I grew up speaking the African Yoruba language, which is highly tonal and performative. The sonic range of Yoruba speech and verbal arts therefore is the unconscious underbelly of my experimentation with postcolonial English prosody. The ‘do-re-mi’ of Yoruba diacritics is then conjoined with the – to appropriate Heaney – “ta-dum-ta-dum” of English meter and prosody. Due to this indigenous African provenance of my modern postcolonial poetics, I have an unconscious preference for the free verse form, which in self-reflection, is probably not unconscious at all but influenced by the verbal arts in Yoruba orature. This is because Yoruba is the first language I spoke before English and before German. That non-Western antecedent is remarkable when I perform my poetry – the very art of delivery is symptomatic of an oral performance in Africa. I do not read from a book, I recite as much of the work that I can remember that makes full sense and then I stop. Typical of what Walter Ong refers to as Oral noetic, it is the rhythm of the poem that acts as memory. I only remember in as much as the rhythmic pattern is not broken in my mind. Once there is a break and unexpected pause, I lose the thread. This further emphasises the importance and interrelationship of Orality, graphology and cadence in my work. Reading a poem for me is a practical demonstration of how my poetry becomes sheet music on a page in which word placement, and displacement aids the reading voice to find the right enunciation and rhythm. In conclusion, I will give an example of such sonic performativity by reading the poem, “Caribbean Blues.”
I
Postcards
scented with love
describing
exotic Jamaica
postcard
still careful artists painting pictures
of Bob Marley
immobilised forever in stone
plucking a tone-dead guitar
because
he does not know
the reggae of it
pictures of gurgling brooks
of lakes of sunlight
of surf and sand and nothing…
II Your photographs
are all hidden away
but do not feel that I do not feel
It is the camera-flash of your smile
which blinds
and I must shutter my mind
against the bright and the dark
bullet-proof my soul against your
flash-bulb eyes
do not feel that I do not feel
but those palm-grooves
of naked bodies
all that oil all that ripeness
It is love ship-wrecked in the sun
even though your name
promises a plenitude
like the blue waters of the bay
it is safe harbour for the sea-faring gulls
or the salt of life
for the diver-fish
water to flood
the sea-ways to a arid heart it is
sea-winds swaying the sad palms – eternal witnesses to many a drowning even though you once said to the waves:
„No panic on the Titanic“
III
still the Titanic sank
sitting still in the still blue silences
of a dead sea-bed …
The graphological arrangement of the sample suite of poems above demonstrates the visual lineation and its placement and displacement of words. You read the lines above quietly or out loud in relationship to the tonal undulation suggested by the placements of lines relative to the margins of the page as explained previously. The sonic result would be the natural rise and fall expected of measured lyrical poetry – the ta-dum-ta-dum of Heaney’s theorising.
