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Firespitter: Jayne Cortez and the Politics of Diasporic Resistance

by Ron Sakolsky
11.05.04

Find your own voice and use it
Use your own voice and find it
(Jayne Cortez, 2002)

AS THE DUB POETS SAY, “word soun ave power!” Though it is sometimes thought of as a strictly Jamaican idiom, Dominican-born dub poet, Ras Mo once told me, “In Dominica, we can’t find the term ‘dub poetry,’ but rather ‘people’s performance poetry’. In the Eastern Caribbean, when you day ‘dub,’ people relate it to Jamaican reggae and dancehall DJs, but ‘dub poetry, ‘performance poetry,’ ‘rhythm poetry,’ ‘rapso’ are all based on the same form from different islands.” Jamaican dub poet, Mutabaruka, elaborated on this diasporic theme in relation to the music associated with dub poetry at the first international gathering of dub poets in Toronto in 1993 by saying, “the commonality is not jazz, reggae or even dub , but the African oral tradition.”

More recently, the 2004 International Dub Poetry Festival, held again in Toronto, noted in its brochure: “Dub poetry speaks clearly and emphatically for those who seek to create a better world by influencing politics with their poetics. Through their performance stance, their ideas and active engagement, dub poets are catalysts of change.” Pioneering Jamaican dub poet, Malachi Smith, who now lives in Miami, summed up the power of the genre during his comments at this year’s “Dub Activism” panel by saying, “the word can be a bullet or a hole to plant a seed.”

Much has been written on the value of creating an African consciousness in relation to national liberation movements located outside of the African continent, particularly in the Caribbean. Dub poetry, as a decolonizing agent, extends the connection beyond that of the nation-state to the Motherland. By so doing, it allows for the creation of a new cognitive map which is at once rooted in Africa and at the same time is dynamic enough to encompass not only two-way flows between the scattered peoples of the African diaspora and Africa itself, but the interactions of diasporic peoples with one another based on both the commonality and the diversity of their diasporic experiences. Here I will draw upon the work of African American poet Jayne Cortez as a touchstone in charting the poetics of struggle along diasporic lines in relation to dub poetry.

In this regard, I want to situate Cortez’s poetry within, or at the very least point out her affinity with, the dub poetry movement. Though usually not thought of as a dub poet, in my mind, she fits the definition of one at its most diasporically expansive. As established dub poet, Afua Cooper, has said, “Because of the reggae influence, dub poets traditionally have privileged reggae music, but jazz, rhythm and blues, calypso, African drumming styles, rap and Afro-Latin styles have been used by many dub poets, in the production and performance of their work. The inclusion of these forms underscores dub poetry’s open-endedness, flexibility, vast potential and possibilities.” It is within this realm of diasporic possibility that Lillian Allen has embraced Jayne Cortez as a “poet of resistance” whose work is intrinsically linked to the dub poetry project of which the former is a leading light.

While many current discussions of the confluence of African American forms of musical expression and dub poetry are often limited to rap, or, more generally, to the spoken word movement, Cortez has always been someone whose musical/poetic sensibility refuses to be confined to a single national identity. Because of her poetry’s “yard to yard” cosmopolitanism, she is at home anywhere in the African diaspora. In this sense, the body of her work encompasses most of Afua Cooper’s above checklist of diasporic musics with a combined spiritual, cultural and political depth that is quite astonishing.

To demonstrate the diversity of the diasporic contexts for the poems which she has recorded with her band, the Firespitters, a partial listing of genres ranges from African American jazz and hoodoo blues to Afro-Cuban son/lucumi/abakua on to Brazilian samba/capoeira/candomblé, and then returning to the African drum in its many incarnations. Starting with that same drum in mind, here are some of the titles of her recordings: “If The Drum Is a Woman,” “You Know (For the people who speak the you know language),” “I Got The Blue-Ooze,” “Taking the Blues Back Home,” I See Chano Pozo,” “Chocolate,” “Samba is Power,” “I and I (For Michael Smith),” and “Drums Everywhere Drums.” These are all no holds barred poems, which not only use and improvise upon the rhythms of, but also are about, the music of the diaspora.

In terms of the poet’s relationship to the music, as Cortez herself sees it, “the poet becomes the band” (Cortez in Sakolsky, p. 661). In this sense, she herself embodies the “Firespitter” persona. The case that I want to make here is not only for Jayne Cortez as a dub poet because of her concern for what she calls “the poetic use of music,” but for dub poetry as a fully diasporic idiom. This is true not only in terms of the international diversity of the artists represented in the movement as a whole, but the opportunity with the form provides for diversity within an individual dub poet’s oeuvre. A poet like Cortez opens up a variety of creole identities to their core and connects the African diasporic dots before our very ears. Celebrating her ability in this regard is not meant to disparage those dub poetry artists who concentrate on plumbing the depths of a single creole identity with which they associate themselves based on where in the diaspora they or their forbears are located. I want merely to point out Cortez’s impressive ability to make her poetry dance to a wide array of African and African-derived drumbeats.

Moving beyond a narrowly-defined national identity, we enter the global stage where an African-based identity is itself constructed of a composite of diasporic influences which can’t be subsumed in any one language, musical or otherwise. Cortez’s poetry treats all hybrid diasporic locations as potentially radical. Defiantly eschewing the lowest common denominator monotony of “worldbeat” blandness, Cortez never forgets that the historical connection to Africa is not just about style, but the blood of kinship, oppression and revolt. As fellow poet Franklin Rosemont delineates the poetic context that animates her work, “Poetry is the language of freedom—language at its freeist, highest, and wildest—and therefore the single greatest threat to the language of Power. And that’s why courageously uncompromising poets like Jayne Cortez are truly indispensable. Refusing to ‘have a nice day,’ this is poetry that prefers to knock the lid off, and lets a future you might like to live in take over.” For Cortez, the blues, though now often simplistically thought of as generically American, can only be fully understood as an African diasporic music. Any attempt to enter the blues tradition without a diasporic grounding can only produce a music that for all its surface gloss and technical wizardry is empty of meaning.

In this regard, I’d like to draw upon the lyrics of the title track on her Taking The Blues Back Home cd:

I’m taking the blues back home
I’m taking the blues back to where
the blues stealers won’t go

I’m taking the blues back home
because the blues stealers like to steal
when they think they have nothing of their own
I’m taking the blues back home
I’m taking the blues back to the fire of the spirits
I’m taking the blues back to the damp undergrowth
I’m taking the blues back to where
the blues stealers won’t go
I’m taking the blues back home

I’m taking the blues out of the mouth of the stealers
I’m taking the blues out of the western stream
I’m taking the blues back before somebody sings
“Ain’t nobody’s business if I steal your blues”
I’m taking the blues back home
I’m taking the blues back home
before Robert Johnson comes from
the graveyard to say
“The blues has been crapped on”
I’m taking the blues back to the crossroad
I’m taking the blues back to the bush
I’m taking the blues back to the place
where the blues stealers won’t go
I’m taking the blues back home before
Langston Hughes returns to say

“They’ve taken my blues again and gone”
I’m taking the blues back home
I’m the owner of the blues
& I’m taking the blues back home
The blues that came to me from the slave dungeons
the blues that came to me from the death trails

the blues that came to me from my ancestors
the blues that came to me in a spell that tells me
through birth that I’m the owner of the blues
from a long time ago
I’m the owner of the blues from a long
long long long time ago
I’m the owner of the blues
& even if somebody says
they have a right to sing the blues
I’m still the owner of the secrets in the blues
from a long time ago
I’m the owner of the blues
& even if somebody pays to play & use the blues
I’m still the owner of the blues
from a long time ago
I’m the owner of the blues
& I’m taking the blues back home
I’m taking the blues back to where
the blues stealers won’t go
I’m taking the blues back home
I’m taking the blues back home

Aside from her Afrodiasporic credentials as a dub poet in an African American idiom like the blues, Cortez is widely recognized as a surrealist poet. As Cortez has said of her friend, Leon Damas, who she called “the Red Pepper Poet” with a “bullroarer tongue,” one could likewise say of her: “Damas was like his poems: quick, precise, sharp, ironic, intense, humorous, confrontational, nonconforming, on the edge, not for commercial use, and not for sale. His eyes were focused on the future; his feet were pointed toward Africa. We encounter him as Negritude in Motion.” The word “Negritude” itself was coined by renowned Martiniquan surrealist poet, Aimé Césaire, who, with his French Guyanese comrade and fellow surrealist poet Leon Damas, was an editor of L’Etudiant Noir, the publication where the term “Negritude” was used for the first time in 1935. In fact, surrealism’s fervent embrace of the Marvelous in African culture, and Jayne Cortez’s breathtakingly unsubmissive poetic fusillades aimed at what she refers to as “whitestream” American culture, is what motivated the impassioned tribute to her by Franklin Rosemont quoted earlier. It is no coincidence that Rosemont is one of the pivotal figures in American surrealism today or that the original Paris Surrealist Group eschewed French national chauvinism and found an affinity with anti-colonial poets like Césaire and Damas.

As Cortez has said of Damas, in a framework that resonates with the aesthetic concerns of dub poetry, “He created his language from the natural tones of Black French Guyana, Black Paris. His message concerned with the experience of the Black world is condensed into a high voltage of metaphors, connotations, imagery, irony, and allusions. The subject is language, his own poetic identity. He interconnected inflections of his voice into his own written drum language. He developed his own spontaneous form of rhythm patterns and accents. Damas used to say, ‘Negritude has many fathers but only one mother.’” It is in the same sense, that Cortez can cast her friend, the late Jamaican dub poet, Mikey Smith, in her poem “I and I” as a “Wolof Stagolee,” at once combining Caribbean, African and African American diasporic lineages in one powerful outlaw image.

However, as Cortez knows, because of her empathy with the Negritude poets, when dub poetry is constituted only of the African diasporic experience as seen through an Anglophone lens, whether Caribbean, North American or English, it neglects the diversity of its patrimony. What she seeks in her poetry, perhaps in part because of the influence of her own Latino ancestry, is to bust out of these Anglophone constraints. In “I Got The Blue-Ooze,” she chants down Babylon to the tune of:

“I got the five hundred year black hostage
colonialism never stops blue-ooze
I got the francophone anglophone germanophone
lusophone telephone blue-ooze”

In all seriousness, but with pointed humor, she urges African peoples through her poetry to break down the barriers that artificially separate and divide Africans in categorical terms by the language of the colonizer. This approach is not meant to simplistically deny the varieties of diasporic experience or to ignore the complexity of the different forms of European colonial subjugation, but rather to plant the poetic seeds for an outernational struggle that exists beyond language barriers and in advance of the limitations of the neocolonial nation-state.

Identifying herself as a surrealist, Cortez imagines a different reality and poetically moves towards it. As noted African American historian Robin D.G. Kelley has put it in his latest and most surrealist book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, “Jayne Cortez dreams anti-imperialist dreams. Today, in an era when many young people believe that surrealism is merely an aesthetic or hip style, Cortez exemplifies the revolutionary commitment that has always been at the heart of the black radical imagination. To call this ‘protest poetry’ misses the point. It is a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

Taking a cue from Kelley in this regard, I’d like to showcase a classic 1982 poem which Cortez recorded with the Firespitters on the album of the same name entitled, “There It Is:”

My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake

They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you

And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes

The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a devise to ossify us with angel dust
pre-occupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
innoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is

The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the lifeblood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake

They will spray you with
a virus of legionaire’s disease
fill your nostrils with
the swine flu of their arrogance
stuff your body into a tampon of
toxic shock syndrome
try to pump all the resources of the world
into their own veins
and fly off into the wild blue yonder to
pollute another planet

And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist
if we don’t organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizzare look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is

Nuff said, you know…