The Arts Forum – MARTIN CARTER

Jul 20, 2008 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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An Interview with Professor Frank Birbalsingh

Continued from last week:

Q: Let us turn to your writing. You began in 1951 with your first collection of poems The Hill of Fire Glows Red, the further collection – The Hidden Man (1952); The Kind Eagle (1952); and Returning (1953).   Then came Poems of Resistance ((1953), the volume that made the strongest impact. Edward Brathwaite has said that your early work, up to 1953 is rhetorical or empty. He sees in your work a “drift into dream and (false) rhetorical hope: into images of resurrection and monumental cosmos.” I suppose he is referring to lines like: “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world”; or “I will make my shirt/a banner/for the revolution”. What is such expectation based on?
A: It is based on the same thing that Brathwaite’s poetry is based on. Poetry is not argument. Poetry is statement.

Q:  But there are statements and statements. One statement can say I am weak and I accept defeat. Another statement might say, I am weak, but I will fight oppression. Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet who claims “there is no nation language” in your work, by which he basically means the vernacular or the Guyanese creole. The fact is that you know and speak Guyanese creole, but do not often use it in your poetry. But I do not see why good poetry cannot be written without the vernacular.
A: Both ways: with or without. His argument is based on what he calls “nation language”. I don’t know what he means.

Q:  I think he means the vocabulary, rhythms, cadence and oral practices or creole.
A: Creole or creolese.

Q: Not creolese because that is pejorative whereas he means a language that is an authentic form of expression.
A: That does not satisfy me. I am writing in a personal language that I know. I don’t write in a language that I don’t know.

Q: And the language that you know expresses your feelings to your satisfaction.
A: That is right. I suspect the fight for “nation language” is false. When you speak of “nation language” you’re speaking of something which I don’t know.

Q: Brathwaite’s poem, “Rites”, about cricket in 1954 is written in the vernacular with all the gestures and exclamations that West Indians use when speaking of cricket. That is an authentic West Indian language. But so is the language we are speaking now.
A: That’s right: it’s conversational language. That’s why I don’t understand what he means.

Q: Still. I want to follow up on the charge Brathwaite makes that your poetry, up to Poems of Resistance, betrays unconvincing rhetoric. I detect confidence or aggression, not necessarily optimism/pessimism, because those terms become meaningless, as you have rightly said. But your early poems have a stridency which seems to go away after 1953. After 1955 or 1961, your tone changes from one of assertiveness to one of self-examination. In a 1961 poem, for instance, you say: “But when I tried to utter words – I barked”. To me, that would have been impossible in the 1953 period.
A: It’s a different situation altogether. Also, some poems were published much later than they were written, so you cannot relate to a particular tone to a specific period.

Q: I still think though that your 1951 poems express either a strong sense of nationalism or a sense of global solidarity with the oppressed of the world. These poems appear to be inspired by a Marxist agenda proclaim-ing universal solidarity against international oppression: “But wherever you fall comrade I shall arise”. That ringing tone of liberation is absent from your later poems, in the 60s, where your tone seems more tragic, as if you accept bad situations in the belief perhaps that they are beyond remedy. Your early poems vigorously assert a will to remedy such situations, and a faith that they would be remedied, if not by you, by someone else. But, in a later poem, “What Can a Man do More” you seem to accept the fact of a muddled situation in which people are confused and the ones you trust are betraying you:
And how to leap these sharp entanglements
Or skirt this village of the angry streets?
How utter truth when falsehood is the truth?
How welcome dreams? how flee the newest lie?
Moral incoherence envelops everything and one is trapped in it. Also in “There is No Riot” there is no resistance to pervasive loss and despair:
Now in these days though no rain falls, and bombs are well remembered there is no riot. But everywhere empty and broken bottles like ruin.
There is no human will to protest against ruin and desolation. It’s as if you are saying that everything is too corrupt, muddled and hopeless. What happened with the Marxist vision that did not” sleep to dream” . . .?
A: I don’t know. One changes, you know.

Q: Brathwaite compared you to W.B. Yeats. He said that Yeats was a young revolutionary who became disillusioned. He took the path that you apparently did, which is to look at the suffering of humanity when you are young and say it must be changed; but after you reach middle age, you conclude that it was the lot of humanity to suffer.
A: Which may be true.

Q: That is a depressing conclusion. What do the titles of your volumes mean? Poems of Resistance is self-explanatory. What does Poems of Shape and Motion mean?
A: The idea of Poems of Shape and Motion is of movement and colour. That is why you have a combination of two things – shape and motion.

Q: Jail Me Quickly is a strange title for 1964.
A: That was written when I wasn’t in prison anymore.

Q: Jail Me Quickly contains poems like “After One Year” which ends:
Men murder men, as men must murder men to build their shining governments of the damned.
It seems critical to suggest that it is somehow inevitable for men to murder men.
A: “Men murder men as men must murder men” casually. It is ironic that men should do this. It is inspired by what Guyanese were doing to themselves.

Q: It also induces the line: “How utter truth when falsehood is the truth?”
A: “How welcome dreams? how flee the newest lie?”

Q: Your next volume is Poems of Succession which consists of a medley, or a mixture of poems from your early and late periods; then you move to Poems of Affinity. What is the significance of “Affinity”?
A: Everything borders with something else. When you speak to me about something, I usually see it in one way, then in another in one flat second. And that is what I’m trying to do: to deal with two things simultaneously, not separately. For example, I have always found it difficult to grasp in my mind the difference between something which is extraordinary and something which is superfluous. These two things merge, and I can see the merging only like a flash of lightning. It does not remain. I can visualize it in my mind, but if I try to express it, it vanishes.

Q: It does not come out: you can’t express it?
A: All you can do is contemplate it; you can’t do more than that. To express it is to lose it.

Q: But as a poet, your vocation is to express your illuminations to your readers. It must be a handicap to get illuminations that you can’t communicate.
A: But it becomes a greater achievement when you finally do utter it; for then it is firmly uttered and only when it is necessary.

Q: What do you think of the work of Seymour and Harris?
A: Arthur Seymour was a good friend of Wilson Harris and myself, also to some extent, of Ivan Van Sertima and Denis Williams. He was a mentor, but his own poetry did not have a cutting edge. I spent many years with Wilson before he left for England . . . The two of us had a strong disagreement on what poetry is about . . .
{Recorded: 15th December 1994]
Editor’s Note: The full length of this Interview can be found in Guyana and the Caribbean: Reviews, Essays and Interviews, ed. Prof Frank Birbalsingh (London: Dido, 2004) pp. 231-243.

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