The Humanities Review

Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007

The immediacy of music has something to do with responses to Requiem. While I am too close to my compositions to discuss them with any objectivity, what I can speak to involves interrelationships of identity and art forms-music and literature in particular. I associate John Black/Blancke, the London trumpeter of long ago, with Requiem because he makes me think of the correspondences between art, identity, race, and otherness. And those correspondences bring to mind another book by Dawes, for whom the relationship between music and artistic identity has great weight. In Natural Mysticism: Toward a New Reggae Aesthetic (1999), Dawes argues that reggae music has come to define a postcolonial Jamaican identity-a Jamaicanness that then finds voice in other art forms, particularly literature.

That is, music can become the means of expression through which a diverse nation finds oneness and constructs an international public-and artistic-identity. Dawes' poetry in Requiem does not overtly address the reggae aesthetic or Jamaica. However, it resounds with questions about identity, race, nation, and power, and it demonstrates Dawes' aesthetic: echoes of African enslavement are one of its defining elements. I can't read the poems from Requiem, much less hear Dawes read them, without hearing, in my mind's ear, Bob Marley singing, "Every time I hear the crack of a whip/ My blood runs cold/ I remember on a slave ship/ how they brutalized our very souls." Yet while Dawes frames postcolonial Jamaican identity in terms of reggae music, a number of earlier Caribbean writers, including George Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Aimé Césaire in Une tempête (1969), and Roberto Fernandez Retamar in "Caliban" (1971) formulate postcolonial identity for Caribbean descendents of slaves in terms of Shakespeare's Caliban and Prospero. *1

These two conceptualizations of Caribbean identity-one based in music, the other in Shakespearean drama-converge for me in complex ways. While I am a scholar of Shakespeare, I am also a lifelong musician and have performed reggae and soca music with Caribbean musicians for decades. As I consider the possibility of joining Dawes in London to play my own music about the middle passage-music also inescapably about Dawes and Feelings as individuals-I am overwhelmed by correlations between art and cultural and personal identity.

Continued...

< prev Page 2 of 9 next >

Article Tools