A Conversation with Kwame Dawes
BY RASAQ MALIK GBOLAHAN
*
The first time I read Sturge Town (W.W. Norton), I was captivated by Kwame Dawes’s extraordinary visions and exquisite language that anchor the poems. I read through each poem, keenly, while praising the fact that Kwame Dawes’s literary oeuvre has gifted us manifold ways to pay attention to the world, to chronicle it through the power of poetry. For in each work written by Dawes, each poem published by him, there is something memorable to take from it. Something that, even now, returns to me as I remember returning to Sturge Town after this interview to think about how Dawes crafts language— the lyricism, the profundity, and the newness of it. So, it was a delight to have him respond passionately to a myriad of questions, including questions on Sturge Town, his new collection of poetry that attends to pivotal themes such as colonial brutality, ancestral memories, familial relationships, mourning, love, etc. This collection embodies some of the major events in Dawes’s life, and even after turning the last page there is still this hunger for the collection to never end. Here, readers, is the first part of the interview with this man whose life has been nothing sort of a torchbearer.
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan: Sturge Town offers the readers a poignant reminder of the place of ancestral names. There is a return to naming, to the acknowledgment of the living and the dead. I think about names like Nyame and Nyankopon, and the space they occupy in enhancing the readers’ understanding of your ancestral background or tribal origin.
This art of naming also reminds me of Kofi Awoonor’s poetry embodying Ewe traditions and ancestral history through naming. In Kofi Awoonor’s “Songs of Sorrow,” the poet addresses ancestral figures such as Nyidevu, Kpeti, and Kove through Agosi. Names like Dzogbe Liza and Kpeti are deployed to lament the destruction that befell their household. What purpose does the art of naming serve in your poetry, and do you think it helps you connect more to your ancestral heritage?
Kwame Dawes: Some facts may help to frame this response. I was, as you know, born in Ghana—in Accra. For the first nine years of my life, I lived in Ghana and I was, as it happens, trilingual in the most pragmatic sense of things. However, as my father was a Jamaican, while he understood some Fanti and, of course pidgin, he was an English speaker and so the language we spoke at home was English. My mother’s tongues were Fanti, Ewe, and she spoke Ga as well. But English was the language we all spoke at home as a family. I have clear recollections of never struggling with understanding Fanti or Ga, but the occasions for using a language other than English, I imagine, were dictated by the language that my parents used in communicating with each other and with us. I do know that pidgin was a normative language around me, and I still understand Ghanaian and Nigerian pidgin. I realize also that much of what happens in pidgin parallels in some approximate way to Jamaican, and so this may explain my persistent ease in understanding pidgin that is not deep into regionalism on the continuum.
We moved to London when I was about eight, and while I know my mother would have wanted us to retain our Ghanaian languages, I can also understand that tyranny of parenting under tough circumstances that would make English the quicker and more efficient language of managing a home. My older siblings all had more of the Ghanaian languages, and by the time we moved to Jamaica, I believe that the lack of practice may have been the reason for them not being fluent in any of these languages into adulthood. Simply put, in Jamaica, my new challenge was to learn Jamaican. And I worked on this on my own. It is fair to say that I lost my facility with Ghanaian languages. I think it is safer to say this than to try to characterize what does happen—something akin to a broad tonal understanding than a lexicon-based understanding of Akan.
Given this, all claims to my Ghanaianness have been characterized by a combination of confidence in my passport (which I kept updated until I became an American citizen), my birth certificate, my name, and my massive family of cousins, aunts, and uncles in Ghana, and, of course, my slight embarrassment at not being able to respond to simple questions, greetings, and so on in Ghanaian languages. But the markers of connection are not insignificant, and as you have observed, my poems are engaged in testing these markers of belonging, in using them to incant a sense of the journey that I have taken as a person.
But I am also asserting a desire to embrace my inheritance. As a poet, I am fascinated with the fruitful tensions between the inheritances that I come to “honestly” and those that I steal or feel the right to steal as a kind of compensatory gesture. What Awoonor does in his work, the invocation of language, is beautiful. It happens in the work of so many multilingual poets for whom English is a borrowed suit—they create something of the mysticism of poetry as tongues through their access to not just other languages, but other spirit spaces. I won’t pretend that this is what I am doing, but it is close, as close as the pleasure of trying new, unfamiliar words on my tongue. For poets like Kamau Brathwaite, this approach to new tongues—a reaching back into an ancestral memory, if you will, is revelatory and important. I can’t pretend to be so earnest, but I think I am reaching for something.
RMG: Some of the poems in this collection chronicle a profound, intimate relationship with your father. Neville’s life settles deeply into these verses—especially in poems such as “What A Father Gives,” and “The Forgettable Life.” In “What A Life,” there is an indelible eulogization of your father’s ingenuity, his sheer unbelievability in the impossibility of learning, of knowing certain things that, to him, were ordinary. In “The Forgettable Life,” you occupy the dignified position of a storyteller as you share with us Neville’s remarkable journeys across the seas of life. What do you think about your father’s stories and your relationship with him as a son and a poet? Do you, like Robert Hayden in “Those Winter Sundays,” or Kei Miller in “Unsung,” see your poems as bringing the readers close to the transcendental life of Neville as a father? What matters to you in exploring those inimitable narratives of his life?
KD: Here is a peculiar thing—there are many poems about fathering, but they are not all about my father in the autobiographical sense. But even that statement is hugely problematic. We, as writers and poets, create a shorthand of convenience when we say such and such a poem is about such and such or about someone. There is something extremely convenient about this type of language, especially for teachers. We do find something deeply vulnerable and revealing about imagining that Hayden’s poem is about his father—that it is autobiographical in the way that autobiography seeks to present a “factual” narrative about our lives. We think that Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is about her relationship with her actual father, Otto Plath, who actually died when she was eight years old. The Daddy in “Daddy” is apprehended in a manner that would not make sense for Plath’s capacity to know her father, except in ways derived from what she may have learned about her Polish-German father; and it leaves us with a conundrum of understanding. Plath, the poet, virtually accuses her father of Nazi sympathies, and those who have read this poem as a strict account of the facts of Plath’s father may be failing to make space for the emotive intention of the poem—a tantrum and a statement of anger about the traumatic early death of this father.
I often have to say that the poem “A Forgettable Life” is not about my father, but, in fact, about my father-in-law. [“What a Life” is not one of my poems]. And there is a freight-load of quite rich and complex information (some might call them facts) surrounding my father-in-law. But the poem itself is inadequate as an accounting of the life of this man whom I love dearly and whom I admire tremendously. Poems locate a core “truth” and then explore the music that can come from that.
I remember walking past the guest room of our house in Lincoln where my father-in-law was visiting. He was sleeping. I was struck by how efficiently he used space, how much he created a quality for self-sufficiency and a resistance to being demanding in the manner in which he slept. There is a certain hubris about those of us who want to be remembered. I envy the humility of those who seek to live well and kindly and then allow the world to determine what happens to them after they are gone. My father-in-law, a gifted, accomplished, and resourceful man, continues to impress me.
The poems in this collection do spend a lot of time thinking about the many ways of fatherhood, of my father, of my being a father and so on. I do like that about it. There is this moment early in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, when Sands says, “If by chance I talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father,” which I kind of like. Of course, “wildness” is not the issue, but the idea that we are the products of our parents, is, I suppose, the point. As I have said before, I associate my growth as a poet with studying my father’s work, and with my own sense of being part of a larger whole because of my parents. I do feel grateful that my father wrote things down—not just his poems, novels, and stories, but also his letters, his lectures, his notes, his emendations in books, his scrapbooks, etc. These resources served as my tutors and became surrogates to fill the gap left from his passing. I was fortunate to have had a rich life with him before he died, but there is much, of course, that I missed especially around this business of writing. My poems, I suppose, return to this consideration often.
RMG: You confront with candor the grim reality of death in this collection. Here, I think about Mammy’s passing. I return to Neville’s death. I think about your recollection of Biyi’s passing and your memory of Aunt Povi’s slender hands. These are aching remembrances, and they remind me of poems such as Derek Walcott’s “Sea Canes,” Marie Howe’s “Dead Friends,” and some of Sharon Olds’s poems to her late father. In Walcott’s “Sea Canes,” he wrote: “O earth, / the number of friends you keep / exceeds those left to be loved.” Also, in Marie Howe’s “Dead Friends,” the poet transports the readers through the landscape of mourning the departed. In Sharon Olds’s ode poems to her father, there is a brave acknowledgment of the end and the indescribable sorrow the bereaved must carry with them. What do you think about capturing this grim reality of life in your poems? Do you think it alleviates the agony or the dread of its eventuality—here, John Donne’s “Death, be not proud” also comes to mind.
KD: Donne on death is fascinating. I always associate that poem with the rich complications of theology—of prevenient grace, or predestination, and of course, of Christian belief. Donne is writing an exegesis of Pauline doctrine, and while we did not spend a great deal of time talking about this aspect of his work, I do return to it because I think Donne is actually writing about doubt, and I find that to be where the poem is truly alive. I learned all of Donne’s Holy Sonnets by heart in preparation for my exams in 17th Century Literature as an undergraduate. I don’t think I found comfort in them around the anxieties of death, but I did take some solace in the fact that Donne was wrestling with faith. “Just one short sleep,” he says. This struck me as valiant hope, but mostly, a brilliantly efficient end to a sonnet. Maybe the poem is comforting not for its content but for its remarkably efficient shape.
Already I have distracted myself from the subject of your question. Do my poems suggest that I consider death “grim”? I suppose it is an easy word, but I can’t consider the poems you list as grim. Death and loss, of course, are difficult and complicated, but I find it hard to take the adjective “grim” seriously when referring to death as there is something, well, comic about the idea of the “Grim Reaper”—comic in the way horror movies are comic. I expect that this is when we actually consider the “reader” as the judges of what their disposition to death might be. My hope is that these poems function in the ways that elegies function. And it is inevitable that the older I get, the more death I see, and the closer and closer to me is the reality of death.
My poems about the dead are, I would like to think, love poems, poems that explore the nature of loss, the peculiar performance of mourning and its startling imposition on us. I hear your question about the why of poems and the possibility that maybe writing poems can be a kind of healing for pain. I don’t know. I truly don’t. The thing is I have come to depend on the making of poems for my well-being, whether I am in crisis or not. In this sense, and I don’t mean this glibly, making poems serves me as eating does, and water does, and as certain pleasures of life do.
I have found that the world in my head is extremely loud, and when I write poems, I find my way to understanding myself, or maybe I get to know what I am thinking and feeling in the world, in my life. I don’t choose to write about a subject to solve it, but I consider the impulse to make a poem completely unrelated to what the poem is about. The impulse is to create a poem, and only then, only when I start to write, do I come to understand what I am thinking about and what I am feeling. I live with a certain openness to images, ideas, feelings, and so on, and I collect these randomly and without design, sometimes in notes, sometimes in snippets of verse, but mostly in the unfiltered mess of my mind. I then drop my bucket into this well of possibilities to make these poems. Only in retrospect, only, then, after I know what I have found in me, can I begin a narrative of what I write about.
You asked about writing about this, and what I am trying to say is that I think I write about everything that happens to pool around in my life. I believe someone famous once said that all poetry is about death. I think there is a truth to it in the most fundamental sense of how and why we live and make art.
Rasaq, I have lost some people very dear to me in this world. There are moments when I remember them and find myself tearing up at their memory. I write poems to remember, to memorialize, and to articulate the feelings of their loss as a way to, for me, and hopefully for others, to rail against their absence. I would never claim this to be an act of healing, but I do claim it as a good fortune for me that I can find language to do this work which is a comfort to me. You see, the poems are almost always a distraction from the reality—there is great beauty in distraction, and art, the making of something beautiful, is a distraction. During the pandemic, I wrote a lot of poems. I remember that John Kinsella and I kept each other company, he in Australia and me in Nebraska, with poems of exquisite distraction—we wrote about dying, we wrote about art, we wrote about memory, we wrote about politics, and we knew that all around us there was something quite terrible happening. I wouldn’t call any of this grim, not me.
RMG: While there is an expansive space for mourning in Sturge Town—which comes in manifold ways—there is also the celebration of the beloveds. There is a relentless quest for the tenderness of love amidst loss. Here, your poem, “Fatherless,” comes to mind. In the poem, you grieve your father’s passing and also attend to the mystery of love, its uncontrollable tide that swept you off your feet. Describing your love for Lorna, you wrote: “Nothing in me would sleep, / nothing in me would rest—call me hooked to love or the need.” Again, in “In This Saying,” you wrote: “Kwame and Lorna / They will hold hands / and, in this saying, the poem ends.” I am interested in the shared realities of life in “Fatherless”—the unsettling reality of your father’s passing and your allegiance to Lorna’s love.
What do you think about the intervention of a beloved’s love in mourning, and what roles does love play in the moment of grief—here, I am also thinking about Gabriel Marquez’s startling title, Love in the Time of Cholera? Do you think a beloved’s love offers adequate comfort in the moments of mourning?
KD: Well, here you are not asking about poetry, and you are asking about life. I think writing poems about love is difficult. I like to tell my students and other writers that they are allowed. It is a saying I hold dear and apply to the inclination we sometimes have towards sentimentality. But we know that the greatest enemy to love poetry are the formulas of love poems that proliferate in the world in popular songs and in thousands and thousands of poems. I like to think that my best love poems are my poems that are not love poems, poems that try to make sense of sentiment and to find language for sentiments of affection and desire and manage to do so in the way those feelings and experiences come to us.
The world does not stop for love. The world remains a mundane and complicated space, weather happens, bills have to be paid, we eat, we fart, we quarrel, and we love and feel. I consider this territory that demands great attentiveness to language and form because without such attentiveness one can easily succumb to form, to what has been done again and again. I expect that what I ask myself about love is what it means to have been in a relationship with Lorna since we met in 1980. And that is a book that unfolds in such variation and complication. It is full of knowing and not knowing, but mostly it is full of gratitude. This is not about poetry, is it? I will say this, though, that one of my principles as a poet is that I make a distinction between the writing of poems and the publishing of poems. I try to always convince myself as I am composing a poem that all I am doing is writing the poem. I do not think of it as a shared work, a published work. This is a great liberation. I mention this because I think it is worth saying that I have written hundreds, maybe thousands of “love poems,” and I am assured that I have managed to indulge in every cliché that might well be available, which then ensures that I might write at least a few decent love poems.
I do think that it is worth saying though that there is an idea that one lives a sentiment in a poem. This struck me when you said, “You grieve your father’s passing [in the poem],” and it occurred to me that while this is colloquially true, it is actually not quite so, or maybe, there is another way to think about it. I grieved my father’s passing in 1984 and the few years after his passing. And in some ways, even today, I do carry a sense of his passing and feel his loss, but “grieve” is not the verb I would use. And when I have written poems about the deaths of my father or my sister, I am ritualizing the gestures of grief, but in and of themselves, I am not grieving in the poems. For me poetry seeks to capture the sense of what grief means, and it thus becomes a way to create a monument to mourning, to grief and so on. The difference is important. Sometimes art induces feelings of grief, but I do think that art monumentalizes grief in ways that positions these as ritual recounting and preserving of human experience.
I think the same is true about love poems. In other words, my poems of love are monuments to love and the entire range of feelings and thoughts around love. The moment of love is rich with complexity, the writing of love examines these sensations and tries to create a space for us to engage them. So those poems you mention are preserving the truth of history in ways that are important in the lives of people who love each other and who hope to stay long with each other. We all do this. We all carry in us moments and memories, which serve as markers, reminders of a sensation that we keep for the purposes of assuring ourselves that we have something important between us that allows us to withstand the harder moments.
Obviously, these markers are not magical, and because we all live in relationships on a spectrum of conditionality and the relative transactional rules that we have set for ourselves. I do believe that I write love poems for the same reason I write poems about loss—the goal is to preserve feeling, to leave markers that might trigger sensations because I need these in my life. I do believe that this creation of art is communal as well, because I have come to believe that the better the poem succeeds at doing justice to the very specifics of the sentiment and to the moment, the more it will resonate with other people. I believe that the gift that poets give to those who read their work is to make the act of empathy more likely. The more we see what the other is feeling and thinking from their perspective and from their peculiar world, the greater our capacity to not just empathize but to translate its meaning for ourselves.
I hope that makes sense. I have been trying to find a way to say this since I started writing about empathy as a theatrical practice in the early 1980s. Still not there yet, but I will keep trying.
RMG: It’s irrefutable—the vastness of the roads you have travelled. Like Neville, like Mammy, like your ancestors. Yours is a larger-than-life portrait of a man whose impacts have travelled across the world. Being the busiest man in Literature, what are you working on presently? What other journeys have you envisaged for yourself as you continue bearing the great weight of narrating your stories and the stories of your ancestors?
KD: I don’t regard myself as remotely the busiest man in Literature because I don’t think such a thing exists. But it is funny to be called that.
I do find it difficult to answer questions about “what I am working on now” for several reasons. First, I am of the ilk that does not like to talk about ongoing projects when they are in the most generative stage. So, what I can mention are the things that might well be ahead for us soon. Peepal Tree is working on my first book on the writing craft and a new collection of short stories. These should be out soon enough. In December 2024, Peepal Tree released Mortality, my sixth collaborative book with John Kinsella. Early this year, Audible Originals released Lover’s Rock, an anthology of love stories by Jamaican authors, which I edited. This is a project in collaboration with the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust. I just completed a deal between the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust and the University of Nebraska Press for a new imprint, The Caribbean Poetry Book Series—Calabash, modelled on the African Poetry Book Fund. As part of this enterprise we will be launching the Neville Dawes First Book Prize in Caribbean Poetry. As you may know, I am the current Poet Laureate of Jamaica and I have formed a truly prestigious Poet Laureate support team based mainly in Jamaica, and with the National Library of Jamaica we’ve been pursuing an exciting program of activities.
In January, my wife and I began the new stage of our professional lives when we assumed posts at Brown University. She in libraries and me in the Department of Literary Arts. The African Poetry Book Fund has relocated to Providence, and we are embarked on a robust series of new projects from our new “home base.” The APBF is beginning some exciting new research-related work. You yourself have been part of the brilliant team of student scholars that have put together one of the most comprehensive annotated bibliographies on African Poetry Criticism and African Poetics, which will eventually be the basis for a truly groundbreaking African Poetry and Poetics reader being spearhead by Matthew Shenoda and Tsitsi Jaji. In June of this year, we will also be releasing a report on poetry book distribution in Africa based on research spearheaded and managed by Uche Okonkwo, yet another brilliant scholar, student, and writer. The list goes on, of course. I can’t repress the excitement I have about a slate of new books of poetry that the APBF will be publishing in the coming year and a half, not to mention the KUMI: New Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set, our new box set just released by Akashic Books.
Hmm, maybe I am the busiest person in Literature, because I am finding myself resisting the urge to list all the things that are happening and forthcoming in which I am deeply engaged and involved.
