Caribbean impulse in Lilian Allen's psychic unrest.

"de root of all language is impulse" -Lillian Allen (53)

"the square root of impulse is language" -Lillian Allen (68)

Cultural debates on Canadian multiculturalism have variously created a literary landscape that is ever changing. Particularly since the 1980s, with the flowering of women's writing, issues of ethnicity and race have been energized by issues of gender and class to transform, even as they challenge, the national image of a mosaic tile work of Canadian body. Current discussions focusing on diaspora aesthetics, taking into consideration the marked presence of Caribbean writers in Canada, have sought to redeem national consciousness from the "edge of the diasporic map" (Eldridge 171). For example, George Elliott Clarke's Odysseys Home presents a comprehensive discussion of the challenge to Canadian national identity posed by "the diversity of black communities" (Clarke 16). As the text presents it, the origins and history of this fragmented group of people are clearly reflected in, and shape, the literature emerging out of that community (14). Odysseys Home uses the term "African Canadian" to recognize "the diversity of black communities" in Canada (16). Discussing various markers of cultural identity, Clarke says that the term Caribbean Canadian would accentuate the Caribbean heritage of those who accept the Canadian identity they have acquired, and that some Caribbean Canadians use the term black as a "signal of their affiliation with some larger African universe" (16). Clarke's argument that those within this community choose to classify themselves by various labels which act as modifiers of identity is validated by the literature emerging from this arena, a point that will be later substantiated by a critical analysis of the dub poetry performance of Caribbean Canadian, Lillian Allen.

Rinaldo Walcott also makes a case for reading black writings in Canada for its diversity and difference. In Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, discussing multiculturalism and its effects on black Canadian writings he points out that, "The politics and discourse of multiculturalism in Canada have allowed for a particular enactment of cultural differences, which in fact pre-empts any coherent or imagined national black community" (Walcott Rude 43). In his Introduction to Black Like Who? Walcott also suggests that "black Canadian works be read within the context of black diasporic discourses" and that "music and other imaginative works best demonstrate the processes of black diasporic invention and (re)invention" (Walcott Black xii). Furthermore, he suggests that black Canadian writings should not be approached as "merely national products" but as works that "occupy the space of the in-between, vacillating between national borders and diasporic desires, ambitions and disappointments" and as such they "suggest the possibilities of the "new", but in many cases cannot leave various kinds of "old" behind" (Walcott Black xii). Among other scholars, both Clarke and Walcott see the literature emerging out of black communities in Canada as distinctly relating to the writers' sense of cultural heritage and identity.

In view of the foregoing, this paper suggests that, as they read the literature emerging from within the Caribbean Canadian community, critics pay attention to how Caribbean heritage acts as an impulse, producing as well as sustaining the work, even as they reflect on the impact that the Canadian environment brings to bear on such impulse. Take the case of Jamaican born Lillian Allen who has been performing dub poetry for over two decades in Canada, although, as Maria Caridad Casas points out, "her commercial debut album, Revolutionary Tea Party, was not released until 1985" and "her first commercially-distributed collection of print poems, Women Do This Every Day, was published in 1993" (Casas 11). According to Carr, Allen's poetry offers a "transformative vision of social change and cultural affirmation in the African tradition of the griot or storyteller-keeper of social memory" (Carr 7). The discussion of her work in this paper offers such a reading as it focuses generally on language as performance in the hands of the modern day griot, positing that Allen's multi-positional status as a Jamaican Caribbean Canadian woman is reflected in the multi-dimensional presentation of the poetic narratives she creates. Allen's poetry consisting of multiple frameworks of immigrant experience within Canada is voiced by a poetpersona who expresses human rage and indignation against social oppression experienced there.

In Particular, concentrating on Allen's "Revolution from de Beat" (Psychic Unrest 93; Freedom & Dance CD #2) this paper examines the dynamic relation between word and performance and impulse. It engages the basic premise that Caribbean "impulse," psycho-sociologically defined, generates the driving force behind the poems, and that impulse, as it relates to Caribbean musical and speech rhythms, Caribbean cultural heritage, creates for this poetic body a "voice" of subversion that challenges national Canadian construction of identity since, it goes without saying, that in any discussion of Canadian Caribbean literature, language must be recognized as a tool or strategy for deconstruction of "Eurocentric imperialism" (Clarke 17). Brenda Cart reminds us that "dub poetry grew out of African-Jamaican linguistic, musical and poetic lineages and strongly influences twentieth-century political-spiritual movements for social change ..." (9). Emerging out of a cultural legacy of oppression and displacement, Allen's work participates in the poetic project that includes transforming the Canadian literary landscape, re-shaping it, as a form of cultural resistance, and as such the poems fiercely challenge monolithic representations and interpretations of gender and identity.

Listening to any dub performance we easily become conscious of the pulse of life that has been put into the poems. If we define this putting in of the pulse of life as impulse, we can begin to argue that the poetic impulse variously generates thematic repetition of issues and musical as well as linguistic tempo of both printed and performance events that are culturally and politically energized. A growing number of critics have already commented on the physiological impulse that the body creates in a dub performance, noting that the physical performance of the human body itself stimulates the poetic event, integrating sound and motion within the live performance and, conversely, that the absence of this impulse creates a stark contrast between performance and print. (1) In addition, we engage a reading of the definition of impulse as the "motivation or reason" for the poetic event when we question the personal, psychological, and sociological context surrounding the performance. Or, using another definition, we can examine the "instinctive drive" or the "sudden desire, urge or inclination" that propels the poem from the creative housing of the poet onto the stage or page it finally inhabits.

Allen's definition of impulse cited above in the preface invites us to examine the performance of language and what it reveals about the "root" or original source of the poems. Written with strong inflections of the Jamaican Creole, Allen's poetry invokes the cultural legacy of oppression and displacement experienced by the black diaspora in Britain, North America, and the Caribbean. In "Revolution from de Beat" (93; Freedom & Dance #2) the poem opens with a chorus, an invocation of the talking drum rhythm (riddim) of Africa which communicated the idea of rebellion to slaves all across the Caribbean islands:

   Ah Revolution from de drum
   Ah Revolution from de beat
   Ah Revolution from de heart
   Ah Revolution from de feet
   Ah revolution (lines 1-5 emphasis mine)

Taking Habekost's definition of riddim (rhythm) as "the heartbeat of the people," that is to say, "the pulse of life," the drum "beat" mentioned in the chorus doubles as the pulse or heartbeat of the people and, indubitably, the source of inspiration for "revolution" (Habekost 93).

The "impulse to be free," the impulse of revolution quickens the pace of the poem as the performance hurtles headlong into a rush of verbal explosion: as seen in:

   De riddim and the heave and the sway of the beat
   keep de rumblings and the tumblings down down down
   to the drums to the beat. To the impulse to be free
   to the life that springs up in the heat in the heat
      (lines 6-9 emphasis mine)

This verbal rush is further hastened by the syncopated rhythms of the recorded performance, referred to in the "routing rhythms (riddims) of the musical tracts tracks" (line 14). We note that in the recorded performance of the poem it sounds an extra beat with a double echo of "tracks" closing the stanza:

   in the pounding dance to be free
   to bust open a window
   crash upon a door
   strip the crust of confinement
   seep truth, through cracks
   through the routing rhythms of the musical tracts
   tracks tracks tracks
   (emphasis mine lines 9-14)

This emphasis on "tracks" calls attention to a dynamic relation of meanings and relays in the process a multidimensional message. There is reference in "musical tracts tracks" to the "soundtrack" of Allen's CD; to the "line of thought" conveyed by the poem; it could even refer to the line of marks left by foot prints, or the position "where one stands, there and then" as in "one's tracks;" equally, "tracts tracks" could also refer to the tracks of memory and history that the dub poem traces by vestiges; and so it could also be the tracks of the underground railway that took the slaves northbound to freedom. The entire verse is performative, moving and swaying to the beat, the impulse of memory and history that the poem traces out in its musical tracks. The musical metaphor in the phrase "de riddim and the heave and the sway of the heat" (line 5) presents the duality of sound and motion, the occurrence of "heat" at the end of the poetic line transforming the image into metaphor, describing at once the wave of energy released in dancing and the anger that gives rise to a wave of rebellion: "the pounding dance to be free / to bust open a window / crash upon a door" (lines 11-12). The verbal violence enacted reflects the radical poetic vision of a world in which Caribbean Canadians refuse to remain in a state of "confinement" at the dictates of an unjust society. Itself releasing a creative flow of energy, the poem responds to the will of the people, the human "impulse," or desire, "to be free" (line 7).

By the third stanza of the poem the revolutionary beat is clearly identified as reggae music:

   De sound of reggae music came on a wave of patter patter
   of deeply rooted internal chatter chatter (chatter (chatter)
   on wings of riddim and melodies gone free (lines 15-17)

Reggae music is represented here as seductive and compelling in its deceptiveness, the poem reminding us that from the very moment of its conception, Jamaican reggae music has been a Caribbean impulse. A religious outpouring of creative energy charged with spiritual rebellion against a materialistic and self satisfied world, reggae music grew out of the instinctive impulse to be free, what the poet here describes as "internal chatter." A discourse from within both self and community, "internal chatter" describes the will/desire of the black diaspora:

   the bass strum the heart
   the bass drum the heart beat
   and the Rastaman pound! Bong bong bong bong (bong bong)
   beat them drums mon! (mon!) Bong bong bong bong (bong bong)
   (emphasis mine lines 18-21)

This stanza focuses largely on the importance of musical rhythm, or to be precise, "riddim." (2) There is a doubling of word and sound and echoing of these doubles that in itself is a Caribbean linguistic device, whereby a word is strengthened or its meaning intensified by the doubling, and its sound given added emotional appeal and value. To "strum" is to pluck the heart as one would the strings of the bass guitar, an image that reflects on the intensity of the physical exercise of the musician whose natural priority it is to exorcise the pain within. By saying that "the bass strum[s] the heart" and "the bass drum[s] the heart beat," the verse, and by extension the entire poem, describes the doubling of sound and performance, the oneness of poet and instrument, as the "s" sounds slide and vowel sounds elide and words become transformed one into the other. Since the drums instinctively reproduce the natural sound of the heart beat, the strumming and drumming describes as much the sound of the performer's heart as the sound of the instrument being played, and together they relay the historical pain of the black community whose determination to be free is being unleashed, must be released, through the "musical tracks" of the dub performance. Word, performance and music combine to create a dynamic charge of energy. Additionally, we note that at times the music overrides the printed word, extending the poetic line with a double echoing of sounds, reminding us that, "de sound" and "the voice of impulse" together create the "riddim pulse" of the poem. This "riddim pulse" is described in stanza four as the "liberation impulse," the energetic force or desire that compels the poet to "dig the colonialists' grave" (lines 27, 34-35).

The stanza envisions an end to colonialism and the euro-centric powers of domination and oppression as it performs a transformation of time and place through which the poetic struggle for acceptance in mainstream literary arena finds fulfillment. (3)

The poetpersona sings:

   of days journeying through the night
   of riddim pulse wails and dreams
   and determination to be free
   of sight
   of a vision that ignites
   of a musical bam-bam fling-down-baps get-up-stand-up jam!
   (lines 26-33)

It is the will/desire/motivation of the people that generates the revolution which makes possible such a transformative vision. (4) The poem reminds us that the call for revolution was first sounded through the drums of the reggae music, and by extension the drums of dub poetry, both of which were shaped by the struggle for liberation. The stanza executes a litany of historical achievements of the black diaspora beginning with the community's struggle for liberation from colonial oppression, and settling on the momentous achievements of the sixties and seventies in the Caribbean which brought civil rights and the hippies' movements, and later the call for black power which opened the way for feminist/womanist movements. Since reggae music originates in Jamaica, the resistance it symbolizes is used in the poem to enact the historical displacement of Africa when Africans were brought to the Caribbean islands as slaves. The poem replaces Africa on the social and political map, pointing to the Caribbean emergence of reggae music as an unleashing of the community's African heritage, long suppressed by colonialism. The poetic narrative explains that for "four hundred years" the black peoples' "ties" with Africa, "De core of the African self," had been "blighted and nipped" by the historical crossing of the "continental divide" and the heritage of "colonialist lies" (lines 45-8), but all it takes is a "sip from the being of the African well" to "uncork the primal African self" and, according to the poem, this "let loose" a riddim and "reggae music found us" (lines 49-53).

The musical discourse of the poem locates the Caribbean as a center for the black diaspora. In the poem, the sound of water escaping upwards from the depths of the African well doubles as the sound of the communal "sighs" (line 57) of the black diaspora in the Caribbean, as an expression of their determination to be free, a determination, communicated through the sounds of reggae. The narrator chants:

   It was the pulse in the Caribbean that echoed bright
   a voice on a beat
   squashed determination released
   and the wondrous sighs of Black people once again rose high
   from a little piece of rock called Jamaica
   where Arawak and Carib bones lie (lines 54-9)

According to the poetic narrative, the "resistance" to colonialism and the call for "peace love and liberation" began in the Caribbean and "spread worldwide on the wings of its artists and shaman" (lines 60-2). In the CD performance of the poem the poetpersona used the phrase "of de Caribbean" whereas the printed text uses "in de Caribbean," a revision that emphasizes the nature and origin of the "pulse," or "riddim," or impulse that sounded the call for change. Dub poetry, firmly rooted in the reggae riddim and tradition is thus celebrated as a manifestation of the spiritual journey from Africa to the Caribbean, and in the spirit of its African heritage it makes a call and response at one and the same time:

   the bass and drums prance like a winded fire
   chenke chenke chenke chenke of a guitar strum
   songs of freedom
   of spirit
   of love
   of redemption (lines 63-8)

Musical rhythm, in both the printed and performance versions of the dub poem, takes precedence, the poem ending as song, a chant for "songs of freedom / of spirit / of love / of redemption," the chorus at the end again reminding us of the Caribbean impulse that inspires revolution (5):

   Ah Revolution from de drum
   Ah Revolution from de beat
   Ah Revolution from de heart
   Ah Revolution from de feet
   Ah revolution (emphasis mine lines 69-73).

In General, the poems in Allen's Psychic Unrest challenge the Eurocentric and African American notions of Canada as land of the free, a safe haven for all. The Preface to Psychic Unrest invokes Gloria Anzaldua's voice and spirit as it proclaims: "Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create." Carmen Caliz-Montoro, speaking of the literary imagination of Canada as Borderland explains that, "Originally, English Canadian literature was shaped by geography, by the elements and the hardship of having to live in the wilderness, or more generally within a space that resisted and was resistant to the presence of Europeans," and also that Canada was characterized by "an image of a safe haven or shelter" (Caliz-Montoro 58). This characterization, she points out, is being changed as the Canadian landscape has been "amply reshaped in the last few decades by the voices of new immigrants and Aboriginal Peoples" (58). For twentieth century immigrant Caribbean writers like Allen, Canada's borderland remains as an arbitrary sign. Nevertheless, as Caliz-Montoro suggests, the Canadian "landscape is presently opening up to Caribbean (women)" (60) and Allen's poetry is clearly a part of the literary project to reshape Euro-Canadian romantic constructions of the geo-political landscape of Canada. The Caribbean immigrant's sense of history clearly informs the poetic impulse to reshape this literary landscape. In "Revolution from de beat" this impulse is drawn deep out from the communal psyche, a "well" that Allen's poem points out can no longer contain or suppress the history of black struggle for human rights.

All the poems in Allen's Psychic Unrest collection, in various ways, present a poetic re-enactment of and engagement with historical black struggle for human rights. The poems are generated by the poetic impulse to expose social and political injustice as it calls for a better world. Allen's poetry reflects in various ways on Canada's multicultural mosaic, revealing the flawed vision of its supporters. Allen questions the practice of multiculturalism while endorsing the ideal through her poetic practice. Among others she sees multiculturalism as "the alibi allowing whiteness to continue as the unmarked dominant term" (Brydon 213). The borders between immigrant communities and Canadian white society are still there; the official multicultural mosaic merely renders them invisible. For Caribbean Canadian writers the struggle for human rights manifests itself on the Canadian literary scene. Caribbean dub poets in particular have had a long battle with mainstream Canadian poetic community whose overt disdain for the performance dimension of dub poetry has ironically called into question, not just the identity of Caribbean poetry in Canada, but also that of Canadian poetry itself. Michael Eldridge's discussion of Allen's dub poetry in his paper "" Why Did You Leave There?": Allen's Geography Lesson," focused on the challenges she faced in the music. In part, he places the blame for what he defines as her seeming lack of success on "the absence in Canada of a relatively large and coherent market for homegrown black musics" (Eldridge 173). Brydon also examines the resistance Allen and other dub poets have faced in both musical and literary establishments, commenting on the initial rejection of Allen by the literary arena at a time when "the Canadian musical establishment welcomed her" (Brydon 212). She places the blame on "ethnocentric stereotypes of how to distinguish between Literature and Popular culture," ironically reflecting mainstream attitude when she says, "Poetry coming out of the African tradition can be valued as popular music, but not as literature" (212).

Getting closer to the bone, Susan Gingell's article on Allen's 1986 poetry performance at A.K.A. Gallery in Saskatoon points out that Allen's poetry antagonizes the Canadian community on two significant counts: "The rhythms of Canadian dub poetry," she says, "are--like its Jamaican and black British forerunners--compelling and musical," a distinction, I must point out, that marked the genre in the Eurocentric Canadian poetic league as different, other and inferior by virtue of its orature. Gingell continues, "We Canadians are not used to being made uncomfortable in our own backyards, preferring to think of ourselves as the world's amiable mediators, conciliators, and peacekeepers" (Gingell, "Canadian Dub" 1). Her admission reflects the Canadian community's refusal to face its hostility toward the difference and otherness representative of the Caribbean community within Canada's borders.

Gingell's more recent discussion of Canadian reception of dub poetry points to both the struggle and victory that Canadian dub poets have had in their confrontation with the League of Canadian Poets, whose arbitrary definitions of what "real" poetry is was used to bar De Dub Poets (Allen, Joseph and Haughton), from gaining well deserved social recognition and support. She points out that the League members' refusal to admit the group when they sought to become members in 1984, "replicated in the sphere of cultural production the exclusions that as Africanadians, De Dub Poets had previously encountered in the Canadian social and economic spheres" (Gingell 10-11). Allen's Psychic Unrest is an incisive record of this struggle, detailing in poetic narrative the experiences of Caribbean immigrants in Canada, men as well as women, although the emphasis is on women.

The power of dub poetry as a social and political medium of communal self expression was quickly vindicated when, a few months later, the poetic impulse stirred the ground from within and members of the League, using the charge of ethnocentricity, made the claim for change, with the result that De Dub Poets were formally offered membership by the League. De Dub Poets' entry into the professional poetic circle of the League of Canadian poets has provided formal proof that the Canadian literary landscape is changing. Now, the critical outflow needs to match the creative. A few critics, not enough, have begun to formally examine dub and other performance poetry in Canada as a "new genre" a "genre of subversion," (Caliz-Montoro 56) which seeks to redress the imbalance of social and political forces in North America. As Rinaldo Walcott points out, "The writing of blackness in Canada ... might begin with a belief that something important happens" there and, "if we accept this, finally, then critics can move beyond mere celebration into the sustaining work that criticique is" (xv). So, the conversations must go on and it is up to us to make sure that the discourse remains true to the performance of those Caribbean writers practicing within Canada's borderlands and to be incisive in our critical acclaim of the worth and value of their works.

Bibliography

Allen, Lillian. Psychic Unrest. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1999.

--. Freedom & Dance CD. Toronto: Verse to Vinyl, 1998.

Brydon, Diana. "One Poem Town?: Contemporary Canadian Cultural Debates." Voices of Power: Co-operation and Conflict in English Language and Literatures. Ed.

M. Maufort and J.P. Van Nappen. Liege, Belgium: Universite de Liege, 1997. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Caliz-Montoro, Carmen. Writing from the Borderlands: A Study of Chicano, Afro-Caribbean and Native Literatures in North America. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2000.

Carr, Brenda. ""Come Mek Wi Work Together": Community Witness and Social Agency in Lillian Alien's Dub Poetry." Ariel. 29.3 (July 1998):7-40.

Casas, Maria Caridad. "Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics." Ariel 33.2 (April 2002): 7-32.

Clarke, George Elliott. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2002.

Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the Vulgar Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Dabydeen, Cyril. "Places We Come From: Voices of Caribbean Writers (in English) and Multicultural Contexts." World Literature Today. 73.2 (spring 1999): 231-37.

Eldridge, Michael. ""Why Did You Leave There?: Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson." Diaspora 3.2 (1994): 169-83.

Gingell, Susan. "Canadian Dub: Performance by Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph. A.K.A. Gallery in Saskatoon, January 29, 1986." Chimo 12 (Spring 1986): 2-7.

--. "'Always a Poem, Once a Book': Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Canadian Dub and Related Performance Poetry." Journal of West Indian Literature. 14: 1 & 2 (2005).

Habekost, Christian. Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of Afro-Caribbean Dub Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.

Sturgess, Charlotte. Redefining the Subject: Sites of play in Canadian Women's Writing. New York: Rodopi, 2003.

Walcott, Rinaldo. Black like Who?: Writing Black Canada. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997.

--, ed. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000.

(1) See, for instance, Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); Cooper, Carolyn, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the Vulgar Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 1995); Casas, Maria Caridad, "Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics," Ariel 33.2 (April 2002): 7-32.

(2) Christian Habekost's definition of riddim focuses on the act that transforms the energy of the spoken word in a multidimensional performance of the verbal art that signifies revolution; see Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of Afro-Caribbean Dub Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.

(3) For an extended discussion on Allen's struggle as a poet musician see Michael Eldridge's article: ""Why Did you Leave There?: Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson." Diaspora 3.2 (1994): 173-4.

(4) Maria Caridad Casas points out the "relationship between the body and the spoken word," in her article: "Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics," Ariel 33.2 (April 2002): 25-8; Allen's "musical bam-bam fling-down-baps get-up-stand-up jam!" is a metaphoric representation of the age old diasporic struggle for recognition on a physical level.

(5) The printed version of the poem does not carry the initial "Ah" sound, which acts here to convey the sound of satisfaction in the poetpersona's voice as she envisions the fulfillment of her poetic prophecy.