Caribbean Literary Discourse: Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean

7. “The Dust”: A Tribute to the Folk

7 “The Dust” A Tribute to the folk Velma Pollard Comment and criticism in Anglophone Caribbean literature in the last decade or so have established the euro-tradition and to a lesser extent the Afrotradition as the pervasive influences on the themes and forms of Caribbean poetry .Too little attention has been paid, however, to a third and eminently valid influence, derived from both of these yet essentially different from either, the “creole” or “folk” tradition; the tradition that accounts for the lifestyle and the way of seeing things peculiar to the people who form the bulk of our Caribbean populations. It represents their reaction to and their method of coming to terms with the events and circumstances conditioning their lives on this side of the middle Passage.This is the tradition that has evolved out of the historical social and economic hodgepodge that has been the Caribbean situation. It has assumed a unique personality and has inevitably imposed on creative activity in the area, an influence that cannot be ignored, an influence that is becoming even more pervasive as our writing describes, with increasing candor, the different realities of our societies. This chapter will look at one Caribbean poem,the now classical “The Dust,”1 and will comment on it as a near-perfect expression of the life,music,and philosophy of the people who have been described as the “basis of culture; people who from the centre of an oppressive system have been able to survive, adapt, recreate; have devised means of protecting what has been so gained . . .and who begin to offer to return some of this experience and vision.”2 It is not possible to put off any longer the appraisal of our more “typical” works using a frame of reference that is peculiarly our own,3 particularly when we dare to point the way for young readers.matter,style,and music in this particular poem have all managed to sidestep the effect of our learned responses—the whole oppressive world of school and books–and emanate entirely from within the folk tradition . The result is a song, internally whole and as deceptively simple as the lifestyle of the people it portrays. “The Dust” / 123 The time is evening; perhaps one of the favorite times of the “little”people, when the prescribed money-earning masks are discarded. The place is a grocery shop, a natural center for chance congregation. It is a rural shop; if it is urban, it is one where rural habits persist, where the impersonal supermarket has not displaced the small-time shopkeeper and the credit system: Write two cake o’soap an half pung-a flour in olive black balance book fuh me, maisie muh dear. . . . (64) A kind of tableau unfolds,beginning with a greeting in which everyone is identified by name each with its appropriate elaboration: . . . how you, evie, chile? you tek dat miraculous bush fuh de trouble you tell me about? hey mary! you there? I int see you there wid you head half hide in de dark o’dat crocus bag and with intimate concern: . . . how Darrington mule? (64) The response to this ordinary question sparks off a discussion of the general ill-faring of things, in which bible history and oral history are called upon for parallels to the current situation. The discussion ends with a naming one by one of the blessings that offset the dissatisfactions of life and a reiteration of the eternal unanswerable question concerning the meaning of things: the joys and sorrows of this life. It is in the description of the present and of the comparable past that the reasoning informing the voice of the people,and the nature of that voice,come to our attention. The interpretation of fact, described firsthand or relayed to 124 / Pollard us by the main speaker, is sometimes incredible and unrealistic to the eye of sophistication.4 but there is no imagination here. The normal response of our people to unusual phenomena is indeed as the poem illustrates it. Those who listen in country buses or in route taxis find no cause to doubt the connection between say the withering of things described as current and World War I or its connection with the eruption of the volcano in nearby st. lucia. And in the actual discussion, narrative and description, inextricably bound together, depend for their reliability not on science or logic in the...