translation of whatever kind, is the mediation of a boundary, not its obliteration… Uptake is the

local event of crossing a boundary” (43). And in that act of crossing a boundary, choices are made

about what to utilize and what to discard. Ideology is crucial to uptake, and intertextuality does not

necessarily account for this. Numerous scholars have since extended Freadman’s initial theorizing of

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uptake (Bazerman, Dryer, Kill, Poe) to talk about genre’s relations to each other in systems, sets and

repertoires and to emphasize the subjects involved in performing uptake. The concept has also been

applied more pointedly in studies like Kimberly K. Emmons’ “Uptake and the Biomedical Subject”

that traces the intergeneric translations and physical outcomes of the discourse surrounding

“depression as mental illness in the United States, and...argue[s] for a reanimation of uptake with

individual subjectivities at the center of theoretical consideration” (135).

Conversely, what my work brings to uptake and ultimately, what it helps Rhetorical Genre

Studies do is turn back to literary studies from which it deviated with the turn to the social in its

earlier years. It confirms that even for literary studies, situations are immaterial and constructed, and

that exigence need not be a problem requiring “fixing” through discourse, as Bitzer initially

contended, but, as Miller suggests, an agreed upon social need. And in the Caribbean, there are

arguably few greater needs more pertinent to Caribbean culture, society and collective consciousness

than the revision and construction our its history and identity. I find the unique case of Anglophone

Caribbean poetry as one that invites a revisionist theorization of genre as social action. While, as

Miller contends, non-literary genres might respond through typified actions to situations that are

perceived to recur, for literary genres, the matter is not so simple when looking at Caribbean poetry.

It begs the question: Do literary genres also respond to situations, and do those situations recur? I

argue that they do respond, but as the Caribbean literary examples here illustrate, the “situation” to

which a text may respond might not be one that recurs, but one that is omnipresent, pervasive and

continually at work in the everyday realities and consciousness of a people. Kenneth Burke’s

introductory argument in The Philosophy of Literary Form supports this point:

Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in

which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized

answers. For there is a difference in style or strategy, if one says “yes” in tonalities

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that imply “thank God” or in tonalities that imply “alas! So I should propose an

initial working distinction between “strategies” and “situations” whereby we think of

poetry… as the adopting of various strategies for the encompassing of situations.

These strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding

ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude toward them… The

situations are real; the strategies for handling them have public content; and in so far

as situations overlap from individual to individual, or from one historical period to

another, the strategies possess universal relevance (1).

Though he does not describe these phenomena using the term “social action,” what Burke

here expresses is an understanding of literary genres as embodying the social action that Rhetorical

Genre Studies scholars argue non-literary forms embody. They are social in the ways that they

address a social identifiable need among members of a social group or society at large, and they

“act” in ways that the group recognizes. The concrete and immaterial history of slavery and

colonialism, and its remnants in everyday Caribbean life presents a unique kind of exigence that

invites literary and artistic response. This exigence helps establish a kind of rhetorical situation that

traditional literary analytical topoi might not sufficiently account for, and that the “recurring” aspect

of Miller’s definition does not address. Still, I hope to show in the chapters that follow, the ways that

the revisionary actions these Caribbean poets accomplish help revise the notion of poetry as merely

what is aesthetically seen, heard and identified as poems on a page or performed out loud, but as

something else, perhaps histories in their own right.

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Chapter II: “Remembered Contents, Changed Contexts”: Revising History through Generic

Uptake in Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics

In this chapter, I consider how the work of one Caribbean female poet responds to

particular historical and social exigencies as her poetry coopts antecedent genres in ways that

transgress them. I examine Olive Senior’s uptake of colonial and neocolonial non-literary texts,

whose poetry ― specifically her 1994 collection Gardening in the Tropics ― questions colonial

ideologies at work in hegemonic textual representations of Caribbean history and geography. I also

include later in the chapter one selection from another collection by Senior, titled Over the Rooftops of

the World. I argue that Anne Freadman’s uptake, which I discuss at length in Chapter 1, helps

provide a theoretical framework through which to trace the intergeneric relations seen in Senior’s

work. Senior’s choices of what to select and discard reveal a deliberate act of resistance to colonial

ideology, taking on a different type of antecedent genre in each section of the collection and

subverting them accordingly.

Senior’s contribution to Caribbean literature has been significant, her work spanning over

three decades and a variety of genres, including “four collections of poetry, three collections of short

stories and at least four works of non-fiction as well as many shorter publications of various kinds in

a range of anthologies, journals and newspapers (Narain 1). That her poetry, much like the poetry of

many West Indian writers, challenges dominant ideologies is almost readily apparent. Indeed,

postcolonial analyses of her work reveal such impulses. Claire Westall (2017) notes that “while

Senior’s work stretches back to slavery, concentrates often on mid- to late twentieth-century rural

Jamaica, and sometimes moves into the present — into the imperial continuities evident in the

Caribbean today and the significance of U.S. influences — it also exhibits a set of core intellectual

interests within this historically large socioeconomic and cultural frame. These interests might be

best thought of as revolving around the emotional complexities felt, explored, and survived by those

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cast as “small” — whether children, adults, or islands — and caught within the everyday pressures

of (post)colonial existence” (2). Westall’s observations are true of the collection I analyze in this

chapter. Indeed, the body of work is steeped in the wisdom of rural Caribbean collective knowledge

of the flora and fauna of the land in all its complexities and transcends temporal boundaries to

construct her counter narrative of Caribbean history. Michael Bucknor’s work on Senior highlights

the ways in which the poet’s Afro-Caribbean poetics challenge monolithic representations of history

and expose past and current exploitations at the hands of colonial masters and neocolonialists. This

examination goes beyond the topoi traditionally deployed by postcolonial and literary scholarship

and seeks to incorporate Rhetorical Genre Studies approaches as a way of revealing how, through

toying specifically with genre, anti-colonial and feminist resistance is exacted. My argument here is

not that Senior challenges dominant ideologies handed down from colonizers and the genres through

which they have historically extended their hegemonic worldviews. This has been argued and

established. What I hope to offer here through Rhetorical Genre Studies framework, is how this

resistance is done through the bidirectional space of uptake.

In seeking to situate Senior’s work alongside the antecedent genres she takes up, I look first

to the afterword of Women Writing in the West Indies, 1804-1926, in which Evelyn O’Callaghan calls for

further investigation to be done into the parallels and continuities between early Caribbean and

contemporary Caribbean writing, as there are connections still to be made (177). I want to accept

O’Callaghan’s charge and forge a relationship between early Caribbean imperial texts and current

writing by female authors. I do not here establish parallels between female-authored early texts and

their contemporaries, as this is not my intervention in this moment, and because, as O’Callaghan

argues, such connections are not necessarily filiative in nature. Indeed, “the early [female] authors

can hardly be termed literary foremothers to current West Indian women writers” though “many

writers now are partially motivated by the task of deconstructing precisely those representations

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circulated the earlier works,” whose writing “might be seen as precursors to what postcolonial

theory calls “writing back to the canon” (177). Unlike her male counterparts, her uptake of colonial

antecedent genres involves constructing a counterhistory through a distinctly female poetics that

privileges the lived experiences of women and that is articulated through the unique idiolect of

Caribbean women.

Gardening in the Tropics comprises four sections — "Travellers' Tales," "Nature Studies,"

"Gardening in the Tropics," and "Mystery," — each containing about twelve poems. Each section

performs uptake of a different genre and serves as a kind of chronotope, taking the reader on a

different aspect of a temporal journey. The concrete poem “Gourd” prefaces the collection and can

be seen as a microcosmic illustration of the collection. Bearing the shape of the fleshy fruit, the

poem goes:

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The collection can be seen as a kind of literary gourd, a “humble took-took” that has much

to reveal beneath its “crusty exterior.” It tells stories of a time “before history” that has been

incorrectly written and that is now being revised through this poetic endeavor. For the genre of

poetry to take on such a challenge, Senior acknowledges through this calligram that, like a seemingly

insignificant genre, the lofty task of penning history can in fact be accomplished. A “took-took” in

Jamaican parlance refers to a small person or object, perceived as incapable of achieving much. The

use of “they say” in parentheses suggests a clarification of the official script of history, or rather, her

account of what precedes history, as written by the Europeans. Further, the recurrence of the

statement both verbatim and paraphrase (“it is said,” for instance) conveys a similar foregrounding

of the grapevine over the more traditional Eurocentric modes of relating the story of a people.

Senior becomes the “god-parent” of a revised history and implores the reader to question the

hegemonic histories held as truth (Senior 2005 46). She hints to the reader that gossip, hear-say and

word of mouth are valuable enough to make West Indian history, and that women’s gossip may in

fact become the official script. More than anything, Senior’s collection makes an intervention into

dominant narratives that is at once gendered, counterdiscursive and transgeneric.

This intervention begins with the first section entitled “Traveller’s Tales,” which throws into

disrepute the discovery tales of early travelers to the West Indies that report benign discovery and

ignore a viable past that existed before that which voyagers penned through imperialist eyes and

called “history.” By “traveller’s tales,” Senior calls up two main genres: the colonial travel tale and

the news report genre. The first poem in the collection, “Meditation on Yellow” performs uptake of

the genres of colonialism, including journal entries, letters and narrative accounts of the Indies made

by the Europeans who are purported to have “discovered” the West Indies. The poem “remembers”

the contents of from early Caribbean narratives that sought to write the history of the West Indies

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from the perspective of the colonizer. One text from such antecedent genres is the diary of

Christopher Columbus’s first voyage as transcribed by Bartolome de Las Casas in the 1530s:

THURSDAY 11 OCTOBER [1492]

I, he says, in order that they would be friendly to us...gave red caps, and glass beads

which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they

took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later

they came swimming to the ships' launches where we were and brought us parrots

and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them

to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In

sum, they took everything and gave of what they had willingly...my intention was not

to pass by any island of which I did not take possession, although if it is taken of

one, it may be said that it was taken of all (THURSDAY 11 OCTOBER [1492]).

The excerpt functions as a narrative description of colonial encounter. The narrator explains his

reasoning behind exchanging gifts with the natives, “in order that they would be friendly to us.” The

seeming generosity does not come as a gesture of goodwill, but one fueled by an ulterior and more

sinister motive. The natives, according to the narrator, are naive as they lack the discernment to see

the ill-will of who would become their colonizer. Instead, they “took so much pleasure and became

so much our friends that it was a marvel.” Though the exchange is unfair, “they took everything and

gave of what they had willingly.” Importantly, we get the perspective of one party only, so for the

reader as well, this is an uneven exchange.

Much like Columbus’ tale, Senior’s “Meditation on Yellow,” “Traveller’s Tales,” writes a

discovery tale of its own (11). The poem begins:

At three in the afternoon

You landed here at El Dorado

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(for heat engenders gold and

fires the brain)

Had I known I would have

brewed you up some yellow fever-grass

and arsenic

but we were peaceful then

child-like in the yellow dawn of our innocence

so in exchange for a string of islands

and two continents

you gave us a string of beads

and some hawk’s bells

The speaker here assumes the role of narrator and begins constructing her own version of

the colonial encounter, but from the perspective that the imperial narrative has left out. The tales

have similarities in the way they unfold: Senior’s tale begins with a time of day to mark the moment

the colonizer encounters the island’s inhabitants, and proceeds to describe the exchange of gifts,

albeit grossly unfair in nature, something the speaker now has the insight to recognize in this post-

imperial moment. In Columbus’s tale, the native is docile and passive, but in Senior’s s/he has

agency and takes control of the colonizer through the creative eye recording. She seizes subjectivity

from the first stanza, reminding the colonizer that he landed on turf that natives already owned,

throwing into disrepute the tale of discovery. “You landed here,” the speaker says, and the tone is

territorial and threatening, even as s/he outlines the actions s/he would have taken to poison the

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unwelcome guest. In uptake, the poet chooses to restore power to the natives whose voices have

been excised from the pages of history. Their resistance is palpable as they speak out against imperial

conquest:

Though I not troublesome

I have to say: look

I tired now

I give you the gold

I give you the land

I give you the breeze

I give you the beaches

I give you the yellow sand

I give you the golden crystals

And I reach to the stage were

(though I not impolite)

I have to say: lump it

Or leave it

I can’t give anymore (16)

Instead, the native is now the one with the ulterior motive, with untoward plans for the

colonizer who is foolish enough to take his host at face value: “Had I know I would have/ brewed

you up some yellow fever-grass/ and arsenic” (11). Later, s/he implies s/he wants the colonizer

dead:

I like to feel alive

to the possibilities of yellow

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lightning striking

perhaps as you sip tea

at three in the afternoon

a bit incontinent

despite your vast holdings

(though I was gratified to note

that despite the difference in our skins

our piss was exactly the same shade of yellow)

The section shows the poem as chronotope, in which the temporal aspects the poem are blurred.

We are not sure whether this is occurring in the speaker’s mind or whether s/he actually poisoned

the colonizer. S/he is speaking of possibilities but the switches to the past tense as if the deed had

already been committed. This is part of Senior’s characterization of the native Amerindians

resistance and cunning as they retaliate against the gluttony and viciousness of the colonizer.

Her poem speaks back to the imperial account of initial encounters between colonizer and

native. In this bidirectional space, she opts to reverse the roles and sacrifice political correctness on

the altar of equality. Her poem is uniquely the imperial narrative’s replica and exact opposite. While

the colonizer’s “intention was not to pass by any island of which I did not take possession,” Senior’s

speaker has “never wanted to possess things” (11). Such features are cues that the writer is

leveraging an antecedent genre for purposes that subvert the genre with which she begins as her

point of departure. But the relationship is a complicated one. Senior essentially relies on the features

of the imperialist genre to signal to her reader that she too is writing a history, but in this context,

the genre behaves in ways that deviate from the intended uses of the genre that precedes and

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informs it. What is being done here is more than simply penning a revisionist history of the

Caribbean. Rather, Senior is performing uptake of the imperial text and transforming it. But she

does not replicate the identifiable form of the diary; this is a poem. The diary bears the trappings of

the colonist’s first person point-of-view and a subjectivity that constructs the identity of its subject,

often erroneously. Like the imperialist text, though, the work is written from the first person point

of view, but in this context, from the point of view of the one colonized and marginalized in the

imperialist version of the tale. This allows the genre to achieve a more balanced perspective, even as

the personal accounts allow for insight into the more intimate effects of natural disaster that tend to

be missing from the historical accounts it takes up. Like Columbus’s diaries and histories such as

Bryan Edward’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, and Edward Long’s

History of Jamaica, the travellers’ tales in this collection are structured with roman numerals to

delineate sections of the text, organizing this “history.”

In like manner, the hurricane stories of 1903, 1944 and 1951 in the “Travellers’ Tales” tales

section are akin to the tales of colonizers who would detail the behavior of the seas and climate

during their travels, but more importantly, to news reports of these hurricanes at the time they

occurred. Below is one news story that covered the hurricane of 1903, reported in the Atlanta

Constitution dated August 11, 1903:

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52

The news report performs its rhetorical function of informing the public of the hurricane

that has devastated the country of Jamaica. From its very title, the reading audience expects it will be

provided with critical information concerning the hurricane’s trajectory, scale and impact. This is a

news report, after all, and it delivers accordingly. We know Senior is performing uptake of this genre

because the title serves as a generics label: “Hurricane Story, 1903.” Though this is a poem within a

poetry collection, it is functioning rhetorically as a news story, giving it a certain degree of

importance and urgency that come with the genre it takes up.4 Conjuring this antecedent genre from

the very title imposes constraints upon our own interpretation of the text, on the contents we expect

and on the order in which we expect them. Instead of a mere report on the weather, however, we

get in its place some very personal accounts of the lived experiences of Caribbean people during the

time of the disaster. Immediately following the title of her news story, there is no factual exposition

of the events of the hurricane. The speaker’s grandparents are given the spotlight:

Time and time again, Grandmother plucked

Bits of fowl coop from the penguin fence.

Grandfather drained his fields, shored up

Their lives against improvidence (19).

To stay true to the genre, Senior still includes aspects of an actual report, but the catastrophe is

productively woven in with the lifestyles of the speaker’s grandparents:

When the wind rose in ‘03, he opened his

tin trunk, took his good clothes out

and packed the corn in. Granny topped it

4 Senior does this as well for Hurricane Story, 1944”; “Hurricane Story, 1951”; “Hurricane Story, 1988” and “All Clear, 1928.”

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with cassava bammies and chaklata balls

with a nutmeg and cinnamon leaf tied

with string. After the storm, Granny

would extract milk from fallen coconuts (lines 11-17)

Together, they are securing food and making do with what they have, even as the storm rages on.

Indeed, grandfather had “learnt/ from his father and his father before him/ all the ways of

orchestrating disaster”, even while grandmother “hitched up her skirt and petticoats to unseemly

heights.../ stood waist deep in the water in her yard and searched/ the blue skies for a sign as

Noah’s wife did.” Together, they salvage what they can from the storm. Theirs is a story of

partnership, and one that relies on female wisdom and intuition for success. It is her ability to read

the sign “when her missing sensay fowl and favourite leghorn turned up safe” that marks the end of

the storm and the beginning of their life after. That intuition is impressed on the narrator, who now

spent time “watching that sensay fowl that strutting leghorn rooster, dying to be/ the first to see the

strange bird fated/ to be born out of that great storm” (21). This is a sign that the grandmother’s

legacy will likely live on through her grandchild. In all the hurricane stories, “characters” navigate

through this disaster by harnessing their creativity for communal benefit. Importantly, through

female speakers and the inclusion of formidable female figures in this collection, women’s voices

become the ones that challenge the dominant (and masculine) discourse on Caribbean history.

While imperial accounts, such as news reports, focus on the number of deaths or homes

destroyed, Senior offers a reworking in which the news report is voided of its "factual" contents and

filled with a process narrative of resilience, inventiveness and survival. By changing the expected

contents of the news report to the personal experiences of the layman, Senior makes the statement

that day-to-day survival strategies of Caribbean people is newsworthy and should not be missing

from the pages of our newspapers and from the visual accounts of the weather.

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Not only does Senior tamper with the colonial genre of the traveler’s tale and news report in

the first section, but she also turns the early fields of nature and taxonomy studies on their head in

the section “Nature Studies” and the eponymously titled “Gardening in the Tropics.” These titles

indicate that the writer is access antecedent genres of natural history that encompasses studies in

nature, flora and fauna that have helped people to “know” the land they inhabit. Beth Tobin’s work,

Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820, examines the rhetorical strategies

used in various genres that represent the tropics -- from natural history and travel writing to visual

and verbal genres such as georgic verse, the garden conversation piece, and botanical books such as

floras and hortuses. Tobin agrees with Mary Louise Pratt’s own observations on writing in natural

history “as a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence” (Pratt in Tobin 28) and

contends that travel writing and natural history are “triumphal and dominated by the trope of

“master-of-all-I-survey”, containing in “the array of visual and verbal texts that represent colonized

nature... an anxiety about the potential for failure of the colonial project. What was at stake in the

various representations of the tropics was ultimately the question, not necessarily the assertion, of

British mastery over the globe’s natural resources” (28).

The activity of uptake allows Senior to critique the discursive tendencies of a variety of

European genres that seem to mystify and aestheticize the tropics, all while “decontextualiz[ing]

tropical nature and eras[ing] the material conditions and cultural significance of the local production

of tropical commodities” (12). Ultimately, the ideology of imperialism, expansionism, and

Eurocentrism informed portrayals of the Caribbean as picturesque and idyllic, ripe for conquest and

exploitation is mobilized through genre. Tobin concurs, stating, “Genre played an important role in

shaping the expectations and desires of artists, local historians, sojourners, and colonial agents who

were confronted with the new and different tropical regions of the world” (30).

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Set against this kind of antecedent genre of knowledge production on natural history and

horticulture, then, the second and third sections of Senior’s collection seek to reconstitute genres

whose ideology has long driven the misrepresentation of tropical nature for imperial gain. “Nature

Studies” performs uptake of colonial histories like Sir Hans Sloane’s A Voyage To the Islands Madera,

Barbados, Nieves, S Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural history of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts,

Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles & of the last of those Islands. In Voyage to the Islands (1725), there is section

entitled devoted to the “Natural History of Jamaica” and begins with a general introduction aimed at

contextualizing and summarizing the author’s general take on the flora and fauna of the island.

Sloane writes:

The greatest Part of the Island of Jamaica was heretofore cover'd with

Woods ; the-Trees remaining are very tall, so that I could not come at the

Leaves, Flowers, or Fruit of many of them, which makes the following

Descriptions the less perfect. I was unwilling to divide Trees into those with

divided and not divided Bodies, because I found the Papaya, which generally

is accounted to have an undivided Body, to be sometimes divided, and so

some Palms. I therefore rather [choose] to range them as their Fruit led me,

or if I had not that, as their Flowers or Leaves (I).

Similarly, Senior’s section on nature studies begins with a general introduction, through the poem

“Plants.” Unlike Sloane whose endeavor to provide accurate descriptions of the island plants is

thwarted by his inability to master the formidable wooded terrain, the speaker in “Plants” is wise and

in tune with the nature of plants:

Plants are deceptive. You see them there

looking as if once rooted they know

their places; not like animals, like us

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always running around, leaving traces.

Yet from the way they breed (excuse me!)

and twine, from their exhibitionist and rather prolific nature, we must infer

a sinister not to say imperialistic

grand design (61).

Although Sloane’s text is arguably deemed a travel narrative, and Senior’s a poem, I would

argue that both collapse these generic labels and engage in the larger genre of a “history.” Both are

certainly responding to the exigence of knowledge making; both are seeking to pen the history of the

Caribbean through its plants. Senior’s work, which comes almost three hundred years later,

understands that to write (or rewrite) history, she must employ the features of the genre that make it

interpretable, mutually intelligible and therefore effective in constituting its own version of the

Caribbean’s natural history.

Formally, Senior’s “Nature Studies” section unfolds in a similar fashion as Sloane’s narrative.

In the latter, each plant or fruit is given its own chapter/section followed by descriptions of its

features and uses. In Senior’s work, each fruit or plant is also afforded its own poetic space, but her

speaker is not merely seeking to describe and inform, she is reclaiming horticultural epistemologies

and revising histories such as Sloane’s, which whitewash the complexities of Caribbean landscapes

and distort representation for their own agenda. In Senior’s “natural history”, the plants are the

colonizers, wreaking havoc on those who seek to control, know and name them. Imperialistic by

design, “armies of mangrove/ on the march, / roots in the air,” boast “clinging / tendrils anchoring

themselves everywhere?” What baffles the colonial historian is well known to Senior’s speaker and

with a cautionary tone in the poem, “Plants,” s/he tells us:

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The world is full of shoots bent on conquest,

Invasive seedlings seeking wide open spaces,

Materiel [sic] gathered for explosive dispersal

In capsules and seed spaces.

Maybe you haven’t quite taken in the

Colonizing ambitions of hitchhiking

Burrs on your sweater, surf-riding nuts

Bobbing on ocean, parachuting seeds and other

Airborne traffic dropping in. And what

About those special agents called flowers?

Dressed, perfumed, and made-up for romancing

Insects, bats, birds, bees, even you -

The beguiling character that Senior gives these plants lends Sloane’s masculinist, imperial narrative a

certain female presence that is missing. Arguably, the decidedly objective and clinical tone of

Sloane’s narrative serves as a well-known proxy for a male-driven colonial enterprise articulated

through a myriad of genres written in the period of slavery in the Caribbean. It constitutes what Pare

describes as “the way a thing is done” (59). For Bourdieu, genres “generate practices immediately

adjusted to [a social order] which are therefore perceived, by their author and also by others, as

‘right,’ ‘straight,’ ‘adroit,’ ‘adequate,’ without being in any way the product of obedience to an order

in the sense of an imperative, to a norm or to legal rules” (Language 143). Senior’s gendered uptake

of Sloane’s text challenges the “rightness” of such histories, and challenges the implied imperialist

reader to acknowledge the authority of that which he has sought to control:

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- don’t deny it, my dear, I’ve seen you

Sniff and exclaim. Believe me, Innocent,

That sweet fruit, that berry, is nothing

More than ovary, the instrument to seduce

You into scattering plant progeny. Part of

A vast cosmic program that once set

In motion cannot be undone though we

become plant food and earth wind down.

They’ll outlast us, they were always there

One step ahead of us: plants gone to seed,

Generating the original profligate,

Extravagant, reckless, improvident, weed (“Plants,” 63-64).

This poem sets the tone that will define the rest of this section on nature studies. Senior’s gendered

poetics of memory and embodiment -- a body-memory poetics, if you will -- and of the genre of

gossip as the official and credible source of historical knowledge, provides a “means by which

people who have been voiceless in the pages of history can now engage in dialogue with those

people who formerly had control over the word” (Olive Senior in Kwame Dawes 74). Importantly,

through female speakers and the inclusion of formidable female figures in this collection, women’s

voices become the ones that challenge the dominant (and masculine) discourse on Caribbean

history. This is evident in the poem “Anatto and Guinep,” a poem that rivals a subsection on the

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same anatto plant in Sloane’s narrative.5 Sloane writes:

Arnotto, or the Paste used in Dying or for other Purposes is made by steeping

the Seeds of this Tree in Water, till' the outward scarlet Colour dying upon their

[Surfaces] comes off and they are clear'd of it.: The Water so impregnated is

afterwards boil'd in several Coppers or Pots like the Juice of the Sugar-cane, till it

comes to be pretty thick, when 'tis put into Canvass with hot Alhes under it, till it

comes to the Consistence of Honey. 'Tis then [made] into Balls, such as are sent to

Europe. 'Tis chiefly made by the Spaniards, and is in Use by them not only for Dying

but Physic, all over the West-Indies. It was very much used by the Indians to paint

themselves [in] Times of War ..The Indians make Batons these Seeds, with which

they paint themselves, being mix'd with Gums, used both in Wars and Dances, it is

astringent and wholesome, it's chief Use is, not to discover the Blood when they are

wounded, being of the same Colour, and therefore it's thought to give [Courage]

(53).

The language here is descriptive and almost sterile in its tone. It outlines with dispassionate

distance the features and uses of the anatto plant (it is “used in Dying or for other Purposes”). He

also provides instructions for how the fruit is harnessed for its benefits, but uses the passive voice,

arguably, to avoid giving credit to the Indians who might have actually created the means for

extracting its benefits, as his own text implies. Sloane uses the passive voice to slyly give credit to the

Spaniards, noting anatto in its most useful form “tis chiefly made by the Spaniards” and used by

them, but “very much used by the Indians” who used it in warfare and medicine.

Senior’s account of anatto begins with what obtains today, and turns Sloane’s almost on its

head: “No one today regards anatto and guinep/ as anything special. / No one puts them on stamps

5 This is spelt “Arnatto” in Sloane’s narrative, but refers to the same plant.

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or / chooses them / for praise-songs or any kind/ of festival.” Here, in the space of uptake, Senior

chooses to update Sloane’s account. Her account says: “You thought anatto was so valuable and

useful, but I am here to tell you it is not.” The speaker reminisces of a time when the Arawak

Indians saw Anatto as indispensable. The speaker echoes its uses for war, but adds in an important

detail missed by Sloane:

Well, with the Arawaks and others who were

Here before us

it wasn't so. Nothing could happen without

anatto paste

or guinep stain to paint their bodies

with.

Guinep black to summon the rain clouds;

anatto red

For war. They also used both for things

In between like

Medicine and curing or birth or death,

Patterns in red

Or black were to them like dressing up

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For occasions.

They wore these colours on their bodies

As we wear clothes:

To protect themselves, to signify or

Engage in play,

As markers on the road of life or as

Flags signaling

In the most straightforward way:

Look at me:

I’m beautiful! (75)

The anatto therefore works in tandem with guinep, and not alone, As Sloane’s descriptions

imply, and more than its use for war, it is a key tools of an indigenous people’s defiant expression of

its beauty. Importantly, the speaker uses the active and not the passive voice as s/he attributes the

deeper knowledge of the anatto and its usefulness to the Arawaks: “they wore,” “they used,” they

affirmed their beauty, all with the help of anatto (“I’m beautiful!”) The genre of the colonial history,

as Sloane interprets it, leaves little room (if any at all) for celebrating the customs of the “Indians”

who inhabit the land imperialists want to control, and histories certainly do not begin, unfold or end

with the colonized subject declaring “I’m beautiful!” This is antithetical action on the part of the

poet. So Senior does conform to the genre in using some referential language in describing the use

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of anatto among the Indians in the Caribbean, but, overall, her descriptions accomplish different

ends. In this sense, Senior manages to makes an intervention that is at once counterdiscursive and

transgeneric. The poem ends:

So give a thought forgotten anatto to

to humble guinep and the memory

of the ol'people

who weren't the first to wear them

anyway: How do you think Moon got stained

black like that?

What do you think Sun used to redden its face? (77)

The speaker acknowledges that this bit of nature comes with a long memory, and this must

be valorized, even as the speaker attributes the countenance of the sun and moon to it.

Senior’s gendered contrivance of this genre stands in stark contrast to the one from which it

borrows. In imperial records, not only are women pushed to the margins of history and of

catastrophe, but, where they featured more vividly, they are reduced in their role as bearers of

children and the property of men. Narratives of conquest instead use gendered language to feminize

the spaces they colonize, not unlike their perceived mandate to plunder the bodies of women. Anne

McClintock makes this argument well in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial

Contest, asserting that the double-themed disavowing of women’s agency and the colonized, recurs

throughout colonial narratives, the latter being decidedly masculine and patriarchal endeavors. The

land, for instance, is likened to the virgin female body, ripe for conquest and plundering at the hands

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of the white imperial male. In Senior’s collection, the land -- and the women who labor over it --

have agency and resist conquest.

Throughout the collection, Senior does more than absorb the antecedent genre. She frames

her tales in ways that are akin to imperial history making, but that are not replete with the ideology

of conquest and imperialism. By co-opting and subverting these genres, Senior manages to empty

them of the kinds of discourse that validates domination, essentially reclaiming the genre as its own

entity, whose traces bear the memory of its “parent” genre. One approaches an imperialist text

anticipating a one-sided account of colonial encounters. Even in cases where those under subjection

speak, their words are often mediated by the primary voice driving the text that encases them. By

deviating from expectations such as this, Senior exercises her power as a writer and history-maker.

The final section, entitled “Mystery,” nicely concludes the counter narrative to hegemonic

European historiography, detailing instead the characters of “African Gods in the New World”

(113). In the sections that precede “Mystery,” Senior “revises” erroneous accounts of history. In this

section she constructs her own that she feels is missing from the pages of history. The term

“mystery” invokes the expectations that come with the mystery genre, known as a “genre of

literature whose stories focus on a mysterious crime, situation or circumstance that needs to be

solved. The term comes from the Latin mysterium, meaning ‘a secret thing’ [and] stories can be either

fictional or nonfictional, and can focus on both supernatural and non-supernatural topics”

(www.literaryterms.net). It is interesting, then, that the people’s history remains hidden. This section

“solves” the mystery by pointing them to their roots.

People in the Caribbean hear nothing of “Obatala: Father of Wisdom” and “Lord of High

Mountains” to whom the speaker prays to “take my aspirations beyond heights/ of great men/

reached / and kept” (116). They hear nothing of “Osanyin: God of Herbalism” (117) or “Ososi:

God of Hunting” (118). Importantly, this section introduces female goddesses like “Oya: Goddess

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of the Wind” (127) whose inhalation makes the “earth hold its breath” and whose exhalation makes

“cities tumble.” When she sighs, “we are born,” and when she whispers, “the Hallelujah Chorus

rises.” At her hiss, “lightening forks” and at her sneeze, “thunder rolls.” She belches and “oceans

churn” and at her chuckle, “Angel-trumpets bloom.” She yawns and “death rattles.” While the male

gods boast various powers to control hunting (118), to provide strength (120) and to influence

nature (121), this poem imbues the female goddess with the most threatening of qualities meant to

incite fear of the kind usually attributed to a male god:

Terrible Goddess,

no need to show your face.

As long as we breathe

We know you are there (127).

Though Oya is goddess of the wind, she ultimately controls life itself by having power over

the breath of life. Her revision and writing of history are gendered. Oya controls life, and “Yemoja:

Mother of Waters” gives it:

Mother of origins, guardian

of passages;

generator of new life in flood

waters, orgasm,

birth waters, baptism:

Summon your children

haul the rain down

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white water: blue water

The circle comes round

Always something

cooking in your pot

Always something

blueing in your vat

Always something

growing in your belly

Always something

moving on the waters (131)

Here the imagery of the water and belly is reminiscent of the process of being pregnant and

bringing forth life. “Cooking in your pot” is similar to the saying “bun in the oven” and the growing

belly is life progressing from conception to new life. Though she is just the mother of waters, she is

the mother of origins, before which nothing exists. Senior takes the power from the European male

God as well as the African male gods and gives it to the women. This is her most potent correction

to history, her most forceful remaking of it.

In a later collection, entitled Over the Rooftops of the World, published over a decade after

Gardening in the Tropics, Senior continues to use uptake in interesting ways. In this collection, she

extends the projects she begins in Gardening, by writing her own descriptions of tropical birds that

counter descriptions in colonial narratives. In the same collection, the poem, “Rejected Text for a

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Tourist Brochure” levies an unbridled critique of the degeneration effected by modernization and

capitalism.:

Rejected Text For A Tourist Brochure

"I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair"

--M.G. Smith, "Jamaica" (1938)

1

Come see my land

Come see my land

before the particles of busy fires ascend;

before the rivers descend underground;

before coffee plantations

grind the mountains into dust; before

the coral dies; before the beaches

disappear

Come see my land

Come see my land

And know

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That she was fair.

2

Up here, the mountains are still clear.

After three weeks, I heard a solitaire.

Down there, the mountains are clear-cut

marl pits. Truckers steal sand from beaches,

from riverbeds, to build another ganja palace,

another shopping centre, another hotel

(My shares in cement are soaring). The rivers, angry,

are sliding underground, leaving pure rockstone

and hungry belly.

3

No Problem, Mon. Come.

Will be one hell of a beach party.

No rain. No cover. No need to bring

your bathing suit, your umbrella.

Come walk with me in the latest stylee:

rockstone and dry gully. Come for the Final

Closing Down Sale. Take for a song

the Last Black Coral; the Last Green Turtle;

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the last Blue Swallow-tail (preserved behind glass).

Come walk the last mile to see the Last Manatee

the Last Coney, the Last Alligator, the Last Iguana Smile.

Oh, them gone already? No Problem, Mon.

Come. Look the film here.

Reggae soundtrack and all. Come see

my land. Come see my land and know, A-oh,

that she was fair.

Prefaced by an excerpt from M.G.Smith’s work “Jamaica” (1938), Senior offers a counter

genre to the kind of aestheticist discourse through which ‘her land’ is verbally framed in tourism

campaigns. Indeed, the poem engages with the vision of the Caribbean as paradise lost, attributing

this loss categorically to the insatiable appetite of neo-colonists for whom capital is paramount.

Senior sets up a contrast between the past Edenic landscape, the present degenerated state and the

future of barrenness that the persona foresees. The epochal progression from past to future is

contrapuntally paralleled with the steady regression of the state, a taut technique made effective by

Seniors deployment of imagery, tone, repetition, language, diction and irony. She performs uptake of

a genre meant to entice, and infuses it with a harsh truth that tourist do not get from tourist

brochures. Brito and Praas (2014) note in “Tourist Brochures: Linking Message Strategies, Tactics

and Brand Destination Attributes” that in the tourism industry, “brochures are a distinctive

advertising medium. They have multifunctional purposes, oriented to persuading or conveying a

more general interest focus on a specific market segment profile. But they all share a common trait:

to be a practical tool in helping tourists answer place-specific questions such as what to see and why,

and how to get there” (124). By offering an alternative and arguably more realistic depiction of the

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country’s state, the poem situates itself in the category of the rejected, foregrounding the irony that

falsity sells in the face of the decline effected by a destructive regime with which the people have

been somewhat complicit. Importantly, her critique is executed primarily through generic uptake of

an antecedent text with which her reader identifies, and that she may now manipulate to challenge.

The poem is structurally divided into three sections, each of which offers different

extrapolations of the broader thematic preoccupation of the poem. This structure, though void of

the usual imagery associated with a tourist brochure, follows the primary executional strategies of a

tourist brochure: it has a clear message, a convincing manner of conveying that message, and is

visually appealing. That the uptake begins with the genre of a brochure and ends with a poem means

that in the bidirectional space of uptake, Senior had to make choices about what to use and what to

discard. Visually, the compartmentalization allows for the tracking of the degenerative process and

sharpens the contrast that Senior wishes to construct between the past and present. The first section

implores one, with plaintive urgency, to “come see my land” prior to its destruction. Like the parent

text, it speaks to the purity of the land but “before the particles ascend; before the rivers descend

underground;” before the mountains are ground into dust (Lines 3-6) -- something a tourist

brochure would not dare mention. The second section addresses the present state of the land as

being viewed from the “clear” mountains. The persona observes the physical and moral ills that are

taking place “down there”, but from which even the “up here” is not exempt. Already, the mountain

bird has become rare, taking three weeks to give a sound. Currently, “the rivers…are sliding

underground.” The final section fast tracks into the future of complete extinction and sterility,

standing in sharp contrast to the pristine at the beginning.

This contrast between the pristine past and the heinousness of the present and future is

made more poignant through repetition. Senior employs repetition within sections to intensify the

emotional effect of the dilemma with which she is concerned. The repetition of this “Come see my

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land”, for instance, works in achieving multiple ends. It carries with it the cadences of supplication,

entreating one to view the land in its virginal state, in a way that foreshadows the impending doom

of mechanization. On another level, it is reminiscent of Jamaican idiomatic response to calamity,

that is to draw attention in melodramatic style. There is also a hint of command, which the emphasis

of repetition lends. The repetition of this phrase is also another way that Senior accomplishes the

persuasive tone of a tourist brochure, albeit for subversive ends. The tourist brochure genre is

replete with implorations to “come see” the intended destination, and Senior’s brochure leverages

that generic expectation to lure and entice the reader to come see her land, only the land is an anti-

idyllic landscape ruined by the neocolonial enterprise of tourism. Her uptake of the genre resists the

stereotypical representations of once colonized tourist destination, but relies on the persuasive

elements of the genre to accomplish counterdiscursive action.

The repetition of “another” in stanza four mimics the insatiable appetite behind exploitative

procedures. The slant and end rhymes which precede this instance of repetition, help lend the latter

intrusive qualities, structurally conveying the thematic concern with excess mechanical impingement

on the landscape. The last few lines of the third stanza rhyme with the first few in the fourth and are

aurally pleasing to the ear. By the time we get to “clear-cut” the musicality, and rhythm have been

literally cut to give way to the descriptions of repeated moral and physical decay.

Repetition, as a rhetorical device in the poem, has incremental elements. In the final stanza,

repetition is used in sarcasm and mockery, and carries the cadences of Jamaican vernacular in the

tourist culture. In lashing out at the damage done, Senior inverts the popular tourist slogan “No

problem mon” and uses successive “no’s to list a series of nothings: “No rain. No cover… No need

to bring your umbrella” (Lines 23-24), hence the loss of vital elements in her environment. The

repetition of “Last” foregrounds the bitter finality of extinction and the capitalization lends these

organisms status of which they have been robbed. Interestingly, “Last” here puns on “lost” as the

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Jamaican Creole speaker pronounces ‘lost’ with a prolonged ‘a’ sound (“laas”) as in “last.” Again, the

emptiness of loss is being conveyed with the able help of repetition as well. Finally, the repetition of

“Come” in this stanza does not bear the plaintive entreaty of the first. Instead, repeated “Come”

suggest threat, somewhat daring, demanding that the guilty confront the crime he has committed.

The stanzas have unifying elements embedded within them that aid in rendering the work of

genre critique. Central to a tourist brochure is its use of imagery. Tourist brochures usually have very

distinct design features that grab the attention of the reader and encourages them to want to visit the

destination. Um and Crompton (1999) argue that image is a crucial element in determining choice

of destination among potential tourists who often have very little knowledge of a destination.

Moriarty (1985) concurs, noting that visual elements are especially compelling when representing

destinations. Senior creates the image with the use of words and her use of imagery intensifies the

ordeal and makes the final state of degeneration more poignant. Diction sharpens the vividness and

ultimate effect of the images painted. The persona speaks of “busy fires”, the grinding of mountains;

clear-cut marl pits and angry rivers. The recurring image of the rivers alongside the images of rocks

and dryness allows one to single handedly trace the decline of the land in the face of architectural

development. First, we are implored to see the land “before rivers descend underground” (line 4);

then the truckers steal sand from river beds while the “rivers, angry, are sliding underground, leaving

pure rockstone and hungry belly” (lines 18-20) and finally all that remain are “rockstone and dry

gully” (line 26). Similarly the single appearance of the solitaire in the second section precedes the

final extinction of the “Blue Swallow-tail (preserved behind glass)” (line 29), even as the warning

that the coral may die foreshadows the “Last Black Coral” (line 28). The inauthentic images of the

glass case and film- “reggae soundtrack and all"- are the salient symbols of the natural giving way to

the unreal.

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The tone of the persona is not static throughout the poem, but fluctuates towards a kind of

cataclysmic critique of the state of the land exploited. Shifts in tone occur in conjunction with the

shift from formal to colloquial language. The first section is written in the Acrolectal variety and

coincides with the almost romantic image that is referenced. By the second segment the tone shifts

to one of clear-eyed lucidity expressed through the Mesolect, even as the realization of degradation

becomes more stark. Tone climaxes in the final stanza with the subversive use of the vernacular

diction. The “latest stylee”, “Closing Down Sale” and soundtrack all spell destruction and loss.

Laced with accusation and bitterness, this exhortatory tone signals the full realization of reality and

the persona’s disapproval.

Ultimately, uptake is about genres relations to each other but no uptake is guaranteed.

Uptakes can travel along many paths, and Senior’s is a postcolonial path for the action of giving

voice to the colonized. There is an overall consciousness in this poem, of its role of recovery. The

poem offers a lucid account of the exploitation of the landscape even while hinting at the moral

degeneration that has accompanied the latter. Senior ends emphatically with the Jamaican Creole as a

way of giving back authority to the local, hence the affirmative “a-oh” in the penultimate line. The

foregrounding of the people’s mother tongue is the ultimate step in rendering this text rejected.

Tourist brochures are usually written in standard English as the latter is known and accepted as the

language of business and the lingua franca of the world. English helps the message of the brochure

achieve mutual intelligibility regardless of cultural background. Creole is usually only included in

places where "local color" in added through a word or phrase. Here Creole is fused with the images

of business (hotels, etc.) and the "no problem" sensibility is used ironically to provide local

commentary on environmental destruction. Indeed, Senior’s entire alternative account considerably

disrupts the ideal façade that the genre of the tourist brochure attempt to create, especially in its

incredulous assertion that the capital-driven tourist industry has helped effect destruction.

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In the end, Senior’s uptake of colonial texts at once offers a kind of resistance hitherto

unattended to in Caribbean studies scholarship. In reworking news reports, traveler's tales, and

histories, Senior's resistance spans across time, invoking the chronotypic stance of each genre, and

putting to use, however unintentionally, early Caribbean colonial texts previously dismissed primarily

for their support of slavery and imperialism. Her work makes a good argument for the power of

uptake to reclaim authority from an antecedent texts that assumes authority in the first place, and

further, that a parent text cannot always predict or control how uptake occurs. It helps cement “the

significance of genre in cultural practice” and beckons for a theory of genre that gives credence to

the “issue of memory,” specifically genre’s long and complex memories, one that not only considers

the “intertextual, and intergeneric memories” (Freadman, “Uptake” 40) informing any instance of

uptake, but the ideology that at once imbricates memory, recall and uptake. There is a move from

genre that is contained that has been refilled with a postcolonial perspective to the genre also as

social action. It acts to revise history and provide alternative accounts that are recognizable and

believable and that people in Caribbean society can come to rely on, or at the very least, use to

question inherited accounts of history. It makes a place for the updates that Caribbean poetry as the

genre that people live (“CXC Introduction”) and cements the necessity of the work.

The collection (along with the selection from her other collection analyzed herein)

demonstrates that ideology is almost always at work in genre, and uptake may be wielded for

resistance to them. For the Caribbean poet, every recall contains layers of a brutal history and the

inherited European traditions that invariably influence representation. Where the antecedent texts

belong to a tradition of Eurocentric hegemony, and are aligned with a system used to oppress

generations, uptake is anything but synchronic, even as uptake becomes the avenue through which

particular generic elements are strategically borrowed, but equally interrogated, adulterated and

transgressed. It is an uptake whose generic beginnings and convoluted memories must constantly be

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negotiated in determining the intended trajectory for that uptake. Further, where “historical

accounts of slavery and its aftermath tended, until the mid1980s, to take the male subject as

normative” and later sociological and anthropological studies take the “privileged the black male as

the archetypal figure of resistance (Narain 3).” This chapter illustrated the ways Senior manages to

accomplish both through uptake that is at once resistant and gendered. In the chapter that follows,

we see the way a male poet performs uptake in ways that differ from the female poet. Kei Miller’s

uptake of cartographic genres shows a tension between adapting the mannerisms of the colonial

genre for subversive ends and adhering to the patriarchal bent that imbues them.

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CHAPTER III: Mapping Generic Immapancy: Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

And the ras says

it's all a Babylon conspiracy

de bloodclawt6 immappancy of dis world—

maps which throughout time have

gripped like girdles

to make his people smaller than

they were.

- “vi” (21)

Once again drawing on the theory of uptake, this chapter provides a close reading of Kei

Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. As my analysis demonstrates, Senior and Miller

perform uptake in differing ways that at once invoke and repeal Western standardized forms of the

same class or name, ultimately deploying a strategy that helps to “void the genre it invoked”

(Freadman 47). Specifically, Kei Miller’s 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,

takes on the genre set of geographical writing and the objectivity and accuracy that these genres

purport. In this section, then, my endeavor is two-fold: I argue that the colonial enterprise employed

a variety of genres that have a distinct hegemonic agenda; and second, that Miller’s uptake of these

genres — specifically the cartography genre implicit in histories, travel narratives, and maps —

harnesses the assumptions and ways of knowing in a manner that invalidates and subverts them.

Miller’s challenge to the colonial genre set relies on a transfer of the genres contents into changed

6 Jamaican curse word

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contexts. Ultimately, the collection’ demonstrates "knowledge of what to take up, how, and when,

including how to execute uptakes strategically and when to resist expected uptakes" (Bawarshi 200).

The primary genre Miller takes on is the map as it is created within a travel narrative, and it

might be useful to establish some of the conventions of that genre that constitute the repertoire of

generic choices Miller has at his disposal in performing uptake. While there it is generally agreed that

travel narratives have few indisputable generic markers, there are still certain conventions, that when

considered together, help one to categorize a text as a travel narrative. In their study English Travel

Narratives in the Eighteenth Century: Exploring Genres, Vivia, Bradford and Murray Goldsmith (2002)

agree that “travel narratives are more capable of hindering analysis than they are able to further it”

(101). While this might be a generalization too broad and totalizing for my purposes here, it does

sum up a particular perspective of these early Caribbean genres. Generally, though, travel narratives

are written from the first person point of view, “though a random cross-section indicates that the

third person is often used” (101). They typically employ narrative prose but can also incorporate

poetry and illustrations such as etchings and maps. Structurally, too, the genre of the travel narrative

might unfold as a chronological record of travels, but must not be “reduced to a mere record of

notes taken daily” as these are then “reworked and written up differently” (102). Most claim

objectivity despite being written from a clearly subjective point of view, especially in the case of the

narratives emerging out of the Caribbean during the period of slavery. Importantly, “The travel

narrative is a construct in discourse which shapes the bare elements of experience, establishes units,

assembles collections and adapts them to an appropriate syntax” and “determines the point of

departure, the point of arrival, the meanders and appropriate detours. It promotes notes into the

record of what is noteworthy. It inserts within a plot those experiences that admittedly derive from

the undifferentiated mass of real matter but which then undergo a transmutation as they shift from

the shapeless accumulation of notes to the constitution of a literary journey. The itinerary is

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organized by this retrospective bearing. ” (Vivia et al 11). Indeed, what Vivia et al identify as features

of the travel narrative may be observed in many texts that bear this generic label. An examination of

many of these narratives reveal such features but also others that complicate such clearly defined

generic prescriptions.

Interestingly, in the case of these early Caribbean imperial genres, the lines between travel

narrative/ travelogue, maps and histories were not always clearly defined. Distinctions between the

genres employed by imperialists are more murky. In my work with the Early Caribbean Digital

Archive, one of the most challenging aspects of writing metadata about early Caribbean texts was

deciding what “genre” they were. “Histories” often read like narratives of travel and the latter often

became cemented, inadvertently or strategically, as the history of the Caribbean, and both involved

mapping and naming of spaces they colonized. Even fiction sometimes became conflated with

“true” travel narratives and helped write the history and geographical identity of the Caribbean. In

fact, many of these narratives touted as “true histories” and/or have been very influential in writing

the history of western expansionism. Suvir Kaul asserts that “narratives of travel were often sources

of prose fiction. Travelers who described the routes they took, the places they visited and the people

they encountered, were not embarrassed about embellishing their experiences, and the combination

of verifiable facts and more imaginative fiction that results defined the genre all throughout the early

modern period” (64). Indeed, Kaul further notes, “the bulk of such description was crafted from

what can only be understood as an early colonial perspective, that is, even before European traders

and colonists were able to establish their dominance over trade routes or territories, their accounts

of non-European cultural and social formations worked hard to suggest European superiority” (7).

Kaul is not alone in this assertion. Scholars like Kamau Brathwaite, Anne McClintock and Evelyn

O’Callaghan also highlight the ways colonial accounts did more than outline experiences, but helped

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cement a particular worldview of the Caribbean and its people and the latent superiority of Europe

and its tastes.

In examining Miller’s uptake of colonial texts, it is important to look at the ideological

underpinnings to better understand how Miller co-opts these in his collection to accomplish the

action of mapping space and identity in the Caribbean. From official records to histories and

travelogues, colonial texts reveal genres whose purpose is defined as producing a record of social,

economic and geographical realities, but whose social action justifies and forwards the mandate of

imperialism, particularly in delineating space and territory. In such genres, early Caribbean narratives

have largely been written from the condescending and hegemonic point of view of the colonizer.

Moreover, the very geography of the colonized is rewritten. Indeed, “the explorer who textually or

cartographically represented landscapes generated an increment of geographic knowledge at the

same time as producing a prospectus and resource for the extension of European power through

space” (Cormack in Sluyter 1997). Thus, both conquest and the act of transcribing it served to

reinforce European power. Percy Adams (1983) agrees with Cormack’s assertion, pointing out that

from as early as the time when British expansionism gained momentum, various narrative accounts

of explorers permeated Europe and were influential to “every realm of thought, to every significant

business, political, religious, academic or creative enterprise” (Adams in Kaul 62). Ultimately, these

explorers engage in an enterprise in which imagined geographies are constructed; these

constructions deliberately and inadvertently engage in shaping the collective imagination to view

geographies in particular ways, ultimately normalizing empire and history that is written from

hegemonic perspectives, and we see this reflected in a variety of literary and non-literary texts.

In examining the scope and limits of West Indian historiography in her work on historical

thought and literary representation in the West Indies, Nana Wilson Tahoe writes of one such

colonial text, Edward Long’s seminal work on Jamaican history, that it is as a “failure of historical

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interpretation.” Its “Eurocentric perspective and framework is...the most characteristic aspect of

West Indian historiography in the eighteenth century,” and a limitation, Wilson-Tahoe argues. As

Tim Watson highlights in his introduction to the Oxford Bibliography on early literature of the

British Caribbean, Caribbean literature in English before 1850 “for the most part, were written by

Creole (Caribbean-born or resident) whites who either took slavery for granted or positively

endorsed it.” Indeed, “no European writer, however critical of the status quo, could avoid, at that

time, expressing a hierarchy which positioned themselves ‘above’... and others ‘below’... It was the

discourse providing the culturally available means of ordering and representing their thought”

(Haggis in O’Callaghan 13). Genres therefore did not stand on their own as apolitical entities

designed to transmit information. They exerted stern imperial force, Europe as the epicenter of taste

and epistemology, normalized enslavement and justified Western patriarchal expansionism and

discovery.

This background is critical in unpacking the nature of Kei Miller’s generic dissent in The

Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. His uptake is more closely aligned with the hegemonic social

action of imperialist genres, enacting a kind of generic resistance that parallels the discursive

character of the antecedent colonial texts, particularly in their patriarchal bent. Unlike Senior, who

infuses her uptake of male-authored imperial histories with gendered accounts of history, Miller’s

counter discourse accomplishes the more latent actions of imperialist genres by failing to alter them

enough in his uptake of them. Specifically, Miller complies with the patriarchal bent of these genres

in a challenge that is operationalized in a manner that differentiates it considerably from Senior.

The title of the collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion is the first generic cue

the reader is given that a genre is being taken up here. This is a project in charting spaces, naming

them and mapping the lay of the land, so to speak. This is the action the imperial travel narrative

accomplishes. But the inclusion of “Zion” presents the first challenge to this colonially charged

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uptake. The colonial mindset is one that assumes it can take charge of space, cast its colonial gaze

upon it, and then chart it accordingly. That it assumes it can in fact map a way to Zion is ludicrous,

if not futile, and the poet uses the voice of the Rastafarian to enact this challenge as the collection

progresses.

The juxtaposition of the Rastafarian speaker with the colonial cartographer is significant. For

one, he is a constant challenge to the cartographer from the beginning, something notably absent

from other travel narratives in which the point of view of the colonizer drives the narrative, and he

is often male. This is one defining feature of these early genres. The Rastafari movement began out

of an oppressive regime and the need to respond to that regime through staunch oppositional

ideology. “Babylon” was initially the white oppressor, but now transcends race to mean any

oppressive hegemonic construct. Consequently, the very meaning of oppression for the Rastafari

changes from simply black oppression by the white imperial hand, but may now be seen in a broader

light as anything that binds or suppresses one’s true identity and expression. This is therefore, at the

heart of it, a universal issue, a global quest for truth. The majority of the world’s population have, at

some point, been colonized or oppressed. Rastafari essentially seeks to tap into one’s true self and

point of origin. It acknowledges that the blacks have been forcibly removed from Africa- the place

where all blacks and all civilization is said to have been born- an turned into a diasporic people

scattered all over the Americas and assuming either a non-African identity or double-consciousness.

Rastafari rebels against this and seeks to put people in their rightful space with none being superior

along the lines of race especially. This opposition to displacement and venture to replenish and set

right the heinous wrongs is a quest for truth in its purest sense. It fuels the belief in repatriation to

“Zion”, used synonymously with Africa and Ethiopia as the place of God and the cradle of

civilization is a fundamental belief of the Rastafari. This doctrine is also translated in varying ways by

different peoples, generally signifies a return to one’s roots.

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Zion is symbolic of a kind of utopia for the black man who was once colonized. “When

Rastafari sing and speak of Zion, Ethiopia is meant…[it] is where God dwells (Chevannes 31).”

Kitzinger in her article “Protest and Mysticism: The Rastafari Cult of Jamaica” quotes a statement

she received from a roneo broadsheet regarding the sanctity of Ethiopia. It states: “We interpret

Heaven this way. The Heaven which is the uppermost part of man where God dwelleth in wisdom

and understanding, declares the glory of God is the firmament, and the moon and the stars- Heaven

to we is Africa (240).” Used synonymously with “Ethiopia” but coming to mean much more, it

represents an untouched space of resistance, stemming from Ethiopia’s resistance to European

colonization. Indeed, they escaped conquest “at the cost of desperate resistance and bloodshed

(H.I.M 1963).”

The concept of Zion emphasizes empowering the black race, by obeying the call to come

home to place where “their race originated…where it may be lifted to its highest plane of usefulness

and honour (H.I.M).” Repatriation is crucial to this concept. The Rastafari suggest that one must be

of a certain mind to truly repatriate there and experience this high plane of usefulness and honor.

Implicit in repatriation as thought is the idea that in returning to Zion, one succeeds in reversing the

trade triangle that set into effect the mass exploitation of displaced Blacks (Garrison 79) .

The cartographer cannot map his way to Zion, and Miller uses his uptake of genre of the

travel narrative with elements of mapmaking to reveal the futility of this endeavor. The collection is

prefaced with two quotations: One from well-known Jamaican Creole writer, Louise Bennett, and

the other, from a Rastafari chant:

She hope dem caution worl-map

Fi stop draw Jamaica small

For de lickle speck cyaan show

We independantness at all!

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Moresomever we must tell map dat

We don’t like we position –

Please kindly tek we out a sea

An draw we in de ocean7

– Louise Bennett

Any any where Rastafari trod

Any any where Rastafari trod

Any any where Rastafari trod

Babylon a follow

Only one place him cannot trod

Only one place him cannot trod

Only one place him cannot trod Holy Mount Zion

– Rastafari chant

Zion is used strategically and symbolically in this “travel narrative” to thwart the plan of the

cartographer and challenge his entire system of knowledge that takes its authority for granted.

Framing the collection as its own narrative, a choice allowed for by uptake, allows Miller to leverage

the expectations a reader has about approaching this exercise in charting a course of sorts. Tur to

form, Miller manipulates the action the genre is expected to accomplish, but to subversive ends. To

do this, Miller uses similar framing, internal structure and ideological thrust as imperial antecedent

7 She hopes they caution world map/ to stop drawing Jamaica small / for the little speck cannot show/ our independence at all! Moreover we must tell map that / we don’t like our position - / please kindly take us out of the sea / and draw us in the ocean.

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genres and then infuses these with the parallel and oppositional figure of the Rasta man, a tactic I

argue complicates the project of resistance Miller perhaps intended this to be.

We know the author is performing uptake from the very title, as previously discussed, but

also from the way the collection is arranged. The table of contents is visually complicit with the way

many colonial travel narratives were arranged, as seen in this excerpt from the table of contents:

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(Miller 7)

This is not just the table of contents for a poetry collection. The arrangement of its contents

and the names given to poems are visually complicit with the genre it invokes. The table of contents

Bryan Edward’s The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. By

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Bryan Edwards, Esq. F.R.S. S.A. In three volumes bears a similar organization using roman

numerals as “titles”, a feature Miller employs:

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

BOOK IV.

PRESENT INHABITANTS.

CHAP. I.

Account of the Inhabitants of the federal Islands…

. — Emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland. — Predomi-

nant character of the European ... Creoles or Natives. —

……………………………………………………….

CHAP. II.

Of Negroes in a fate of Slavery. — Preliminary Observations.--^

Origin of the Slave Trade. — Portuguese Settlements on the African coast…

………………………………………………………

CHAP. III.

CONTENT

CHAP. III. ….

C H A P. IV.

Means of obtaining Slaves in Africa….

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C H A P. V.

…..Detail of the management of negroes on

the fugar plantation.— Mode of maintaining them. — Houses, clothing,

and medical care.—Abuses (Edwards iii-viii)

A table of contents is supposed to render comprehensible the contents of what follow. Miller’s

contents, like the collection includes voids and uses parallelism in unexpected ways. Still, seeing the

contents helps the reader know what is to come and this narrative includes gaps and cannot always

be accounted for. This impulse to co-opt the colonial genre for the purposes of remapping the

colonized world carries throughout the collection. Cartography scholars agree that the enterprise of

mapmaking emerges most poignantly in the early modern culture out of a desire to see the world as

a whole, to comprehend it, and to “organize and capture its variety in a single, harmonious frame”

(Ramachandran 4). This is a key characteristic of this antecedent genre. From the start of Miller’s

collection, this desire is interrogated through the voice of the rasta man offering an alternative to the

western cartographic way. But the interrogation is done alongside seeming adaptations of the

epistemological modus operandi of the colonial cartographer. “The Shrug of Jah”, the second poem

in the collection, begins:

In the long ago beginning

the world was unmapped

It was nothing really —

Just a shrug of Jah

something he hadn’t thought all the way through

Our world was neither here nor there

with him

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and neither here nor there

with itself.

A world

which did not know

if it would stay

or go. (10)

Here, the persona’s explanation of the ontological origins of the word is in keeping with the way the

colonizing eye sees it prior to mapping its geographies into one harmonious, palatable frame.

“Establishing the Metre” follows suit, noting how “two men set out to find the sprawling measure

of the earth,” walking the “curve from Rodez to Barcelona,/ and Barcelona to Dunkirk. Such a

Pilgrimage!” In an attempt to establish a metric system, these two men — French cartographers

Pierre Mechain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre — “dared to stretch uncalibrated measuring tapes”

between France and Spain, “and foot/ by weary foot, they found a rhythm/ the measure that exists

in everything” (11).

Miller does not merely rework the travelogue framework. He also takes up and takes on

generic qualities of imperial discourse in general. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in particular, is

often interpreted as an imperialist text and model of a colonial travelogue in the ways it seems to

normalize conquest and civilizing endeavors. Central to this normalizing is the main character’s

experience on the island, which he maps in detail as the narrative progresses, from arrival to

civilizing conquest. Susan Smith-Marais argues in “Converted Spaces, Contained Places: Robinson

Crusoe’s Monologic World” that Crusoe’s appropriation of and adaptation to island space “emulates

processes of colonization” even as his narrative actively engages in the formation of hegemonic

geographical identity (103). Crusoe’s diction in describing the island, coupled with his proclivity for

naming things and people, is in large part how he assigns his identity. In his journal entry dated

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September 30, 1659, for example, Crusoe describes the island as “dismal and unfortunate,” and

names it “the Island of Despair” (52). He recounts his frustration with volatile weather – “dreadful

hurricanes”, “terrible storms” and earthquakes- common to Caribbean islands (74). As Crusoe

begins to “naturalize” and make a home for himself on the island, using its fecundity to his

advantage, his descriptions of the space become more favorable as well. Ultimately, Defoe’s novel is

instrumental in writing the myth of pre-colonized land as empty and volatile- the colonizer shapes

and maps it for productive utility.

Crusoe’s accounts form part of the generic array of travel narratives, bearing striking

similarity to those of explorers like Christopher Columbus, for example, whose journals of his

discoveries in the Americas details island experiences like inclement weather and savagery: “I

thought it well to write an account of all the voyage very punctually, noting from day to day all that I

should do and that should happen, as will be seen further on. Also…I resolved to describe each

night what passed in the day, and to note each day how I navigated” (Columbus in Markham 17).

Likewise, the elements of exploration, discovery and territoriality observed in Crusoe’s narrative are

laced with inadvertent hegemonic worldviews concerning the spaces they “discover”. With little

justification, and with his own admission that he cannot unequivocally say where he is, Crusoe

concludes from his observations that he “must be near the Spanish dominions; and perhaps…all

inhabited by savages” (80). Crusoe’s island is largely uninhabited, however, so he paints a picture

primarily of landscape, until later when Friday surfaces and begins adding human presence needed to

“complete” his colony.

The cartographer in Miller’s collection is his own Crusoe seeking to map a way to a territory

that really cannot be mapped. In “Unsettled,” Miller relies on the hegemonic representations of

spaces as unknown and unsettled before offering a counter narrative:

So consider an unsettled island

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Inside — the unflattened and unsugared

fields; inside – a tegareg

sprawl of roots and canopies,

inside – the tall sentries of blood

wood and yoke-wood and sweet-wood,

of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard

they will one day splinter cutlasses,

will one day swing low the carcasses

of slaves; inside – a crawling

brawl of vines, unseemly

flowers that blossom from their spines;

inside – the leh-guh orchids and labrishing

hibiscuses that throw raucous

syllables at crows whose heads are red

as annattos; inside – malarial mosquitoes

that rise from stagnant ponds;

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inside – a green humidity thick as mud;

inside – the stinging spurge, the night-

shades, the Madame Fates;

inside – spiders, gnats and bees,

wasps and lice and fleas; inside –

the dengue, the hookworm, the heat

and botheration; unchecked macka

sharp as crucifixion. This is no paradise –

not yet – not this unfriendly, untamed island –

this unsanitised, unstructured island –

this unmannered, unmeasured island;

this island: unwritten, unsettled, unmapped (14).

The use of numerous words with the prefix “un” connotes a defining of space not by what it bears,

but by what it lacks. According to the Oxford dictionary, the prefix “un” is added to verbs to denote

“the reversal or cancellation of an action or state; deprivation, separation, or reduction to a lesser

state.” It bears a certain negative connotation: If the territory is unmapped, it suggests that it

somehow lacks mapping, and needs it; if it is unsanitized, it needs to be sanitized, and so on. The

notion of the unsettled, unstructured island is common to travel narratives and histories of the early

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Caribbean. Establishing a space as wild, “unmannered” and “unmeasured” justifies conquest and

subsequent exploitation. One such text, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, though arguably a work of fiction,

conforms to this key feature of histories of its time. Like Behn’s Oroonoko, Miller’s descriptions are

lush. In speaking of the colony of Surinam, already inhabited no less, the narrator describes the

territory almost as if it were yet to be discovered:

'Tis a continent whose vast extent was never yet known, and may contain more

noble earth than all the universe beside; for, they say, it reaches from east to west

one way as far as China, and another to Peru: it affords all things both for beauty and

use; 'tis there eternal spring, always the very months of April, May, and June; the

shades are perpetual, the trees bearing at once all degrees of leaves and fruit, from

blooming buds to ripe autumn: groves of oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, nutmegs,

and noble aromatics continually bearing their fragrancies (48-49).

The narrator’s diction here is almost nauseating in its adoration of Surinam. The lushness of the

flora and fauna are conveyed through descriptions like “trees bearing”, “blooming buds” and

“groves of oranges.” Not be overlooked, however, are the terms of longevity used as part and parcel

of this narrative of beauty and fecundity. Things here are not just beautiful, but they seem to be

inalienably endowed with qualities of aesthetics and use. The spring is “eternal”; the shades,

“perpetual” and the trees “bear at once all degrees of leaves and fruit” (49). So vast is this territory

that the “all the universe” cannot measure up to it. ‘Tis the continent that seemingly keeps on giving.

The narrator continues:

The trees appearing all like nosegays adorned with flowers of different kinds; some

are all white, some purple, some scarlet, some blue, some yellow; bearing at the same

time ripe fruit, and blooming young, or producing every day new. The very wood of

all these trees has an intrinsic value above common timber; for they are, when cut, of

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different colors, glorious to behold, and bear a price considerable, to inlay withal.

Besides this, they yield rich balm and gums; so that we make our candles of such an

aromatic substance as does not only give a sufficient light, but, as they burn, they

cast their perfumes all about. Cedar is the common firing, and all the houses are built

with it. The very meat we eat, when set on the table, if it be native, I mean of the

country, perfumes the whole room…”(49).

Trees produce ripe fruit every day, and the wood not only holds much monetary value, but is useful

for a variety of other purposes. The narrator notes that it would be impossible to “to give an

account of all the diverse wonderful and strange things that country affords, and which we took a

very great delight to go in search of…” (49).

Miller’s descriptions are equally as rich, if not overdone in this poem. The roots and

canopies are described as “tegareg” in nature, meaning completely wild, uncouth and lacking class or

civility of any kind. The orchids are “leh-guh” and the hibiscuses labrish. They are vulgar and loose,

much like the macka that cannot be tamed, “unchecked” in its sharpness. It is the cartographer who

must now come and give a place an identity through claiming, naming and mapping; Indeed, in the

poem “i. in which the cartographer explains himself,” the cartographer acknowledges his job as

imagining “the widening / of the unfamiliar and also/ the widening ache of it;” His job is “to

untangle the tangled, / to unworry the concerned , / to guide you out from cul-de-sacs/ into which

you may have been wrongly turned” (16). The arrogant certainty with which the cartographer

articulates his role in mapping the world is not unlike the bravado displayed but known

cartographers in literary and geographical history:

iii.

The cartographer says

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no –

What I do is science. I show

the earth as it is, without bias.

I never fall in love. I never get involved

with the muddy affairs of land.

Too much passion unsteadies the hand.

I aim to show the full

of a place in just a glance (18).

So what does Miller here achieve by first adhering to the conventions of this genre?

According to Amy Devitt, “the writer moving among locations carries along a set of writing

experiences, including the genres acquired in those locations. That set of acquired genres, that genre

repertoire, serves as a resource for the writer when encountering an unfamiliar genre” (220).

Considering the genre knowledge that precedes and informs the transfer helps us understand what

aspects are being taken up and what is being done away. Identifying both gives us a sense of the

nature of the relationship between the parent text and the uptake text, and the nature of resistance

of the latter, if any. Here, what begins as philosophically in line with the colonizer’s worldview when

making a map begins to be punctuated with corrective notes and, eventually, defiance. This is part

and parcel of Miller’s uptake. He must first play by the rules before he can challenge them. The

frame of the map, of mapmaking, and essentially worldmaking, provides a useful starting point for

establishing an alternative mapping exercise and world view. As Ramachandran notes in The

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Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, “for much of European history, worldmaking

had remained tied to the idea of creation, an original, divine act that had prescribed an absolute

order to all things” (7).

Perhaps the most poignant feature of the uptake Kei Miller performs in this collection is

practice of place naming that the cartographer undertakes throughout his attempt to map his way to

Zion. Historians B.W. Higman and B.J. Hudson’s in-depth study of Jamaican place names tells a

story of a genre “rooted in colonialism” and doing more than simply naming and categorizing

according to landscape features (6). On the contrary,

Generic terms or labels are used to classify landscape features and to place them in a

hierarchy… Thus river is by itself a generic term but not a place name, whereas Black

River is a place name containing both the generic classifier river and the specific

descriptive black. Similarly, a settlement might be labelled a town or village, as in

Browns town and Central Village. Jamaica developed a refined system of

classification for types of rural enterprises, including estate, pen, and mountain, for

example, which had precise meanings. A looser labelling reflected notions of status,

as when a settlement or enterprise included in its name terms such as hull, castle or

hut. All of these generic terms functioned as labels, serving to locate specific places

and place names within an accepted hierarchy of classes (6).

The sources for Jamaican Place Names, maps and historical documents from the time of slavery to the

twenty-first century compiled in a database of over 20,000 names, reveals that the planter class was

primarily responsible for naming places in Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean at large.

Naming, much like uptake, involves making decisions about what to highlight and what to

leave out; what is worthy of naming and may be named after. The cartographer engages in the

practice of naming in a similar fashion as the plantation master. Throughout the collection,

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numerous poems are titled “Place Name” and proceed to define that place by features greater than

the physical and topographical lay of the land, but by more latent elements that might not be

apparent to the imperial eye. Titles like “Place Name: Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come”; “Place Name:

Swamp”;“Place Name: Wait-A-Bit”;“Place Name: Shotover”;“Place Name: Corn Puss Gap”;“Place

Name: Half Way Tree”; “Place Name: Bloody Bay”; “Place Name: Flog Man”; “Place Name: Try

See”; and “Place Name: Edinburg Castle” activate the imperial genre of naming and elevates the

genre of poem to something more of a cartographic survey. More than allowing the reader to

identify the genre by way of its form and content, the place-name poems perform the social action

of giving character to spatiality form and giving meaning to them.

In the figure below, taken from Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, the author — a British

colonist and historian —outlines various place names given to parts of the country during the time

of Spanish rule. Long notes that since the names are of Spanish, Portuguese and Morrish origin, it is

“difficult to explain the meaning of several.” Still he takes the liberty of compiling a glossary of these

place names for those desirous of tracing the names retained “as a memorial that this island was

once in the possession of Spaniards.”

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Arguably, Long’s compilation of this glossary is a kind of uptake of place-naming practiced

by the Spanish who virtually wiped out the native population of Amerindians who owned and

named the land initially. Higman and Hudson note that while many colonized regions of the world

retained indigenous place names, in Jamaica “few indigenous names and only a sprinkling of Spanish

ones survived, though several of the survivors have a prominent place in the landscape” (23). It is

clear, Higman and Hudson note, that with economic and political power, came the “domination of

land and people, and the power to give names to places” (21). Long mentions at the start of his

description of the island that the name of the island itself, Jamaica, is supposed a derivative of a

name given by one European discoverer “St. Jago” but possibly an “Indian extraction” from a name

given by the “Aboriginal Indian discoverers of this island.” Yet in his uptake, history privileges the

names the Spanish left behind. Miller writes resistance through his uptake of such a history as

Long’s. In naming places, he disrupts what might otherwise be a seamless hegemonic narrative

passed down from an inherited, distorted history. Instead, he “translates material from one side to

the other” (Freadman) and overwrites its expected contents. One case in point is the poem “Place

Name: Shotover”:

Shotover – so named because our people, little acquainted

with French, could make no sense of Château Vert. And

talk truth, Mr Backra, dat was too stoosh a name for

your house. ‘Green and fresh,’ you said. No – it did just

mildew and old; a house which, like yourself, has since

returned to the fold of Portland’s earth. But oh Mr

Backra, if through the muffle of mud you should hear us

traipsing on your ground, one of us asking – how it come

about, the name? you will discover that when victims live

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long enough they get their say in history: Well sah (an

old man answers) , in dem dere backra days, bucky-master had

was to catch back the runaway slaves, so him would draw for

him long musket and buss gunshot over dere, and gunshot over

dere, shot dissa fly pashie! pashie! all bout de place. And so

comes we get de name (41).

Instead of explaining the meaning of the name, which is essentially a corrupted version of

the French phrase Château Vert, the speaker addresses the colonial master in a tone that is daring and

instructive, reminding him that “when victims live long enough they get their say in history.” In the

end, the victim of slavery reclaims the right to name and uses the language of dissent (Creole) to

explain how “so comes we get de name” (41). In this poem, both the framing and contents

challenge the genre of naming in the practice of charting territories that have been colonized.

In “Place Name: Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come,” the speaker translates the name “In plain

english: do not enter without invitation.” He then retells the story of Goldilocks and the Three

Bears, with Goldilocks as a “rude pickney...nuff-gyal” whose intrusion into the bears’ place of

residence amounts to her exercising “her colonial right to porridge, to beds/ and to chairs,” even as

she “proceeded to bruck up things.” Goldilocks, the speaker suggests, is foolish. Had she “pennied

the secret names of places” she would have known that “Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come” means

“you’re not welcome” (without invitation) or otherwise “come in as you please — just know that

this ground, these bushes, these trees observe you with suspicion many centuries deep” (26). Here

the rhetorical move of naming is leveraged to chide the colonizer for now knowing “secret” and true

meaning of the place name, a meaning that flies in the face of the colonizer and his tendency to

intrude and plunder. The use of the generic label helps Miller to accomplish this dual action.

Higman and Hudson argue that the “pattern of generic labelling reveals a strong tradition of local

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naming practice. Historically, the pattern observed in Jamaican place-name elements paralleled a

similar redefining of English terms and words in other areas of life” (25). He elaborates on the place

name to challenge the colonizer and his place in that space.

In other poems, he challenges the arbitrary nature of generic labelling. “Swam” exemplifies

this:

Place Name

Swamp , backbush of Moneague, forgotten place until 2003.

‘Swamp’ it was called, though nothing in that brambled

landscape bore proof of name – nothing to say moisture,

or damp that could set in furniture, no bones of alligators

had been found. They cleared the ground and gridded it

out for houses. One ram goat was duly killed, blood

sprinkled as just-in-case blessing – as if them never know

what Quashie did done know, that old magic measures

don’t always work here. Today a Ferris wheel spins on

the bank of a come-back pond. Boat rides are offered to

visitors. Tour guides twang their Hs across wide water:

Welcome ya’ll to Swamp – backbush hof Moneague. Forgotten

place huntil 2003. Now, we har sailing hover Helizabeth

Havenue. Now hacross Martin Boulevard; ladies and

gentlemen, below hus in this deep is yards and yards hof grief,

plenty plots of soak-up dreams.

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Though the voice of the cartographer drives many of the poems, the place-name items take

on the tone of historian, and are the spaces through which an alternative history of place is written.

The roads bear the song of of slaves and maroons in “Roads”:

The secret roads and slaving roads,

then dirging roads, maroonings roads,

Our people sing:

Alligator dah walk on road

Yes, alligator dah walk on road

The cow roads and cobbled roads,

the estate roads and backbush roads.

Our people sing:

Go dung a Manuel Road

Fi go bruck rock stone

The marl roads and bauxite roads,

the causeway roads and Chinese roads.

Our people sing:

Right tru right tru de rocky road

Hear Charlie Marley call you

The press-along, the soon-be-done,

the not-an-easy, the mighty-long –

so many roads we trod upon

and every mile, another song.

The naming of roads usually depends on their “density and complexity. Many significant routes are

never given names but are known simply as road or railway to a particular settlement, indicating that

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these are the most efficient routes to travel” (Higman and Hudson 223). In this poem, Miller imbues

an otherwise basic functional entity with “secret” character. The “slaving roads...and marooning

roads” bear the memories of slaves being transported to and fro the “estate roads” during the period

of slavery, and later, the “marl roads and bauxite roads/ the causeway roads and Chinese roads”

speak to an age of development from Chinese investment in Jamaican roadways that would also

have its consequences. As the types of roads are being named, “our people sing” folk and negro

spiritual songs that have helped them survive slavery.

The challenge to the cartographer’s system of knowledge really begins with the poem

“What the Mapmaker Ought to Know”:

On this island things fidget

Even history.

The landscape does not sit

Willingly

As if behind an easel

Holding pose

Waiting on

Someone

To pencil

Its lines, compose

Its best features

Or unruly contours.

Landmarks shift,

Become unfixed

By earthquake

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By landslide

By utter spite.

Whole places will slip

Out from your grip (14).

The doubt expressed in the poem rings true of the uncertainty that pervaded the processes of

mapmaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ayesha Ramachandran points out in The

Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Europe:

When in 1651 Andre Mavell mused, “Tis not, what once it was, the world,” he was

speaking for at least two generations of Europeans who had experienced at first

hand the effects of an expanding world, transformed by the discovery of a new

continent on the other side of the Atlantic and of new planetary bodies circulating in

space. No longer the divinely ordered terrain familiar to classical antiquity or the

Middle Ages, “the world” now seemed, in Marvell’s words, “but a rude heap

together hurled.” With a mixture of elegiac solemnity and wonder, the poet

articulates one of the most profound intellectual shifts of early modern Europe: the

definition of “the world” as a new category encompassing a previously unknown

intellectual expanse and holding new imaginative power. For the poet and his

contemporaries, the crumbling of old systems of explanation had left the concept

vague and undefined (5).”

With the cartographer, there is a movement from the bold, confident, patriarchal machismo of the

explorer charting the course of the world through the map, to a certain insecurity about whether he

can actually map the world accurately, eventually having to ask for directions. In the poem “i. in

which the cartographer explains himself” the speaker outlines his job as that requires him “to

imagine the widening/ of the unfamiliar and also/ the widening ache of it; / to anticipate the ironic

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question: how did we find /ourselves here? My job is/ to untangle the tangled,/ to unworry the

concerned,/ to guide you out from cul-de-sacs/ into which you may have wrongly turned (16). In

this sense, the uptake that Miller performs also carries with it the believable anxieties of the

antecedent genre. Anne McClintock (1995) notes in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the

Colonial Contest:

The colonial map vividly embodies the contradictions of colonial discourse. Map-

making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the

map both preceded and legitimized the conquest of territory. The map is a

technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in pure,

scientific form, operating under the guise of scientific exactitude and promising to

retrieve and reproduce nature exactly as it is. As such, it is also a technology of

possession, promising that those with the capacity to make such perfect

representations must also have the right of territorial control. Yet the edges and

blank spaces of colonial maps are typically marked with vivid reminders of the failure

of knowledge and hence the tenuousness of possession. The failure of European

knowledge appears in the margins and gaps of these maps (27-28).

That the challenge to the cartographer’s imperial way of seeing the world is undertaken by

another man is noteworthy. Unlike Senior’s collection, Miller’s uptake of colonial texts challenges

imperial bravado but perpetuates patriarchy nonetheless. The Rasta man challenges the cartographer

as he tries to map his way to Zion, as in the poem “ii. in which the rastaman disagrees”:

The rastaman has another reasoning.

He says - now that man’s job is never straight-

forward or easy. Him work is to make thin and crushable

all that is big and as real as ourselves; it is to make flat

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All that is high and rolling; is to make invisible and wutliss

Plenty things that poor people cyaa do without - like board

Houses, and the corner shop from which Miss Katie

sell her famous peanut porridge. And then again

The mapmaker’s work is to make visible

All them things that shoulda never exist in the first place

Like conquest of pirates, like borders,

Like the viral spread of governments (17)

Their banter is an epistemological pissing contest, man to man with competing systems of

knowledge. The business of worldmaking is a “man’s job” and it is never easy. Unlike Senior whose

challenge amounts to a gendered uptake of imperial genre, Miller’s uptakes keep the patriarchal

thrust of the imperial genre more or less in tact. In “xx. in which the cartographer tells off the

rastaman,” the cartographer acknowledges that they both are cartographers:

The cartographer sucks his teeth

and says – every language, even yours,

is a partial map of this world – it is

the man who never learnt the word

‘scrupe’ – sound of silk or chiffon moving

against a floor – such a man would not know

how to listen for the scrupe of his bride’s dress.

And how much life is land to which

we have no access? How much

have we not seen or felt or heard

because there was no word

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for it – at least no word we knew?

We speak to navigate ourselves

away from dark corners and we become,

each one of us, cartographers.

The challenge the Rastaman poses mirrors that which he takes issue with. Undoubtedly, mapping

the new world was represented as a masculine endeavor. As Anne McClintock further argues in

mapping the unknown world was a militant, male endeavor that saw the “predominantly male agon

of empire” manifesting itself through “men orient[ing] themselves in space, as agents of power and

agents of knowledge” (24). And the Rastaman — the voice of resistance to the colonizing

cartographer — is no different, despite initially “dismiss[ing] too easily the cartographic view” (vi).

He gets the opportunity to guide the cartographer in “x. in which the cartographer asks for

directions” and is happy to send him :

Sometimes the cartographer gets frustrated when he asks an I-

formant how to get to such and such a place, and the I-formant

might say something like —

Awrite, you know the big white house at the bottom of

Clover Hill with all the windows dem board up, and

with a high shingle roof that look almost like a church?

Yes, the cartographer says.

And in front the house you always see a ole woman,

only three teeth in her mouth, and she out there selling

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pepper shrimp in a school chair with a umbrella tie to it.

And beside her she always have two mongrel dog and

one of them is white and the nedda one is brown?

Yes, I know exactly where you mean, the cartographer says.

And in the yard there is a big guinnep tree that hang

right out to the road, so school pickney always stop

there to buy shrimp and eat free guinnep?

Yes, yes, the cartographer insists. I know it.

Good, says the I-formant. Cause you mustn' go there.

xx

Here the rastaman is the gatekeeper of knowledge and takes charge in extracting information

from the cartographer, only to opt not to assist him in the end. The rastaman serves as the symbolic

roadblock to the colonizing cartographic endeavor and he sabotages the effort with a sense of

entitlement and a touch of humor.

Ultimately, this exercise in mapping and naming proves futile, as the cartographer cannot

essentially map his way to Zion. “Where the cartographer assumes that he can approach his work

without bias, the Rastaman expounds the inextricability of Jamaican history, place and people, an

argument that the cartographer eventually concedes” (Etter 12). By framing the collection

deceptively as a cartographic genre, Miller is able to wield the power of generic expectations to

accomplish generic dissent first through the challenge of the Rastaman, and finally through the non-

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arrival to a place at which once cannot ever arrive, “a place that does not / keep still at the ends of

paths. Know this, / that lions wi trod don’t naturally worry about reaching Zion. In time/ is Zion

that reach to the lions (69). The inclusion of the Rastaman introduces a whole system of rebellion

that helps in the project of resistance. Miller manages to thwart the project of imperial mapping by

proving the futility therein. In doing so, he elevates an authentically Caribbean system of knowledge,

Rastafarianism, over imperial epistemology. In the chapter that follows, “Language and Generic

Resistance in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren,” nation language is elevated through

uptake and leveraged for resistance through genre.

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Chapter IV: Language and Generic Resistance in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi

Revalueshanary Fren.

Norman Manley, in his capacity as one of the leaders of Jamaica’s national movement, and

former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:

We can take everything that English education has to offer us, but ultimately we

must reject the domination of her influence, because we are not English… nor

should we ever want to be. Instead we must dig deep into our own consciousness

and accept and reject only those things of which we from our superior knowledge of

our own cultural needs must be the best judges. It takes political action to stir a

country into a state of national consciousness… This political awakening… goes

hand in hand with cultural growth, and this is the change that we are seeing taking

place. Around us and before our very eyes are stirrings of the first shoots of a deeply

felt ‘national’ artistic and intellectual life. Colonial education had induced in many

Jamaicans— more than ninety per cent of us black and descended from Africans

brought to the New World as slaves— a tendency to undervalue African elements in

Jamaican culture (109).

I begin with this statement from 1939 because this impetus to reject what is “English” would

pervade national consciousness in the years leading to independence and after in many Caribbean

countries. Genre, as a situated, complex dynamic of sociohistorical variables and attending

accordingly to them, would reflect this impetus as well. Arguably, though, no genre that employed

Standard English could manage to fully accomplish this rejection. In fact, the genre of poetry in the

Anglophone Caribbean has been so steeped in Englishness that to create poetry that employs Creole

is itself an act of resistance. While many argue that dub poetry is its own genre, a kind of

performance poetry, if you will, I want to argue that it is an uptake of the poetry genre as inherited

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from colonial masters. In performing uptake of “poetry,” dub poets select language and “riddim” as

key elements in levying resistance, not only to oppressive systems and politics, but to the oppressive

antecedent genre that it takes up.

As Bill Ashcroft writes in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures,

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The

imperial education system installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language

as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities... Language becomes the

medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the

medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become

established.

Understood this way, genre becomes a vehicle for mobilizing oppression and linguistic control. This

chapter examines how language works to mobilize genre and the attending social action that is being

performed through genre that deploys Creole, as opposed to Standard English, as a means of

resistance. I also examine Johnson’s uptake of the elegy genre as a more pointed and deliberate kind

of generic dissent achieved squarely through uptake, with the help of language.

My argument about language is informed in part by Anis Bawarshi’s application of the

theory of translingualism that “challenges monolingual ideology's dichotomies between norm and

difference, convention and creativity, which want us to imagine a vertical, hierarchical understanding

of agency in which difference, transgression, and creativity are associated with more agency,

cognitive ability, and language fluency, while norm and convention are associated with less agency,

cognitive ability, and language fluency” (Bawarshi, “Beyond Genre Fixation” 245). Linton Kwesi

Johnson writes and performs in Jamaican Creole/ Patois, a tactic I argue mobilizes the poetry genre

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into social action.8 In my previous chapter I argue that the bi-directional space of uptake allows for a

specific kind of resistance through genre. Here I introduce the variable of language and its

relationship to social action enacted through uptake of antecedent genres in English.

The introduction to the Caribbean section of the Oxford Handbook on World Englishes

begins “this chapter offers an areal linguistic profile of the English varieties spoken in the

Anglophone Caribbean” (389). That the English-speaking Caribbean does not, in fact, speak

English, but varieties of it, at best, should be enough to nullify the bent of the category altogether.

Countries like Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica and the Bahamas have linguistic profiles so complex that

a continuum theory is perhaps what comes closest to illustrating how language operates in these

Anglophone territories, and even then, the Acrolectal or more formal “English” end of the

continuum continues to display clear differences from British English. The native, mother tongue--

what Brathwaite calls “Nation language” and what Carolyn Cooper call “Noise”-- of those who

actually inhabit the “English-speaking” Caribbean has proved hard to tame. Indeed, the sheer irony,

then, of this introductory statement is part of my contention here and is one has been taken up, in

various ways by numerous scholars like Kamau Brathwaite, Carolyn Cooper, Michael Bucknor and

Velma Pollard whose different critiques of the Anglophone literary canon have helped us highlight

the limitations therein. But while much has been done by way of including works that employ the

sound and native tongue of Caribbean peoples, I want to look at the way language advances genre

on its own, and how it complicates uptake. As Anis Bawarshi further contends “thinking about

genre from a translingual perspective draws our attention to uptake as… a site of transaction where

8 Linton Kwesi Johnson is a Jamaican poet based in the United Kingdom. That he has not lived in the Caribbean but is still able to contribute significantly to Caribbean artistic expression from the diaspora is noteworthy. It suggests the distinction between one who is authentically “Jamaican” or not “Jamaican” enough by virtue of locale does not serve the purposes of this project.

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memory, language and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and

negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts” (245).

I want to suggest that the literary genres that have largely defined the Anglophone Caribbean

literary canon privilege Standard English and the written word, a privileging I argue is misguided.

Further, this privileging is tantamount to what Chalice Randazzo calls genre exclusion, and further

necessitates exploration of what is silenced or pushed to the margins of canonized forms of a genre.

Dub poetry, penned and performed by practitioners like Linton Kwesi, Jean Binta Breeze and

Mutabaruka, employs a kind of transgressive poetics of breaking the master’s English tongue upon

which they also rely as a means of communication, and infusing the master’s medium with its

perceived oral opposite.

Mutabaruka’s insightful quip that "the language we talk, we can't write; and the language we

write, we can't talk," (Mutabaruka in Cooper) ably encapsulates the fundamental dilemma of the

Anglophone Caribbean learner. Indeed, there is ongoing tension between the language Anglophone

Caribbean nationals speak from birth (Creole) and the language in which they learn to read and

write: English. With “English” as the official language of Anglophone territories, standardized

written varieties of English have pride of place, and are expected to be seamlessly assimilated and

articulated in uniformed ways by its users, although the non-standard, oral Creole/ Patois is well

known to be the first language of most. Still, learning standard English as it was intended to be used

continues to prove challenging, and there remains no consensus on what a successful English-

speaking profile looks like in the Caribbean (Shields 1989; Pollard 1994, Devonish, Brathwaite).

Yet, there is another issue at work here, and that is the implicit bias for the written over the

spoken word, and the assumption that real poetry is also what is printed on a page. During the time

of slavery, the written word held this mystifying power to liberate and to humanize the slave, and

they were forbidden from accessing it by English slave masters who served as the gatekeepers of

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literacy and who used it to erase identities and write hegemonic histories into existence. Jeffery

Gunn, in his work on literacy and the humanizing project in Olauda Equiano’s narratives, notes “the

division between oral culture and literate culture” in Equiano’s first encounter with a book. He

relates: I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had great curiosity to talk to

books, as I thought they did; […] I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put

my ear to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when

I found it remained silent. (Equiano 1793, p.69) The written word is a foreign concept for Equiano,

Gunn notes, as he is still working within the framework of an oral culture.

So there is a way in which print has aligned with English, and orality with Creole with

African oral cultures in the Anglophone Caribbean. Indeed, the English of the colonizer neither

speaks nor answers. It is silent and salient. So they are either spoken of oppositionally or as part of a

narrative of progress where literacy is seen as emerging from the oral or pre-literate. Central to the

argument for what prevents Jamaican Creole from becoming the official language of Jamaica, for

instance, is the need for it to have a writing system, to be codified and made intelligible in print, that

those who speak it also be able to write it. Indeed, as Walter Ong highlights in his seminal work on

orality, literacy and the technologizing of the word, “[readers] are so literate that it is very difficult to

conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe”

(2). Certainly, there is bias that sees reading and writing as superior to the oral and this bias carries

over into conceptions of what qualifies as the genre of poetry. As Habekost advises, “the original

African cultural framework…needed neither literacy, letters nor books to constitute art, knowledge,

civilization and a social system.” But in the Anglophone world, it does. While Ong notes that

“understanding the relations of orality and literacy and the implications of the relation is not a

matter of instant psychohistory or instant phenomenology” but calls for “wide, even vast, learning,

painstaking thought and careful statement” (2), the central argument upon which the work pivots

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takes much of the differences between oral and literate cultures as fundamental and implicit. More

recent scholarship has nuanced dichotomous and oppositional understandings of orality and literacy,

acknowledging what Ong hints at when he concedes that not only are the issues involved in

understanding and describing the relationship between the two “deep and complex, but they also

engage our own biases” (2). The bias that sees reading and writing as superior to the oral is well

understood. Indeed, even where the mutual exclusivity of these processes is countered, the

underlying implication is that writing cements sound and thought, affording the latter a degree of

permanence that renders the relationship of interdependence far from equal.

Dub poetry, as described by Mervyn Morris’ in his 1997 article “Dub Poetry?” is,

written to be performed, incorporates a music beat, often a reggae beat. Often, but

not always, the performance is done to the accompaniment of music, recorded or

live. Dub poetry is usually, but not always, written in Jamaican language; in Jamaican

Creole/dialect/vernacular/nation language. By extension, it may be written in the

informal language of people from anywhere. Most often it is politically focused,

attacking oppression and injustice (1).

The dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson understands this bias and uses it to establish a

transgressive poetics by straddling the line between the language that is spoken, but neither written

nor read, and the language that is written but not regularly spoken: “All language practices involve

negotiations across asymmetrical relations of power, as well as across time” (Bawarshi). The sound

of dub poetry undeniably captures the cadence not only of Caribbean speech and music, but of

Caribbean. As Brathwaite famously notes, the hurricane does not roar in pentameter. In my mind, it

roars to the rhythm of reggae. It roars to dub. Dub poetry on the page, weaves orality in each line,

posing a challenge for those not conversant with the linguistic and performative elements employed

by dub poets. Michael Andrew Bucknor points out that dub poetry often presents a challenge to

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critics (302). I concur with Bucknor, but extend his analysis to suggest that part of the challenge has

to with implicit bias, of which Ong speaks, in considering English literacy in relation to orality.

Where the codes that are intricately wired are codes that are assumed to be dichotomous, the results

may likely confound.

Still, this in large part explains my choice of this genre as a means to ponder how we might

rethink, if not remix the category of the Anglophone, if not the genre of poetry itself. As Neil Ten

Kortenaar suggests in the introduction to Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy, literary texts

make certain practices “available for contemplation and discussion” (19). Analyzing the strategies

deployed by the Caribbean postcolonial dub poet can tell us much about the practices that are being

subverted, and may usher new ways of seeing resistance through genre. I therefore foreground this

examination with Kortenaar’s notion of the metacultural nature of literary material, particularly in

the postcolonial context:

Texts have a metacultural component to them, a self-conscious relation to the verbal

culture they emerge from, as well as to the generic and textual tradition they deploy.

Texts always raise the question of their own nature, including their relation to

audience, to a tradition they inherit but also redefine, and to a means of their

production (19).

While there are particular conventions that govern literary genres, I see the latter as embodying

literacy that is shared or valued by the larger community, or signaling what may be valued by that

community in both what is read and what is held up as representative of group identity.

Poetry in print is insufficient in representing the lived experiences of Anglophone Caribbean

people. The dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson seeks to address this. Acknowledging that the

genre is understood to work within the confines of print, it loosens the scribal out of print and

inserts the oral that must be attended to. It turns imperial English and notions of the poetry genre on

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its head. The selections I reference from his 2002 collection Mi Revalueshanary Fren, exemplify the

appropriation of word and sound to represent the national consciousness of a people freed from

slavery and navigating their way into new cultural and expressive terrain, and it does this, I argue in

part through English, but whose English? Our own messy, messed up, adulterated version of

English: Creole.

Still, dub written about as poetry for performance, as a form that anticipates performance.

Victor Chang, for example, writes in his review of Dub Poetry: 19 Poets from England and Jamaica:

“[Dub poetry] is a poetry of statement, shouted at you from the platform; it is…poetry for

‘performance’ in truth. Its strengths lie in shrill denunciation and protest, polarized stances,

confrontational postures” (Chang in Morris 67). Similary, Mervyn Morris, in “A Note on ‘Dub

Poetry’” states, “The word ‘dub’ in ‘dub poetry’ refers to the activity of adding and/or removing

sounds [and] is written to be performed, incorporates a music beat, often a reggae beat” (66)9.

Johnson, on the other hand, does not subscribe to this implied oral-scribal dichotomy. Publishing

books before he even made records of his poetry, Johnson says “I wanted to write poetry that was

accessible to those whose experiences I was writing about, namely the black community. I wanted to

write oral poetry that could hold the interest of the reader as well as the listener.” Here there is not

the “first this, then that” sequence that is taken for granted, that is, first the oral that is then made

official through a written English variety. Johnson places them on equal footing and suggests that

the written word is the performance. His tactics demonstrates his recognition of genre agency as

“includ[ing] knowledge of strategic genre performances in space and time, within asymmetrical

relations of power (246).

9 Morrison would later use the phrase “performance poetry” in describing the oral and performative elements of dub poetry.

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Johnson’s generic dissent is deployed primarily through language and uptake. In exercising

the power of selection, Johnson’s most strategic selection is Jamaican Creole, which makes the force

of his uptake that much more effective. From its very title, then, the collection, Mi Revalueshanary

Fren, misspells “revolutionary” and instead uses “revalueshanary,” and a number of things are

achieved through this change. For one, it introduces to the discussion of revolution, the invariable

revaluation that must also take place for serious change to occur. Second, the changes to the last few

letters of the word cause it to better reflect how the Creole speaker would actually pronounce

“revolutionary”, with the “shon” sound toward the end being replaced with the short ‘a’ sound in

the middle instead. Note that this misspelling does not now make the word a Creole word. And if all

one hears is the performance of the poem, this is a key element that can be missed. It is resistance

levied through the English language. It relies on the master’s language, in print, to fully make its

critique.

According to Russel Banks, in the introduction to the collection, “whether it’s a ballad...or a

dramatic monologue...or an elegy… or a poem that brings us news from the street… there is a lucid

quality to the language and structure of his poems, a determined, ironic playfulness that cuts against

the rage and grief that brings the poet to write in the first place” (v). This rings true when we come

upon a poem like “Inglan is a Bitch” (37). At a glance, the poem takes the shape of a ballad, with its

four-lined stanzas and rhyming scheme. Readers approach a ballad expecting a certain

lightheartedness of tone, often achieved through the rhyming and simple language ballads typically

use. Johnson plays on this and begins the poem with a simple stanza that begins to tell a story of

the speaker coming to London. It goes:

w'en mi jus' come to Landan toun

mi use to work pan di andahgroun

but workin' pan di andahgroun

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y'u don't get fi know your way aroun'

The refrain that is repeated throughout the poem carried the most potent attack to the land of the

colonial master, chanting:

Inglan is a bitch

dere's no escapin' it

Inglan is a bitch

dere's no runnin' whey fram it

Arguably, the language Johnson uses is simple but is not easily intelligible to one who is not fluent in

Jamaican Creole. Lines like “inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry” and “me use to work dig

ditch wen it cowl nuh bitch” are not readily understable to the untrained ear or eye. But the part of

the poem needing the least translation is the most important takeaway: “Inglan is a bitch” and there

is no escaping it. The ballad ends with a call to action achieved progressively through the

incremental repetition of the refrain, the last line of which changes from an acceptance of defeat to a

call to action: Inglan is a bitch, there is no running away from it, don’t bother trying to hide from it,

you have to know how to survive it; you have to face up to it, there’s no running away from it; and

finally, “is whe wi a goh dhu bout it?” (meaning, “what will we do about it?” (39)

In “All wi Doin is Defendin”, the repetition of the call to listen that which is being spoken (or

shouted) implies an audience who hears the poetry that one reads on the page. The speaker

beseeches, “hear what I say if yu [sic] can”, “lissen man.”10 We read this call to listen and to act in

many other poems throughout the collection and the body of Johnson’s work at large. In “Liesense

fi Kill”11, for instance, a poem about the deaths of Black people in custody, when the speaker calls

10 Hear what I say if you can, listen, man 11 License to kill (with pun on “li/lie”)

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up a conversation with another, s/he says, “hear her now…but hear mi now” (15, 21)12. Yet, again,

if all we do is hear the words “Liesense fi Kill”, we assume the “Lisence” is the standard English

word syntactically, and that its meaning is from the lexicon of the English language. Instead, by

corrupting the spelling of the word and instead penning “LIEsense” fi kill, Johnson is able to load it

with meaning, resistance and daring accusation of the police who wrongly execute a right to kill

blacks in Britain. The misspelling emphasizes the lies.

While many of the most obvious changes to language occur on the surface level of spelling

and letter arrangement, what is done with syntax is nothing short of cunning. There are times when

the syntax is that of the basilectal variety, and therefore more closely aligned with more African

forms in Creole. There are other times, however, when all that differentiates the phrases from

English is Creole pronunciation, signaled, of course, by phonetic construct. “New Word Hawdah” is

one case in point. The stanza that is repeated throughout the poem goes:

di killahs a Kigale

mus be sanitary workaz

di butchaz a Butare

mus be sanitary workaz

di savajiz a Shitila

mus be sanitary workaz

di beasts a Boznia

mus be sanitary workaz

inna di new word hawdah (1-9)13

12 Hear her now, but hear me now 13 The killers of Kigali/ must be sanitary workers/ the butchers of Butare/ must be sanitary workers/ the savages of Shitila/ must be sanitary waorkers/ the beats of Bosnia/ must be sanitary workers/ in the new word order.

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Here, the most radical deviations from English occur on the phonetic level (“workaz,” and

“hawdah,’ for instance) but not so much in the syntax. “Di beasts a Boznia mus be sanitary workaz”

is syntactically identical to the translation in English: “The beasts of Bosnia must be sanitary

workers.” The changes made to the Standard Acrolectal variety of these words are done to make the

pronunciation more authentic to and representative of a native Caribbean speaker and listener. Less

is done by way of the arrangement, so a non-native speaker can begin to glean what is meant. What

is achieved here is Intelligibility but not at the expense of the native tongue.

Because no one can really be “literate” in Creole, as renowned Creole writer Louise Bennett

contends, dialect makes its way into written literary works often by way of English or the forms of

English. There is no getting around this, and perhaps there is no need. Perhaps, Anglophone might

still mean English, but acknowledge the increasing shared ownership of the language that once

belonged squarely to the colonizer. Johnson’s poetics reflect the poet’s reverence of sound as

integral to meaning within the scribal text where European language and medium complement

African oral poetics without repeating the oppressive hierarchy.

Johnson’s creole is steeped in his uptake of the music genre of Jamaican resistance: Reggae. In

the poem, “Reggae Sound,” reggae reverberates through the arrangement of words even when

instrumental accompaniment is absent. A “shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing/ rock-wise

tumble-doun sound music” (103), the rhythm of reggae is like that of “a tropical electric storm

(cooled doun to the pace of the struggle) (10-11).” There are commands embedded in the poem like

that of a deejay deciding what to take out and to leave in rhythmically and figuratively:

Slow drop. make stop. move forward

dig doun to the root of the pain;

shape it into the violence for the people,

they will know what to do, they will do it

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……………………………………….

Foot-drop find drum, blood story,

Bass history is a moving

is a hurting black story (lines 15-23).

Not only are commands given about what is to be done to the music, but also regarding the story

that is being told about the hurt of a people whose pain is rooted out through dubbing. Phrases like

“slow drop. make stop. move forward” signal direction. As the people follow that direction, their

hurt takes shape and is rooted out, as “bass history is a moving / is a hurting black story.” As Aduga

Onuora ably puts it, “Dub poetry simply mean [sic] to take out and to put in, but more fi14 put in

than anything else. We take out the little isms, the little English ism and the little highfalutin business

and the little penta-metre [sic]… It also mean [sic] to dub out the isms and schisms and to dub

consciousness into the people-dem15 head” (Onuora in Morris 66). Doing away with the learned

meter of European literary forms, in the very sound of the words is the bass of the reggae beat. The

onomatopoeic diction, for instance, mimics the groovy sounds of reggae, all while conveying the

“black reared / pain rooted / heart geared…musik [sic] of blood” (1-4) that is described in the

poem “Bass Culture.” Words in English, and variations of them actually form the beat, even before

it is performed to music. Here Johnson is taking up the reggae song, and is ensuring that it qualifies

both as “reggae sound,” and as poem. Unlike conventional European rhyme and meter, the beat

that governs dub poetry is reggae. This is revolutionary in its own right, as reggae developed as a

response to the hegemonic systems of the white oppressor. While the reggae music in oral

performances of the poetry are well written about, Johnson finds the music steeped in the language.

He says “I heard music in language and I wanted to write word-music, verse anchored by the one-

14 fi: to 15 People’s

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drop beat of reggae with meter measured by the bass line or a drum pattern; I wanted to write lines

that sound like a bass line” (Johnson v).

Still, and perhaps understandably so, the use of print and sound in one hybrid form is not

without its problems, but presents a challenge I hope more scholars in Anglophone literature will

accept. Critics like Victor Chang contend that the form does not lend itself to “any subtlety of

approach, anything that is inward-looking, musing, quiet, reflective, tender, delicate, [or] registering a

complexity of position or feeling” (Chang in Morris 67). Of course, Chang’s sentiments reflect not

only a bias toward writing as capable of restricting and elevating consciousness, but also the

Eurocentric worldview of what “real” should feel like and how it ought to function. But Johnson’s

transgressive poetics can also be seen in his manipulation of larger western poetic conventions.

Johnson appropriates forms like the dramatic monologue, ballad, and most notably, the elegy in

poems like “BG for Bernie Grant in memoriam 1934-2000)”, “Reggae fi Radni (to the memory of

Walter Rodney)”, “Reggae fi Dada”, “Reggae fi Bernard” and “ Reggae fi May Ayim.” Using this

form to contemplate and lament on the passing of another, and all in a language variety dismissed as

vulgar and incapable of capturing subtlety, goes against the sentiments of Chang and other critics

who criticize the polarizing, harsh positioning of dub poetry. Take the elegiac poem, “BG (for

Bernie Grant in memoriam 1934-2000)”, for example. The deep emotion that is conjured as the

speaker remembers BG is introspective, and definitely has more than “a momentary flash” that

Chang says dub amounts to:

an wi remember

how yu bill di unity in yu community

dedicate yuself to yu constituency

brace yu braad back gense bigatri

an stan firm fi justice an equality

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yu woz wi cheef

yu woz wi choice

yu woz wi champian

yu woz wi face

yu woz wi voice

yu woz wi main man (32-40)16

Undoubtedly, Kwesi Johnson deploys oral and literary practices that antagonize the primacy

of the European-derived written word, and gestures toward the consideration that colonial

resistance cannot adequately be carried out in the tongue and literary form of the colonizer but

through a new and more viable hybrid form that is fecund with postcolonial vigor and vitality.

Defying the colonial, then, is bound up with resisting Standard English and the medium of print,

while working in both. Writing, Ong argues, is a “particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity,

[which] tyrannically locks [words] into a visual field forever” (12). This cannot be escaped. What

Johnson does by injecting all the oral elements is to at once force orality onto and beyond the page,

and he is not alone in this endeavor. Dub poets like Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka also have tactics

that cause us to question who owns English and what might we do with it? Rather than repeat the

view that “Dialect is a corruption of English, a distortion arising out of ignorance and

illiteracy…that cannot be represented as a version of English…without appearing fractured,”

compositions like those in dub demonstrate that text can in fact “diverge from the linguistic

16 And we remember/ how you built the unity in your community/ dedicated yourself to your constituency/ braced your broad back against bigotry/ and stood firm for justice and equality/ you were our chief/ you were our choice/ you were our champion/ you were our face/ you were our voice/ you were our main man.

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standard in print, and by owning up to “each and every one of its divergences…” (166) can extend

the potential of both.

Uptake allows for Johnson to take what may look “flat on the page,” as Johnson says, (in

Morris 5) and make it gesture toward performance in which the print comes alive with meaning and

importance when such gestures are obeyed. In the process, Johnson adulterates Standard English by

misspelling words, dropping off word endings and beginnings, distorting spellings to achieve a play

on words and multiple layers of meaning. He flips syntactical elements for particular effects. These

moves are subversive in the way that they at once harness the privilege of the master’s tongue for

intelligibility, in the medium that is tied to the colonizer, but then render both inadequate in meeting

the expressive needs of the explosive content. And therein lies the transgression.

The inherent orality of nation language, Laurence Breiner suggests, is problematic. He

contends that with the normalized written Standard English as the acceptable variety, the norm for

Creole is practice in oral use, “with all its inherent shiftiness” since “at first, no one is literate in

Creole” (165). Writing in Creole, then, encourages one to be “literate” in the oral variety, and helps

render it a viable form for literary expression, and not simply broken English. But part of what

makes the dialect in print particularly problematic is the same oral/scribal dichotomy bias I speak of

earlier in this chapter. Orthography is at the root of the problem, according to Breiner. Conversely,

Kevin Adonis Browne asserts in Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean

that language variety use in Caribbean artistic forms is always a strategic choice. “Our worldviews

unfold…as a complex culture of vernacular expression recognizable on the linguistic level not only

in terms of tone or syllable stress but also in terms of semantic inventions and the strategic

arrangement and application of rhetorical forms” (41). Rhetorical choices in Caribbean cultural

expression are deliberate and achieve particular motives. Undoubtedly, Johnson and other dub poets

“corrupt” Standard English words to levy critique and spur protest.

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At the very least, “scribalised oral forms”, Carolyn Cooper purports, “raise theoretical issues

about marginality and the boundaries of voice and print” (4). It calls into question whether the

borrowed medium is so ingrained that we inadvertently toss aside anything that deviates from the

Eurocentric norm. The oral component, done the way Johnson and other dub poets have done,

extends the potential of stagnant written words. In the same vein, because orality is associated with

Creole varieties, putting these in print “presents and preserves striking rhythms and locutions”

(Breiner 166).

There is also the uncomfortable admission, however, that sound may rely upon print for

complete efficacy. While many have since disputed Ong’s claim that “oral tradition has no residue or

deposit” in the way that writing is residual, offering thing-like marks people can see and touch,

writing certainly offers a degree of permanence and concreteness that orality alone may not. To

circumvent losing all subversive potential because of this fact, dub poets like Johnson instead

conduct a kind of reverse colonization, appropriating Western forms and conventions in ways that

transgress them. “In response they elevate performance over print, orality over literacy, political

responsiveness over permanence” (Breiner 140).

Through strategies that force the reader to attend to oral components of the written text,

Johnson induces reconsideration of what it means to write and read postcolonial material products.

Even in analyzing these works, I also fall into the trap that Carolyn Cooper does in her examination

of orality, gender and the “vulgar” body in Jamaican popular culture: I find myself paying more

attention to the scribal over the oral. In this sense, I feel I too have adapted a kind of literacy bias

passed down from the colonizer, compounded by my own analysis in print. Like the game of tennis

Anne Freadman uses to explain uptake, Creole helps Johnson exchange linguistic shots that English

language would not have allowed him to do. The work of dub poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson,

Jean Binta Breeze, Mutabaruka, Lillian Allen and Michael Smith have made their way into the

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Caribbean postcolonial literary canon, though as Cooper wittily puts it, “all post-colonials are not

created equal” (15). As writings from the Anglophone Caribbean seek to represent authentic “noise”

that once marginalized oral texts foreground, however, dub and other oral works are finding their

way to the center of what is now being valorized as the new paradigm. Perhaps, in time, then, the

literacies of Caribbean folk will be more hybrid, and the impetus to segregate the oral and the

scribal, less apparent.

The final text I want to consider from Mi Revalueshanary Fren is one of a number of similar

texts occasioned by a monumental social event in Caribbean history -- the 1980 assassination of Dr.

Walter Rodney. I use “similar” with some reservation, since texts working within genre are at once

similar and distinct and may at once adhere to generic convention and defy them. As Scryer

(agreeing with Baktin and Miller) contends, “utterances are not simply instances of a category,” as

“each occurrence of a genre is addressed to a different context, audience, and time, [and] evokes a

different set of strategies within an acceptable (to participants) range” (35), though, admittedly, how

a text categorizes itself or the category that is invoked in experiencing the text can be quite telling.

“In effect, genres are abstractions or ever changing sets of socially accepted strategies that

participants can use to improvise their responses to a particular situation” (Scryer 35). The

assassination of one of the Caribbean’s most brilliant and iconoclastic minds, and the conflicting

print and television media coverage that ensued surrounding the circumstances of Walter Rodney’s

death set into effect a conflict centered not only on Rodney, but on biographical representation and

the writing of history -- an eerie irony for one whose life and work were devoted to contesting the

history of Africa and West Indian subjectivity as written from the hegemonic perspectives of

Western colonizers17.

17 Most notably, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

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Beyond Johnson’s translingualism within his poetry, he also reworks Western literary genres

like the elegy.18 The “contents” of the elegy prove useful for Johnson in accomplishing the action of

mourning and lamentation that the occasion of sudden death necessitates. Here I rely on Carolyn

Miller’s notion of genre as more than form, but accomplishing meaningful social action, considering

substantive and contextual variables and “mediating private intentions and social exigence; [and] by

connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent” (163). I also draw on

Jamieson’s understanding of antecedent genres as established genres that help one decipher and

translates genre into different contexts.

For uptake to occur, there must exist an existing genre for selection and transfer, and the

West Indian poet’s relation to memory and to antecedent genre is inevitably fraught. Because genres

are inherited from from colonial contexts, replete with a colonial way of seeing and of knowing,

West Indian writers have long struggled with adapting Western forms to accomplish distinct and

often oppositional social purposes. As George Lamming, Edward Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant and

others theorize, the West Indian writer “travels with the memory, the habitual weight of colonial

relation….[and]the fact of England’s supremacy in taste and judgment” (Lamming 25-27). The

memory of antecedent genre, then, cannot be disentangled from the legacy of colonialism, and we

see in Johnson’s adaptation of the elegy, an uptake that at once borrows a medium and alters it out

of necessity.

In Western literary convention, the elegy is known to be a poem that mourns or laments the

loss of someone who has died; it could also refer to a poem written in elegiac verse. While variations

exist, traditional elegies tend to progress through the stages of lamentation and mourning, to

invocations of the deceased for the purposes of admiration or praise, to finally ending on a note of

comfort or solace for one’s loss. Known as a political poet, Johnson has frequently admitted he

18 Brathwaite, Edward. “Poem for Walter Rodney”, 2010; Carter, Martin “For Walter Rodney” (1980).

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“came to poetry through politics”, using the genre of dub poetry to spur political action in anti-

colonial struggles (Johnson in Russel iv). By elegizing Walter Rodney in“Reggae fi Radni (to the

memory of Walter Rodney), Johnson empties the generic form of a crucial aspect its expected

contents, suggesting that the life of a rebellious, postcolonial subject is a worthy muse to spur

monumentalization through text. This political move is made also by Carter and Brathwaite, who,

like Johnson, both use the form to give voice to the silenced and to write a revisionist version of

history from the margins. Brathwaite’s elegy to Rodney, for instance, strategically appears in a

collection called “Elegguas” which at once conjures the denotative meaning of “elegy” and

“Eleggua”, a Yoruba deity who operates a kind of doorway and represents boundary crossing,

opening and closing.

In Johnson’s poem, generic boundaries are crossed as well. For one, the speaker does not go

through the traditional stages of lamentation to solace. Importantly, no solace is found in this

instance of mourning. Instead, there is the repetition of Rodney’s death as shattering a dream in the

midst of a very crucial scene. That dream, one could surmise, is the dream Rodney had of offering a

more authentic version of African and West Indian history, referenced in Rodney’s poem as

“history’s weight” that Rodney carried on his back. Instead of seamlessly moving from expression of

grief to solace, the poem repeats the chant of mourning, and uses the colloquial lexicon of gossip to

offer its own version of a Rodney biography and of what might have caused the assassination of the

revolutionary:

some may say dat Walta Radni

woz a victim of hate

……………………………

some wi say dat Walta Radni

shoodn tek-up histri weight

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……………………………….

some may say dat Walta Radni

woz a priznah af fate

……………………………

some may say dat Waltah Radni

woz noh shaak fi di sea

an all dat him did want

woz fi set him people free

wid di workaz an di pezants

him shooda kawpahrate

but like a fish to di ook

him go bite pan Burnham19 bait20

Here Johnson’s chronicling of Rodney and the events surrounding his death engages in a kind of

historiography common to West Indian postcolonial writers -- using hearsay as historical truth to

debunk the myth of hegemonic historical narratives as authentic and superior to those produced by

disenfranchised subjects.

Further, the stanzas of the poem do not conform to the conventions of elegiac verse in its

rhyme and meter. Instead, the music of reggae is used to guide the rhythm of each stanza. The

infusion of performative and musical elements is not entirely unique to the elegy, but the use of the

reggae genre is crucial in Johnson’s uptake of the form, as reggae consolidates aesthetic and social

revolutions of all kinds. More than mere beats and basslines, this musical genre is defined as

19 Footnote from Johnson’s collection: “Forbes Burnham -- paramount leader of the ruling PNC government in Guyana between 1964 and 1985” (109) and widely thought to have orchestrated the assassination of Walter Rodney. 20 Some may say that Walter Rodney was a victim of hate/ Some will say that Walter Rodney shouldn’t have taken up history’s weight/ Some may say the Walter Rodney was a prisoner of fate/ some may say Walter Rodney was so shark for the sea/ and all he wanted was to set his people free/ with the workers and the peasants he should have cooperated/ but like the fish to the hook/ he bit Burnham’s bait.

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response to oppressive political establishments and is the musical embodiment of the Rastafari anti-

Babylonian movement. Initially developed as a categorically black mode of expression to the

hegemonic systems of the white oppressor, the different tenets of Rastafari have multiple appeals, as

has been adapted as a form of resistance to oppressive regimes. In using reggae as the underlying

rhythm of this elegy, Johnson does away with learned meter of European literary forms in both

sound and generic essence and infuses his uptake of the an agenda of resistance. As Aduga Onuora

ably puts it, “Dub poetry simply mean [sic] to take out and to put in, but more fi21 put in than

anything else. We take out the little isms, the little English ism and the little highfalutin business and

the little penta-metre [sic]… It also mean [sic] to dub out the isms and schisms and to dub

consciousness into the people-dem22 head” (Onuora in Morris 66). Here, interdiscursivity works to

add layers to Johnson’s elegy that might not have been otherwise apparent through a mere literary

examination of the text.

The form of the elegy proves useful in the way that it functions to mourn the passing of

someone, and Johnson acknowledges this by framing his poem in a form that is easily recognizable

to his reader. In this sense, the classification Johnson invokes is a signal to the reader about how this

text might function, and what the writer is seeking to accomplish. By drawing on this antecedent

genre, Johnson is able to harness the features of the genre’s conventions and to establish his purpose

from the very title of the poem. Further, the linguistic make-up of the title reveals Johnson’s political

agenda in this uptake of the elegy. The phrase in parentheses “(to the memory of Walter Rodney)” is

the instance in which the reader knows this is an elegiac poem. Interestingly enough, however, it is

also the only phrase in the entire poem that is written in the mutually intelligible language of English.

The rest of the poem -- from the title to its final line-- is written in Creole. This suggests that, if

21 fi: to

22 People-dem: People’s

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nothing else is understood by a wider audience, the function of the text as a commemoration of the

life of Walter Rodney must be known. Additionally, in phrasing the rest as hearsay and in a native

West Indian language, Rodney wrests the pen of history from the hands of the colonizers and

reclaims it to be written by marginalized subject for his own people.

The elegy as a poem of mourning joins “Reggae fi Radni” with antecedent western genres

before it. The adaptation of the genre for the distinct context of celebrating the life of an anti-

western colonialism revolutionary; the use of native Creole to pen the poem; and the use of reggae

music and not elegiac meter as the guide to the stanzaic structure of the poem are ways Johnson

operationalizes the elegy for subversive ends. Johnson’s undertaking of elegiac uptake confirms that

literary endeavours by Caribbean writers that borrow Western linguistic and formal conventions

might be read as more than imitation or mimicry.

Ultimately, in postcolonial considerations of West Indian writing, the impulse is often to

dismiss a text as imitative or entirely revolutionary. In appropriating a borrowed medium that is “not

quite right” (Breiner 107), and instead using and altering its elements for distinct ends in a distinct

context, Johnson as a postcolonial writer might not be said to effectually “use the master’s tools to

dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde) --admittedly an appealing claim to make. Instead, this delicate

nuancing of the process of uptake in this context might help us consider what aspects of the

master’s house might still be useful, even as we seek to dismantle others in constructing our own.

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Conclusion

This dissertation sought to apply a Rhetorical Genre Studies approach to literary analysis,

using poetic works from the Anglophone Caribbean as case studies. Using the concepts of genre as

social action and the theory of uptake, I looked at the ways literary texts perform social action. While

literary studies and studies in rhetoric and composition are thought to share a certain antagonist

relationship -- at least among many who theorize in these fields -- I do think that there are strands of

rhetoric and composition that may be threaded through areas of literary studies in productive ways.

Rhetorical Genre Studies is one such strand, which, when held alongside postcolonial examinations

of texts might be very useful in helping us tease out otherwise dormant variables of texts whose

generic constitution might be equally as revealing as its textual contents. By virtue of their function,

these poetry collections help make a case for reorienting Caribbean literary analysis and literary

analysis in general.

I chose Caribbean poetry as case studies through which to apply uptake and a theory of

social action because of the way it boldly takes on imperial history and dares to do the same action

that history does: to write the story of a people through genres that are easily identified and trusted.

It is a mechanism that allows for more than entertainment and aesthetic or even literary appeal.

Through uptake, these poets are able to access the genres that have written history, and use them to

challenge those narratives and write their own. In this sense, we do not have a travelogue being

intentionally taken up and translated into a poem, for instance, now do we necessarily have a

travelogue being taken up and translated into another travelogue that adheres to all the conventions

of that antecedent genre. We have poets exercising the agency that the bi-directional space of

uptakes allow, making decisions about what feature of an antecedent genre might serve them — like

framing, titles, naming, tone and structure — and doing away with others, like contents that in some

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cases record erroneous histories of Caribbean landscape and people, or in others, color it with

imperial bias that renders their accounts unreliable. This is the power of genre.

The notion of poetry engaging in revisionist work is not new. In fact, it forms the very nexus

of the majority of scholarship about the literature of the Caribbean. To date, Caribbean literature has

largely been defined by its the challenge it poses to empire, and the discourse surrounding it has

often used oppositional terms to describe this relationship: a kind of writing back to empire; a

quarrelling of sorts. Indeed, scholarship on works of the Caribbean has largely attended to works

produced after 1950, and has more or less acknowledged that the overwhelming bent of Caribbean

literature is the “attempt to construct new cultural identities that escape the domination of the

colonial past” (Booker and Juruga 4). As Cynthia James highlights in arguing for the formulation of

a literary history for Anglophone Caribbean literature, “so far, Caribbean literature is usually

conceptualized in regional, thematic, and post-independence ideological terms, important areas

being “a West Indian reality,” a quest for identity, a colonial resistance, and the aesthetic of the

folk” (1).What I attempted to do in this project is show how a Rhetorical Genre Studies theory helps

undo generic boundaries and how they might be used to challenge these inherited histories and

epistemologies. This challenge is not explicitly oppositional but straddles the line of compliance and

contestation in order to accomplish decided ends. For Olive Senior, the political posturing of

Gardening in the Tropics is less about being “confrontational or polemical”, she says in 2001 interview

with Kwame Dawes:

I am providing the means by which people who have been voiceless in the

pages of history can now engage in dialogue with those people who formerly

had control of the word. So, they might choose to take a confrontational

position, but I, myself, as a poet, am not engaged in a confrontational

position. That’s not where I’m coming from, at all. I just want to open up the

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dialogue and have people talking in a different kind of way. We haven’t had

dialogue; what we have had is texts — historical text, anthropological text,

etc. and I just want those people who have been written out to start talking

about their own lives, their own experiences (Senior in Dawes 74).

I want to suggest that uptake allows for this dialogue that does not necessarily confront

inherited knowledge but resists full scale adaptation of antecedent genres whose ideologies taint and

complicate generic memory. Importantly, for Senior, gendered revisions are necessary. This is seen

also in Kei Miller’s uptake of geographical and cartographic genres. His uptake of antecedent genres

cannot ignore the memory of European expansionism and conquest that it carries. In fact, it relies

on it to render the expansionist endeavor futile. In making a case for the development of a theory

to understand the relationship between colonialism and landscape, Andrew Sluyter (2010) writes:

“The explorer who textually or cartographically represented landscapes generated an increment of

geographic knowledge at the same time as producing a prospectus and resource for the extension of

European power through space (Cormack 1997). Similarly, the colonial bureaucrat who developed

techniques to inventory and analyze landscapes refined geographic method at the same time as

consolidating European surveillance and control (Butzer 1992)”. The European way was to conquer

and intimidate its subjects into internalizing and assimilating its values, tastes and traditions.

Writing within the conventions of an imposed tradition is complicated, to say the least, and

uptake must also be seen as a product of having to wrestle with this complication. For one, it

communicates mastery of a genre to collective Caribbean audience who recognizes genres based on

standards predetermined and unequivocally accepted as the norm for writing Caribbean history and

experience. In addressing the Caribbean poet’s relation to “Europe” In his seminal work on West

Indian poetry, Breiner writes:

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Poetry readily serves as a demonstration of capability and promise to one’s self and

to one’s people, an assertion that “we can do what they can do.” At the same time, it

was until recently most often directed toward a British audience, and from that

perspective asserted something slightly different: “we can do what you can do.” On

both counts imitatio is an almost essential technique. Only a rare poet can innovate

without first proving to himself and others his ability to copy judiciously; without the

preliminary demonstration of competence, the masterpiece that assures entry into

the guild, poets seldom feel secure about innovation. The attempt to write poetry

begins with the writing of what others will recognize as poetry (107).

Uptake helps take care of the recognition bit, but I have argued that these poets use poetry to take

up a variety of genres that themselves eschew seamless categorization, but whose social action of

writing the history of an entire region and people, creates an exigence to which contemporary

artistes must respond. They must do so by first accepting the challenge to write their own version of

history that rivals the longstanding, formidable one that exists, however hegemonic and biased. In

this sense, the task is not to write poetry that imitates the antecedent genre of poetry. It is to take on

and to take up the genre — whether travelogue, map or “true history”or entire sets of genres that

are intermingled — with its attendant social action, and reclaim the power to tell the story and to

(re)write history in the process. By making murky the rules that govern the poetry genre, and instead

accessing the conventions that very clearly activate another genre, such as the travelogue or the

“history”, the Caribbean poet communicates generic mastery, seizes agency and the power to

control the narrative of history and worldmaking.

While I have opted to focus on individual poets as case studies in their own right, there are

numerous other poets and literary artistes that achieve generic dissent through their performance of

uptake. A larger project would have included Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, for example. Her

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collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman is arguably an uptake of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and

has been described as having presumably completed quite well the ‘same’ task that she attempts in I

is a Long Memoried Woman (Nichols in Dawes 142). Beyond that, this work unfolds as a travelogue,

providing an account of history that gives identity to the lost souls that European historical scripts

overlook. Her female persona eulogizes their names through African ritual and canonizes black

fighters like Toussaint and Nanny. The nature of Nichols’ uptake challenges patriarchal ideology

rampant both within imperial accounts of Caribbean history and among her male West Indian

counterparts in resistance. She proves, as Senior does, albeit differently, that in taking up imperial

genres, she decidedly personalizes them. Nichols frames the collection through the long-memoried

woman, the alternative authority for understanding history and the one who accepts the mammoth

onus of not forgetting “what we refuse to remember” (‘Taint’: Line 19). She internalizes the plight

of her people, being forced to know the harsh experience of the Middle Passage and New World

slavery is “the Black beginning/ though everything said it was the end” as “the men who seed the

children” lose hope with “that loss of deep man pride” (‘One Continent/To Another: Lines 23-25 &

53-56). “Traded by men the colour of [her] own skin” she bleeds at the altar of her children and

maintains posture in the face of back-breaking force and is therefore the authority employed by

Nichols to write the collective history, conduct the proper funeral rituals and ultimately eulogize the

names- male and female- who have had untimely deaths. Peter Fraser in his review of the collection

notes that “the acceptance that oppression came from men in general as well as slave-holders leads

to a much more subversive view of the world than most men can achieve” (105).There is also more

room for uptake analysis in prose fiction — Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Caryl Phillips’

Cambridge are great starting points.

My application of uptake and genre as social action in the field of literary studies has

implications not only for reorienting literary analysis in the case of Caribbean literature, but for

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Rhetorical Genre Studies as well. In this moment, the majority of studies in uptake examine non-

literary texts and social action still implies recurring situations . “Campbell and Jamieson observe

that in rhetoric ‘the existence of the recurrent provides insight into the human condition” (p.

27)...Recurrence is implied by our understanding of situations as somehow ‘comparable’, ‘similar’ or

‘analogous’ to other situations… What recurs cannot be a material configurations of objects, events

and people” (22) (Miller 156). My examination throughout this dissertation makes a case for typified

responses to a situation that might not be said to recur, per se, but that is pervasive and ever present

in the collective consciousness of Caribbean people, and that is imperial history and its effects that

continue to necessitate responses through poetry, drama, prose, visual and performing arts and

artistic expression on a whole. But this not to say the unfolding of history does not present frequent

and ongoing opportunity for artistic response. Indeed it does, but an adequate exploration of that

concept is beyond the scope of this project. As Laurence Breiner concedes, the development of

poetry is “complicated by rapid historical change, in the stream of which it is occurring: the

sequence of colonialism, nationalism and federation, black consciousness, micro-nationhood, and

transnationalism through which Caribbean cultures have been passing in the course of this century

(24).

In this sense, Anglophone Caribbean poetry complicates this aspect of the rhetorical theory

of genre as social action, and supports exigencies as a “social need” and not necessarily as a

“problem” or “defect” as Lloyd Bitzer first conceived it in “The Rhetorical Situation.” In Genre as

Social Action, in response to Bitzer, Carolyn Miller asks:

How are we to view exigence, which is at the core of situation? Exigence must be

located in the social world, neither in a private perception nor in a material

circumstance… Exigence is a form of social knowledge — a mutual construing of

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objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them

what they are: an objectified social need (157).

Caribbean poets, in particular, write poetry that responds to this need, and though this kind of

“literary self-consciousness unfolds at different times in different islands” the development of a

“self-consciously West Indian poetry” persists “against the background of cultural awakening

occurring throughout the Caribbean during this century; like colonialism itself, this is one of the

shared experiences of nations sharply isolated from one another as much by history as by

geography” (Breiner 25).

I have also attended to the issue of language as crucial to the writing of resistance through

genre. Not only does the poetry of The Caribbean accomplish the social action of revising history,

but its prominence as the genre that best embodies the lived experiences of Caribbean people no

doubt contributes to its effectiveness in this endeavor. This is arguably not the case for many other

societies, and partly why the Caribbean serves up the best examples of a complementary framework

for integrating Rhetorical Genre Studies and literary theory, and for what I hope will be the

beginnings of a turn in rhetorical genre theory to more concrete applications to literary works and

contexts. The ground is certainly ripe for those interested in this kind of expansion in both fields. It

must also reorient the way we approach the teaching of poetry in the Caribbean, and the way we

frame pedagogy about literary genres. If we come to understand genres are more than their formal

components, and even more than their deviations from convention, we begin to examine authorial

decisions and their social actions.

138

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