Abstract
After being away from Jamaica for a decade, one morning I woke up and heard two workmen talking. The windows had grillwork; the sun came into the living room, which was bright. The sound of men talking came from behind the wall. These were the class of men who do the heavy work of construction, pouring concrete, fixing cinderblocks, making drainage ditches. I think they were speaking of dancehall and Yellowman. The talk went on. The sounds rose and fell, the pace slowed, the voices spoke in sequence and together, a dialogue that was amplified and at the same time too remote for me to make out. Meaning was hidden behind the wall. “Dialogue recovered its place, which had long stood empty. It resurfaced suddenly, on its own,” Edmond Jabès writes.1
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Notes
Edmond Jabès, The Book of Dialogue, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1987), 34.
See Antonio Benitéz-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1992), 10.
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1986), 406.
Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), 25.
Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Modern Political Doctrines, ed. Alfred Zimmern (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1939).
Alexander Pope, Poems, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 153.
C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s Book Stores, 1963), 152.
Ezra Pound, “Vers Libre and Arnold Dolmetsch,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1935), 440.
On the logic whereby literature comes to be guardian of the language and therefore of the nation, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 48–51.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove, 1963), 216.
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday, 1961), 9.
T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 17.
T.S. Eliot, “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes toward the Definition of Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968), 79–202; 99–100, 137.
Matthew Arnold, Poetry and Criticism, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 204.
Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 7.
George Steiner, Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 78.
T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 124.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in Selected Writings, ed. T.B. Bottomore and M. Rubel, vol. 1. (London, 1963): 272–73;
added emphasis; quoted in Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 76.
Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 172.
Hyppolite Taine, History of English Literature, vol. 1 trans. H. Van Laun (New York: Worthington, 1889), 29; added emphasis.
William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads” in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 453.
George Gordon Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 83.
Paula Burnett, ed., The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1986), 3.
Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer, and Society (London: New Beacon, 1967), 48.
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989), 124.
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 182.
Susan Howe, The Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Windsor, Vt.: Awede, 1987), n.p.
Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987), 55.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 66.
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© 2009 Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten
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McMorris, M. (2009). Ah Noh Musik Dat: Speech in the Discourse of Nationalism. In: Noland, C., Watten, B. (eds) Diasporic Avant-Gardes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08751-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08751-5_8
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