Preamble:

“Love Affair with literature,” is an annually event hosted by the department of literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus. The department  invites a prominent writer to read works that speak to the topic, whichever way the writer interprets the theme. The invited writer this year was none other than Kwame Dawes, with laudable accolades, which anyone can get from  the internet. I was asked to introduce him, and therefore, thought it would be a disservice to just read his biography since anyone could.  Instead, I decided  to personalize the introduction as I have known Kwame for  over 20 years.  Although not close, we have been engaging each other  in one capacity or another. Also, I wanted to  use his poems/word to introduce him; so here is my introduction of Kwame Dawes

“Turn to the alchemy of dub,” is, for me, an unforgettable line from Kwame Dawes’ poem Faith. Just that phrase alone tells us something essential about the poet we welcometonight.

To speak of dub as alchemy is to understand something profound about this Caribbean region we call home, and specially Jamaica. Dub music, born out of rhythm and experimentation, is indeed a kind of alchemy as it takes fragments such as sound, memory, slices of history, bass, and voice and transforms them into something larger, more grounding than their parts and that sits in the base of your stomach, well at least mine.  Transformative.

When Dawes names dub alchemy, he shows us something about his own poetic imagination: a deep respect and understanding for Jamaican creativity, for Caribbean ingenuity, for what our people have made out of centuries of movement, struggle, invention, and survival.

The first time I met Kwame Dawes was when I was invited to Calabash International Literary Festival, after my collection Caribbean Passion, 2004 had been published by Peepal Tree Press. I remember a brief encounter  a moment before my reading. One of the poems in the collection, “Bumbu Clat,” is about the cloth women used  to use when they had their menses before pads.  The title of the poem is said to be the worse Jamaican bad word, and just a few week before my reading, an artist was arrested for shouting the word out on stage. (Absurd, but colonial ideology still rules and bumbu clat and other such words were still on the legal books, and punishable). Nonetheless I was determined to read the poem and I did. However, I remember asking Kwame just before I went on stage, if I could be arrested for reading the poem, hence cursing a Jamaican bad word at a public event. Needless to say I didn’t get arrested.

But that was not my first contact with Dawes, I remember getting an email from him, requesting an interview for his anthology Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets, which was published in 2000. I remember him calling me to make plans for the interview.

Since then, I have watched his career unfold; a career that stretches across continents and institutions, across poetry and teaching, across publishing and cultural leadership.

His tag line is “the busiest man in literature,” which makes him my twin in this regard as I regard myself as the busiest woman in literature. We are both hard workers.  Perhaps you don’t know that Kwame is the day name for a boy born on a Saturday in  Ghana where almost every child has a day name.  My day name is Ama. The nursery rhyme about children born on specific days says “ Saturday’s child works hard for his living, so Kwame’s success must be measured against his hard work.

But busyness alone does not define Kwame Dawes, who is a man with a clear mission to create space for others and to build platforms.

Dawes’s objective is  to ensure that poetry does not live quietly on a shelf but circulates through communities and across borders.

In another of his poems, Stray Paths, Dawes writes:

“This is the desire I carry
the moment of being announced
followed by the golden silence
of my presence.”

I believe that those lines aptly describe Kwame Dawes who is both public and private at the same time. A man whose work travels everywhere, whose presence is felt across the literary world and yet who carries within himself that quiet interior space where the poet lives.

The place where ideas are constantly turning and where imagination never rests.

If there is one thing you should know about Kwame Dawes, it is this: He is always thinking, always imagining the next possibility for poetry.

And through that restless imagination he has created something remarkable, and  has forged a path for himself and for others.

We see that mission in the co-founding of Calabash International Literary Festival, which has become one of the most important literary gatherings in the region.

We see it in the African Poetry Book Fund, which has opened doors for poets across Africa.

And we hope to see it continue to unfold through the Caribbean Poetry Book Series that bring Caribbean poetry more fully into the world’s literary conversation.

Because poetry, as Kwame understands it, must not only be written; it must be sustained, supported and given a platform to breathe.

Kwame Dawes shows us that poetry can be organized, nurtured, and even , dare I say it, monetized to build ecosystems where poetry can live and grow.

There is a stanza from Dawes’ poem, “Marked” that seems appropriate to conclude this introduction. Dawes says:

 “The poet must weep
when he returns, his linen
garments brown with the blood
of promise, his feet sticky
with the spilled blood of despair.
A soh it go.”

“The poet must weep when he returns.”

Perhaps that is where we recognize ourselves most deeply.

Because to be a poet in this time  and in this world is to carry both vision and grief.

As a poet, I weep every day for my island. I weep for my people. I weep for the world. I weep for a future where there will be less inequality, less gender-based violence, less child abuse.

But maybe, just maybe,  “a soh it go,” will be said not as a throw away but as an affirmation.

Because poetry reminds us that another way of imagining the world is always possible, including supporting our cousins and nearest neighbours, Cuba

And that is why the work of poets matters. That is why the work of Kwame Dawes matters.  He continues to turn again and again to the alchemy of dub, to the transformative power of language, rhythm, and imagination.

To launch his Poet laureateship this year he has continued and expanded the Edward Baugh Prize for adult writers from Portland, St. Thomas, Kingston and St Andrew; the Louise Bennett-Coverley Prize for adult writers from St. Catherine, Clarendon, Manchester, Trelawny, St. Ann and St. Mary; and the Michael Cooke Prize for adult writers from Hanover, St. James, Westmoreland and St. Elizabeth.

Kwame Dawes says, “For me as a poet and as the Poet Laureate, I see it as an opportunity to see what people are thinking, what they’re feeling, and how they’re writing those feelings. It is a way to promote part of our culture, the construction of a way of seeing the world through this creative mechanism.”

Brothers and Sisters, let’s welcome Kwame Dawes, Jamaica’s current Poet Laureate.