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about

Opener, “Kamau” pays respect to the lauded Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite who passed away in February last year. Brathwaite was an important influence on Joseph – the two writers met several times. On “Kamau” Joseph compellingly conveys not only the nature of Brathwaite’s aesthetic, but the full potential of a Black surrealist poetics, in an urgent, clipped diction against a rousing musical soundtrack which features Hutchings on bass clarinet.
When asked to convey the essence of Brathwaite’s “energy” in a 2018 interview, Joseph used the words “audacious … muscular,” while also noting the late poet’s capacity to “give voice to the voiceless.”

lyrics

For Kamau
For the furtive sound of his phonaesthetic exegesis
For his secret technology, his liquid textolgy, the seppy
Pure energy
Seducing the ear,
Lancing the plane of sight
And if vision is righteous and holy and pure
Then Baba Kamau was the sonic sage
The one who never kept silent
The one who never wear necktie yet
The one who never wept in pews, who
Wove beads of triplet notes
With the trumpet in his throat - the infinite muse - a bad and contagious poet!
Perceptible only in a glance
Emerging
Dressed in black
Much blacker than black
Surrealist conflict
And I’ve been a black surrealist
Ever since I saw my grandfather chuck the wheel
Of his Austin Cambridge
With a rock so it don’t roll down hill
And simple to the sea
Because iron don’t float
Since I ran between vine and root
Leapt over the wire
Where the land rushed wild to the sea
Picked the fruit
Still warm from the vine
I hid in the trees
So much hairy snake and picka bush
Was tying up the land
But strong poems still found me
Between the leaves


Come on, flash your costume
Flash your rage, poet
Play sailor mas
Play jab jab
Play junkanoo
Play rukatuk music
Play with fife and bones
And fiddle and flute
Play mojo jumbie
Dance the juba
With the hands akimbo
Play stick man
An’ bus’ they carapace
Play mud mas
Plot your root
Piss blood
Piss rum
Wear the brazen breastplate
And the burnt wooden mask
From the Upper Volta
Wear pins in the mouth
Like the tailor carving a map of Africa
On the corner of your island
Play kaiso
Play calypso
Play socalypso
Play rapso
Play jazz, like a second skin
Reel you in, reel you in, reel you in

I carried my black surrealist manifesto
Between elbows
Like fetish to poison wounds
In the bronze plateau of the Congo
Read me in, read me in
Brooklyn warehouse space
Bo running water, no hot heat, no light
But Fanon, Fanon, Fanon, Fanon

Read me in, read you in
I read you in every squall and bawl of the hurricane
Write this in the distance
Write this on the wind
Write this on the waves
Write this in cowpasture
In fragments
Under islands
Write this in each trace of diaspora,
In each stone that skims from Africa
Blooming into Islands! islands! Islands! Islands!

— O Baba O —
May you return if possible
As a grey bearded afronaut
Emerge again
As a secret colour
As prophet
Emerge again - deep teacher, as wizard
As hawk or black bird
As if you fell from the stars
As if you emerged from the rainforest
Whole


— Oh Baba O —
Come on,
swing your horn
Swing your horn and flash your second skin
Flail and flash your colour
Omen, omen of jumbie
See-er man, obeah man
Obeah man who can make remote vision of people
with psycho-spiritual camera,
then the next day tell you exactly
what you was wearing, what bone you was chewing
at your kitchen table the night before
Surrealist since black, behind god’s back

Come on, cast speaking serpents out
Flash your beacon, be bold, be something else!
And on the first day, on the first day
of the first week
of the first month
after your death
I come with real, real, real, real, real
real fire this year

Oil does not dry on the tip of his tongue,
nor honey on the tips of his fingers

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about

Anthony Joseph Trinidad and Tobago

Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, musician and lecturer described as ‘the leader of the black avant-garde in Britain’. His written work and performance occupies a space between surrealism, Jazz and the rhythms of Caribbean speech and music.

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