David Dabydeen wrote the 14 poems that Slave Song comprises while an undergraduate at Cambridge University. The set of poems won Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1978. Several individual poems were published before their collective publication in 1984.

Throughout the volume, Dabydeen renders the sound of the spoken Guyanese language, using characteristic slang like “Juk” for poke and alternate spellings for Guyanese vowels, yielding such lines as “Tie me haan up . . . Haal me teet out . . . Set yu daag fo gyaad / Maan till nite” from the collection’s title poem (28).

In the introduction, Dabydeen details the logic underlying his dialect technique, tracing it to the raw and “brutal” conditions of plantation labor and colonial life. Dabydeen appends—in a semi-tongue-in-cheek imitation of T. S. Eliot’s didactic footnotes in The Waste Land—“translations” of each poem into standard English and annotations that offer cultural translations and scholarly elaborations on the poems’ implicit social dynamics and literary precursors.

The annotation to “The Servants’ Song,” for example, explicates the poem as “an example of Guyanese peasant humour, simple and bawdy in a Chaucerian way but more crude” (50). Dabydeen has called empire, in addition to its social, economic, and political aspects, a “pornographic” project; the erotic dimension of colonial power differentials is a significant and overarching theme of the collection (Dawes 213).

“Love Song” grows from a cane cutter’s fantasy about a white woman; “Nightmare” portrays a white woman’s rape fantasy from the cane cutter’s perspective; by contrast, “Brown Skin Girl” addresses the modern phenomenon of Guyanese women who offer themselves as prostitutes or mistresses to foreigners in hope of escape.

Though all speak in the Guyanese vernacular, each poem comes from a different perspective, constituting in Mark McWatt’s analysis “a carefully constructed mask by means of which the poetic persona inhabits the men and women” (16). The personae include a chorus of laboring women, male cane cutters, servants, and an old man. In channeling these disparate voices of Guyanese experience, Dabydeen writes, “The English fails where the Creole succeeds” (14).

Bibliography
Dawes, Kwame, and Neville Senu, eds. Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001, 196–214.
Grant, Kevin, ed. The Art of David Dabydeen. Leeds, U.K.: Peepal Press, 1997.

Categories: Caribbean Literature, Literature, World Literature

Tags: Caribbean literature criticism, Commonwealth Poetry Prize 1978, Creole vs English in literature, David Dabydeen academic article, David Dabydeen biography, David Dabydeen literary themes, David Dabydeen poetry analysis, David Dabydeen scholarly interpretation, eroticism in colonial literature, Guyanese Creole in literature, plantation labor poetry, postcolonial poetry analysis, race and empire in poetry, Slave Song annotations, Slave Song character study, Slave Song criticism, Slave Song cultural translation, Slave Song David Dabydeen analysis, Slave Song dialect poetry, Slave Song footnotes analysis, Slave Song plot, Slave Song postcolonial critique, Slave Song summary, Slave Song themes