Professor Kwame Dawes happily receives the Institute of Jamaica's Silver Musgrave Medal from Mayor Desmond McKenzie, mayor of Kingston. The presentation took place on October 13, 2004, at the institute in downtown Kingston.
Last month Professor Kwame Dawes was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal for Literature by the Institute of Jamaica.
Since 1992 he has been teaching at the University of South Carolina where he is a Professor in English and Distinguished Poet in Residence and Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.
In recent years his name has been associated with author Colin Channer as principal architects of the Calabash International Literary Festival, held annually since 2001 at Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
Kwame Dawes was, however, well known to many in the church community during the 1980s as an actor and the principal playwright with the now defunct Christian Graduates Theatre Company (CGTC). This drama group was comprised of talented actors, musicians, producers, directors who shared a vision of communicating the Gospel through theatre.
In an interview conducted by email with The Gleaner's Mark Dawes, Professor Dawes shared his views on literature, Christian Theatre and his personal faith. The following is part one of that interview.
THE GLEANER: To what extent is poetry a good vehicle for the propagation of the Gospel?
Kwame Dawes: In many ways that is like asking me to what extent the way I eat is a good vehicle for the propagation of the Gospel. Let me try and explain. I did not come to
poetry to pass on a message. I came to poetry to be transported by language into a world of imaginative splendour and daring. I came to poetry because it prompted my intellect. Above all, I came to poetry because poets managed to say things I often thought but could not express (to paraphrase Pope). They did it brilliantly and contained in what they did was their heart, their person and the world that they lived in.
Poetry transports. It becomes food. So I write poetry as an extension of myself. And while I understand that poems can be didactic, filled with the fervour of evangelism and all of that, the models of poems I have seen in the Bible resist that inclination. In the Psalms we meet prayers. In the Prophets we meet language seeking to capture the heart of a nature or the voice and mind of God -- the writers turn to poetry for the way it evokes an emotional and intuitive
connection to meaning.
SEXUAL DYNAMIC
In the Song of Songs, the poem is a lyric, a song to seduce, to celebrate, to express very personal sexual dynamic. Only slightly disingenuous people, or people afraid of their sexuality, would want to suggest that Solomon wrote that poem purely as a metaphor for the love between God and man. Oh, the poems may be about that, but not in a metaphorical sense. It is plainly a love song--a sexual song and a narrative about how love is formed and threatened. We were created to understand those feelings and complications.
So who would want to insist that the Song of Songs propagate the Gospel? And yet in its honesty, in its celebration of love between a man and a woman, it is a testament to the heart of God. What I am saying is that I write poems to find meaning in life, to find some way to celebrate, as Marley says, "the beauties"; to find ways to articulate the impossibly
complex.
DISTURBING TRUTH
Sometimes a poem will express something of my faith, and sometimes I will write a poem about a salmon swimming up river. In both there is something sublime taking place--something that goes straight to who I am. The painful and perhaps disturbing truth is that when you meet a poem of mine, you meet me. And as you start to understand my poems you start to understand what I believe about who shaped me, and where my heart is. I become, then, a witness, through my poems.
Sometimes my poems will startle, sometimes I will use language that some would call foul, and sometimes I will be seen as been quite un-Christian in my poems. But read more carefully and you will find me there, I hope me, the Christian who is many other things balled into the figure. But, most importantly, read and you will see a person who is growing and making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. My utterances are not always pure, and not always righteous.
The same is true of my poems. But I own them as mine. I grow in my poems. I came to poetry first by reading Christian poets, not because I was looking for Christian poets, but because I happened to find them compelling and they happened to be Christian. I began with Gerard Manley Hopkins while I was studying for
A-Levels at Jamaica College.
FIRED
IMAGINATION
A Catholic priest in 19th century England, Hopkins' poetry fired my imagination and led me to write poems--bad poems, but poems that were reaching for something. I was moved then (and still am now) by his effort to speak his faith: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," and yet his passion is for the sensuality of the line and of images. When I read the metaphysical poets of the 17th century: Marvel, Donne, Milton, Herbert, Vaughan, et al, I knew I was reading poets who held to a faith in a way that was deeply complicated, sometimes contradictory and wonderfully engaged.
They became useful models of how to use poems to understand the meaning of faith. Even (T.S.) Eliot's Four Quartets became an affirmation as he
struggled to find that "still point of the turning world". I could go on. In other words, I never came to poetry thinking that I was entering a "worldlian" space. It is true that I suffer often for my faith as a poet. Maybe "suffer" is to strong a word. People can be uncomfortable about it. But I have come to appreciate that more often than not, I am the one failing in my craft when I cannot seem to break that anxiety. So the challenge I always return to is to be sincere in my poetry and to not pretend to be someone else. I am a born-again, tongues-speaking, prophecy believing, Bible-reading evangelical Christian. I rarely announce that like this, but I need to here. This means that at some level, these elements will shape my poetry. I am much else, it is true, and some of it not triumphant, but all of that mess will come through in my work. So, to get back to your question, if my life is a good vehicle for the propagation of the Gospel, then so is my poetry. Where I fail, poetry will fail. And where I succeed, so will poetry.
THE GLEANER: How does your Christianity influence the work that you do?
Kwame Dawes: The greatest challenge for a writer is honesty, I think. It is not vogue to write about faith, to be openly full of faith in poems. Skepticism is essential in contemporary poetry because art tends to want to ask questions, to explore beyond the absolutes. I am drawn to that instinct and in many ways it is that instinct that has enriched my own faith.
LIVE WITH ABSOLUTES
The process of delving into the meaning of God's word or trying to make sense of the contradictions of life is part of what it means to be a Christian for me. But I also live with absolutes. They anchor me and ground me. If I have prayed and I have seen God heal my son, I have to lie to not celebrate that somehow in a poem, and yet I was faced with that dilemma when I wrote "Prayer for my Son." (in Shook Foil). The great thing about poetry, however, is that one can then at once confess and repent all at the same time.
The poem is about the meaning of faith for a poet. But part of my honesty is to say that it is quite possible for someone to read a single poem of mine and never have a sense that I am a Christian.
Maybe this is not what should be true about me, but it is true. And this does not worry me, because I think what is clear is that my world view, which is evident in everything I write, is rooted in this faith. I can't shake it. So I don't set out to write poems about my faith. I set out, instead, to write poems about experience and to do so through the honest prism of who I am and what I think.
THE GLEANER: In the 1980s Christian theatre in Jamaica was on the incline. It has since declined to the point where it is virtually non-existent. What went wrong? Why is Christian theatre in Jamaica seemingly in the doldrums?
Kwame Dawes:I was probably too close to what you describe as an "incline" to have been fully aware that this was what was taking place. But I can see how one might have imagined that things were happening in an exciting way giving all the work that was happening with organisations like Youth For Christ, Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, and the new Christian Graduate Theatre Company, the work being done within the Charismatic movement and much else. Yes, things were happening and I think that it had become quite clear to many of us that part of the call of Christians was to find ways to express our faith in any way possible. If a decline took place, there are some quite basic reasons for it:
We were actually working in a semi-professional context. No one was being paid, and we were embarked on something that we did out of passion.
Most of us were single or only newly-married, most of us were only beginning to work and so we had quite small responsibilities.
We were also forming something out of enthusiasm and passion and so we managed to get away with some poor organisation and some lack of forward-planning. But leadership is critical in these matters.
Leadership and vision. It was my view, all along, that what we were trying to do with CGTC was not so much introduce an alternative a Christian alternative to secular theatre in Jamaica, but to actually elevate the standard of theatre in Jamaica, period.
In other words, I saw us quite well suited with talent, experience and drive, to really create a new theatre movement in Jamaica that would hold professionalism, artistic integrity and creative discipline as the key features of that theatre.
LEGENDS
I was reading the legends of great innovators and trend setters in theatre, Derek Walcott, Peter Brook, Augustine Boal, Gerzy Grotowski and so many others and I was convinced that like them, I had to develop an aesthetic that would define every aspect of the theatrical approach that we would use, and that if we did this, and if we embarked on the process of training ourselves to be effective in this, we would really challenge the way theatre was being done in Jamaica.
At the time there was no school or movement in theatre that seemed to offer an aesthetic basis for the work we did. Dennis Scott had started something and the work of Sistren was a model-but these were slowly being eroded by the demand of commercialism. So my vision and the one that we were starting to share as a company, went beyond simply doing Christian plays.
One of the most important advantages we had was that we had a core of immensely talented and trained individuals who were seriously committed to the idea of a Christian drama company. People like Faith Hamer, Jennifer Campbell, Keith Ellis and Maurice Hall were all experienced theater people, and in the case of Hamer, Ellis and Campbell, professionally trained folks. They brought a certain professionalism to what we did, but they also came with a clear appreciation of what we wanted to do.
IDEOLOGY
The fact that our ideological basis for theatre was Christian was important to us and to our own integrity as individuals and to our relationship with God. But we were also certain that that ideology could give meaning and value to the art we produced. The decline came because many of us left when things were ready to become institutionalised, when we were beginning to see a way to afford this kind of theatre movement. I left to study in Canada, and even though a strong theatre company was in place when I left, I think that I did not do a good enough job of passing on the vision of the company to others. Most importantly, it has been clear again and again that much of what happens with theatre at this level has as much to do with the writers as it has to do with the directors. I was the principal playwright for the company.
When I left, I could not be that. Eventually, the factory of plays that was me, was taken from the company. I could write in Canada, but I had always depended on the company to help me shape the plays into credible pieces.
This was too difficult from so far. Eventually that petered out. I remain convinced that the vision and concept of a drama rooted in Christian aesthetics is something that can work and work well in Jamaica. I remain convinced also that there are many theatre people with a strong Christian conviction who long to do work that draws on such an aesthetic. In other words, I believe that what you see as a decline can be arrested. These things take a single-minded individual with the talent to lead and inspire others to follow. It can still be done.
THE GLEANER: Describe where are you at in your journey of faith? How have your views evolved about God over the years? Are there things you now believe about God that you did not believe say 10 years ago?
KWAME DAWES: No. God never changes. I have learned more about him, but I think I learned more about me. I have learned a great deal more about my need for Him. There are no easy answers to tough questions. The older I get, the more resigned I am to not having to have the answers. But what has not changed is a strong sense that He has been my sustainer. Really. None of it is deserved, you know?
REMAIN A CHRISTIAN
I have also become acutely aware of my failings, my weaknesses and my desperate need for his mercy and grace. So I remain a Christian. It is funny, but I like it when some old Christian friends meet me after many years and they want to ask me if I am still a Christian, if I still love Jesus.
The joke is that the question is asked as if I have a choice. I really don't have a choice. This faith is not something that I conjured up and then made into something real for me. I met Christ. This is a simple fact that I have sought to nuance many times. But it is true. I had an experience.
I could deny that experience, say that I was just philosophising or something, but I can't do that with honesty. The truth is that I came into my faith -- he brought me to that place, and I can't shake it even if I wanted to. I have to remain disciplined. The longer you live, the more opportunity you have to fail God, to embarrass him. I have done my share of letting him down. But I am grateful for his mercy and his forgiveness and for the friendships that he has given me.
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
Send feedback to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com
