Fugue and Other Writings - Excerpt

From the “Introduction”

About his own writing, my father was modest to a fault. In the Prolegomena of Caribbean Literature, he quotes his poem “Fugue” and then proceeds to disparagingly dismiss its value: “I am afraid that I wrote that innocuous poem and I quote it tonight because, to my astonishment, it is a most anthologized poem which school children recite dutifully at festivals to show that they are Jamaicans – as their teachers tell them, and that they are satisfied with their local colour, as the poem implies.” (14). There is nothing innocuous about the poem, and nothing inappropriate about quoting it in the context that he does. After all, he is speaking of form and content and its evolution in the establishing of a West Indian aesthetic. But it was typical of my father to play the complex role of being confident in his abilities as a writer, and being dismissive, in that British manner of understatement, of its importance, of the importance of any work, for that matter. I suspect that it was always this reserve, this ability to say that the hype may be more than it deserves to have, that made other writers both fear and respect him.

As I write this, I realize that I am writing about a man who I am discovering. The discovery is a peculiar one because it does not entail a complete discovery – a movement from tabula rasa to a full slate. Indeed, as I “discover” things about him, I find them to be rediscoveries, smacking of that encounter with a childhood memory, a way of seeing the world, of recalling people, which is latent and in need of something, some stimulus, to stir it up, to allow it to be retrieved. I have heard talk of his life, his youth, his experiences. I imagine that I have also read much of his work as it has appeared in various forms over the course of my life. But those readings were never stored in my mind to be retrieved at will. As I re-read some of this material, and as I force my critical eye to rest on the work that I have before me, I then discover that there are patterns that unravel him in a manner that makes absolute sense to me now. The poet, Neville Dawes, wrote his way through much of what would define him for the rest of his life.  The novelist, Neville Dawes devoted his energies trying to write a work that was aesthetically admirable and yet as thoroughly committed to ideology as he himself was.  He knew the kind of novel he wanted to write, but it is clear that he was never sure he had achieved this.  The critic, Neville Dawes, was passionate about what he wrote and thought about.