"Slave Song" is unquestionably one of the most important
collections of Caribbean/Black British poetry to have been
published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in
1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen
as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer. At the heart of
"Slave Song" are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers
expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from
Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance,
of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical
core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of
translations (which deliberately reveal the actual
untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of
critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best
contextualise the original poem. It took some time for the
displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as
much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that
Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own
duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of
Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the
supposedly voiceless workers and peasants. This new edition has an
afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to
these poems after more than twenty years.
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