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The politics of decentring

The contours of the 20th Century have been shaped by the phenomenon of migration across the world resulting in a global crisis of deterritorialisation.

The experience of geographical, linguistic displacements and the attempts to re-establish continuities and certainties regarding one's own history, language and cultural heritage are at the heart of much of the recent poetry produced by black writers in Britain.

Exploring the parameters of cultural identity, ideology and language within the context of the diaspora condition across the world today, writers have entered the depths of almost any environment by writing about it with an aim to reterritorialise.

A consistent political factor of these new literatures lies in its strong impetus towards decentring the existing hierarchy.

"English" poetry has a strong if not always a prominent history in the British Empire. Its purpose was to instil the right "English values" in colonised subjects and to project a vision of all that was finest and most admirable in English culture.

Thomas Babington Macaulay presented in his famous "Minutes on Education" that one of the most efficient ways for colonial authority to legitimise its cultural ideology was to perpetuate the myth of English high culture through the valorisation of specific kinds of literary texts.

Through this educational theory, the language and thereby the culture of the colonial origin was filtered down to percolate in the minds of the colonised subjects, thus establishing a hierarchy.

The early 19th Century politics also prompted the founding of a Standard English, Language was used as an emblem of a bond that brought together otherwise disunited cultural factions.

This striving for uniformity culminated in linguists such as Daniel Jones advocating the educational pronunciation as a standard against which other forms were judged as being deviant, uncouth and educationally sub-normal. His English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917) was a case in point.

Such linguistic dictates functioned to exclude people from power and influence in terms of class and ethnic differences of dialect and pronunciation. So much for the politics of centring a standard.

Now for the politics of decentring by the authors of other cultures and non-standard "englishes". It is usually viewed that the English language has an unbroken tradition of excellence and when it goes to sleep there is always an Irishman who appears and wakes it up.

In this context, I would like to site James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when he questions about the politics of linguistics when he reflects on his English lecturer's ownership of the language - "The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine".

Then again, quite recently, we have Seamus Heaney in his Government of the Tongue pointing out that to use Standard English is to commit an act of linguistic perjury - a point already made by Robert Burns in his Scottish poetry and more recently by Liz Loch head and tom Leonard in their Scottish Patois poetry.

For the black writers in britain, this is equally significant and they have today turned the issue of language into a site of cultural resistance and assertion.

Influenced very much by the Liverpool poets and the protest singers of the 1960s such as Bob Marley and the Wailers, black-writers such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, James Berry, John Agard, Fred D'Aguir, Benjamin Zephaniah, Grace Nichols and Louise Bennet have re invented a variety of dialects which have creatively expressed the black experience and politically expressed a resistance to the dominant culture.

A Caribbean, claims Kamau Brathwaite, is compelled to write in a National Langauge because "the hurricane does not howl in iambic pentameters". Note how Agard satirises the language issue in his protest poem "Listen Mr. Oxford Don".

Me not no Oxford don

Me not no Oxford don me a simple immigrant from Claphan Common

I didn't graduate

I immigrate

I ent have no gun

I ent have no knife but mugging de Queen's English is the story of my life. I don't need no axe to split/up yu syntax I don't need no hammer to/mash up yu grammar Dem acuse me of assault on de Oxford dictionary imagine a concise peaceful man like me dem want me serve time for inciting rhyme to riot I'm not a violent man Mr. oxford don I only armed with mih human breath but human breath is a dangerous weapon.

The use of the Creole dialect and the calypso rhythms achieve an extraordinary interface of langauge and culture as it ushers in a new hybridised form of expression. The overall effect is realistic, forceful, humorous and politically sharp.

As experimentalists, the Black-British writers disturb the order of the mainstream which, when viewed from their perspective, lacks the vibrancy of their native expression and has remained in a state of stasis for too long.

Breaking fresh poetic ground, the diaspora writers have re-energised the creative flow of the English langauge although the decision may have been taken for political reasons.

Grace Nichols justifies her use of the langauge as a fusion of two tongues because she comes from background where two worlds are constantly interacting. She concisely captures her two-mindedness in these lines:

I have crossed the ocean

I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung. Benjamin Zephaniah who was recently in the news for his anti-war- protests in Britain, not only deals with poetry that reconstructs a new language but also with poetry that blends promiscuously with other mediums, forms and images.

Zephaniah's versions of "dub poetry" which is a mix of reggae, poetry and the elements of Rastafarianism have scaled heights of popularity pretty much as music concerts do.

His themes range from sociopolitical issues to children's poetry, animal and cultural activism. Here is how Zephaniah builds his poetry with the reggae riddim:

Dis poetry wid me as I pedal me bike I've tried Shakespeare, Respect due dere.

But dis is de stuff I like. Dis poetry is not afraid of going in a book Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look Dis poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big world involved.

An if I hav a problem de riddim gets it solved.

I've tried to b e more Romantic, it does nu good for me.

So I tek a Reggae Riddim an build me poetry.

I could try be more personal

but you've heard it all before,

Pages of written words not needed

Brain has many words in store.

There's a wealth of poetry by black writers published in Britain at the moment. Writers of the Asian heritage too indulge creatively in fusing the "mother" language with Hindi, Urdu and Cantonese.

However popular their writing is, several questions involving the quality of literature when political considerations replace aesthetic ones are raised.

Then, there are problems relating to: the Black writers laying claim to the ownership of "British" poetry, the struggle to overcome the biases of publishers and anthologists and the struggle of writing itself within the constraints of the English language.

Some of the shortcomings of these literatures, in my opinion, lie in the lack of their own critical framework to evaluate and appreciate their work.

There is also a need for these writers to purge themselves of parochial concerns and stop moaning about colonisation.

Many of the poets who have moved away from the politics of colonialism are richly contributing to the huge cultural field in Britain by reaching out poetry to the public through readings, poetry "slams", poetry art installations, poetry bars, workshops and programming for the radio and television.

One of the recent poetic creations is the film poetry genre, which combines the image, text and music, achieving a remarkable poetic resonance through a powerful inter-medial fusion.

Fred D'Aguir's "Sweet Thames" takes on the subversive slant of Enoch Powell's infamous rhetoric of the "rivers of blood" speech in 1975.

The film-poem is directed by Mark Harrison on the theme of black immigration. These creative works of art are important, valuable and accessible but are still disqualified by serious critical attention.

However, a valuable and a positive index to cultural change is indicated by the different ways in which the Black-British poetry contests the politics of representation, a representation that is no longer relevant to a "pluralistic" Britain, where a painful plenitude of cultures have mongrelised the "mother" culture.

The recent cultural proliferation can be seen as enriching if one perceives that every dialect is not only a way of thinking but also of living and the right to do so. Blair's Government, today, is attempting to define the British identity by reclaiming the sense of "classic" Britishness, which has become a thing of a past.

The traditionalists are at a huge disadvantage in either defining or re-defining any sense of selfhood in a cultural environment of differences.

In literature, the key writers for 100 years were the ones who carried the imperial ideal. When one rejects the imperial past, who or what have we got?

A definition of "Britishness" is becoming oppressively monolithic with regard to culture, literature and even language; a non-British attention to Britain by de-defining Britain would perform a service beneficial to the strengthening of the reality or even a dream of multiculturalism.

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