Poui introduces poet Richard Allsopp

One of the many significant features of Poui, the Cave Hill Literary Annual, is that one can always look forward to its introduction of noteworthy new writers. But this journal, published by the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at UWI Cave Hill and edited by Mark McWatt, Jane Bryce and Hazel Simmons-McDonald, is also noted for its presentation of new work by a number of the Caribbean’s leading established writers as well.

Poui Number 8, December 2006, does that. Yet it still manages to generate even more interest through its selections of poetry. In one case it is a new poem, written by a Caribbean elder statesman of language and literature; a distinguished veteran in these circles yet a new voice in poetry. Most readers would have been surprised at this discovery of Professor Richard Allsopp as a poet. But Poui turns up one of the best known names in Caribbean linguistics and a pioneer in the study of Caribbean English and Afrogenesis as a fresh new poet long after his retirement as a university academic.

McWatt describes him in the introduction. “Better known as a long-serving academic at Cave Hill (now retired) and the region’s foremost lexicographer, Richard edited The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, published by Oxford in 1996: an enormous achievement and one of the most important and influential works to be published by a UWI professor. Readers of Poui who know the dictionary but are not acquainted with Richard Allsopp’s wide and varied talents and interests, will be pleased to discover that he is also a thoughtful and sensitive poet”.

The Contributor’s Note continues to recognize him as a prolific researcher. “After relinquishing active teaching in 1990 he has continued up to the present as Research Fellow in Caribbean Lexicography. He was a founder member of the Cave Hill campus in Barbados in 1963”.

SRR Allsopp is Guyanese and started the Caribbean Lexicography project around 1970 or 1971 with a grant from Guyana and set up a project office in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Guyana. The project continued with more funding at Cave Hill leading to the compilation of the Dictionary.

In his poem “Lost Lines” Allsopp plays on the nuances of words, employing pun, interrogating subtleties and hidden lineages, raising new questions about old bloodlines out of the horrors of slavery. It is an interesting poem to emerge during the period of commemoration of the Bi-Centenary of the Abolition of the slave trade. Significant as well, because it is the work of a researcher into the language that emerged out of the transplantation of those enslaved Africans in the Caribbean.

The lexicographer-poet explores much including his Anasi image in which the great folk hero of the enslaved is cast as a conspirator in their capture. (“the human arachnids/Who snared you in their rope-webs? / — dragging you from bush to beach to barge to boat you over sea, /More than two centuries ago?”). The poet talks of tricksters and slavers and the Akan version of the Eshu figure all in one image in a poem in which he asks questions about ancestry, identity and history.

Lost Lines
by SRR Allsopp

Great great great grancestors, did you ever see?
The human arachnids
Who snared you in their rope-webs?
— dragging you from bush to beach to barge to boat you over sea,
More than two centuries ago?”
Did you, ancestral man and woe-man come,
Cursing your captors,
Shackled in stink of stool and vomit

On the self-same ship?

I doubt it.
Is that history unrecognized, forever hid?
Perhaps! Perhaps …
But get to Barbados, hell-frightened yet alive you did.
And separately sold, one some day?
And one some other day …? Or year …?
And sent some place far, far from anywhere?

And did you ever meet? Or was it
That your bastard browned-off children met?
First picking pond-grass or fetching water,
In the third-class creole gang long hours afield?

Who were you anyway?
Where in white sin and black skin did I begin?

After the first rites of rape, was there ever chance
For black creative Love to make its stance?
Or was it just
Consensual lust
Putting out one-name piccaninnies, leading to testamental ones
And down to me? …

Sometimes I sit beclouded …
Starless …

Unhorizoned …
As I yearn to know …  …

(Ah what may future dna detection finger out?)

There are just a few interesting peculiarities in the poem. Its lineation, stanzaic structure, the way the lines, the pace, the many ellipses and the constant questioning move the poem is modernist.  Yet it retains the older convention of beginning each line with a capital letter, more associated with blank verse, metric or other ancient forms.