Verse in August 
(For Frank Collymore)
knock drum
draw bow
on fiddle strings
let rhythm jump
and catgut screech
let all time jig
a kalinda and reel
these august freedom days
let dead bones rise
and dance their own bongos
who’ll dance my death farewell?
who’ll trample me a rhythm on my grave?
‘bongo macedonia
viniway viniway bongo’
not my tall sons
they have not seen nor heard
that macabre rime of death
and if they did
i could not answer their disdain
they have inherited another season
in this uprooted suburb
of folk from villages and slums
where dusks brood secret hatreds
and faces are tight shut
from love and friendship.
[. . .]
i saw br’angas once
kneel under killing blows
his poui warding death
’mumma, mumma.
you son in de grave arready
he down in de grave arready’
he rose from that
his fierce eyes bleeding vengeance
his squat thick body leaping
the stick flailing,
the drums choked on a note
and his foes fled.
rum drums and singing men
gambash in the gayelle
carray!.ah bois garcon!
ah ah! ah ah!
‘hooray horrah cutoutah
how much hero you kill in arima?’
bloodshed on freedom day
rum drums and broken heads.
ah august kalindas!
all that long ended
but i have it still
a bright splash on the mind.
[. . .]
the days stand up to bless me
as i die
bedded on my dying century
dreaming the century’s youth
in a good place that’s gone
among the folk i loved
while my own death
howls from a mangy dog
haunting these barren streets.
what’s all my witness for?
why do i wear the poor folk and the years?
eh brother what’s the score?
is the game won or lost?
will i know now
at the breaking bitter last?
do old men know?
-Eric Roach
Eric M. Roach (1915 – 1974) of Tobago, is a poet and playwright deserving of a higher place in West Indian literature and more attention than has been accorded him. A very good example of his impact may be seen in three of his more outstanding poems – “I Am the Archipelago”, that has been often anthologised, as well as “Hard Drought” and “Verse In August”.
We have discussed him before in these pages, and previously focused on “Verse In August” several years ago. It is, however, a poem worth revisiting because it is never really exhausted in a reading. Its value resides in a number of considerations.
On the anniversary of emancipation from African slavery in the Caribbean – the First of August – it becomes a memorable poem that resounds with strong references to the culture that is informed by the African heritage and traditional vestiges. It becomes a poem whose own theme of emancipation has post-colonial dimensions in its powerful plea for identity and recognition of indigenous culture, with a strong heritage of heroism, and a context of the spiritual importance and respect for the ancestors.
As a poem, it has enduring qualities such as a grounded musicality in its rhythms and its references to music in the tradition as well as to traditional poetry. Music is not only a subject but an integral ring in the rhythm and voice heard in the poem. Its post-modern form is remarkable, showing the possibility of what can be done with it, while helping the poem to move unencumbered by conventions. That last quality is also one of the things protested by the poet – a freedom of spirit, the ability to express oneself in a spiritual tradition to which one once belonged.
The artistry of the poem further expresses that lost with the death of creative traditions, and an appreciation of them as such. The poet/persona values them for the pride that they allowed their devotees/practitioners to feel, and to express in bravery, courage, even if all this is rooted in masculinity (the traditional society remained patriarchal). The stick fight, for example, was not just violence, but an art, a culture grounded in honour and heroism. The kalinda which was part of it, is a musical tradition through which the society, that particular culture, expresses itself in oral literature.
The high spiritualism of the poem is another factor responsible for the verses’ power and enduring quality, making it unforgettable. It claims not just the loss, but the disrespect for the importance of spiritual observances. The traditional African culture is steeped in its deep spiritual roots. There is much spiritual or religious significance in the lost practices lamented by the poem’s persona, for which the bongo dance is an excellent example. Note the virulent bitterness with which the poet flings out his sense of loss in referring to the bongo. Even the kalinda included recourse to the powers of the obeahman, invoked for invincibility. But above that were the lost observances of ancestor worship in the African vestiges. In a way, this makes one remember a similar attempt by Derek Walcott where the Sadhu of Couva is equally bitter at social loss and disrespect of the Hindu and the sacred (poem “The Sadhu of Couva”). Errol Hill did the same in his one-act verse play Dance Bongo.
The poet feels we are not emancipated because of our disregard for cultural and spiritual traditions that set us free, gave us independence and identity as a people and made us whole. Critic Laurence Breiner comments on Roach’s three preoccupations as a poet – nature, folk culture, and history. We see here illustrations of how history becomes predominant and subsumes the other two, as Breiner claims.
The poem’s impact is also owed to the way it strikes us given the biography of Eric Roach himself. In particular, he raised his strident voice against the rise of forms of poetry developing in 1970 – 1972 (including Dub Poetry) with strong post-colonial resonance; delving into the indigenous, the radical, the revolutionary and expressing the black consciousness mounting at the time. Roach condemned it in terms as strong and vitriolic as those used in the poem “Verse In August”.
It was the same Roach (or perhaps not) who wrote “I Am the Archipelago” and “Hard Drought”. But it was a disenchanted Roach who drank poison and swam out to sea to be consumed by the Atlantic Ocean in 1974. Poet Jennifer Rahim recognized the irony in her own reference to it as if Roach was performing a reverse of history, swimming across the Middle Passage back to Africa.
However, he was actually putting into practice what is held in myth and legend. That Africans who were able to recover the power, actually went to the seashore and took off in flight back over the ocean to Africa. This was a form of emancipation from the slavery that kept them in the West Indies. It was an emancipation Roach sought since he was unhappy with the way the new blacks were addressing the problem.
“Verse In August” is a poem about emancipation and what has been lost. It is also about what the poet himself sought to recover.