Michael Smith: From Myth to History

Michael Smith: From Myth to History
Isabella Maria Zoppi
According to the Trinidadian poet John La Rose, Michael Smith appeared
in the Caribbean skies like a comet, and like a comet he vanished. After his talent
and his success, what strikes one most is his premature death, violent and unarguably political: an emblematic end for a poet who had denounced poverty
and violence in the Kingston ghettoes, injustice and corruption inJamaican politics
and all over the world.
On 17th August 1983, in Stony Hill, the lame poet was walking past the local
offices of the Jamaica Labour Party, then in power, against which he had often
spoken, when some fanatical supporters stopped, chased and attacked him.
Michael Smith's death was absurd, almost certainly not premeditated and,
moreover, from the political point of view, inconvenient: a brawl, a gesture of
rage, attackers who ran away abandoning their victim on the ground, still alive
- ..Stoned to death on Stony Hill-, as Edward Kamau Brathwaite wrote in dedicating his History ofthe Voice to the Jamaican poet in 1984. To a man who spoke
out against abuse and oppression, who had become a standard-bearer for the
poor, the marginalized and the oppressed, to precisely that manJamaican society
offered the self-sacrificing death of a martyr.
Michael Smith was born in Kingston on 14th September 1954; his father was
a mason and his mother worked in a factory. As he himself said, he acquired much
of his education on the street and from an elder Rastaman who belonged to the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He was trained as a poet and actor at the Jamaica
School of Drama, where he graduated in 1980 with a Diploma in Theatre Arts.
Yet the young Smith had already become famous after taking part in the eleventh
World Festival of Youth in Cuba in 1978, where he performed what is probably his best and best-known poem, «Me Cyaan Believe It-, which he presented
again at Carifesta in Barbados, in 1981. On that occasion, Michael Smith was fIlmed
by BBC2. In 1978 one of his poems, .Word-, had already been recorded and in
1980 another, «Roots-, was released on disc (45 rpm); other poems had been
published in the journal Race Today. In 1982 he performed in London at the first
International Bookfair of Racial Black and Third Worlds Books, after which he
left for a national poetry tour in Great Britain, during which BBC television ftlmed
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a documentary, Upon Westminster Bridge, about his work. In Britain Smith also
recorded his first and only long-playing record, -Me Cyaan Believe It., for the
-Island Records· label, accompanied by Dennis Bovell's reggae band. In November
1982 he performed in Paris for UNESCO; then he went to Milan and Amsterdam.
In Fe~)fu<U>.' 1983 the association which had brought him to Great Britain, -Creation
for Liberation., organized an international festival as a tribute to the Dub poet
who was to die only months later.
!he poetic corpus left by Michael Smith has much greater value when it is
~onsl~ered as a whole than when analyzed in its single parts. Smith performs
life, hiS own and o~er~' alike, the only one he knows, that life which is a struggle fo.r all the margmahzed and the abused, in Kingston and all over the world.
~or ~ the core is reality: it is from the social context that the Dub poet draws
msprrauon, so that his poems of protest, denunciation and prophetic vision range
from the soft tone of nursery-rhyme to revolutionary enthusiasm, from the soothsayer's apocalyptic mode to the war bard's Tyrtaeic style. To gather and hannonize
these apparently di:Sparate features: there lies 'the poet's consistency. Smith does
not let himself be distracted: poets have a mission, they are spokesmen, they give
substance to ordinary people's thoughts, dreams, needs and frustrations. It was
Oku Onuo~a, the other great Jamaican poet from the ghetto, who first coined a
term to defme that new movement, offering a sort of manifesto of what the Dub
poet's role is: -I am no poet / no poet / I am just a voice / I echo the people's /
thoug~t / laughter / cry / sigh / I am no poet / no poet / I am just a voice.!.
. Mlcha~I.Smith's visions are not the individual lament of a misfit or a parucular sensitive soul, but they represent the instability and dissatisfaction ora
~hole generation which found itself caught between a world of inherited traditions, of distant origins - in time and space - and a new world with different values
~ase? upon consumerism and technology. According to Seneca the Old, tradi~
tlOn IS the young man's strength and the old man's limitation. Dub poetry has
been abl.e t? go beyond the previous generations to find its own literary balance,
appropnatmg that language and folklore which were tradition to make them ins~m~nts of a current social protest. In this way, Dub poets started a sort of artiStiC .Journey in search of their complex identity as Black, twentieth-century
Jamaicans. The poet Smith's apocalyptic visions of fife and blood are the coherent
mirror ~f the reality the man Michael Smith lives together with his generation.
Sffi1th's ?nly collection was published after his death, in 1986, edited by
Mervyn M~rns, to who~ he h~d brought. his manuset;ipts and a tape asking for
the more .ltterate. poet s help m formulaung a converuent representation on the
page ?f those lines :vhich, b~in~ oral poetry,. had been conceived for the stage.
The title Itself of this collection IS emblematiC of the new era which was to be
engendered by Dub poetry: It a Come, it is cOming. It echoes another visionary's words, reminding the reader/listener of Marcus Garvey's speeches about
the regenerative changes which were about to subvert the old system: no one
knows w:he~ Africa's n~demption time will come; it is in the wind; it is coming;
one day It will come; like a storm. Ambiguity is the charme of this title a posthum~us expression ofSmith's innermost convictions. It is coming. But what does
the erugma of the neutral pronoun -it· hide? It also recalls Yeat's -Second Coming.,
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with its things falling apart, the -widening gyre· of history, the lost innocence
and the terrible future which is going to be in the dread beast's power. Both the
Irish poet and the Rastaman had been waiting for the Antichrist and his revolution. It was perhaps of redemption, revolution and storm that Michael Smith was
to become a prophet: .It a come / fife a go bun / blood a go run / it goin go teck
you / it goin go teck you. 2.
Describing situations of extreme tension, Michael Smith becomes the spokesman of the "downpressed. - the oppressed in Rasta slang - claiming that the moment to rebel is getting closer. Time is ripe for the young to get up and fight for
their rights, (-fire a go bun.) and, perhaps, with his -it a come·, the poet foresees
the breakdown of all the repreSSive political-colonial shitstem. - as they were
called by Peter Tosh with a Rasta idiom - unbearable on the threshold of the third
millennium, such as apartheid in South Africa: ·So Maggie Thatcher / yuh better watch ya / yuh goin go meet yuh Waterloo / yuh can stay deh a screw / I a
subpoena you / from the little fella / call Nelson Mandela / who goin go tun a
martyr / fi yuh to stop support/ de blood-sucking 1/ calla partheid. (-It A Come-).
Even though Dub poetry has roots very different from those of traditional
Western lyric poetry, yet it developed within a Western (albeit colonial) social context, and it has naturally acquired some of its features. For instance, it often has
recourse to biblical images from the European literary memory, which sometimes
are clearly traceable to the Metaphysical poetry ofthe seventeenth century. Another
great Western influence on Dub poetry is Eliot's. According to what Brathwaite
remembers in his History ofthe Voice: ·What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean Poetry
and Caribbean Literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the
conversational tone· 3. It was listening to Eliot's recorded voice reading ~ Preludes.,
•The Lovesong of]. Alfred Prufrock., •The Waste Land. and -Four Quartets., that
West Indian poets recognised how the rhythm and structure of jazz music supported the English poet's verse. And Dub verse is made up ofwords, spoken words,
conceived to be recited aloud, words following an inner rhythm, supported by a
sound which is the foundation of it all, the reggae -riddim•. Dub lyrics are poems
made to be performed in a live performance, thoughts developing along a beat,
in front of that audience which is their medium and their target, accompanied by
the hypnotic four-beat syncopated reggae rhythm, stressed by bass guitar and drums,
often enriched by the Rasta drums. As Christian Habekost said in his anthology
Dub Poetry: 19Poetsfrom England andJamaica: -Together with this sound, the
word develops its full meaning and the whole poem gains a power that hits the
listener. Thus the foundation of Dub Poetry is WORD, SOUND & POWER. 4.
That is why, where possible, Michael Smith's poems should be analyzed and
compared in their printed and their recorded form, or, even better, in the live
performed version. On the Island Records performance of -It A Come., an analysis
of the role music takes is rather important: after a very brief guitar introduction,
the poet's voice starts telling its story in medias res, and the music takes on the
part of a mere supporter, with a slow, relaxed classic reggae rhythm, which accentuates a vivid contrast with the fight, fire and blood images running through
the whole poem. This contrast is given even more strength by the saxophone
phrasing in the distant background, which emphasizes a sort of hot, happy and
99
drowsy tropical atmosphere. The poem is performed almost without a pause,
almost at normal speaking speed; in the refrain, Smith stresses the intonation as
~ it were a round game, thus creating a half-ironical half-alarming result, knowmg that the prophet's role is often that of a Cassandra.
. As happened in the Arthurian cycle to Merlin, who knew from the very beginnmg when and how his time would come, so in contemporary Jamaica first of
all the best soothsayer is prophet of his own fate, as Smith says in .Sunday.:
I sit
Sunday
not meditating on
people clapping
shouting
meek
shall inherit the earth
but meditating
freedom
I
shall not die
a natural death
but fighting.
.
Somehow.~ poem represents an aside within the collection. It is expressed
m a soft, meditative tone: there is no need for over-refined language or for
preacher's emphasis to communicate with simple and tragic certainty what will
be. A violent death is nothing but the logical outcome of the poet's choice today.
~unday, the. Lord's day, sees him meditating, but rejecting the usual gathering
m church Wlth the multitude, rejecting passive acceptance. Smith secludes himself and reflects upon freedom; then, in a neutral and final tone, in a sort ofbiblical formul~ stresse~ by .th~ iteration of -shall., his conclusion comes: choosing
freedom Will cost him his life. Softness is left for the harshness of human events.
The lucidity and essentiality of these few lines are made even more dramatic by
the contrast generated by the quotation from the Mountain Speech and all the
disparate images of death suggested by the verb -fighting•.
Even though this poem can be read as an aside because of its tone and theme
- it is ~robably the onlf one in which the poet makes himself the subject of his
verse, rnstead of speakmg through a poetic persona who stands for him and his
people at the same time - these words represent the slant of the whole collect~on: a visio.nary, prophetic slant irate with the wrath of the just, but at the same
~e reflective and easy, because it is in this way that ordinary people's thought
IS expressed.
After a first dismayed opening to the world, a moment of reflection which
involves incredulity and acts of denunciation, the awareness that the current situation cannot prevail takes over. The confrontation with reality belongs to the first
poems: «but. me naw go siddu~g pon high wall / like Humpty Dumpty / me a
face me reality. (-Me Cyaan Beheve It.). Though coloured with ironic wit by the
100
allusion to an English nursery-rhyme, theselines represent a hard rite of passage
in the poet's formation, which naturally leads to a second step. If poetry is the
ordinary people's voice, at that time and in that place it cannot be apolitical and
isolated, it is universally apparent that a change becomes ineluctable: -Some goin
go call it awareness / an we goin go celebrate it wid firmness / adders goin go
call it revolution / but I prefer liberation. (-It A Come.). Now the need has come
to get down from the wall; it is not the time to confine oneself to observing and
meditating, but it is the right time to get involved, because poetry is an instrument of politics and Vindication, and the vehicle of new ideas through the new
era everybody is waiting and fighting for: .Poetry is part of the whole process
of the whole liberation of the people. It political. More than political, still, you
know. It more than political. It is written out of a political experience of political
and social environment. And as such it transmit that message, but it also is not
within a partisan political sense, partisan politics. It also have its international
arena to stand up in... So you know, you have to link your experience and don't
make them limit your perception to only here and you only think with your belly
and can't use your head· s.
That is how poetry becomes the instrument of that battle young West Indians
feel they have to fight against the oppressor to achieve their identity and their
freedom. The -downpressor., defined by name only when dealing with foreign
situations, can be identified with the -shitstem., the heritage of the colonial structure; with the politicians, hardly conscious ofJamaican reality and ready for corruption; with Western religions, values, habits and cultural intrusiveness. Here
the Tyrtaetic feature of Smith's work comes to the surface: it is not with words
that a revolution can be won, but words can stimulate a waking conscience, can
infuse courage, can give hope. And it is people who are going to rebel and make
their own revolution, once the poets' words have been received and assimilated.
To stand up to such a protean enemy, it is impossible to cross swords without
war songs: Michael Smith, poet of the voice, offers his arms. And sound becomes
power, the instrument of defence and offence: -Dis-ya soun a murderer, / it cyaan
go no furtherer, / de wretched of de eart / goin go meck de downpressor / nyam
dirt. (-Yout Out Deh.).
Smith is a sort of Jamaican -griot., who expresses the traditional value of
his people in a half-traditional and a half-irmovative way, mixing together old
and new words and a new musical trand based on very old drum beats; therefore, it can be said he represents the musicality of oral poetry and at the same
time the links between ordinary people, their experiences and their artistic expressions. In one word, the very essence of oral literature, but ready to be spread in
any way the modern world and its technology can provide, such as radio,
magazines, books, videos, records. Yet, even though it is so deeply rooted in oracy,
Smith's verse does not disdain to draw on more classical forms of literature - as
if this could underline and strengthen his right to be considered a true poet like, in the above-quoted lines, the clear reference to Frantz Fanon and his Les
damnes de la terre.
Smith's people are exasperated and rebellion is about to explode. The young
are desolate, they struggle; there is no work, no models to follow and conform
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to; just anger, and the future promises nothing good. White society does not care
about the young people's problems in the ghetto: the unemployed are treated
as vagabond shirkers, or even delinquents, and this happens especially for those
who follow the Rasta faith. Poverty seems to be the worst crime of all. Isolated
~arginalized, they meet to smoke a spliff, sharing marijuana and thoughts, reason~
mg about the things of the world, dreaming about a free society where everybody
has his own chances, and nursing their grudge: -Me naw disown dis-ya talk / fi
chat bout me freedom. / Naw tun criminal / siddung fill me lunge wid smoke /
~nd sing song of !a~entation / all day long. / ... I cyaan just a galang / a hope
like a barren lan fl ram / I soon bus / for behind I is darkness / round I destruction, and before 1/ hunger / a go blow fire!. (.A Go Blow Fire.)
Hunger and unemployement are very serious matters, but Smith sometimes
chooses to represent them in the light style of the nonsense-rhyme. In this way,
he manages to catch his audience's attention by striking at the heart _ their worries about their children's future - and intensifying the contrast between the
authorities' uncaring answers to social and economic problems and the harsh
reality black~amaica~s have to survive. With child-like simplicity and deep irony,
the poet depicts the Image of the daily struggle of a poetic persona with whom
any of his listeners can identify, and he does it with clearheadedness without
intermediary elements such as stylistic devices or figures of speech. Smith has
recourse to the stock of oral tradition and he relies simply on the allitteration of
the dental consonant -t· and the guttural consonant -k" - connotation of toughness and hardness which can be easily read - and on the musicality of these kindergarten rhymes as a vehicle to transmit the message of urban poverty. Metre and
allitteration in a S~)ft o~ spiral refrain take the reader back to the atmosphere of
a yard-game; the Idea IS suggested that Jamaican young people can metaphorically c<:unt themselves out to see to whose lot a job will fall, and perhaps also
wellbemg, and to whose lot suffering:
Ticky ticky tuck
everyting stuck
Dem a look little wuk
Wha yuh name?
Me no know
Whe yuh goin?
Nowhere
What yuh lookin?
Anytin
Ticky ticky tuck
everybody bruck
What a luck
No wuk (.Ticky Ticky Tuck.)
But often, describing scenes from the daily life in the Third World Michael
Smi~ 's ironic wi.t gives wa~ to the bitter and objective tone of a reporte~. He em-
bodIes the chrorucler, the gnot, who has always recorded the usual horrible, mean
102
things, regretting that these troubles involve mainly the younger ones - who, on
the contrary, should bear in themselves the germ of change: -Look .how much
youth out deh / a live from han to mout / an j~s a run all about / an JUs a pester
people / fi get some little pittance / so dat them life can balance, (-Yout Outpeh,,).
This theme is dear to Smith. Poverty is a crime, unemployment an illness,
hunger is desolation. He often wonders how a man can still g? on tolerating ~ch
pressure, when it is impossible to adopt ~nd defend the. baSIC value belongmg,
in theory, to all human beings: «Me feel It, yuh see, / fl see so much yout out
deh / under such a hell of a strain / till dem don't even know dem name. / Dem
out deh nuffer dan cigarette butt, / out a luck a look fi wuk, / tinkin dat freedom
is a sen~eless dream, / an grip wid such feelin of hostility / dem woulda strangle
a dawg fi get a bone / an devalue dem ~ignity, .(<<M.e F~el It, Yuh See·).
.
Life is a bitter history, without happmess, nch In Violence and oppresslOn.
But, amidst this squalor, the artist sees a sheet anchor wich is still po~s~b~e to ~sp.
Religion provides a way out of material and spiritual poverty, u~tillt 1~ po~slble
to -lick the chalice' - to smoke ganja - in a Rasta temple and pm on~ s faith o~
the Lord's Kingdom: «Long time we have no fun~ / A seh de lat~st tmg now IS
gun / Look, man haffi a run! / Lawd God! A pure fITe bun! / Thy ~gdom con:e,
/ What is to be done? / Long time we have no fun, / All we have IS we chahce
in de palace. (.Long Time·).
. .
.
.
«All we have is we chalice., the pIpe, the «chillum. for the collective nte of
smoking. Here the tone is kept purposely ambiguous: it is ~ifficult to ~istinguish
between the regret at having nothing else and the consolat~on of ~avlllg at least
a guideline to refer to. To young Jamaicans in search of the.lr .ldentltJ:, and to the
poet himself, Rastafarianism offers a secure .harbour and .It IS a sprmgb?~rd to
enter the world. It is the breastplate protectmg them agamst troubles; It IS t?e
filter which, defending the initiate's eyes and mind in front?f :ealitJ:, ~llo~~ hrrn
to set himself against the system and to claim with c~nv~ctI.on hIS .1lldl.vldual
freedom while living in a post-colonial society with all Its llffilts and Its distress.
But, while oppOSing, the Dub poet does not disdain to mak~ use of son:e features of the language the ancient colonizers imposed upon.hls people, like the
archaic formula «Thy Kingdom come· borrowed from the Bible. The reader can
imagine Michael Smith with one ear tuned in to the sound effects of contemporary
life and the other to words and rhythms he gets from the past. A go~d ex~~ple
of this characteristic of his is the literary use he makes of Afro-Jamalcan Idiom,
when he extends the metaphor of a well-known traditional proverb .to create a~
allegory which represents the sufferings of the poor, with another ghmpse of l.Us
sharp wit: .Cyaan meck blood out a stone, / an a cow never know / de use a Im
tail / till fly teck it, but from dem born / dem a fan de fly of poverty from de ass
/ for dem never have a tail fi cover it" (-I and I Alone.).
That is how oral poetry naturally fuses elements from Creole language and
life with others from the most classical British literary tradition. Like the other
Dub poets Smith has inherited the consequences of the linguistic revolution Louise
Bennett h;d actuated out some years before. Therefore for them to perform in
what Brathwaite called «Nation Language" is no longer a matter for discussion.
For the Dub poets Nation Language has become the rule, conforming with what
103
happens at the same time in the world of popular song, of which they adopt many
devices, rhythms, vocalic modulations, the piled up or scanned syllables, the blue
notes (notes situated somewhere in between two subsequent semitones), pauses,
syncopated beats. Smith performs in Nation Language, but he enriches it with
linguistic and literary references from the mother-country language and culture.
Derek Walcott wrote these two emblematic lines about the linguistic problem
in «North and South», in 1982: -It's good that everything's gone, except their language, / which is everything.6. Cultural imperialism is still omnipresent, even
on a reggae background.
A strong survival instinct emerges from all Smith's work, to witness his great
vitality and creative energy. To the pressures and impressions coming from the
outer world, the artist opposes the inner balance he gets from the certainty he
has a purpose in life, he is his people's voice: -Dem naw destroy I / meck I give
up / fi-I life got a sense of purpose» (<<Dem Naw Destroy I·).
It it this certainty that drives him to fight and to exhort others like him to
defend themselves. Made stronger by his inner balance and by his capability of
wielding Word, Sound and Power, Smith knows well that a bland interest, a mild
comprehension will not be enough. Now, for the artist's audience, the point is
not whether to shake themselves out of the secular wait-and-see policy in order
to question themselves - about their own identity, their negritude, their future,
their daily bread. Now the point is to find answers which allow them to identify
the possible solution to help Jamaican black society and to let it rise when it is
running the risk of suffocating: «Meck dem know how yuh feel, / an no bodder
come to me / come look sympathy / for friendly understandin / is not the solution / We waan answer, or else / dis ya civilisation ya / cyaan go no furtherer»
(-Meck Dem Know How Yuh Fee!»).
But the quest for answers and solutions is a step not everybody can take. It
requires awareness and maturity - uncommon qualities, especially when most
of those who should show them have to face very difficult situations concerning
their mere survival every day. To these people life seems such a poor thing that
dreams, hopes and desires diminish in value till they vanish. The word freedom
becomes nothing but a meaningless sound: -tinkin dat freedom is a senseless
dream». The most Widespread feeling is a vague, ill-defined grudge, together with
the despair deriving from the loss of human dignity. It is because of this complex
situation that many lay down their arms and renounce the Rastafarian moral code,
trying to get into Babylon's structure to satisfy their primary needs: Babylon which,
in the Rasta philosphy, is hell on earth, the Western world with all its temptations,
its crimes and its wrongs. If nothing worse, a bitter disappointment is awaiting
those who give up, because it is impossible to trust Babylon, the land of deceit.
So they find themselves in an even more precarious balance, spiritual mestizos,
in delicate equilibrium between the Chosen's creed and the treacherous Western
attractions: «Me feel it, yuh see / fi see dat inna dis-ya concrete jungle / de yout
no go nuttin to relate to / Some tryin fi get close to Babylon / to pay dem rent /
but de system / han down a crucial kind a judgement» (<<Me Feel It, Yuh See)>>.
Notwithstanding all the pessimistic visions and .the anguish which shadow
the picture Smith gives about present and future times, in spite of all the suffer-
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ings, some positive moments are not missing. There, through his poetic persona,
the artist reasserts his strength and his hope for better times which cannot be far
off: «But a going walk pon me blistered feet / sing louder den de abeng / through
me swollen mout / an stan firm / wid me puppa olograph / drench in blood /
Sunday a come» (<<Sunday A Come»). Quoting the abeng, a Maroon musical instrument, Smith recalls subtly but firmly his belonging to Jamaican tradition, underlining its oral qualities and its historical background.
.
One of Michael Smith's fundamental themes is a necessary step for West
Indian authors, as for Africans: negritude. How to face, understand, sustain one's
own colour and belonging, one's own identity, with all that this implies concerning the cultural background, folklore and mentality of a group which now have
to assert themselves in a post-colonial system, recovering their lost values and
trying to include them in contemporary society:
Went to an all black school
with an all black name
all black principal
black teacher
graduated
with an all black concept
with our blackety blackety frustration
we did an all black march
with high black hopes
and all black song
got a few solutions
not all black
went to a show
and saw our struggles
in black and white
Lawwwwwd have mercy (-Black And White.)
While the book begins with Smith's most famous poem, «Me ~yaan Believe
It», probably following Morris' or~er, th~ first lyric o~ th~ re~ord 1S «Bl~ck And
White». It seems possible to read mto this chOice an md1cauon that this theme
is a key to the whole work. The a cap~ella performance has perh~ps been
preferred in order to emphasize the meanmg and exp~ess the message m a m~re
direct way, without any sort of distraction. Or perhaps 1t has b~en a for~ed chOiCe
because of the difficulty of adapting a rhythm to that metre, as m these lines word"
themselves are the rhythm. The best accompanimen~is the echo s~ggested by
the iteration of the adjective «black», - which would ~e m upbeat, mus1cally spe~k~
ing. The stress falls on the following nouns, o~en shghtlydra~le~out, espec1al
ly when bisyllabic. This device is remarkable ID the pronounc~a~lonof the word
«concept. whose rhythm is clearly marked probably because 1t mclu.desthe e~­
tire meani~g of the previous lines: throughout his youth, his educat10n and h1S
105
society the whole mentality was «black«. The adjective. black» is anticipated by
a pre-modifier, «all», except in line four - .black teacher. - to emphasize and
amplify the idea of an enfolding and persistent blackness pervading the first part
of the poem. There is just one «black» which has a different pre-modifier, in line
nine - «high black hopes». This variation has been used to accentuate the difference from the word •hopes »and the other nouns mentioned before: the adjective •high. with his connotations makes evident the inner spirituality of hope
and all that it implies. But at the same time .high» has a double value. It is the
key-word which prepares for the second part of the poem, introducing the
audience to the disappointment of those hopes, in a tone rich in self-irony. The
first stress on the adjective «black» is in line twelve, where it is preceded by the
negative phrase «not all», pronounced with a significant stretching of the vowels.
This stress seems the landmark of an ideal half of the poem, and it is the sign of
a division in the artist's intents. First he has described a world immersed in its
negritude, consciously or perhaps not; in this second part he pictures the interference of the white world, or much more probably, its immanence, and he does
it with an innuendo: not all the solutions were black, and if not black, what else?
In one word he introduces the consumers' white society, its technology and its
rules: the «show» - and, if the whites propose solutions, not necessarily are they
all good. The show has also the function of putting an immaterial distance between the artist and his social context, a distance which is needed for a mature
growth of his thought; for once he becomes an outside observer, and from a
detached point of view he can finally see clearly.
In the first part ofthis poem the tone is almost didactic, a little pedantic, strongly ironical. At this break-point, when describing the shock of realiZing, the voice
changes. First, it was limpid and shrill; now it becomes rough, lower, the rhythm
slows down, as if a theatrical aside were started, speech which was for everybody
but now is spoken to oneself. ·Black and white» is almost spelt out, it is pointed
out, detached from the rest. The artist plays with the ironic pun existing between
the blackness of the whole poem and the idiom: to see things in black and white
means to see them clearly for the first time, a bitter result after so much time investigating. Printed, line fourteen and fifteen differ from their oral form. Smith
says •saw our struggles in / black and white», pronouncing the first four words
in one breath, quickly, and then, after a significant caesura, he scans what mainly shocks him and therefore has to strike his audience, ·black and white., the
core of this dualistic poem of contrasts.
Finally, line sixteen alone would deserve a complete study including oral
poetry, poetic diction, theatre arts, folk singing and ethnomusicology, and maybe
something more. It has already a great power on the page, but, when heard, it
catches the listener with a master-stroke. In the word «Lawd», the Jamaican creole
spelling for «Lord», the 'W» is written five times to represent the very personal
way Smith says it. In It a Come this feature appears in three poems only, but
nevertheless it can be read as if it were Smith's identification mark as it made
him famous all over the world. This particular pronunciation symboliz~s the sound
of a special model of motorbike, the S90, made by Suzuki to be used principallyon sand, and which was a status-symbol in the United States and in the
106
Caribbean at the time Smith wrote. To obtain this effect, he lowers the tone of
his voice but does not lower its volume; then he remarkably stretches the vow~l
opening his throat using it as an organpipe and l~tting his 1;Jreact: come out. as If
it came directly from his solar plexus. That speCIal sound IS ach~eved by Slffiply letting the vocal cords vibrate at a given frequency and keepmg under stnet
control all the other muscles. In a single breath .Lawd» becomes .hav~» and on
the same wave, but respecting a little stop, the word «mercy· follo,:s. With a great
mastery of technical devices, stressing the consonant «m» and ItS h~m~~ and
primordial connotations - being the first sound pronounced by any mdlVldual
at any latitude, related to the mother fi~re - Sr:uth underline~ t~e urgency of
his demand and at the same time the feeling that It cannot be satIsfied. The work
Michael Smith does on sound has always to be read along a double path: or: ~~
one hand there is the artist formed at the Drama School who has learnt.the lu:uts
of his vocality and how to overcome them, and who has mastered alhtteratI~:>n,
assonance, consonance, rhyme, rhythm and iterat~onh~ al7ea~y used follo:,~g
his nature and traditions. On the other hand, there IS an mstmctIve poet-mus1Cla.n
who has the rare capability to reach a total permeation of the sound and phonetiC
signals his world emanates.
On the record, the slightly reverberated a cappella performa.nce of «Black
And White. followed almost immediately by the reggae band openmg ro~ of ·Me
Feel It. plunges the listener completely in~o the ~esired atmospher~. ~1fst, the
main theme is presented, as if it were a pomt of view t? refer t<;> while Jo~rn~y­
ing over Smith's literary speech; then it ~s devel<;>ped Ir: that ~l1enc~ which .mcreases concentration and emotional tension and It culminates m a chmax which
is unusually pronounced in a softer tone. Finally, after on.e secor:d left empty of
sounds during which the listener relaxes and wonders, lffiffiedlately the drum
roll follows, the roll which had been aurally anticipated by the c.ontract~d rhythm
of line seven .with our blackety blackety frustration» - the listener IS caught.
In Smith',s work the theme of blackness is recurrent. In «Dis Ya Dutty» r~­
cial pride wakes up with an open claim of black value and the search begms, It
is time to investigate Caribbean history and roots: «Koo pon we: / we black but
we no ugly. / Koo pon we: / come face we histo7Y»'
After so much reasoning, an active intervention meant ~o shake the.collective conscience out of the secular resignation which marks It..The p.ast :s to be
rediscovered, recovering the betrayed values, and the future history ':' still t~ be
traced. Roots remain the quest's starting point, roots to explore, to brmg ~o light
again, to rely upon, to love: •but a like now yuh scratch dem drum / f1 know
yuh name an whe yuh come from» (<<Sunday A.~ome»).
.
For an artist to be «rooted. means the ability to transform the consCiousness of one's cul~re and traditions in words, music, dance or images. Smith.cel.ehrates the sense of identity and belonging he has acqUired thanks to Rastafanaru~m
in the poem. Roots». This lyric has been included in the record - ,:here the tItle
appears with a different ortography: «R-oots·. The performance IS base~ on a
Rasta drumming instead of on the usual «reggae riddim»; this gives the lmes a
hypnotic cadence which catches the listener's attention. as the eye of the sn~ke
catches that ofthe bird. Rasta drums are doser to the old African drums than anything
107
else still being used in the New World. They are intimately connected to the
meaning of the world «roots· and wrap the poem in a primordial mystic atmosphere, pervaded with that religiousness which is part of the earth itself and which
finds its natural expression in music, especially in the drum sound. And the words
Smith is - more than saying or singing - psalmodizing become one and the same
with the chant of the drums. Smith's personal way of pronouncing the word
«Lawd· is employed ten times in a sort or refrain; «Lawwwwwd / an dem a roots
/ an dem a roots». Throughout the poem this device is almost overdone, as a
primary cry stressed to the human limits. But what strikes most in these verses
is their being a chant, and therefore, from a European point of view, an open
window towards the Rasta world: «Some a beat a drum / fi get closer to dem roots
/ an dem a beat / an dem a beat / an dem a chant / and dem a chant / Jah / Jah
/ Rastafari / Jah/Jah / Roots are I». The word «root», repeated continuously, assumes a vaste range of meanings, both literal and metaphorical, and, with the
flexibility Smith attributes to it, it allows him to trace an ironical inquiry where
the only possible answer is: «roots» - positively or negatively. But, behind irony,
a bitter background is glimpsed; their names do not belong to them, not yet, and
they cannot define who they are, in spite of their quest for their roots: «Dem ask
in wha im age / Im seh root / Sex / Roots / Name / No roots / cause dat no belong
to I an I». In these lines an example can also be seen of how Smith makes use
of absurdity to obtain a stylistic device: because of the hard living in the slums
men lose their balance and become unable to deal with a sensible and coherent
reasoning. This absurd device appears in many of his poems, such as «TickyTicky
Tuck», «I An I Alone», «Me Cyaan Believe It», and it approaches Smith's verse
to the European «Theatre of Absurd», especially where his lyrics are structured
as a dialogue or anyway in conformity with a dualistic scheme.
Smith does not consider the quest for one's roots as a monopoly of blackness, but he makes it universal, a more complex and widespread restlessness
including the whole of mankind: «Black man / Chinee man / Coolie man / White
man / de whole a dem / a look idem / roots».
Smith's most famous poem, as has already been affirmed, is «Me Cyaan
Believe It», which according to Christian Habekost can be considered «a prime
example of one of the sub-genres of dub poetry which we would like to call
folklore dub poems'» 7. The poem deals with the inhuman living conditions in
the Kingston ghetto; Smith pictures Violence, sexual exploitation and bad housing through the witnessing of a poetic persona wandering in the slums. Things
are described through a double perspective; there are two episodes for each items:
what happened to others and what involved the speaker himself. «Me Cyaan
Believe It» is a sort of refrain, which links the different themes and recalls the
audience's attention on the hopeless scen~ry depicted which is made to sound
even more desperate by that deep «Lawwwwwd» - Smith's signature. In these
lines the poet not only includes nursery-rhymes, children's games, proverbs, but
he builds his lyric «on and around a mould offolklore elements. s.
Finally, it seems interesting to see how Michael Smith himself described to
Mervyn Morris the creation process he followed to give birth to his poetry, in
particular to «Me Cyaan Believe It»: «An man seh, 'Boy, me can't believe it, that
108
the thing gone up, you know' . Me seh, 'Rathid, a it that
. ' you know! We. can'tthbelieve
. And when you can't believe it and you look and you see the things at you
~~'t believe it! And then me go home now and me seh, 'Yeh. po7m no I wfan
l y evo ve.
«C aan Believe It». That is the poem I want. And then lt sow
get a poem. Y
. h . t it down -line piece a line - and you go weh
It ~ght ~ork ~u~n:O~:'l~o~~ome back and you build on it. Or it ~ght come
an you ~a~~~~t The whole intensity just come right out and you Just really «roopS», ng
. .
hythm come to me first. You know, is a rhythm, and
it release. Or sometimes a r .
kn
c l ' And then me try to rememh 'D h hythrn-ya feel IDce, you ow, lee IDce.
me ~e'rh~ ... and then build under that, build up under ~h.at. Build unde~ that
~~~ catch me breaks and the bridges. Just like how a mus1Clan wor~ out· '. ty
Michael Smith can be read as a poet of his t~e, mirror 0 f Jama1Ca~ SOCle
r'
~S~id~~~t
~~~~t~e~~~~~;;~~h~~S;~=::~~~r~d~~~~:d
~~:~q=~~~cF
illS ru
n the world of oral literature - the Afncan hentage - an t.e
~~~~;eb~;::~iC,which is borderless, as shown by the success reggae mUS1C
had,
~~ ~~~ htJ~~} ::~:=l::~~~idual, and even of the mass.es, has little in
.~ the history of mankind as it is traced by the evolution of thought,
~:;ghr~i:~:~~~f~~~h~~~~~:~~}~s~J~~:~~~~~:~:~~;:~~~::ohi~~u~~
ou .
to belong to any individual in partlcular. Or t ey seem
eXistence, do not ~~o have been able to give history a sense, with in~enti~::m,
~~=:~~~t~~~edirection to different events. Human perception of .hl~tor~cal
e
time is rathber vagudthr
.
they are 0 serve
o.
d r' g and thls was
we were living another private «tlffie», that of our every ay Will ,
G~eg~~:~t~~~fJ~~~~~~~~~~~:~~~:~~f:~~';in~~
outsildt~shl~~~~~ reason
too that innovations - new literary,. philosophiC'thartiS ,
. if d'
. s need time to assert emtic movements, new reli?io~s, sC.len~ lC ;scov~~h~l Smith this time has been
,
~~~~r:~~~~h~~i~~l~~~~~::~~~f~p~~~
t he deSigr:~~~~:~~~ee::~~
which involved him, and the time necessary to b e reco
great artist he was.
fts
f th D b future
To this visionary poet the chance of being the cra man 0
e u
he had prophesied has not been granted.
Isabella Maria Zoppi
.'
is currently writing a doctoral dlSsertatwn
on Derek Walcott's poetry
109