Vernacular Poetry 97

Wuk, nuttin bu wuk

Marn noon an night nuttin bu wuk
Booker own me patacake cunt
Booker own me pickni. children
Conventional notions of vernacular ef cacy shifted several gears when Bob
Marley gave his words and music to the world. Black British writers brought
their own experience to the beat, as when Linton Kwesi Johnson born in
rural Jamaica in 1952 but moving to London in 1963 took performance
poetry into the blend of music and verse known as dub, which he is gener-
ally credited with inventing. Mostly written in street language, Johnsons per-
formances activate challenging perceptions of immigrant experience against
a background of the reggae music he also writes. Di Great Insohreckshan
(1984) uses these rhythms to document the riots that broke out in Brixton in
the early 1980s. Grace Nichols grew up in a coastal Guyana village and has
lived in Britain since 1977. Her frst collection, I Is A Long Memoried Woman
(1983), closes with an Epilogue that speaks to migration and renewal across
the world, and so reaches beyond this chapter and further into the intertextual
domains of anglophone poetry:
I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old one
a new one has sprung
With the proliferation of English as a world language, especially in the wake
of empire, postcolonial criticism has focused increasing interest on the various
ways in which language is used to resist or subvert the authority of Standard
English as the dialect of colonial education (as in Samoan Sia Figiels riposte
to Wordsworth in The Dafodils from a natives perspective (1998)), or
alternatively to explore the liberating creative possibilities associated with the
blending of Western and non- Western linguistic and cultural traditions (as
in the allusions to Homer and Dante in the work of St Lucian poet Derek
Walcott). Many postcolonial poets (from Linton Kwesi Johnson to Ghanaian
poet Kof Anyidoho) have favoured performance poetry as a means by which
to signal the importance of oral traditions, and the unique aural and rhyth-
mic infections of postcolonial vernaculars, within and alongside traditions of
written verse.
Alan Gillis began this section by suggesting (in Chapter 4), that poetry can
both delight and teach. Vernacular poetry even when it is less explicit about
the relationship between language and power than Tony Harrisons tends to
be has much to teach us, particularly in a period when global migration, as
CAVANAGH TEXT (M2204).indd 97 16/3/10 17:21:39