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Jahan Ramazani on Derek Walcott ("A Far Cry from Africa")
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How can a poet choose between his language and his idea of home? A postcolonial turn this week, as Jahan Ramazani joins the podcast to talk about Derek Walcott's "A Far Cry from Africa."
Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Professor and the Director of Modern and Global Studies in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books, most recently Poetry in a Global Age (Chicago, 2020).
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is my distinct honor today to have Jahan Ramazani on the podcast, someone that I've been hoping I could get to come on for quite a while now, and we're able to make it work, and I think this is going to be a wonderful experience.
00:00:24
Speaker
for all of us.
Derek Walcott's 'A Far Cry from Africa'
00:00:27
Speaker
So the poem that Jahan has chosen to talk about today is by the poet Derek Walcott.
00:00:34
Speaker
a poem of his called, A Far Cry from Africa. And as ever, there will be a link to the text of the poem in the episode notes. So for people who'd like to look at it as we talk about it, you can find it there.
Jahan Ramazani's Career Overview
00:00:49
Speaker
We'll hear lots more about Walcott for those who aren't yet familiar with him in just a moment. But first, let me tell you more about our guest.
00:00:59
Speaker
Jahan Ramazani is the University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor and Director of Modern and Global Studies in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He's the author of six books. His first book was on Yeats and Elegy, and then he wrote a second book that was about elegy more broadly speaking.
00:01:25
Speaker
At which point, at least in my reading of it, Jahan's career took a bit of a turn, a kind of ever-widening, the widening gyre or something, a kind of widening aperture.
00:01:40
Speaker
And he's, in his four most recent books, are, I think, can be understood as a kind of sequence that suggests the nature of, well, of the trajectory of his career. So in 2001, he published a book called The Hybrid News, Postcolonial Poetry in English.
00:02:03
Speaker
Then in 2009, a book called The Transnational Poetics, which was followed in 2014 by poetry and its others, news, prayer, song, and the dialogue of genres. That's 2014, I think I said. And then most recently in 2020, a book called Poetry in a Global Age.
00:02:27
Speaker
I want to say more about that trajectory in just a moment and the significance of these books in the field that he and I both work in.
Editorial Contributions and Anthology Work
00:02:38
Speaker
But first, let me also point out that Jahan is not only an author but has done a staggering amount of really important editorial work
00:02:49
Speaker
So he's been an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He's worked as an editor on the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. For people who don't know, these are the kind of go-to
00:03:04
Speaker
standard editions of literary anthology that are, you know, in the case of the Norton, that are assigned in classrooms throughout the world. And the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is like a must-have handbook for terms and concepts and ideas from the history of poetry.
00:03:27
Speaker
Jahan is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Post-Colonial Poetry to the editor of special issues of the journal New Literary History.
00:03:38
Speaker
and the editor of the updated versions of the Norton Anthologies of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, a volume of which I held up for him to see on my screen before we started talking because it's the volume that I've taught out of many times. And so both as a scholar and as a teacher, I'm indebted to Jahan Ramazani and his work.
Poetry in Postcolonial Studies
00:04:03
Speaker
That work has, as I intimated a moment ago,
00:04:08
Speaker
increasingly considered how poetry, which had been thought of, I think, formerly as somehow marginal to the emerging fields of postcolonial and then transnational studies,
00:04:24
Speaker
perhaps because poetry seemed to lack the social and political scope of the novel or even of theater, was with poetry's kind of inexhaustible capacity for ambiguity and nuance and attentiveness to the linguistic utterance in its own right.
00:04:50
Speaker
in fact, was remarkably attuned to, for instance, the hybridity that characterizes post-colonial experience and transnational lives and channels of contact.
00:05:11
Speaker
Johan's work, I think it's no exaggeration to say, has changed the field of poetry studies in salutary ways and indeed has re-situated poetry studies within the larger field of literary studies.
00:05:26
Speaker
Those are big claims I'm making about the guest we have on the podcast today, but the scale of those interventions should not obscure the fact that, at essence, our guest today is just a beautiful and deeply attentive, close reader of poems and is clearly someone who loves poetry.
00:05:48
Speaker
and loves poems and loves to talk and think about them. And so I'm so pleased to welcome him onto the podcast today.
Walcott's Caribbean Influence
00:05:56
Speaker
Johan Ramazani, how are you? I'm well and thank you. It's such a treat to get a chance to talk with a fellow lover of poetry and you yourself are such a wonderfully attentive, careful, thoughtful, beautiful reader of poems. So it's a pleasure to have a conversation with you.
00:06:18
Speaker
Oh, well, pleasure's all mine. Thank you for saying that, though. It's always nice to hear. So like I was telling our guests, you've chosen Walcott, Derek Walcott, for us to read today. And our audience on this podcast, for some of them, Walcott will need no introduction. I'm sure there are listeners now who knew Derek Walcott
00:06:44
Speaker
well themselves, but for others, this may not be a familiar name. And so, Johan, I wonder if you might just give us a kind of biographical note to kind of situate Walcott in the history of 20th century and 21st century poetry that you have in mind.
00:07:10
Speaker
Sure, I'd be happy to. And I'll just say that part of the reason that I chose Walcott, although I was paralyzed for some time when you asked me, you said, you could choose anyone. I was like, oh my God, there are so many poems that I love from so many different parts of the world, an impossible thing. But I noticed that there weren't as many poets
00:07:37
Speaker
from the postcolonial world and I thought maybe Walcott could be kind of a gateway into that world as he was for me as a reader of poetry as I moved, as you said, from someone like Yeats then into postcolonial writing because there are really strong connections there. But yes, Derek Walcott was born in 1930
00:08:01
Speaker
in on the island of Saint Lucia in Castries, the city there. And he grew up there in Saint Lucia, part of a small minority Methodist community there in a predominantly Catholic culture. Interesting connection there with Yates, also part of a predominantly Irish world, yet belonging to a Protestant minority.
00:08:30
Speaker
And he, unlike many of the great poets from the postcolonial world, he stayed in the Caribbean for much of the early part of his
Walcott's Early Career and Education
00:08:43
Speaker
career. He had his education. He was one of the first
00:08:46
Speaker
people to go to the then University College, now the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where he met with many of the great minds and talents of that generation from around the Caribbean.
00:09:07
Speaker
and was a member of the first graduating class in liberal arts. Would he have grown up in a multilingual home?
00:09:18
Speaker
Yes. Good question. Or a culture I don't know very much about St. Lucia period. Yes. And that is reflected in his work and as in so much Caribbean writing. So I think it's important to say that in St. Lucia, the standard English is the official language. And yet, St. Lucia traded hands between the British and the French 14 times. So
00:09:45
Speaker
there's a strong residual presence there of French-based Creole as well. And then there's also a Creolized English as well. So it's really a kind of trilingual, if you want to call them really separate languages,
00:10:10
Speaker
But a lot of code switching goes on in St. Lucia. I'll never forget arriving for the first time in St. Lucia and my cab driver asked me in very formal, in which direction shall we, something like that. But then the next minute he's speaking in French-based Creole with people on the street. So a really fascinating melange of
00:10:39
Speaker
of languages that he would have grown up in. Good, good, good. So I interrupted your narrative. No, no, no. So he's educated in the Caribbean. Yes. He stays there for quite some time. And I should say that he was very proud of having an education that was grounded in the classics of English literature. Of course, Saint Lucia was still
00:11:07
Speaker
you know, a British colony at the time. And so, you know, he learned the classical literature, literary canon, and that's reflected in his work, but also the, you know, the great British, you know, writers, he came to know very well. And I think we see in his work very strongly the presence of
00:11:34
Speaker
you know, high modernism writers like Yates and Elliott and Pound and Hart Crane and others, W.H. Auden. And so he's, you know, like so many of the postcolonial writers, trying to figure out ways of bringing together that
00:11:55
Speaker
what he calls a sound colonial education with his more local cultural inheritances in his work. He does go on to have much more of a presence
00:12:11
Speaker
in the wider world. His first book was published in 1962, so at the age of 32. And he, in London, In a Green Night. And from that point on, he comes to the United States, he goes to Europe, and he becomes, he befriends people like Robert Lowell, and among others, the great writers of
00:12:41
Speaker
who were presences in that moment in the literary world. In the 60s. In the 60s, yes. People like Seamus Heaney also spent a fair amount of time with Seamus Heaney as well as Walcott, and they were
00:12:59
Speaker
close friends and sort of rivals and had, you know, wrote about one another's work quite a bit, both as authors, you know, sort of
00:13:13
Speaker
from the parts of the world emerging out of the British colonial experience.
Connections and Nobel Prize
00:13:19
Speaker
And both as authors who spent significant amounts of time in the US. Exactly. And so Wolcott did teach for quite some time on the latter part of his life at Boston University, among other US institutions.
00:13:35
Speaker
He later in life built a house in St. Lucia, I should say, in the interval. So he was in Jamaica. He moved then to Trinidad for quite a while. I should also say that he was very involved in theater, both writing his own plays and theatrical productions, supervising his own theatrical productions, prolific journalists writing extensive
00:14:04
Speaker
reviews while still living in the West Indies before he moved, you know, at least for part of the year to the U.S. later in life when he built a home back in St. Lucia and would spend part of the time in the U.S. each year and part of it in St. Lucia.
00:14:29
Speaker
And another thing that he and Heaney have in common is the Nobel Prize now. Exactly, yes. Wolcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992. I'll never forget it because he happened to be in Charlottesville for reading at the University of Virginia where I teach on that very day. Oh, wow. When they called him or whatever. Yeah, and he was being trailed by
00:14:57
Speaker
a bunch of reporters and we were all wondering, we heard the news, is he actually gonna show up? And he did show up and was really pumped as you might well imagine. So yeah. That makes me wanna ask, I mean,
00:15:14
Speaker
I think you let slip sort of modestly a few moments ago that he, like Heaney, these are both poets whom you had the chance to know and talk with. Both of those poets now sadly have passed away in recent years, but I wonder,
00:15:38
Speaker
Jahan, can you take the narrative you've given us of Walcott's life and tell us how it intersected with your own coming to read him and then to know him personally and maybe tell us a little bit about what he was like, not on the page, but across the table?
00:15:56
Speaker
Sure, sure. So, yeah, I mean, I first began to read his work, having written that book on elegy and being obsessed with
00:16:11
Speaker
death and grief and mourning and all those cheerful subjects that are of course so central to 20th and 21st century poetry. I found myself reading Walcott and going from death to writing about the image of the wound in post-colonial poetry, particularly in Walcott's Omeros, which I had heard him read at the University of Virginia and was just
00:16:41
Speaker
Well, when it was in manuscript in the 1980s and was totally blown away by the power of the rhythms of the language and its richness, even though I couldn't take in everything that was going on in the poetry, I knew that this was something incredibly exciting and different. And yet that, again, had strong connections, particularly
00:17:06
Speaker
for me, with someone like W.B. Yates, whose work I'd spent a lot of time with, in that Yates, as I mentioned, finds himself in a kind of intercultural divided situation as someone who is very much a leader of Irish cultural nationalism in certain ways. And yet, at the same time,
00:17:36
Speaker
very opposed to certain qualities of the Irish Catholic majority. And when he talks even about his relationship with the English language, and I think this has a bearing particularly on the poem that we're gonna look at closely together,
00:18:02
Speaker
He's very aware of having a complex and even vexed relationship to his English cultural heritage, because he says on the one hand,
00:18:17
Speaker
He talks about how the Irish have undergone such persecution. And he talks about his hatred of the British because of the centuries of colonization, the devastation and suppression of Irish language, culture, traditions, and all the rest. And yet this deep love
00:18:44
Speaker
of the English language, this deep love of authors like Shakespeare and Spencer and even William Morris. Spencer, of course, is very much part of the British Colonial Project in Ireland.
00:19:00
Speaker
So that divided sense of allegiances that Yates then shares in turn with a writer like James Joyce, who was also very important for Walcott and had similar ambivalences about Englishness and English cultural inheritances.
00:19:26
Speaker
you know, I recognized in that a connection, a bridge that would help me to enter into this world of Walcott's work, even though I was not deeply familiar with the Caribbean. And I just, you know, fell for it fully. And I'll just say biographically that, you know, I think
00:19:49
Speaker
you know, my being a hyphenated Iranian American, probably the- I'm glad you brought this up.
00:19:58
Speaker
like you. I think that that had certain resonances, obviously. We have our own ambivalences and our own educations in English and love. Exactly. And that sense of divided cultural inheritances and how do you reconcile these worlds that are often at war or in conflict with one another?
Literary Legacy and Cultural Identity
00:20:24
Speaker
So that very much helps to explain how you felt drawn, well, first to Yeats and then the way in which that attachment perhaps modeled one that you might form with this other poet, Derek Walcott. The
00:20:44
Speaker
the piece you've judiciously left out was the sort of gossipy side of my question too, which is what was he like? Yeah, I mean, what was it like to talk to him? Yeah. So it was interesting. I'm trying to think how I can put this. Walcott,
00:21:06
Speaker
Had really strong opinions and he was not afraid to share them He was very concerned obviously to be and this is evident in his work and a Book-length poem like Omeros in which you know, he's directly Setting his work up against Homer's. Yeah
00:21:32
Speaker
you know, so he's very concerned about his place in the canon. I think it was the third time I met with him. One of the anthologies you kindly mentioned had just recently been published, the Northern Anthology of Modern Contemporary Poetry, and he had just come back from a trip in East Asia, and he said, hey, I heard you gave me a lot of pages.
00:21:55
Speaker
I said, Yeah, you're a really important poet. And of course, I would want to do that. And so I said, Well, I want to see my pages. And I said, Okay, I was thinking, Oh, no, you know, how can I do this that come to my hotel tomorrow, but but I want to see I want to see my pages. So I, you know, scurried around looking for a clean copy.
00:22:17
Speaker
of the anthology and some local bookstores couldn't find one, had to bring my teaching copy and very quickly erased some of my markings next to some of his poems, sat there at lunch with him with one of my wonderful grad students who happened to be a woman. And I will say that Wolcott had a history of, how shall we say,
00:22:46
Speaker
you know, not of kind of vexed relationships with women, sometimes self-evidently sexist. And so I was concerned about that dynamic in his complimenting her in various ways, which of course made me very
00:23:08
Speaker
Mary made me very uncomfortable. She was great about it. Then he wanted to see my pages. I let him look at my pages. He looked at every one of the 40 odd pages that I put in the Norton Anthology, and then closed the books at Han. He couldn't help but remark on the fact that
00:23:27
Speaker
certain or other authors who were adjacent had gotten many fewer pages. So he wasn't at all interested in talking about my research and writing about him. He was really just concerned about his place in the canon. So it's understandable. Yeah, well, there's a kind of
00:23:53
Speaker
cynical view that we could and perhaps at some level should take of that kind of, you know, reputation measuring or whatever we want to call it. Yeah. But on the other hand, I guess I would just say, you know, somewhat more sympathetically to that kind of self regard that, you know, particularly for someone who grew up at the kind of margins of the culture to which he aspired
00:24:22
Speaker
you know, to be included in. It must be a profound thing to look at a Norton anthology that contains, you know, mostly poets who don't look like you and who don't have your background.
00:24:42
Speaker
and to see that you belong in that company. Absolutely. You said it so well, Cameron. I think that for an Afro-Caribbean poet who grew up in what was considered a backwater, a colonial backwater,
00:25:06
Speaker
and someone who used to watch, you know, these enormous tourist, you know, kind of cruise ships come into Kestries Harbor and so forth. And, you know, he was among the kind of, you know, dark local people who were seen as kind of part of the local color in many sense. Right. Yes. To then find
00:25:30
Speaker
his own work and his own voice represented alongside people he had read and relished and loved and who transformed his life, people like Eliot and Yates and others, I think was extremely important. And I think it helps explain a certain insecurity that obviously he had and that you felt
00:25:56
Speaker
in those kinds of moments. And yet, at the same time, everyone who met him or knew him when he was a young poet, you know, age of 14 and 15, trying to self-publish his own first poem on the screen or whatever, going to college, everyone who encountered him thought, this guy has an outsized talent. You know, he was often thought of as this
00:26:25
Speaker
enormously talented, you know, kind of genius of a writer. So he also knew that, that he had an incredible gift for metaphor for the rhythms of language. Yeah. Yeah. It's what I remember. I mean, my first reading of him came in college and it was Omeros that was assigned in the class that I was taking. And I just remember being overwhelmed by the
00:26:53
Speaker
the sort of ear for rhythm and the beauty and the ambition of that, which, like you say, sort of, wants to, you know, seems eager to be in dialogue with Homer. But also, you know, like Dante, I say, right? Isn't that the poems in that kind of Terturima, isn't it? Exactly, exactly.
00:27:15
Speaker
All right, fantastic. So thank you for that background. The poem of Far Cry from Africa is a young man's poem.
Mau Mau Uprising Context
00:27:25
Speaker
Is it not? I mean, I think I'm using the dates in your anthology that he wrote it in
00:27:31
Speaker
1956, I think, or it was magazine publication or something. Yeah, he magazine publication in 56, book publication in 62, he wrote it. He told us he wrote it in 1953. Oh gosh. In his early 20s.
00:27:48
Speaker
Right. Okay. And those dates will, of course, matter. I mean, maybe not in their granular specificity, but in terms of the era in which they situate us for reasons that I think will become clear when we listen. We have a recording and we'll listen to that now.
00:28:08
Speaker
I was going to ask for some context. Do you think it would be useful to give that before the reading? Sure. Just that here we have a speaker of the poem, obviously, whose closely resemblance Derek Walcott and his youth
00:28:29
Speaker
and he is looking out from presumably the Caribbean, but the poem is largely reflecting on the Mau Mau uprising or rebellion in the 1950s, which was a revolt against British colonial rule.
00:28:48
Speaker
on the part of a group of Kenyans who were violently resisting at that moment the white settlers who were in Kenya. And I'll just say that there were brutalities and atrocities on both sides.
00:29:14
Speaker
He refers to a white child hacked in bed in the poem, which is a reference to a six-year-old child who was killed early on in the conflict in his sleep. And yet, I will say, it was a question of disproportional violence at the same time. The British
00:29:39
Speaker
hanged over a thousand people. They put in internment camps or concentration camps over a hundred thousand people. There were tens of thousands of people who were killed by the British. Ruthless suppression of this revolt.
00:30:00
Speaker
This was happening in the 1950s when Walcott was in his 20s in the Caribbean and sort of looking to Africa and thinking. Exactly. He's looking to Africa and is trying to understand his relationship on the one to his African inheritances, his African ancestry as someone who's, you know,
00:30:25
Speaker
four parents would have come because of enslavement through the Middle Passage to the Caribbean in bondage. On the other hand, he also has both racial inheritances on his paternal side from Britain and Europe.
00:30:47
Speaker
And at the same time, of course, cultural and linguistic inheritances from England. So he's trying to think, how do I put these things together, these sides of myself together? Although he only comes to his own intimate personal experience toward the end of the poem.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah. That's terrific. And so we'll hear the word Kikuyu early in the poem, and that's a reference to the ethnic group in Kenya that was
00:31:28
Speaker
participating in this uprising against British colonial rule. Good. So thank you. Here then is Derek Walcott reading the poem.
Title's Dual Meanings
00:31:42
Speaker
And once again, for those who want to look at a text as they listen, that link should be available to you in the episode notes. A far cry from Africa.
00:31:55
Speaker
And the title of the poem is ambiguous. It's supposed to mean a cry of torture and also a cry of distance. A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt of Africa. Kikuyu quick as flies, batten upon the blood streams of the veld. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, kernel of carrion, cries
00:32:26
Speaker
waste no compassion on these separate dead. Statistics justify and scholars seize the salience of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed, to savages expendable as Jews?
00:32:45
Speaker
Thressed out by betas, the long rushes break in a white dust of ibises whose cries of wield since civilizations dawn from the parched river or beast-teaming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read as natural law, but upright man seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
00:33:09
Speaker
Delirious as these worried beasts, his walls dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, while he calls courage still that native dread of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again, brutish necessity wipes its hands upon the napkin of a dirty cause. Again, a waste of our compassion as with Spain. The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
00:33:40
Speaker
I who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vain? I who have cursed the drunken officer of British rule, how choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both or give back what they give. How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?
00:34:11
Speaker
Well, I always like to ask, especially when we have a recording, and I'm thinking also of your telling the story of, you know, among the encounters you had with him were these sort of public readings. What you find yourself thinking about or discovering anew, just in the voice, even apart from the particular content that it carries in this case?
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, it was interesting listening to this time. It's a very formal voice and there's something very obviously formal, you know, to our ears in the 2020s, obviously it sounds, we're so used to a kind of poetry readings that are very, how should we say,
00:35:10
Speaker
low register and not florid and not very formal in this way.
00:35:21
Speaker
Intimate, maybe. Yeah, much more intimate. It sounds at a certain level of grandness almost that it's aspiring to in its formality through that voice. And yet I will say, while we might think, oh, he sounds like he's trying to be more British than the British, I don't think that's quite fair because
00:35:48
Speaker
you know, in the Caribbean, he talked about how in the Caribbean, there is a love of grandeur, there's a love of large gestures, there's a love of formality and artifice and a rhetoricity to the culture, that anthropologists like Roger Abrams have talked about, you know, the man of word, words of the West Indies.
00:36:12
Speaker
And when I hear Walcott speak like that, I can also hear a certain other West Indian orators I've heard who speak with incredible formality and eloquence. And that's, I guess, what I'm hearing, that it partly comes out of a Caribbean-ness sport.
00:36:33
Speaker
And which is also present. I mean, this is an obvious thing, but present in the accent, which is an absolute British accent. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. Good. He helpfully, you know, gives us a way in in in in how he sets up his own reading by by glossing his own title or at least pointing out that it contains an ambiguity, a far cry from Africa. John was
00:37:03
Speaker
What's the question about that? And maybe it's worth sort of just teasing out and making explicit what the double meaning, if indeed it is double, what the double meaning is there. But then having done so, I guess my question is, how does that announce a kind of problem or an occasion for the poem as a whole?
00:37:29
Speaker
But in the tension between the two meanings of that phrase, how does that allow us to think about the kind of predicament that the speaker of the poem finds himself in as he begins to speak?
Ambivalence and Complexity in Themes
00:37:46
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right about the, you know, it's helpful that Walcott points to that doubleness and that this is a poem that's full of such doublings and triplings even, because it's a poem that's just rich in kind of ambivalence about its subject. And, you know, yes, Far Cry from Africa, do we hear in that
00:38:16
Speaker
that the author is or the speaker is sympathetically listening to a cry from far away Africa that he's sympathetically hearing maybe even the cry of the oppressed.
00:38:30
Speaker
in Africa as this revolt is taking place, or is this a far cry from the Africa that he might have loved, or
00:38:46
Speaker
thought of as himself very much connected to. And those are just two of the different ways of thinking about it, but many more. Yeah. Well, so in that, just to hold on to that second way for a moment longer, right? So there is that idiom in case it
00:39:07
Speaker
It's hard sometimes to explain these sorts of videos because we just want to say them and hope that people know what they mean. But right, we say that something is a far cry from something else when we mean it's an inferior version of that other thing or quite distant in some way from it in terms of, okay.
00:39:30
Speaker
assuming, and I think of course we should, or it's not just an assumption, it's there, that that meaning is operative here. Would the implication be that I, the presumably Caribbean speaker of the poem, am hardly an Africa myself?
00:39:56
Speaker
And or might it mean, were you suggesting a moment ago that it might mean that the Africa that is present in the poem is a far cry from the image I'd had in my mind as a Caribbean, you know, African diasporic
00:40:16
Speaker
person from the Africa that exists in fact. Yes, I think I think that is one of the implications of the title, because as we, you know, we'll see as we dive into it, there's a there's a real sense of, you know, how can, shall we put it, revulsion toward the violence
00:40:45
Speaker
You know, that is part and parcel of this anti-colonial revolt. So, yeah, I think both things are there. And the poem is, I think, as that title intimates, both trying to sympathetically move into and understand the revolt and what's happening there.
00:41:11
Speaker
and feels very much alienated from it at the same time. Yeah. My asking you about how the title of the poem maybe gives us a way into thinking about the occasion of the poem as you've done too, is it occurs to me like I'm always in these conversations, find myself referring back to the Stevens line, you know, the poem is the cry of its own occasion. Right. Right. The idea of the,
00:41:39
Speaker
whatever it is that he hears or senses in his relation to the place named by that word, Africa, produces his own utterance, which is the poem, right?
00:41:59
Speaker
And I like what you were saying too, that it isn't simply a poem that evinces sympathy for what is happening to people with whom he feels some kind of affiliation or, you know, identitarian kind of sympathy, but also that there's a kind of
00:42:28
Speaker
on top of that or undergirding that somehow, there's this tone of sort of revulsion, I think was the word that you used. Let's get into the opening lines of the poem. A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt and that's our first line break of Africa. I wonder what you make just of that first line break
00:42:54
Speaker
Jahan, is that a sort of interesting enchantment to you? Or what do you make of the first line on its own even?
00:43:09
Speaker
It certainly, the enjambment certainly, well, it does a number of things. First, it gives us a sense of rhythmically, metrically, that we're playing around with something close to iambic pentameter to blank verse, although there are some occasional rhymes in this poem as well that crop up, but there's no regular kind of rhyme scheme.
00:43:32
Speaker
beyond maybe the ABAB at the very beginning, and then some recursions of that sort rhymes and half rhymes. So it partly sets up the rhythmic patterning of the poem, but it does also, I think, highlight that beast metaphor, the tawny pelt. And the word beast
00:44:02
Speaker
is one that recurs throughout later on in the poem. And I think the poem evinces this kind of real vexed response to the ways in which humans can act
00:44:18
Speaker
like beasts, maybe even worse than beasts in certain ways. But here, yes, it's complicated because, you know, Tony Pelt, we think of maybe, you know, is the Tony Pelt of Africa? Is Africa being compared to an animal? Is this
00:44:40
Speaker
in a replication of certain colonialist stereotypes of Africa and associations of it, or are those in play only to be undercut and ironized?
00:44:57
Speaker
A wind is ruffling. Are those the winds of anti-colonial revolt and revolution that are blowing through Africa that he's meditating on in the aspects poem?
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a compelling suggestion you've just made. As I sort of look at the poem on the page, I notice that it's in three stanzas, which at a glance you might think are the same length, but I count it, and I think we get a
00:45:35
Speaker
10-line stanza followed by an 11-line stanza followed by a 12-line stanza. So there's a pattern there, too. It's sort of accretive or growing. It's a snowballing kind of stanza. So maybe with that in mind, it makes sense to sort of segment off our discussion into a discussion of the first stanza, then the second, and then the third. And in sort of looking at the first
00:46:04
Speaker
One thing I'm wondering about is what is the imagined or implied
00:46:14
Speaker
vantage point from which these descriptions are being offered or recorded, even like where where's the camera? Because it seems, you know, in that first, you know, just to get us started, maybe in that first sentence, that first line and a half.
00:46:35
Speaker
in the first line, it might seem like it's a kind of a close-up on a particular animal or something, but then it zooms all the way out into a kind of like global satellite or something, right? So maybe with that disorienting kind of movement in mind, tell us how you sort of wrap your arms around even just that first 10 lines of the poem.
00:47:01
Speaker
So I think the vantage point is one that involves
00:47:10
Speaker
I hadn't thought of putting it this way ever before, but your question makes me, as I'm looking at it, I want to say that there's a lot of zooming in and zooming out, you know, that, um, that, you know, as you say, in those first couple of lines, we, uh, we get, uh, very sort of distanced, almost allegorical, uh, reflections on, you know,
00:47:35
Speaker
that nevertheless zoom in on the worm as a kernel of carrion. We zoom in on the single white child hacked in bed, yet we also have these reflections
00:47:50
Speaker
that are almost kind of Auden-esque. Statistics justify and scholars seize the salience. I'm laughing because I want to prove this to you or something, but in the margin on that line, I have the word Auden written down.
00:48:09
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like Auden, but for people, I don't know, who didn't read the same things we did or don't understand that association, can you maybe say something then, since we're both apprehending it at this moment? Sure. So we're referring to the English poet W.H. Auden, a modernist poet, you know, older than Walcott, younger than perhaps that sort of first generation of high modernists. But what does it mean, Johan, to be Auden-esque?
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah. You know, for Walcott, what is it that we're both attuned to here? So I think in this moment, he's taking on board in a way that Auden does as well, kind of language of impersonal bureaucratic statistical sort of analysis.
00:49:01
Speaker
political, socio-political sort of rhetoric and satirizing it. So I guess I would say that in an Auden poem like The Unknown Citizen, which is written entirely in this kind of satiric voice,
00:49:20
Speaker
in toning the impersonal discourse of kind of bureaucratic, you know, statistical knowledge that I think that that comes in useful here for Walcott as a way of skewering how
00:49:36
Speaker
colonialism will try to justify the deaths that occur as part of colonial rule.
00:49:53
Speaker
through statistical, through these very detached or remote methods of explanation, which takes us, again, zooming to a very zoomed out perspective that is juxtaposed with the very zoomed in
00:50:11
Speaker
point of view that is deeply a word that occurs twice in the poem, compassion, that really tries to think about and engage the specificity of death as its experience in this kind of violent conflict.
00:50:34
Speaker
And both times the word compassion comes up, it comes up in proximity to the word waste. Exactly. I'm thinking about how, you know, and I'm sort of speculating here, but please check me on it, how Walcott
00:50:55
Speaker
in the Caribbean, and I would be more specific than that, though I don't know where he was at this point, you know, at the point of the composition of the poem. I take it from the biography you've given us that he was somewhere in the Caribbean at this point. Yeah, Jamaica, thanks. In Jamaica, good.
00:51:12
Speaker
that we're in an age that is presumably just pre-television news kind of age, at least certainly in the sense that we have come to know it. So that if he's getting in real time or to whatever approximation of real time that was possible then, he's getting news
00:51:36
Speaker
It's in newspapers, right? Or magazines or things like that. Yeah. And he wrote for some of those, you know, Jamaica Gleaner, for example, and then
00:51:49
Speaker
in Trinidad and Tobago. Yeah, he absolutely newspapers and radio, of course. Right. Radio. I mean, he himself became quite well known in the Caribbean, partly through this BBC programme Caribbean Voices that projected, you know, Caribbean authors across the Caribbean. Yeah.
00:52:12
Speaker
Right. And the BBC, you know, well, in particular, presumably would have been the kind of prime outlet of the kind of colonial line. Exactly. Exactly. So I guess, you know, why do I raise the thing about newspapers rather than television and radio is an interesting kind of interstitial technology here. But well, maybe because it
00:52:37
Speaker
it builds in a kind of level of distance or abstraction or reduction to sort of statistic or linguistic sign or something, the atrocities that are being committed rather than the kind of visual immediacy of the news technologies that we're more familiar with.
00:52:59
Speaker
now, and maybe some of that is present here. Those lines, statistics justifying scholars sees the salience of colonial policy. Then those lines that you and I both sort of heard the echoes of Auden in, and I love that reading you gave us of what that voice is doing here.
00:53:21
Speaker
They lead right into the line that you flagged for us before we listened to the recording, that quite violent line. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? That line ends in a question mark and then is followed by the line to savages expendable as Jews.
00:53:51
Speaker
So it seems as though the poet is bringing a kind of historical knowledge or awareness to the encounter with what is happening now in front of him and somehow
00:54:15
Speaker
using that knowledge as a lens through which to make sense of what he's witnessing or indirectly witnessing. But Johan, could you say something more about those two lines that end of the first stanza? Yeah, that's great. I think you're absolutely right.
00:54:38
Speaker
I guess the most striking thing about those is that the questions turn in different directions. One is the question that seems completely sympathetic with the civilian settlers in Kenya who are being killed by the Mao Mao. What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
00:55:04
Speaker
But in the very next line, we turn in the opposite direction to savages, which I read as two so-called savages, to the so-called native peoples, the Africans, who are here, he says, expendable as Jews, or asks expendable as Jews.
00:55:28
Speaker
a horrific line that of course is now comparing the British colonial killing of the Mao Mao of the Kikuyu
00:55:45
Speaker
to the fairly recent in that moment in 1953, right? Yeah, eight years following the liberation of the camps. Yeah, of the Holocaust, the perhaps most systematic mechanized mass murder in perhaps in human history,
00:56:14
Speaker
He manages the move from one line to the next.
00:56:19
Speaker
to draw our attention to the suffering and the atrocity being committed on both sides. Both halves of that line then, I'm totally persuaded by your reading of the word savages.
00:56:38
Speaker
It's as though the word were in quotation marks. But of course, the idea of the expendability of the Jews is itself as though it were in quotation marks, right? Exactly. It's not as though the poem deems them to be expendable. Exactly. Oh my gosh, yes. Right, yeah. No, and this is an undercurrent throughout Walcott's career. There's
00:57:06
Speaker
he constantly goes back and reminds us that the so-called savagery that Europe has often attributed to Africa is something that occurred in a much more systematic way in the heart of Europe, this great European civilization that he is also an inheritor
00:57:33
Speaker
Right,
Colonial Violence and Allegory
00:57:34
Speaker
right, right. And so there's a connection being made between Nazism and colonialism. Right. I mean, just to kind of point on it, but yeah. Exactly, exactly. Those questions aren't answered, right? They're rhetorical questions. But perhaps as though an answer or something like that. We get a stanza break and the second stanza now,
00:58:02
Speaker
I find, I'll just offer this as an observation and ask you to reflect on it. It feels to me here as though the kind of particulars of the historical conflict are kind of, I don't know what the right verb is, but sublimated or abstracted or buried somehow. And we get a kind of
00:58:28
Speaker
allegorical sort of scene or something instead. So talk to us about that. Yeah. So I think you're right. And we didn't even mention, for example, in the earlier stanza that we get the Kikuyu, you know, quick as flies battening upon the bloodstreams of the belt. So
00:58:50
Speaker
again, a much kind of closer, you know, fly, fly level sort of attention, as well as the, you know, the worm and the singular, single white child, who is, again, not allegorical in any way, then a move to a kind of
00:59:15
Speaker
reflection much more broadly on patterns of human
00:59:23
Speaker
violence. We get a reference here of how he's reflecting on what's happened since civilizations dawn. So suddenly our time horizons have greatly extended. And he talks about how they're
00:59:48
Speaker
He reflects on the violence of beast on beast on the one hand and on the other. In other words, there is, as Tennyson calls it, you know, nature, red and tooth and claw, this kind of raw violence of the natural world.
01:00:05
Speaker
But it seems even worse here, a violence that is based in, you know, he particularly is thinking, I believe, of referring to kind of religious and other kinds of justifications for violence
01:00:26
Speaker
that in his mind make it all the more abhorrent when he says, you know, the upright man seeks his divinity. And again, this is very satiric, I think, seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. You know, yeah, so thinking of the way in which colonialism and, you know, religious Christian expansionsism
01:00:54
Speaker
you know, the white man's burden and all the rest are going hand in hand with one another.
01:01:02
Speaker
You observed, a little while ago as we were setting up the poem, that it seems to be in a kind of, I don't know what we should call it, like it's pentameter-ish or something, you know, or to Frost say there's like strict iambic and loose iambic, so this is loose iambic.
01:01:26
Speaker
and that it rhymes, though, is sort of irregularly and kind of haphazardly. I wonder, you know, when you referred to the way this stanza seems preoccupied with what your phrase was, patterns of human violence, I wonder, I mean, I want to know what the
01:01:54
Speaker
the metrical regularity such as we have it, or even the presence of rhyme, which I hear in this stanza. I mean, it's there in every stanza, though not in the same pattern. You're right. But here, for instance,
01:02:15
Speaker
the word pain rhymes with the word plain. The word with the poet, the stanza ends in a couplet, you know, with dread rhyming on dead. These rhymes feel pretty present and insistent to me. And I just wonder, I guess, if you have
01:02:36
Speaker
What could one say about the fact that the poem is in this kind of meter or that it does have this rhyme? I suppose one thing we could say is that it's sounding, it's a way to sound kind of public.
01:02:49
Speaker
And it's perhaps it's a way to sound British or something. But what do you make of the rhymes or do you have a reading of the fact that it rhymes or any of the rhymes in particular? So, no, it's a great question. I think that the
01:03:10
Speaker
In the first stanza, we start off with very regular rhyme, pelt, flies, veld, dice of paradise, and then starts to sour and get increasingly dissonant as the stanza moves on.
01:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, juice doesn't rhyme with anything, right? Except maybe some resonance with seas, exactly, which has some resonance with cries, you know? So, yeah, things get more and more dissonant as the stanza goes on.
01:03:49
Speaker
as we get more and more zoomed in on the violence. And I think in the second stanza, you're absolutely right about those perfect rhymes and we almost get a heroic couplet at the end of the second stanza. And I think that coincides with these lines about the death and it's the kind of closure of death
01:04:17
Speaker
And the closure sonically, I think, you know, there's a clicking shut, as, you know, Sylvia Plath would put it at the end there that that I think resonates with with what's going on thematically. Yeah. And well, that that that what you call that that that heroic, almost heroic couplet, while he calls courage still
01:04:43
Speaker
Trying to recover the syntax is not easy there, right? It's not easy. I'm going to read the sentence again. So this is the last four lines of this 11-line stanza. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars dance to the tightened carcass of a drum while he calls courage still that native dread of the white peace contracted by the dead.
01:05:13
Speaker
the white piece is a really resonant phrase here. I mean, it seems clearly to evoke the kind of racial politics of the poem, but say more maybe about the phrase white piece and what it's doing for you.
01:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, so white piece is in some ways obviously at the most basic level a reference to death. He calls courage still that native dread of the white piece, of death, of dying, of
01:05:53
Speaker
But obviously, as you as you're suggesting, this is a piece that is imposed, you know, given white supremacist colonial rule through, you know, systematic killing and oppression of the African population here. So peace, I think, is, again, quite ironic. Yeah. You know, brought in here.
01:06:22
Speaker
And it's such a weird way to describe death too. It's as though death is like a disease caught by the dead. Right, right, right. No, exactly. That's really true. Yeah. But, you know, if I just wanted to say, you know, in response to your question, so that's the more particular way of thinking about the rhyme in the poem.
01:06:47
Speaker
at the more general level, here we have this poet in his early twenties who wants to prove his chops, right? And what is the kind of discipline that he has found himself working in? It's the discipline, the metrical and literary discipline of literary English, the great canon
01:07:11
Speaker
And like the great Jamaican writer who we think of as often a thoroughly black American writer, Claude McKay, who wanted to prove himself
01:07:28
Speaker
over and over and over again in the form of the sonnet, for example, that he could master and even outdo anyone in this white-coated form. I think Walcott similarly is taking the techniques, the structures of the, how shall we say, the Western
01:07:57
Speaker
lyric poem of ambivalence, in a way, and the poem of meditation, of broad reflection, and showing that he can
01:08:13
Speaker
use all of those tools in quite powerful ways to describe an experience that had not found its way into utterance in the canons of English poetry. I love it. I'm thinking of the line, which I wish I could quote it perfectly, but I can't.
01:08:36
Speaker
in Shakespeare's Tempest, you know, Caliban saying, you know, you taught me language and the profit on it is I learned how to curse or what's the line, you know, that matters, of course, also to the, you know, to the emisses there and the great retelling of the Tempest and Tempet. Absolutely. And that's great that you cite that because I think in the third and final stanza,
01:09:03
Speaker
we get a very short line, the shortest line in the poem, I who have cursed. And I think that he's very much, he had to be thinking of Caliban taking on the language of Prospero. And what's amazing about that is, so that's Shakespeare, that's Caliban addressing Prospero, but in a sense, the analogy there would be sort of,
01:09:32
Speaker
Walcott is to Shakespeare as Caliban is to prosper. But you've made me think of something else too, in sort of reminding us that Walcott is a young and kind of up and coming poet at this point, and in thinking again about the historical moment that he finds himself in,
01:09:57
Speaker
it of course makes perfect sense. I mean, to me, as someone who's like, I work on the poetry of like the fifties and sixties, that, well, you know, Anglophone poets, I mean, this was a moment of a kind of return to form and that that was a marker of literariness in a way that, you know, 50 years earlier, it would have seemed the opposite. It would have seemed
01:10:22
Speaker
you know, but here, you know, like Richard Wilbur is writing his tidy little poems, which are marvelous. And so, yeah, right. Makes sense that Walcott would be, perhaps for different reasons or additional reasons, be attempting this kind of thing.
01:10:41
Speaker
Absolutely. And this is obviously before the loosening occurs, of course. The great loosening of the late fifties. With the confession of people like Lowell. And so Lowell, of course, as you know better than I do, is still writing very formal, gnarly, tightly knotted verse at this moment. Yeah, yeah.
01:11:06
Speaker
Yeah, and here it seems right, like those rhymes are kind of markers of that imprinting of culture or something. Yes, yes. Okay, fantastic. The third stanza now begins with this sort of movement that I find linguistically quite lovely.
01:11:27
Speaker
the first line of the third stanza begins with the word again, and the second line of the third stanza ends with that word. So again, brutish necessity wipes its hands upon the napkin of a dirty cause. Again, a waste of our compassion. As with Spain, the gorilla wrestles with the Superman.
01:11:48
Speaker
That, again, gesture, is there... I mean, you said earlier the poem is full of doublings and triplings and so on and ambivalences. What do you make of that kind of marker of replicability or something? Yeah, that's great. I mean, my sense is that here it's partly following on the previous stanza in which he's basically talking about how human beings have massacred each other
01:12:17
Speaker
you know, since Time Memorial, but that also there's a particular
01:12:22
Speaker
kind of killing that goes with, you know, it takes place within colonialism that wants to see itself as in the service of some kind of higher power in a way. I think that, again, is about kind of the exhaustion that we feel in our own moment, I think, of, you know, here we are again witnessing another spectacle of violence and
01:12:51
Speaker
feeling very much as observers, as spectators, and trying to figure out how the hell to make sense of it, how the hell we should feel about it. And I guess if I may just make
01:13:11
Speaker
a remark in connection with an earlier point you made in relation to the news media, it seems to me that precisely what's going on here is trying to carve out through poetry a different kind of space from what you get in opinion journalism or
01:13:32
Speaker
now we would say in social media or what have you, that is a space for feelings that are very complicated, very contradictory. You know, if I may, I just want to throw in a story about how, you know, I've never found it possible to give a kind of lecture about this poem because it's so conflicted and so ambivalent. It's drawn in both directions.
01:14:02
Speaker
And so what I often have done is have my students actually debate the poem and draw out the sympathies on one side toward the British, toward their culture, toward the suffering that the white child hacked in bed his
01:14:24
Speaker
has had and their family and so forth. On the other hand, the powerful sympathies with the Mao-Mao and with
01:14:34
Speaker
colonial, you know, anti-colonial revolt and the desire for liberation, that wind that's ruffling through the 20 pelt of Africa again. So and and, you know, abhorrence of the way that the British have responded. And my students going through a stanza by stanza do a beautiful job of kind of dramatizing how
01:15:01
Speaker
the poem goes back and forth and, you know, and phrase one phrase after another or one image after another, you know, you can you can push it one way or the other. And by doing that, they show how the poem, you know,
01:15:16
Speaker
and acts within its very conflicted, very convoluted, sometimes kind of, you know, tonal moves and imagistic shifts and all the rest, you know, a spectator's sense of, you know, just the difficulty of an emotional of the thinking feeling that one has
01:15:45
Speaker
when one has deep connections on both sides of such a conflict, as we'll hear later in the stanza.
Classroom Debates on Perspectives
01:15:55
Speaker
Oh, that sounds great. What an interesting classroom exercise and experience that is. You know, I also find myself thinking as you describe the kind of ambivalences and tensions and conflicts and so on, these words in a different context, but also about like fifties poems.
01:16:15
Speaker
might sort of describe the way we are learning and the new critics are wanting us to think about the resources and affordances of poems in general. It's just that here the stakes seem quite different and much more sort of
01:16:35
Speaker
sort of radically situated in the identity of the speaker. Absolutely. It's not just the tensions of the well-brought urn of high aesthetic, you know, kind of very neatly closed kind of tension. It's a tension that involves, you know, belonging and politics and race and identity, an identity that feels like it's being ripped asunder in some way.
01:17:04
Speaker
And something is simple, and here we'll get to these lines, which are really the, I mean, in a way, the sort of crux of the poem comes at the end of the poem, I think, right? The very simple act of expressing oneself because it has to be in a particular language,
01:17:30
Speaker
it is already a kind of commitment of one's energies in a political direction. Yeah. Um, I, so the, I doesn't come until the, the, the fifth line of the final stanza, I, who am poisoned with the blood of both
01:17:56
Speaker
Where shall I turn? Divided to the vain. Poisoned is such a strong word there.
01:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Especially because he's talking about blood and you would think that, you know, the blood is what nourishes it, what gives us oxygen. I was thinking, I who am fed with the blood of those, I who am sustained by the blood of those, but no, poisoned. Both of them are poison. Yeah. Where shall I turn? Divided to the vein.
01:18:31
Speaker
Yeah. So, and of course, you know, turn, we think, I can't help but think, having been trained at Yale, as you were, in the ways in which poems often reflect on themselves, you know, that verse involves turning, a turning, and this poem turns and turns
01:18:55
Speaker
from one perspective to another, one sympathy to another, one kind of compassion or revulsion to another, where shall I turn divided to the vein is both a kind of meta reflection in some ways on what he's doing in this poem itself.
01:19:14
Speaker
And the question, yeah, so I was thinking the same thing. Ordinarily, I guess when one asks, where shall I turn, what you're expressing is,
01:19:27
Speaker
you're in some kind of predicament and what you would like to be able to do is to turn towards safety or comfort or rescue of some kind, but here it's as though both sides of the bridge are burning or something.
01:19:46
Speaker
So then we get to that line, which, yeah, it's really conspicuous in sort of looking at the poem on the page. You see how much shorter it is. It's, you know, if we've been saying it's pentameter, mostly to this point, this is what, dimeter or maybe trimeter, I don't know. I, who have cursed, and then the enjambment is the drunken officer of British rules. This brings me to a question that's been sort of lingering
01:20:15
Speaker
throughout our conversation.
Colonial Influence on Walcott's Perspective
01:20:17
Speaker
Johan said, take it for what you will or do whatever you'd like with those lines that I've just been pointing to. It's not just that Walcott is sort of part of the African diaspora and thinking about what's happening in Kenya at the time, you know, with the British colonial rule and the Maumau uprising.
01:20:43
Speaker
he's not just a member of the diaspora, he's also a colonial, a British colonial subject himself, right? You know, I'm trying to think in other words, like how would the poem be different if it were, say, an American poet, you know, a different kind of situatedness, if an African-American poet were writing a similar kind of poem at that time. So,
01:21:07
Speaker
that awareness I guess comes to a head in those lines, right? That he too has felt a kind of- Exactly. Rebelliousness to British rule, yeah. Yeah, no, very much so. That's well put. You feel in this moment almost that this comes out of personal experience. I've seen these drunken officers of British rule. I've had to encounter
01:21:36
Speaker
them. And so there is this very strong sense not only of ancestral and racial connection, but also experiential one of belonging to a culture that is still under British colonial domination and is in that line anyway, using that English language to curse it.
01:22:06
Speaker
Is there some, I mean, I confess, I don't know very much about the nature of the British colonial rule in St. Lucia in the 20th century. Is there some sort of misgiving or feeling of, I mean, is Walcott worried about being too good a subject? You know, like should, is part of the word here, like should we be,
01:22:36
Speaker
Rebelling? Interesting. Interesting. I don't know. Yeah. You know, I think probably that worry would have been even more intense living in Jamaica. I see. Yeah, right. Right. We have had history of uprisings and rebellions that have been crushed brutally by the British.
01:23:00
Speaker
And there, I think, yes, there would be a kind of anxiety about wanting to show. But I think it's also very much felt throughout his work, a sense of, you know, the weight of British, you know, oppression
01:23:23
Speaker
And so I think there is this kind of inter, you're pointing us to a really fascinating kind of inter-regional, global south, global south connectedness here that traverses those distances. Obviously nothing- The distance of the middle passage. Of the middle passage, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Sorry, yeah. No, no, no, that's great.
01:23:52
Speaker
And I think that that sense of affinity deepens as he goes on more and more. And I can't help but notice at the end of that very line, how to choose, you were asking me about in Jam Mintz earlier, that choose is suspended there at the very end of the line. How choose between this Africa
01:24:21
Speaker
The this is interesting to me. Yeah, you want to say something about that? Yeah, this this Africa that that perhaps is an Africa that is heroically fighting for liberation.
01:24:37
Speaker
But I think we're also given reason to think this Africa that has done the committed atrocities, committed acts of violence that are abhorrent. I think both of those are rolled up in that this.
01:24:55
Speaker
And the English tongue I love, yeah. Tongue, you know, kind of familiar metonym for the language I love, but it somehow makes it feel all the more sort of personal and
01:25:11
Speaker
Um, like one couldn't give it up, you know, one could give up a language, but not one's tongue. Yeah. Right. I mean, unless you were, you know, in some Greek myth or something. That's right. Um, yeah. Um, yeah, you're, you're reminding me of, uh, uh, yeah. Well, anyway, the, the end of the wasteland, uh, there's a reference to the, I get it.
01:25:34
Speaker
a Elizabethan play in which a character bites out his tongue and spits it at his torturers. But yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Not only would that be to dismember yourself to give that tongue up,
01:25:54
Speaker
It would also mean the end of this poem. To silence yourself. To silence, to silence. Yeah. Betray them both or give back what they give. Because I suppose they both give, I mean, in addition to whatever poisoning has happened here, they've, he feels enriched by both.
01:26:17
Speaker
Yes, I think that's right. And betray is such an interesting word. The worry about, you know, how can I be true to both of my cultural inheritances and to affiliate myself with the English tongue and the English literary inheritances and all of that. Is that to betray, you know, my, you know,
01:26:45
Speaker
African brethren, as it were, other colonial subjects, and vice versa. And he even tries to imagine
01:26:59
Speaker
betraying both sides, giving up his language, giving up his sense of affinity with Africa. And obviously that's a very dangerous place because, you know, what would he be without either or both of those?
01:27:19
Speaker
Yeah. Earlier, Johan, in talking about the questions that end the first stanza of the poem, you had said that they sort of are
01:27:35
Speaker
they kind of come from opposite directions. So there's a kind of oppositional orientation between them. The poem as a whole of the third stanza ends with a series of four questions, each a line. Well, I mean, I guess the first of those four is longer than a line, but how choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love,
01:28:01
Speaker
betray them both or give back what they give. And then these two questions end the poem. How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? I have, I guess, a few questions about this, but let's see if I think they're all kind of intertwined with each other. I mean, one question is just like,
01:28:23
Speaker
The word cool seems really interesting to me here, and it was a bit of a surprise to me every time I read the poem. I wonder what the, you know, what, it's a famously kind of ambiguous word, polysemic kind of thing. You know, you think of everything from Miles Davis to, I don't know, whatever else, you know. So what's the status, like what kind of coolness does he have in mind here?
01:28:48
Speaker
And then, and the word live I think is interesting too, but I guess the sort of apart from the particular questions about word choice in those terminal positions of the lines, my question sort of harking back to the way the first stanza ended is, are these questions, do you read them as similarly sort of opposed to each other or intention with each other? Or is this poet sort of coming to some kind of
01:29:15
Speaker
It's like, is he getting off the fence by the end of the poem? Yeah. There's certainly not a kind of neat symmetrical opposition here at the end, and the oppositions, you know, this or that sometimes are occurring
01:29:33
Speaker
within the single line or how choose between this Africa and the English tongue. So their oppositions, you know, within these final lines. I mean, to my mind, it feels like, you know, the, the, the rhetorical questions are, I don't know how to put this exactly, but, but there, there's a kind of torque there. They're twisting ever more tightly at the end. Um, you know,
01:30:03
Speaker
Finally, we have this expression of just exasperation with the slaughter, with all the death and dying that's going on.
01:30:17
Speaker
now, you know, through the killings on either side, you know, how can I face it? And I think be cool. Yeah. To my mind is, you know, how can I hold my composure? How can I continue to be a
01:30:35
Speaker
a cerebral rational person in some way. A pentameter producing. A pentameter producing, yeah, exactly. And I think actually a lot of these last final lines really are very much in pentameter. And interestingly enough, he's going toward a more regular meter here. And
01:31:03
Speaker
And then, yeah, how can I turn? And we get that turn and the final turn at the end. How can I turn from Africa and live? You know, I should defer to you here. Is there something you want burning to say about this final line? Well, I mean,
01:31:30
Speaker
I guess what would it, if the idea is, and I'm just thinking out loud now, but if the idea is that turning from Africa and presumably more sort of securely attaching his allegiance to his English language and his British identity,
01:31:59
Speaker
if that would make it impossible to live, then I guess what I'm curious about is sort of what's the view of living that's sort of upon which that thought is premised, like what does it mean to live?
Ending Questions on Identity and Allegiance
01:32:17
Speaker
Does one need to sort of, I mean, is this some kind of claim about
01:32:24
Speaker
I wouldn't be living if I were denying my Africanness. It would be a kind of white death or something. Right, exactly. Well said. I think that's right. I mean, it's interesting to think about this in juxtaposition with giving up the English tongue, right?
01:32:44
Speaker
that I love. So we were saying that that would be awful. It would make him mute. It would be this kind of bodily, almost physically felt kind of act of self suppression.
01:32:59
Speaker
But it's interesting that in this climactic line, it almost comes as something of a surprise having said, you know, made clear the stakes of having expressed this love for an English tongue that really finally it's Africa that gets the final, you know, statement of allegiance.
01:33:22
Speaker
that it wouldn't be just a full mute to give up Africa. It would be to give up his existence completely. I guess it would be because he recognizes that fundamentally he comes out of an Africanized, new world,
01:33:45
Speaker
culture. To give that up, to give up the sense of connection with Africa, would be a self-annihilation in a way. You could see this poem in some ways as a 1950s
01:34:11
Speaker
kind of rewrite of the kind of tragic mulatto sort of poem that was, you know, in the 19th century quite popular and we get some of it and Harlem Renaissance poets like, you know, Langston Hughes, for example. Say more about what's designated by that term for people who aren't familiar with it. So just, you know, the sense of being torn
01:34:36
Speaker
between one's whiteness and blackness as the so-called mulatto. And here there is a, obviously he's talking in part here about a racial inheritance, a blood inheritance that is
01:34:56
Speaker
you know, kind of tragically pulling him in opposite directions. And there's no sense of a neat resolution of it at the end. He leaves us with these questions. So again, I think that's a departure from the new critical, you know, neat tensions and resolutions. Right. There's almost a kind of explosive sense of of the relationships among these different
01:35:26
Speaker
and opposing senses of revulsion, you know? So that we come to at the end. And I think that's part of the reason that it ends with all the twists on, twist on, twist on, twist of these questions at the end.
01:35:44
Speaker
Yeah, so it's all of the tensions we've been describing all along we might remember are in some sense inaugurated by the title of the poem which has its own kind of tension and we shouldn't think this is the kind of poem that seeks to resolve or thinks it can resolve that tension.
01:36:09
Speaker
And yet, I think it is wonderful that, and I don't think this is just a new critical thing, that poetry can be a space in which those tensions, those ambivalences, those conflicted feelings, I mean, I think of someone like
01:36:29
Speaker
a precursor poem to this would be something like Yeats' Easter 1916, which is again a witnessing of an anti-colonial revolt in which the poet gives utterance to both his sense of maybe this was a waste, maybe the English would have come, and yet also that there's something powerful going on here that he's witnessing.
01:36:55
Speaker
You know Yeats much better than I do, but at the end of that poem, he's really sort of memorializing and sort of sees that resistance as heroic in some sense. He does. He tries to bring it to a close, although I don't think completely, whereas here the ends are much more frayed and loose.
01:37:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Those words, I guess, um, neither of them cool nor well live rhymes with give in the, in the, in the previous line. Cool. Doesn't rhyme with, doesn't get a rhyme. Yeah. Interesting. Um, yeah. How can I turn from Africa and live?
01:37:43
Speaker
Well, Johan Ramasani, what a wonderful hour and a half this has been and a beautiful conversation this has been. I know that I hear sometimes from listeners that they very much want to hear the poem a second time, having heard the discussion of it. And I wonder if I could ask you to be so kind as to read a far cry from Africa for us as a way to send us out.
01:38:09
Speaker
I would be delighted and thank you for your wonderful questions and companionship. It's been delightful to talk with you about this incredibly powerful poem. Thank you, Kamran. You're very welcome. A Far Cry from Africa. A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt of Africa.
01:38:34
Speaker
Kikuyu, quick as flies, batten upon the blood streams of the Velt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, Colonel of Carrion, cries, waste no compassion on these separate dead. Statistics justify and scholars seize the salience of colonial policy.
01:39:01
Speaker
What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages expendable as Jews. Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break in a white dust of ibises whose cries have wheeled since civilizations dawn from the parched river or bee steaming plain.
01:39:26
Speaker
The violence of beast on beast is read as natural law, but upright man seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as his worried beast, his boars dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, while he calls courage still that native dread of the white peace contracted by the dead.
01:39:55
Speaker
Again, brutish necessity wipes its hands upon the napkins of a dirty cause. Again, a waste of our compassion, as with Spain, the gorilla wrestles with the Superman. I, who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
01:40:19
Speaker
I who have cursed the drunken officer of British rule, how choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both or give back what they give. How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?
01:40:47
Speaker
Well, Jahan Razani, thank you again so much. Yeah, no, it's been a real pleasure for me, a real treat for me. Jahan, your name, I've got it right. It means world. Yes. It's the Persian word for world. And I think, you know, we see that you're sort of living up to that name. I try to not let it go to my head.
01:41:17
Speaker
It's been a pleasure and an education to talk with you and I'm sure our listeners will feel buoyed by it as well. So thank you again and thank you listeners for hanging out with us for the last hour and a half or so. Please share the episode with a friend if you've found it stimulating and stay tuned. We'll have more for you soon. Be well everyone.