To An Expatriate Friend
Colour meant nothing. Anyone
who wanted help, had humour or was kind
was brother to you; categories of skin
were foreign; you were colour blind.
And then the revolution. Black
and loud the horns of anger blew
against the long oppression; sufferers
cast off the precious values of the few.
New powers re-enslaved us all:
each person manacled in skin, in race.
You could not wear your paid-up dues;
the keen discriminators typed your face.
The future darkening, you thought it time
to say good-bye. It may be you were right.
It hurt to see you go; but more,
it hurt to see you slowly going white.
Mervyn Morris
In the context of the career of West Indian poet Mervyn Morris, “To An Expatriate Friend” is now an old poem, among his early work. But it may be considered one of the classics of Morris’s poetry and West Indian literature – among the most memorable, with a prominent place in the literature of social realism.
The poem was selected by critic and editor Victor Ramraj for inclusion in Concert of Voices – An Anthology of World Writing in English (Broadview, 2005) as representative of Morris. That is correct because of the poet’s treatment of race, politics, the ‘Black revolution’ and social issues in Jamaica. It is similar in Ramraj’s selection of “Family Pictures”, which is another of this poet’s definitive pieces – ironies of love, marriage, family and gender from Morris the “new man”.
He is officially Professor Mervyn Morris, OM (he was awarded the national honour, Order of Merit in 2009), and was invested as Jamaica’s Poet Laureate in 2014. These honours recognised his exceptional contributions to West Indian literature as poet, critic and academic. His role in the recognition of Creole poetry, of language in literature is exemplified by his influential criticism of Louise Bennett and dub poetry, particularly that of Mikey Smith. He has been one of Jamaica’s leading theatre critics.
As a poet he has been quite an impactful post-modernist, considering his creation of characteristic brevity in terse, ironic verses with economy of language as a hallmark. Over the decades of his career this poetry has been dynamic with increasing complexity by the time he got to I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems (2006). “To An Expatriate Friend” is not among the post-modern, but is nevertheless a defining poem for Morris. He is consistently a humanist. For him, too, “all in compassion ends” (Walcott), as he is a post-colonialist, well understands revolution and could associate comfortably with the left wing radicals of the late twentieth century.
Apart from being celebrated for his post-modernist verses of characteristic brevity, he has made a mark for other types of poetry, such as is represented by “To An Expatriate Friend”. He is able to satirise those who uncourageously sit on the fence (as in the comic tragedy of the “non-combatant”), as he does the fashionably black and the fashionable revolutionary.
There is an equal sense of compassion for those psychologically affected by the climate of the ‘black revolution’ – “the revolution. Black . . .” as he describes it. The casualties include the student on the university campus in Morris’s case study of such middle-class youth who discover blackness, is caught up in the “loud horns of anger” but never finds himself. The student in the poem ends up in insanity, wandering around the campus daubing his blackness against the walls.
In these poems, Morris writes from a reality. He draws on true experiences on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies where he worked. The boy who ends up deranged might well have been taken from a true life case. There was an undergraduate, a student of English on the Mona Campus who ended up in madness during his studentship under circumstances not unlike the boy in the poem. The “expatriate friend” was actually a colleague, another member of the university staff who the poet presents as another casualty of Jamaica’s black revolution.
Morris’s poetry treats with the social and political climate in Jamaica which was generating much heat by the end of the 1960s. This was part of larger developments elsewhere. The Black Power movement in the USA was very influential and made waves across the Caribbean. Rastafari in Jamaica was gaining ground, winning social acceptance in the mainstream and middle-class society, and was part of another wave of African consciousness. Walter Rodney was expelled from Jamaica by the Hugh Shearer government in 1968 and sent further waves of seismic shock through the Caribbean. Socialism and Communism were on the rise in the region and working-class consciousness was both popular and widespread, commensurate with rising racial tides against whites. Empathy with the proletariat became a strong principle among university radicals and Rodney’s Groundings With My Brothers became an influential text.
This was “the future darkening” referred to with pun intended in the poem. The white expatriate and his local light-skinned accomplices were seen by the “sufferer” and the radicals as the oppressor class and the enemy. The poet’s white “expatriate friend’ feels threatened if not in danger in such a climate. There was a belief that the poem was written for Professor Bill Carr, a white English lecturer in Morris’s department at Mona, who left Jamaica and took a position at the University of Guyana. That, however, was not the case, and Morris confirmed that it was someone else.
What is important is the poet’s mastery of pun and irony. He finds it more hurtful that his “colour blind” friend is “slowly going white”. Roles seem reversed and subtly deliberately confused by the poet, who now takes the position of the black oppressed for whom whiteness is condemned. On the other hand, the friend for whom skin colour never mattered is now “going white” – behaving like a white man. The poet is deliberately using double meaning – the expatriate is feeling fear for his safety (going white; turning pale).
This poetic response to the prevailing socio-political climate is also to be found in the work of others. Walcott treats it quite unsympathetically in Dream on Monkey Mountain, in The Last Carnival (or In A Fine Castle), as did Earl Lovelace in The Dragon Can’t Dance. The botched and ill-fated attempted coup in Trinidad in 1970, prompted the writers’ treatment in those works, while Morris addresses the prevailing atmosphere in Jamaica which grew over a number of years between 1968 and 1972.
Morris’s concerns with this subject continue in other poems such as “Meeting” in which the persona finds himself in “an unfamiliar bed of radicals” whose Marxist argumentative behavior he finds “a nightmare”.
Yet Morris, ever the humanist, is drawn to the caring decency of the Marxist radical Walter Rodney who “cared when anybody hurt /not just the wretched of the earth” in his “My Rodney Poem”. The elegy for Rodney pays attention to the sensible reasonableness and social conscience of the man, and not just his radical activism. These are the same qualities identified in the white expatriate.
The poem “To An Expatriate Friend” stands out as a memorable mark of this poet’s social concern and his preoccupation with race, politics and humanity.
