Every Imagining of a Return Is a Myth: A Conversation with Kwame Dawes

My first in-person encounter with Kwame Dawes was in the summer of 2018 in Andrews Hall at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. As I entered the hallway of the English Department, his familiar voice, previously only heard through recordings on the internet, reached my ears. Certain it was him, I settled in and patiently waited for him to conclude his renowned summer lectures, this one centered around the iconic Bob Marley. I have journeyed from the quietness of my room in Nigeria, where I first listened to him, to sitting in his class, and now engaging with him about his new book. I reflect on this to say it is a dream to be in conversation with the prodigious Kwame Dawes about his latest poetry collection, Sturge Town (W.W. Norton), which will grace US bookshelves this summer. Sturge Town investigates complications of historical narrative, individual and collective identity formation, and the interplay between personal triumphs and communal losses. Dawes demonstrates a keen sensitivity in his interrogation of the human condition, navigating the tension between adversities and quotidian joys, inviting us to defy the experiential challenges of life with both resilience and introspection.

Saddiq Dzukogi: Were there moments during the writing of Sturge Town where you found yourself pleasantly surprised?

Kwame Dawes: I should say that Sturge Town wasn’t “written” in the way that I might say Prophets was written or  Jacko Jacobus was written. Those are long poems written to be long poems. This collection became Sturge Town in the process of organizing a book and not out of a process of writing a poem or a series of poems. A few years ago, my editor in the UK, Jeremy Poynting, observed that I had not done a fully Jamaican collection since Wheels. We agreed that it might be good to put together such a collection. The poems in this collection were largely written during the last few years. What I found to hold these poems in Sturge Town together are the intimations of origin and a kind of care for ancestors—an idea I cribbed from a tweet by Romeo Oriogun that he tweeted when tweets were called tweets. But what I discovered to be a wonderful framework to hold these poems together is the subject of light and sight. These are old obsessions of mine, but here I found my recent poems living inside the idea of light and darkness, sight and blindness. So, surprises? No. I think writing teachers like to encourage writers to surprise themselves. The truth is this is such an impractical hope. I mean we are writing the surprises which, well, kills the surprise, no? I prefer the idea of discovery or reconsideration. But most of what drives me as a poet is the alarming sensation of not being able to have the poetic skill or mastery to do justice to what my imagination and feeling and thinking are gleefully indulging in. Since failure happens often enough, success is pleasantly surprising, if one wants to use that term.

SD: This kind of competitive circle of trying to match your boundless imaginations and feelings—your hunger to expand what is possible artistically—is it about achieving perfection, to the extent that it exists, or something else?

KD: I would not describe it as “competitive” in that sense. I think I am keeping up with myself, my ambitions and my delights. But mostly, I have not felt that I have exhausted the things I want to write about, or the things that I think need to be told. I will be honest, I have tried not to give too much thought to any of this. I have seen writers I have admired declare that they are done, and then stop. I don’t understand that sensation, but this does not mean that I don’t anticipate it as something I might feel. What keeps me writing is the desire to make poems. I don’t know how else to put it. Sometimes this desire is sharpened by seeing work that makes me want to write, or it is sometimes guided by a changing “audience.” I could not have anticipated the number of poems I would write with John Kinsella as my first “reader,” as it were. But now I can’t imagine myself, my poetic self and identity, without those poems. I did not go looking for it, but it came looking for me. I am seeking to be faithful to the artist in me.

SD: In the opening poem of the collection, “Before the Return,” you assert that “every imagining of a return is a myth,” challenging the sentimentalized idea of going back to one’s roots. The poem suggests that the idealized vision of an ancestral homeland is constructed. Could you elaborate on what you hope to uncover or reclaim through the ritual of “return”?

KD: I am using “myth” here in a strict sense, not in the colloquial sense of “not true.” But the idea of a “constructed” narrative is accurate for it’s one I apply, also, to all memory. This is a psychological truth. I am more interested in the purpose of myth, less so its invention. I could have said it better: that the idea of an ancestral home is as old as all humanity, I suspect. I claim this only because we know that in disparate cultures, going back into antiquity, the fragments of human considerations recorded either in poems and songs, or in scriptures or ritual practices, propose and enact this relationship between place, the dead, origin, and belonging. In this sense it is mythological. But “Before the Return” seeks to draw attention to the construction of these stories so that they have a repeatable (thinking ritual) function in our lives. In the most basic sense, I have chosen to take some familial liberties with the privileges of being a poet. As a poet I want to somehow (there is hubris here) enshrine my lineage in verse. More spiritually, I think, I want to “care” for my ancestors—a reminder that perhaps the dialogue with the dead (even if in different languages) is a two-way street.

SD: You refer to Derek Walcott in Sturge Town and it suggests a broader conversation about literary lineages. Are there specific authors whose work you turned to while writing this book?

KD: Perhaps Walcott, not the man, not the personality, but the poems, is one of those “witnesses” I imagine watching me as I labor to stave off embarrassment (which is what making poems often is for me). I want my poems to be at ease beside his poems. The way I imagine old athletes attend matches and sit beside each other in the pavilion laughing about their playing days, none feeling like an imposter in the stands. But I know you mean something else about Walcott. Walcott, you see, like Lorna Goodison and Kamau Brathwaite and Lucille Clifton and Seamus Heaney, have all built their own “Sturge Towns”: Castries for Walcott, Heartsease for Goodison, Bellaghy for Heaney, and so on and so forth. And I have taken instruction from them to build in verse my own myth of origin, if you will. It is only slightly geographical, in a metaphorical sense. But geography and place and culture are all part of it, somehow. After a recent reading, my friend, the poet Chris Abani, texted me. He wrote, “the poems are a cartography.” I do like the implications of that and the way that idea opens up the poems. It strikes me as a useful way to approach Sturge Town, wouldn’t you say?

SD: I couldn’t put it as beautifully, I am sure. This brings to mind another poem from the collection, “The Prodigal Converses with the Land,” where you emphasize the importance of dialogue, even if mediated by an unwilling interlocutor—the very land in which your grandmother is consecrated. The poem grants the city and its land a voice, fostering a mildly confrontational dialogue with the poet. On a broader scale, the poem addresses cultural barriers. Can you imagine a world where personal myths intertwine with broader societal narratives?

KD: This is not something I have to “imagine,” because, as I have said, I am a person of faith, and also a person who engages “myth” not as lies or untruths, but as symbolic systems of belief that can be applied inside of faith and creative articulation. The poem “The Prodigal Converses with the Land” is, of course, a bit of a fancy. After all, I am constructing two psychological positions, neither of which belong to Cape Coast, because what do I know of the spirits of Cape Coast? So I am using a poem and the device of the metaphor to talk to myself. I am arguing with a landscape that is being anthropomorphized by me for my purpose. This is hubris, really, but I take some comfort in the good intention, the intentions of conscience, behind the poem. Deep at the back of this poem’s conception and heart is a conversation I am trying to have with the dead. And the dead here is my grandmother, who I refer to in the third person rather than speaking directly to her as I do in other poems. But I am also asking a whole nation to accept me back—less so a living and contemporary nation, but more so the place of my ancestors. The beauty is that by this gesture I have started to cut a path to that feeling of belonging, of home. There are more paths, more related to my children, my “people” as it were, and a whole body of diasporic spirits trying to make sense of the rupture of displacement. Ah poetry! But this is a start.

SD: Speaking of your journey, how does Sturge Town mirror the challenges and triumphs of navigating multiple cultural roots? Does it represent something lost, or perhaps a spark of something new being built from old stones?

KD: On the surface of it, I have experienced many departures and arrivals, and many places called “home.” All of this has made the need for navigation, as it were, necessary and even unavoidable. Of course, the greatest elements of navigation along these lines have related to the bureaucracies of migration—certificates, visas, passports, and the like. An immigrant if you will. And I do believe that the upheavals caused to the psyche by forced displacement and unwelcome arrivals are real. But I must say that as a child my earliest understanding of self, inside of this thing called “who am I,” was an enriching sense of duality. I had multiple homes. My mother is Ghanaian, my father Jamaican. So, I grabbed those inheritances without even understanding their depth and scope. And I also found a shield against whatever pains led me to say, “I am not liking this place,” in being able to say, “I have another place I can go to,” whether I physically could or not. I like to credit this sense of being in a place—and feeling able to consider that place as an outsider—as one of the first superpowers I was imbued with, which would serve me well as an artist, a writer, and a poet. I am grateful that I escaped the crisis of self associated with displacement because when it mattered most, being from somewhere else was a gift. Being “home” and away from “home” has also been good for my poetry. It has aided me in being quite deliberate about the cartography of home, if you will.

SD: This book covers a lot of ground, introducing elements of history, colonialism, and the legacies of slavery.

KD: Yes, it does. But this should not surprise anyone. Born in Ghana to a Ghanaian mother and a Jamaican father who was born in Nigeria; raised in Ghana and Jamaica; lived in UK, Canada, South Carolina, and Nebraska; consumed by reggae music; coming of age in the seventies; Christian, Black with a long-standing fascination with history—well, I would have to work really hard to completely ignore myself in my poetry for those themes you mention not to be part of the load it bears. Hopefully, there is an artful, sensitive, and intelligent engagement with these themes in my work.

SD: As I read Sturge Town, I detected a pronounced sense of assuredness, a conviction, even, about your sense of identity. There seems to be something close to a sense of spiritual calm. How have the insights of your journey as a person and a poet brought you to this juncture of spiritual clarity?

KD: “Spiritual calm.” Interesting. To answer this honestly, I will say that my poetry is not something I rely on to articulate my relative spiritual condition. When I think of my spiritual life I think of something quite specific which has to do with my faith in God, which is something I am constantly working on. Better put, I connect intimately with Paul, the first-century early apostle of Christianity, and his admonition to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. Which is why faith for me is both assured and being worked out desperately at the same time. Its relationship with poetry can only be metaphorical. Poetry is not a religion or a faith for me. Without poetry I would still have to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. I thought you were going to say that my poetic craft seems more assured and masterful. I would have liked that.

SD: I am fascinated by your poem “Reburial,” where the transformation of Nyankopons’s name holds a central position, highlighting a deep connection between language, faith, and comprehension. What are your thoughts on the limitations of language in preserving memories, spirituality, and reclaiming lost history?

KD: Language does have its limits, but this is a peculiar thing to say if language is all we have. One of the things that representational art gives to humans is an alternative to the retrieval of memory through language—the telling or retelling of experience. New technologies like photographs, videos, recordings, and so forth, threatened to displace language written and spoken—let’s say poetry—but I think what it did was remind us that the preservation of memory through the recall of poetry is more than just a reliving of experience but a transformation of experience into something artful and inventive. It’s a selective recall that allows for a range of additional sensations as we preserve memory, and this is why we keep doing songs and stories and poems and so on. I think I am getting at something badly. But your question begins with Nyankopon-Nyame-Odomankoma, that Akan trinity, and the cultural and theological negotiation that is represented in the decision to translate the English word God or Father and the Judeo-Christian God into a Ghanaian deity. The “sky/higher/supreme God” strikes me as densely fascinating because of just how much is at stake. Kamau Brathwaite starts to consider this in poetry when he observes in The Arrivants that Christ will pray to Odomankoma. Superficially this reads as a radical postcolonial corrective. But it is also mischievously syncretistic and above all deeply intimate and earnest. Christ praying to the Odomankoma is Christ praying to Zeus, except Odomankoma has never been accused of being archaic and mythic in the obsolete sense of things, and it is all messy. I have never sought to untangle this messiness but to be at ease with the inexplicable. My poem, I think, is not an academic exercise because I pray. I come from a family on both sides of the Atlantic that have had earnest faith questions, and this is something I embrace. This is a lengthy way of saying that poetry helps me to carry all the layers of a conundrum, to clarify, to complicate, and to be delighted by the pulsing, living thing that’s formed—a poem. In other words, the failure of language is a powerful thing, for it means we are pushing the limits of language and ultimately this has to be the ambition of poetry.

SD: As I read, I felt a sense that the work could assert itself as a unified poem with distinct parts capable of serving individual purposes. What were some of the structural decisions made in organizing the collection?

KD: I had a suspicion not long ago—I had had them before—and I shared it with my editor Jeremy Poynting as we were making a grand publishing plan for my poetry over the next decade. The suspicion was that I had been writing a great deal about Jamaica, and about the idea of Jamaica as landscape and space in the last few years. We started to call it “the Jamaica book” and then “Sturge Town,” which I had pulled out of a hat soon after the following developments started to take place. I created a few search terms and got some help doing a word search through some three hundred newish poems of mine, to see what would come up. What came up was a wonderful clustering of  Jamaica and home-related poems, and slowly it became clear that I might have a  Jamaica-focused collection. I knew I would not publish a  Jamaican collection in the manner that I did  Nebraska, for instance. But reading those poems led me to other places—broader places of myth, of memory, and, of course, of home. A series of poems related to Sturge Town, meaning poems that evoked that village, seemed to contain themes of movement and ancestry and memory, and this loose framing started me thinking of the final collection. I kept it loose, allowed myself the possibility that if only one word created a bridge, that would be enough. I can’t pretend that I have full command of how the book is organized—meaning, I have not worried terribly about connections and associations, because these poems are all part of a wave of writing I have been doing. This work has been shaped by my writing conversations with John Kinsella, my engagement with art as a source for so many of my poems, and my habit of chronicling the urgent facts of my present living. In other words, Sturge Town is my dispatch from the territory of my life at sixty-one years old. That has to be something.

SD: In “Keratoconus,” gratitude for light’s abundance stands defiant against the backdrop of war and natural disasters. Yet, you weave in a deeply personal thread—a year of darkness where shells clouding your cornea stole your sight. Can you speak on how this profound experience of vision loss redefined your relationship with gratitude and reshaped your lens as a poet, one who now “sees through dying cells”?

KD: I think it is true that sometimes our physical ailments and other elements of lived life can provide what one might call opportunities for poetry. I suspect, though, that what is truer is that when poetry assumes a function of clarification or discovery in our lives, it is difficult, and maybe a sign of ingratitude, not to apply its uses to our own lives. I have talked about the way that blindness has dotted my family tree, and so in my normal living, the idea that genetics are a kind of fatalistic determination has occurred to me. In the late eighties, while in Canada, I was diagnosed with keratoconus, and, at the time, it was believed to be a congenital disease. Scientists had proposed that it perhaps “skipped a generation,” which all seemed to work just well for my own peculiar biography. Both my grandfathers were blind when they died. For several years, while I was studying, I was, for all practical purposes, legally blind, as the doctors tried to find solutions for this condition—thick and powerful lenses, and contact lenses. In 1996, it was clear that my cornea was too scarred and I had transplants done, using human tissue. It is clear from the language of my poems, my obsession with light and sight, dating back to my earliest collections, that this was a real presence and haunting in my life. I am grateful for science, for advanced technology, and for good caring doctors, but I am also aware that my sight is vulnerable. Still, at my age, such considerations are par for the course, and I expect them to find their way into my poems. So, of course, I am “seeing through dying cells”—it is a basic metaphor around mortality, and a more intimate metaphor from my own circumstance.

SD: “Fish, Serpent, Egg, Scorpion” pulsates with the raw vulnerability of a father’s love. You lay bare your own mortality and offer yourself entirely to your son, crafting a poignant composition of devotion. How does the interplay between vulnerability, the stark reality of death, and unyielding love sculpt the dynamics within this father-son bond? Furthermore, how does this interplay reshape your understanding of fatherhood?

KD: You are very kind in your description of that poem—I mean your description of how you see me in the poem. I am always struck by the ways in which our expressions of love are, despite our efforts, fundamentally selfish. The poem is a confession, really, to my son, about how unfair I was in invoking a weighty truth (I will die at some point) in my conversation with him. Of course, by writing it in a poem, I have doubled down on this quite unfair act. But as with all gestures of love, it is also an act of deep affection and one that seeks to correct the absences I felt in my own life, due to no fault of either my father or myself. In the end, I hope it is clear that the poem is mostly a celebration of my love for my son and an expression of how much I like him. You see, he let me do this, and he kept me close rather than push me away, and this is a credit to his humanity, and to his beauty as a man, and as a son. The poem, as you say, is “raw,” but it is not without calculation and design, and it is this tension between untrammeled sentiment and the organization of artifice that sits, for me, at the heart of the best poems.

SD: “At Anchor: The Real Situation” begins with a vivid image of a fishing boat on a calm morning, where a dying man, presumably Bob Marley, dreams of Jamaica. Personally, for me, Bob Marley’s music conjures a sense of tranquility and peace. Can you speak to how Marley’s music captures the essence of his struggle with mortality and his quest for spiritual truth?

KD: I find it interesting that people consider songs about revolution, war, crying down oppression and lamenting the degradation of people tranquil and peaceful. Marley’s art is deeply political, spiritually complex, and only rarely (“Kaya,” “Three Little Birds,” and others) evoking peace, though even then the songs are seeking to wrest hope from vividly observed struggle, like in his song “We and Dem”: “But someone will have to pay/For all the innocent blood/That they shed everyday/Oh, children, mark my words.” “At Anchor: Real Situation” references one of Marley’s last tranquil moments. In the years before his death, when Marley was aware of his cancer (though we were not), he would sing in “Real Situation”: “It seems like, total destruction the only solution/And there ain’t no use, no one can stop them now.” The poem is set in Bavaria where Marley went on a last-ditch effort to beat the cancer. He had sang his last concert, his body was emaciated, and he was surrounded by sycophants and genuine friends, waiting, waiting. I imagined a moment of tranquility, a sensation as far removed from the frenetic pace of his last months before he collapsed in Central Park. I want to think that he finally had a moment of peace. This is a fantasy, though it seems consistent with the accounts of that brief period by his friends. Yes, the poem reminds us of the painful burden of the prophet. It also, I hope, reminds us of the cost that contemplating the tragic horrors of history and our current world can be for our most committed artists.

SD: Is poetry a sufficient medium of introspection, particularly where the fear of mortality is dominant?

KD: I would say that poetry is adequate for poetry. I can’t say that for me poetry helps me think more or less about my mortality. By this I mean I would think about it even if I did not write poems. But art, we imagine, has a kind of persistence that can outlive us. All of this may seem pointless (after all we will be dead), but in the present moment, my capacity to imagine what challenges may face those who live beyond me, those I love and care about, makes me think that what I do leave might be a comfort. My father “left” his art, his writing. It has been a comfort.