Andrew Salkey’s long poem Jamaica bears the subtitle An Epic Poem, Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society. Published in 1973, after more than two decades of work, Jamaica sprawls across centuries of Jamaican history and includes a wide range of events and themes.

Framed by a prologue, “I into history, now,” and an epilogue, “Is the lan’ I want,” the poem consists of four major sections. The first section, “Caribbea,” addresses the land and sea in direct empathy:
“Caribbea, / knowledgeable, / patient, / raise your emancipated breasts, / maternal, / absolute, / elegant, / malachite eyes” (106).

The second section, “Slavery to Liberation,” focuses on five significant years in Jamaican history.

The third section, “Mento Time,” depicts everyday urban life in 20th-century Kingston in the rhythm of Mento music, a precursor of ska, rock steady, and reggae genres.

The fourth section, “Caribbean Petchary,” focuses on three historical events and closes with an ode to the petchary bird (the gray kingbird known for its loud “Pittire” song):
“you and Caribbea are one in us; / you are Caribbea!” (93).

Many of the poem’s various subsections turn upon the events of key years in Jamaican history:
1692, in which the city of Port Royal suffered a massive earthquake;
1796, the year of a major rebellion, the Maroon War;
1833, in which slaves were emancipated by the British Parliament;
1865, the year of the Morant Bay Uprising;
1907, in which an earthquake devastated Kingston;
1938, the year of labor riots, the consolidation of the worker’s movement, and the founding of the People’s National Party;
1944, in which the first elections were held;
and 1951, in which Hurricane Charlie wreaked considerable damage to the island and left thousands homeless.

The language of Jamaica, like much of Salkey’s work, attempts to render Jamaican speech—its articulations, elisions, and cadences—on the printed page. Salkey’s foregrounding of Jamaican speech as a poetic medium harmonizes with the poem’s overarching theme of harnessing the island’s history, and the experience of its people, to articulate Jamaican identity and culture.

“Culture,” goes one of the poem’s several refrains,
“come when you buck up / on you’self. / It start when you’ body make shadow / on the lan’ ” (107).

Salkey’s approach to Jamaican history through epic poetry at once stylizes the experiences of the colonized and demonstrates the potential of doing so. Rejecting both willful ignorance and mimicry of the colonizer, Salkey’s poem both performs and argues for an expansive and adaptive approach to Jamaican poetry:
“I into history, now. / Is not’ing but song I singin’ / an’ name I callin’ / an’ blood I boilin’ / an’ self I raisin’, / in a correc’ Anancy form, / a t’ing I borrow / an’ makin’ me own, wit’out pretty please / or pardon” (12).

For Salkey, Anancy, the wily spider-man of Ashanti mythology, emblematizes the adaptive culture of the African diaspora and the grafted African roots of Caribbean literature. Like the figure of Anancy, the poem embodies and argues for fashioning art out of both evolving diasporic traditions and ambivalent legacies of European colonialism—such as the English language—which the Caribbean artist may borrow, adapt, infuse, and inflect with local geography, imagery, experience, and voice.

Bibliography
Salkey, Andrew. Jamaica: An Epic Poem, Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society. London: Bogle L’Ouverture Press, 1983.

Categories: British Literature, Literature