Race & Poetry in America
Transcript for Student Voices
Colin Channer and Devon Epiphany Clifton
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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.
Devon Epiphany Clifton: I'm Devon Epiphany Clifton, a PhD candidate in the Department of English, and I'm speaking with award-winning writer and Assistant Professor of Literary Arts, Colin Channer, about the recent panel discussion on Race & Poetry in America. So, Professor Channer, it was so wonderful to hear you share some recent work and to think about that offering in the context of your other poetry, and so my first question is one that I think picks up on a real throughline in your writing. So to start I'd really like to hear you talk more about place and your particular figurations of place in your poetry. You said this lovely intriguing thing in the discussion: “everywhere is New England.” You also have a sentence in the poem “Roots”: “I plait time to those wetlands often”? And I couldn't help but think about the spatial dimensions of that time as both “Roots” and “Spumante” move from New England to Jamaica or the Caribbean to England and back. First question, then, is just to get you to speak a little bit more about your staging of connections between places and making them almost at times interchangeable in the poetry, especially in the context of the Caribbean.
Colin Channer: Thank you very much for the question. One of the great things about poetry is that poetry often operates like cinema in that we can shift time and place easily, we can dissolve time and place very easily: poetry often works in dream time. And so, for me, as a writer who's lived—was born in Jamaica, moved to New York at the age of 19, lived in Europe for a long time and now I've been living in New England for about 12 years, I carry home with me, but the home I carried to a new place also has in it other homes existing simultaneously in time. One of the things I've recognized, and many writers have, about the legacy of empire is the notion of New England, for example: everywhere England conquered was essentially New England. So being born in Jamaica, a year after independence—I was born in 1963, political independence came in 1962—I was raised in what was essentially a colonial space. And there's a long history, between the geographies of New England and the Canadian maritimes and the Caribbean, for example: cod to feed enslaved people came from these waters here. You know, Bristol, Rhode Island, you know, had many rum distilleries, you know, from sugar grown in the Caribbean. And so, for me, as a poet, again there’s that sort of cinematic occupation of time and space simultaneously and that capacity, willingness to dissolve but also, too, being an immigrant, there is a way in which the immigrant often has to think of what's most valuable. I remember leaving Jamaica and having to think about what things I would leave behind: everything couldn’t fit in two suitcases, right? And so I think that that sense of baggage, right—and baggage is a good way of selecting what is contained, right—I think confers on one a kind of appreciation for even the simplest things, and so for me, you know, the wetlands of Rhode island and southern Massachusetts draw me, and that's perhaps because they remind me of wetlands I knew at home.
DEC: Thank you so much for that, really great. Yeah, I think one of the things that you said about dream time also reminded me of—and, of course, you know, I have to ask you about music and sonics and your writing—but this idea of dream time reminded me of another comment you made and another question that I had thought of asking, which was, you had this line: “reggae sublimates Jamaican English and patois into poetry.” And as a student of psychoanalysis, of my field, I couldn't help but think when you were talking about dream time, the resonance, then, with your use of sublimation and the way that these aesthetic registers are both very psychic, I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, going back to this idea of dream time, of sublimation, that construction of reggae sublimating to make an English and patois into poetry, so rich, right, when we think of sublimation in the psychoanalytic register as the transformation of a forbidden or unsayable thing into one that is capable of being expressed. I really wanted you to talk about that and also maybe talk a little bit about, how does your understanding of the sonic context you draw on, which is connected to place, which is connected to these particular histories that find, right, various New World locations which you inherit, as you say… how does it then shape your creating of a home in a way that starts with sound [unclear].
CC: Yeah, so, you know, patois and Jamaican English weren't always accepted in Jamaica. Jamaica, like many predominantly Black post-colonies is, in many ways, an anti-Black Black country, right?
DEC: Right.
CC: Right, and so the language of ordinary people, which was patois in different registers—Jamaican English—was a language that was marginalized. The reggae artists found the poetry in that language, and here's the thing: writers writing in any language or speaking in the language still have to find the poetry in that language right, and so you know somebody who's speaking Dutch, for example, still has to find a poetic language in Dutch. So for me, right, I do so much from reggae because the writers used the language in a way that was interesting to me. You know, before reggae, Jamaican English and patois were used primarily for comedy, for broad comedy, usually to ridicule the people who speak that language daily and reggae artists found a full emotional palette for patois and Jamaican English and so, for example, you find in reggae a music that can be simultaneously political, philosophical, comedic, spiritual, erotic, romantic, ridiculous, with no conflict, right? So that, to me, was a model that came into my subconscious, right, because I was growing up in Jamaica along with the music and questioning all kinds of norms of what was valid, what was invalid, what should we value, what shouldn’t we value…my nickname in high school was “Channerebel” because they said, you know, Channer rebels against everything, you know! [laughs] But he gets his work done. And so, that respect for different registers of language, it is really an ear tuning, and I think it's one of the ways in which poetry calls us, it calls us by the ear, we find ourselves listening a lot and finding nuance in sound, right? And so, when I began to write—I began to write seriously pretty late in my late twenties, early thirties—that sense of multiple linguistic ranges was something that was available to me, right, also to the way in which the marginalized people in Jamaica often speak in figuration. So again, that was something that was available to me. Now, something that's available to a poet doesn't mean that the poet will avail themselves of it, but for me, my regard for reggae allowed me to trust reggae, and trusting reggae, reggae sort of guided me.
If you listen to Bob Marley, for example, listen to a song like “3 O’Clock Roadblock,” that song is primarily in English: ”why can't we roam this open country, why can't we be what we want to be, we want to be free, 3 o'clock in the morning roadblock curfew and I've got to throw away my little herb stock.” It’s primarily in English. If you move up to a song like “Crazy Baldheads,” now you're finding Bob entering registers of Jamaican English and patois, but also scat singing, right? Because Bob is rooted in the American blues tradition as well, right, so all of these inheritances come back to me, along with inheritances from, you know, Britain, which has internal colonies as well: Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. And just a portrait of the world, right, and also you know when I moved to the US, I moved to the Bronx, and there's so many different languages around me there, and because my ear had been kind of tuned, it all becomes a part of me.
DEC: Well, thank you so much for that, Professor Channer, and I’m sad to say that our official ten minutes are up, but I just wanted to thank you so much for participating in the event and also for this interview right now, thank you.
CC: A real pleasure. Thank you so much.
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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu.