Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies by J. Edward Chamberlin (review)

HUMANITIES 175 colonization, and culture in his native place, rather than a clean pair of heels. (JOHN LAVERY) J. Edward Chamberlin. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies McClelland and Stewart. 325. $19.95 paper As J. Edward Chamberlin's carefully phrased subtitle signals, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies is a study not of West Indian poetry per se but of how this poetry enables West Indians to repossess the language and culture that slavery and colonialism took from them. The claim C.L.R. James makes for West Indian cricket in BelJond a Boundary (1963) is what Chamberlin is making here for poetry: James contends that through cricket, which evolved into the West Indian game, West Indians gained a sense of their worth, identity, and independence; Chamberlin maintains that West Indian poets ... have taken back what belongs to them - not only their own language, but the freedom to use it.' He examines West Indian poetry as both evidence and source of this socia-cultural change. His approach is literary rather than linguistic; he emphasizes the poets' preoccupation with finding a language of their own, demonstrating through close analysis of particular poems the shift from British standard English to what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls nation language. The poets he concentrates on are Brathwaite, Lome Goodison, and Derek Walcott, but he refers to a good many other West Indian poets resident in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the West Indies, including dub and rapso (performance) poets, who perhaps represent the extreme of language repossession. Chamberlin's sympathetic approach to the West Indian heritage of 'dispossession, resistance, and recovery' is in a way a response to Naipaul's alleged charge in The Middle Passage (1962) - which Chamberlin alludes to more than a dozen times - that nothing was created in the West Indies. (Chamberlin is one of several critics who mistakenly assume that Naipaul directs his negative observation - which concludes a section in The Middle Passage censuring the brutality of slavery and colonization - at contemporary West Indian society.) Interestingly, Chamberlin quotes similar comments on 'West Indian nothingness' made by Walcott and Brathwaite but readily accommodates them as youthful lapses or phases on the part of these poets. Chamberlin acknowledges that several dichotomies, with which it is leasy to become infatuated,' have 'shaped' his study of poetry and West Indian society. He is particularly absorbed with the universals/particulars dichotomy. Recurringly he points out the distinctness of anglophoneWest 176 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 Indian language and culture but at the same time underscores its affinities with other languages and cultures. The universality of West Indian poets, he argues, is based not on Juniversal models provided by European humanism ' but on ~what is shared by all poets and by their readers in different times and places.' He constantly draws parallels with other writers - Joyce, Yeats, and Michael Hartnett, for instance - to underline commonalities. Chamberlin finds that West Indian poetry provides an unusually 'clear illustration' of 'questions that bear on all poetry.' He raises a number of these issues in his study: What is ~the language of the people'? What is 'the poet's truth'? Is there ~some canon (or anti-canon) of correctness governing poetic subjects and styles'? Is literature a mirror or witness to life? Chamberlin expertly outlines the problematics of these questions but addresses them only in an introductory way; he evidently has the general reader rather than the specialist in mind. And when he shifts to discussing them in relation' to West Indian poetry, he addresses a non-West Indian reader or student who has to be introduced to the issues of the literature and has to be provided with explanations of the unfamiliar. Chamberlin does such briefings very thoroughly~. as his outline of the long-rurming critical debate in the West Indies over the relative merits of Walcott and Brathwaite illustrates. (It should be noted, however, that his parenthetical explanation of the origins of the title of the Guyanese journal Kyk-Over-Al is only partially correct: the Dutch fort from which the jounlal takes its name is at the confluence of three rivers, and is closer to Bartica than to...