Sighting the Slave Ship
We came to unexpected
latitudes –
sighted the slave
ship
during divine service
on deck.
In earlier dog-days
we had made landfall
between forests of
sandalwood,
taken on salt, falcons
and sulphur.
What haunted us later
was not the cool dispensing
of sacrament
in the burnished doldrums
but something more
exotic –
that sense of a slight
shift of cargo
while becalmed.
Few will be surprized
to hear that the idea of organizing a conference on poetry in English language
teaching sprang partly from my own experience. In the English department
of the Université Lumière Lyon 2 we offer in second year
a certain number of optional courses, among which are a set of four called
Cultures of the Commonwealth . On these courses Canadian, Australian, South
African and West Indian literatures are studied in their historical and
cultural contexts. My own contribution is a 24 hour course (two hours a
week for twelve weeks) in which a selection of poems written by West Indian
poets are read in the context of the history of West Indian immigration
to Britain since 1948 .
Combining poetry with
history in this way is clearly a perilous undertaking, and one is constantly
aware of the need to steer a middle course between the twin perils of offering,
on the one hand, a reductive reading of poetry and, on the other, a sentimental
reading of history. Yet, as long as one bears these dangers in mind, it
can be a very rewarding combination, both for the study of poetry and history
in general, and for the specific literary and historical situation of the
Caribbean. My object in this essay is to try and evoke some of these general
and specific rewards and, in order to illustrate some of the general points
I shall be making, I shall use the very short poem by Pauline Stainer quoted
at the top of the page, which also happens to be the first poem the students
meet on the course.
Before I begin on
the avantages of combining the study of poetry with the study of history,
let me first make clear how I work with the students. In the first session
we look at the different strategies used in a text to produce an effect
on a reader : strategies concerning sound, semiotics, syntax, poetic devices
and semantics. I use the Pauline Stainer poem to illustrate these ideas.
From then on, the students are given almost every week a single poem to
prepare for homework, and in class we combine their observations into a
coherent whole which offers a reading of the poem as a historical document.
I insist on a very strict format, which corresponds to the traditional
French commentaire de civilisation. The students must produce an
introduction, focussing on the author, the date, and the type of document.
We usually develop an overall argument out of one of those aspects, which
enables us to expand on 2-4 key features of the text. Finally, our conclusion
will offer an evaluation of the text as an historical document. The only
difference, in sum, with the familiar commentaire de civilisation is that
the historical facts are reached by means of an analysis of literary effects.
To give just one example from Pauline Stainer’s poem, there are usually
very fruitful discussions around the polysemy of the word “ latitudes ”,
in which the geographical meaning opens out onto moral meanings. What is
I think important for teaching, is that something students find interesting
but difficult, the analysis of the literary effects of a poem on a reader
and how they are created, is made easier by relating literary considerations
to historical effects.
Recent critical trends,
with the debatable exception of New Historicism, have not tended to study
literary texts in general and poetry in particular in such a way as to
bring out their historical situation. And yet students’ understanding of
a poem is almost invariably helped by situating it in the general context
of history and the specific context of literary history. Pauline Stainer’s
poem was written in 1992, at a time of a general stir of interest in the
history of the Atlantic : the slave trade, colonization and the migration
of labour. The 1991 Census was the first to include questions concerning
people’s ethnic origins and its findings provided the basis for all kinds
of discussion on the theme of race relations. The 1492 discovery of America
was being commemorated in many media at the time, most strikingly (though
perhaps not most successfully) in film. Most students will have seen, or
at least heard of the Ridley Scott film starring Gerald Dépardieu,
and will be aware of the film-maker’s attempt to avoid a purely Eurocentric
view of Columbus’s discovery. I can use this to show them that the contrast
between the visible and the invisible so tellingly evoked in the poem is
in fact part of a much wider discussion on the causes and consequences
of a purely Eurocentric historical vision and I may move on to the example
of the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen, who in the early 1990s was also raising
interesting questions about the representation of Black people in art.
Having published Hogarth’s Blacks : Images of Blacks in Eighteenth
Century Art, he was about to turn his attention to Turner, whose painting
The Slave Ship is very much part of the background to our poem.
This situating a text
historically presents the additional advantage opening up perspectives
of intertextuality : poems can be grouped and understanding helped by making
connexions. For example the cargoes mentioned here “ sandalwood … salt,
falcons and sulphur ” are interesting in themselves, but even more evocative
if one explores the echoes of Masefield’s poem Cargoes or of Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
In sum such an approach
is essentially a way of opening up and opening out poetry for students,
rendering poetry at once more rich and more accessible. To borrow both
an image and an idea from Keats : climbing the gradual slopes of
historical facts may be easier than attacking the north face of purely
literary analysis – but the views from the peaks are just as magnificent
!
I would like to turn
now to the advantages that the combination of the study of poetry with
the study of history offers for history. The first point to make is that
poems, like any literary documents, only perhaps more so, offer a human
perspective on history. Langston Hughes has called poets “ lyric historians
” and I think the phrase is a good one in that lyric poetry is the most
common genre in modern times but, in the particular context of Caribbean
poetry, I would personally add that they are sometimes satiric and
epic historians, as well. The fact that a poem is obviously not a primary,
but a secondary, source of history can be turned to an advantage since
it makes obvious the need for critical distance on the students’ part.
The Pauline Stainer poem, in particular, often leads to a very interesting
discussion on the questions of who is talking, when and to whom.
More generally, I
have noticed that the often elliptical nature of poetry stimulates discussion.
This is particularly true of the Pauline Stainer poem, where the slaves
are not evoked explicitly, but as “ a slight shift of cargo ”. It their
invisibility and their silence which compel the reader to closer investigation,
both of the poem and of the historical reality it conjures up.
Not all poems are
so elliptical. Indeed, it is not uncommon for poets to fulfill the historical
function of providing eye-witness accounts of historical events. In such
instances poets’ accounts tend to be critical (though they are occasionally
celebratory) and thus often provide an unofficial history of the times,
in counterpoint to official history. In a time of surveying the history
of the twentieth century, two people who would agree with this view are
Peter Forbes who recently edited the anthology Scanning the Century : the
Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry and Peter Childs, who recently
published a critical survey entitled The Twentieth Century in Poetry. Both
works focus on the poet as historian and neither ignores the presence of
Black British poets.
Another advantage
for historical discussions is the fact that poetry, unlike many other documents,
asks the big questions. At the beginning of the course I remind students
of Aristotle’s remark, that “ poetry is more philosophical and more serious
than history, for poetry deals in universals, while history deals in particulars.
” To come back to our poem, the question What is the cargo
? must lead to Who is the cargo ? and in this shift in interrogative pronoun
is to be found the essential interest of the poem.
Last but not least,
poems are concentrated and concise, therefore memorable. This is of course
poetry’s main function and it does not seem to me the least of its merits
as a teaching tool. It means that students can leave class having literally
“ internalized ” a text, in the sense that they have learnt it off by heart
and who knows but its meanings may continue to work themselves out in them,
long after class and in other contexts.
I would like, in a
last part, to look at some of the reasons why the combination of poetry
and history works especially well in the context of the Caribbean. Working
in an English department, my focus must necessarily be on contemporary
British history, and as far as that is concerned, contemporary Caribbean
history is located in the particularly interesting historical fields of
decolonization and immigration. These fields are of course interactive
: as one Black Briton put it, “ We are here because you were there. ” These
are areas of contemporary history which students usually find stimulating
and in some cases close to their own everyday concerns. One of the classes
is devoted to the theme of migration, a theme which rarely leaves students
indifferent. The history of the migration of poets between Europe and the
Caribbean and back is part of the general history of the English-speaking
world, and thus raises important questions of cultural imperialism and
race relations. The latter terms are of course developed elsewhere in the
curriculum of “ civilisation britannique ”.
As far as contemporary
British poetry is concerned, Caribbean poetry constitutes an exciting and
neglected area. As well as injecting a welcome international element into
what is all-too-often a rather parochial poetry scene, Caribbean poetry
reminds us that poetry is primarily an oral art, never far from music and
drama. Many students are familiar with and approve of the poet Linton Kwesi
Johnson (LKJ) as a dub musician and they find it interesting to compare
the effects of a poem read as a poem and a poem as words set to music,
since LKJ has recorded all his work in both forms.
Finally, on a course
that aims to combine an interest in literature with an interest in history
(or vice versa), I can also offer an approach to interest those whose are
stimulated by the study of linguistics. Caribbean poets may write in any
form of language along a continuum that runs from the local Creole to standard
English. Since a choice of language is involved, interesting linguistic
questions are raised. Moreover, the geographical and historical situation
of the Caribbean means that the British perspective must sooner or later
open out onto more cosmopolitan vistas and other imperial cultures : Spanish,
French, Dutch, and above all, American. This factor again helps to broaden
the usefulness of the course. All of the students will be fluent in French,
many of them will be familiar with Spanish, and most of them will be enthusiastic
for all things American, so it is to be hoped that questions raised on
my specifically British course will occur to them later in different contexts.
In this brief space
I have not tried to do more than touch on some the pleasures involved when
history and poetry are intertwined, but I hope I have managed to give you
some idea of the inherent possibilities of the combination. Not least of
its advantages is that once the fairly rigid framework of the commentaire
de civilisation has been established, the fields of study are so rich that
there is considerable scope for letting students follow their own inspirations
and develop their own ideas.
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