This essay examines the production of cultural voice in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson,the African/Caribbean/European dub poet. It suggests that the double-displacement of an African-Caribbean Black living in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity-making and history.
Reviews books on Afro-Hispanic and Caribbean literature. Includes The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin; Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance; Nicolas Guillen: Popular Poet of the Caribbean, by Ian Isidore Smart.;
The author examines race, language, and identity in Derek Walcott's poetry, reading Walcott's poetry as an extended meditation on the question of whether it is possible to exist within the English language and an Afro-Caribbean tradition, drawing poetic nourishment from each, or whether the attempt is a betrayal of both. Of mixed racial ancestry, a native speaker of French Creole who was formally educated in British colonial schools, raised Methodist on the Catholic island of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott occupies a peripheral place with respect to both English and Caribbean culture, it is noted. Throughout the course of his poetic career he has been criticized from both perspectives, either for "appropriating the Other" and putting it to use in the service of the dominant culture or for not assimilating that dominant (English) culture fully enough.;
Kuwabong suggests that both Lorna Goodison's and Claire Harris's poetic of matrilineage survives on their positive representation of the mother-daughter relationship, which ideologically borders on the Caribbean concept of a daughter becoming her mother
Kamau Brathwaite 's "Resistance Poems: the Voice of Martin Carter" is also in Stewart Brown's book All Are Involved: the Art of Martin Carter (Leeds: Peeple Tree, 2000), pp. 130-144.
