Mary Hanna

TITLE: UNcle Time
REVIEWED BY: Mary Hanna
PUBLISHER: Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Dreadwalk: Poems 1970-78. London: New Beacon Books, 1982. Strategies. Kingston, Jamaica: Sandberry Press, 1989.

When we were poets world burned
with a bright ash, everything we touched was fool's gold, was wonder -
remember?
('Elegies', in Strategies)

Dennis Scott (1939-1990) was a Jamaican poet, playwright, actor, director, critic and teacher. His contemporaries have been heard to speak of him as a Renaissance man - Caribbean yet cosmopolitan. Edward Baugh, in characterising the group of poets who worked and 'burned' together in the sixties and early seventies, put it this way: 'Each ... has both feet firmly planted on his native soil, but each is open, consciously and critically so, to the stimuli which any wind may happen to blow in off the ocean'. Baugh was speaking of Dennis Scott, Anthony McNeill, Mervyn Morris, and Wayne Brown - young poets who read one another's manuscripts, exchanged criticism and encouragement, and wrote poems that were lean and sinewy, exhibiting an 'intellectual toughness'.

Anthony McNeill, in an illuminating article in the Jamaica Journal (December 1971), spoke of Scott's struggle to find the culture he was comfortable with. McNeill proposed that Scott's imagination was trained to colonial images and themes because of his education in colonial schools and his upbringing in a middle-class Jamaican family. He wrote that Scott struggled to find a voice that expressed the Jamaican culture coming into being in the sixties and noted that the first manuscript that Scott presented, called Journeys and Ceremonies (67 poems: 1960-69) spoke partially in a western idiom:

You walk through my blood

Like small lights in a hundred rooms, you smile

and there are mirrors, you walk softly between

my hates and your hand caresses

some sleepy-eyed beast,

perhaps your fingers are twined

in the white mane of a unicorn'

The unicorn represents the received culture and the sleepy-eyed beast that of Africa, coming into awareness in the Caribbean. It is interesting to note that Scott's best-known poem, 'Uncle Time', was the earliest poem in this first manuscript. It was the first attempt at writing serious poetry in the creole in Jamaican literature, preceded only by Louise Bennett's foundational comedic offerings:

Uncle Time is a ole, ole man ....

All year long 'im wash 'im foot in de sea,

long, lazy years on de wet san'

an' shake de coconut tree dem

quiet-like wid 'im sea-win' laughter,

scraping away de lan' ...

Uncle Time is likened to the spider-man, 'cunnin' an' cool', an Ananse figure who moves 'like mongoose' and creeps up on you cruelly with his smile is 'black as sorrow'.

Watch how 'im spin web roun' yu house an' creep

inside; an' when 'im touch yu, weep ...

The creole language is celebrated in this poem which, as McNeill noted, almost immediately achieved 'classical proportions in Jamaican literature'. It was Scott's task as a poet to choose which cultural path - and which language - he would develop as his true voice; the struggle made a master poet of him.

The poet is speaking.

The window reflects his face.

A bird crawls out of the sun. Summoned.

Its wings are like tar.

That is because it is very hot.

The poet sweats too.

There is a beak at the back of his throat -

the poem is difficult,

his tongue bleeds.

That is because the bird is not really

dead. Yet.

Clap a little.

('Bird of Passage' in Uncle Time)

This poem opens Scott's first published manuscript of poems, Uncle Time. His signature bird imagery, clever lineation, and powerhouse endings are represented in this perfect poem about the difficulty of the art. The making of poetry causes the poet to bleed from the tongue, the language is unsettled, the choice of cultural paths not quite complete. But for his great effort, the Icarus-figure that is the poet at work should receive some applause. As Mervyn Morris noted in his illuminating introduction to Uncle Time, the reader is invited to attend, to witness, and to be involved ('Clap a little').

Another strong feature of Scott's poetry as it evolved was its closeness to the movement of the dance. Again quoting from 'Elegies':

... once there was

a thin fierce heat in the hand, in the head,

the leap into desire, the falling dance

like bright ash in the evenings.

Baugh noted that the leap, the dance, and the movement of the dance are what define a Scott poem. He pointed to the poem 'Chillsong', which opens Dreadwalk:

When the beak snaps that grasshopper,

crunches his back like a bone-edged wind,

what is the kind of his pain?

Let us celebrate that jumping grace

which any stray bird may consume,

may release, may lock down with a steel mouth

into the cold

waiting

as a poem cuts us off from ordinariness

with its iced mouth, truth.

Here we find the 'jumping grace' of the grasshopper/poem captured and crushed (distilled) by the bird (the creative act), until there comes into being a poem of uniqueness, different, set apart in its final form, 'truth'. Similarly, 'Everything is/shaped, is liquid, is/finished' ('Precautionary Measures' in Uncle Time).

The task of the poet was no easy one for Scott. He struggled with the movement, with each word, placing it just so. He drew on his background as a dramatist to imbue each poem with a narrative that bespoke the relationship between parts and blossoms forward into a new space that is 'truth':

but with a sudden flesh

the tree empties its longing to the light

invincible, and green.

('Resurrections')

Beneath the surface of a Scott poem there is visceral disturbance, or - as one critic notes - 'the threat of violence and anarchy'. Scott's poems drew on the surreal and he was a master of telling imagery - symbolic birds, fires, cats, knives. His use of the creole was spare' but significant. He carved out a place for himself and his poetry in the volatile years when a national culture was coming into being, and he drew on his experience in the drama of the independence years to select content that defined the quarrel between cultures and voices. Relationship is the key to understanding his poems.

In Dreadwalk, Scott examined the society he had inherited and which he was slowly becoming aware of as a member of the protected middle class. He wrote 'I-songs', seeking out the culture of the Rastafarian and exploring members of that community:

'No more poem!' he raged, eye red;

'A solitary voice is wrong,

Jericho shall fall, shall fall

at the People's song!'

So. Only I-tongue have the right

to reason, to that sense of dread.

Man must keep silence now, except

man without bread.

No. See the flesh? It is cave, it is

Stone. Seals every I away from light.

Alone. Man must chant as Man can gainst night.

('More Poem')

Here Scott refuses the easy path to accepting a radical place in the new culture and stands up for his right to chant as he can - as everyone must - 'gainst night'. There is an echo of Dylan Thomas's 'Rage against the dying of the light' from the received culture, and a nod of compassion to the Ras who is disturbed by it, but Scott persisted in carving his own path. He would speak of bankers who defied the need for imagination in the same tone of voice:

The phoenix hid at the sun's center and stared down

at the Banker's house,

which was plump and factual, like zero.

Every good Banker knows

there's no such bird.

('For the Last Time, Fire')

When the Banker's house burns, what emerges from the ash is the imagination in the form of a phoenix: 'Something shook itself out of the ash./Wings. Perhaps.'

Scott's gentle voice can be heard in poems like 'Squatter's Rites' and 'Grampa'. Here he celebrated the 'old molasses men' who built what they could and who cherished family, as Scott did. His poet's voice told of historical wrongs in 'Farmers' Notebook' and 'Epitaph': 'They hanged him on a clement morning, swung/ between the falling sunlight and the women's/ breathing, like a black apostrophe to pain.' He argued against anger as too easy a response and instead asked for respect and remembering. It was a hard call, and the poet did not make such requests without anguish. With the Black Mass in Uncle Time and the 'blackman' in Dreadwalk, Scott stated his identification firmly and chose the Caribbean homeland without equivocation:

It is time to plant

feet in our earth. The heart's metronome

insists on this arc of islands

as home.

('Homecoming')

Scott might no longer have needed quite such a terrifying sentry on his mind, once this choice was made. He might have been able to give the slip to the old men in the mind:

In the stone gardens of my mind

There are old men with fingers like scissors,

Snip, snip. Harvesting heads.

('Sentry')

Scott could 'invent/ dream' when 'weary of watching murder'. He could adopt his black persona without sinking into the hungry streets:

in the dread time of my living

while whatever may be human chains me

away from the surfeit of light, Mabrak

and the safe land of my longing,

acknowledge I.

('No sufferer')

This powerful close to his first printed collection showed how far Scott had come from the poems of unicorns and sleepy beasts that so intrigued McNeill. Scott had come into his own as a poet and a Blackman and spoke with assurance of Rastafarian concepts ('Mabrak') and the peace of being home and at home with the rising culture of the 'I-man'. Scott had found his place.

'A poem has to sing,' he wrote in Dreadwalk, 'sometimes so high glass breaks/and the animal in your eye runs/ for cover, so much pain.' Yet in the end there was the peace of arrival.

Dennis Scott died prematurely at 51. He received his education at Jamaica College, where he was Headboy, and taught at Kingston College and JC before attending the University of the West Indies, Mona, where he graduated with First Class Honours in English. While at UWI he was assistant editor of Caribbean Quarterly. He wrote the 'Black Mass' poems on a Shubert Playwrighting Fellowship, 1970-71, that took him to Athens, Georgia, and later received a Commonwealth Fellowship to study education at Newcastle-Upon -Tyne, England. He was director of the School of Drama at the Cultural Training Centre, Kingston, and became a visiting professor of directing at the School of Drama at Yale. In 1988 he staged an American play in the USSR with Russian actors and he appeared as Lester, the father-in-law, on the Cosby Show. His own plays have been produced in the Caribbean and the U.K.

Uncle Time earned him the International Poetry Forum Prize and he also was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Silver Musgrave Medal. He lived in Connecticut, U.S.A., with his wife Joy and their two children. Many poems in his last collection Strategies are dedicated to his family, especially his son. Wayne Brown commented on these last poems in words of high praise. Brown said of Dennis Scott: 'Increasingly as the years passed his humanity shone through his poems; and the poetry itself went on improving. By his last years he was, in my view, one of the 20-odd finest living poets in the language'. Brown closed his article on Scott with the final poem from Strategies, 'Journeysong', noting the echo of 'Othello' in the final words ('Soft you, a word or two. I have done the state some service, and they know it'):

Oh I could tell you:

streets that ran forever

through the sun there

was sea too

nightwine sometimes

a woman in my sleep

(was it you?)

and dances

sudden as your laughter

here's a map I named

each village you;

some days the rain walked by

my window differently

and once a strange beast sang

lifting its throat to the yellow sickle moon -

I turned to tell

And wanted

here. Home. See

how I've changed.

Soft. I have brought you

all the poems

in my face.