HUMA 4307

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4307

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Oct 30, 2023

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Lillian Allen, “Assessing Dub Poetry’s Literary Impact- Black Voice” American poet Nikky Finney began by referring to the 1739 slave codes of South Carolina: “A fine of $100 and six months in prison will be imposed for anyone found teaching a slave to read or write. And death is the penalty for circulating any incendiary literature…” Finney goes on, “The ones who longed to read and write but were forbidden, who lost hands and feet, were killed by laws written by men who believed they owned other men… words devoted to quelling freedom, insurgency, imagination, all hope Traditional poetry- Yeats, Chaucer This work was propagated in a way not to emphasize that these were creations of individuals who worked out of a specific cultural context in the throes of particular historical times and rooted in particular landscapes. Dub poetry did what good poetry should do, and that is reach for and reflect its own space and vernacular, the concerns of the personal, social, spiritual and political, in its own time. Dub poetry- and has given birth to and helped the spoken word form take root. The Harlem Renaissance was an African-American arts movement developed around 1918 in Harlem in response to the pervasive notion in America that Black people had no culture and could not make or appreciate art. The aim was to present alternative conceptions to the white stereotypes of “the Negro” and to present a view to American society countering the dehumanizing and racist conceptions entrenched in American beliefs about Black people. It also set out to articulate that Black people had a long history and rich culture that should serve to redefine Black presence in America, beyond enslavement. Kwame Dawes contends that dub poetry owes much of its spiritual sensuality to reggae music by “a stillness, a hint of undulation … a place where the rhythm is in complete control.” He describes it as “a sweet place, a spot in a groove that is perfectly comfortable, perfectly right … shaped by the music. … A poem, a poem. This is the taste of reggae Reggae music paved the way for the international, cross-cultural popularity of dub poetry The poetics of 1`qe combined music and message, with lines like “my fear is my only courage …” and the poetic comfort of recurrence, repetition and insistence: “get up stand up. Stand up for

dub brings a host of others elements while prioritizing and playing with different aspects of “sounding” for effect, grounding emotional centers in language phrases and working with transmutation of energy all of which are culturally coded and so essential to creating, awakening and validating shared and visionary ideas and experience; necessary ingredients for creating community. Dub poets enter language to explore the complexities of marginalization from literature and from dominant culture. Dub is concerned with emerging the individual voice rooted in the context of collective culture because dub calls simultaneously for justice, equality, redress, unity, aesthetic satisfaction and accountability. Dub poetry’s loudest scream is that voices need to come from specificity, the best way to colonize consciousness is to suppress it. Let us consider that we are hearing from youth, marginalized and a range of diverse cultures only because they/we have stormed the barricades, trampled the ‘no entry’ signs. Did these voices not exist before? I ask you to consider the ideological agenda in claiming poetry for one section of society. Shouldn’t all lovers of poetry be asking Finney’s question of all those voices they have not heard from in our society? Poetry is not only the pathway to your inner voice, it is also a pathway from the inner voice marginalized peoples have always resisted the silencing and have employed any means available in the articulation of their experiences, vision and creativity Sometimes the word was the only thing they possessed, their word their only fight against absurdity and injustice. T New form creates space and beings and processes where none existed before. New forms are especially powerful as they remind and assert for us that there are new possibilities If gatekeepers of ‘good poetry’ could step out of their niches, and see the real threat to excellence in a contemporary world is a lack of diversity and the commodification of our value to each other as community Dawes discusses the dilemmas of aesthetic and social class in the world of poetry, noting that this dilemma of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ supports an idea that creativity is not a universal phenomenon but unique to only some communities and cultures.

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