Some recent link-hopping yielded the following–
an essay by Anthony Kellman: Towards a National Caribbean Epic
So much stimulus for formal exploration! Not sure if I want to write an epic just now, but the essay makes for interesting and inspiring reading. I’m thinking of the contemporary epics that could be written, particularly as a first generation immigrant from the Caribbean diaspora – Guyanese by heritage, (Black) British by location/placement, aspiring to hip-hop (and, by extension, African-America) and the then nascent drum n’ bass scene (and electronica in a wider sense) as cultures from which to carve out or cobble together some sense of identity…
“…of utmost importance, [the epic] emerged out of a need for honor and self-definition both at the personal and national levels. The epic was mostly concerned with depicting a society the way it wanted to see itself and the way it wanted the rest of the world to perceive it.”
It’s ironic that even the term “first generation immigrant” is ambiguous; here, I use it in the sense that my mother first came to the UK in 1963. I was of the first generation to be born on British soil in our little branch of the family. And I was born into a generation for whom the notion of a Black British community was just as difficult to define. If I wrote an epic, what would my nation be? Which society would I speak for? Who would my heroes be? Which ancestral spirit or muse would I invoke? From which culture would my rhythm hail*? Which cultural devices would I catalogue?
No easy answers there. Of course, whenever I start thinking along these lines (it’s a recurring theme) I think of work from Bernardine Evaristo, Diran Adebayo, Andrea Levy, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar (’home is always elsewhere’), and others. I worry about relevance. I worry about how hard it might be to transcend autobiographical navel-gazing. But if I could navigate a path to something new and fresh, it sounds like the kind of project I could happily dedicate a serious body of time to…
*Years ago, I had a conversation with Roger Robinson about devising a poetics inspired by drum n’ bass, along the same lines as jazz poetics, something like the way Robert Creeley did it, or the kind of reggae aesthetics that Kwame Dawes celebrates. Of course, it can be argued that drum n’ bass doesn’t have the same cultural weight as jazz or even reggae, so I’d probably interested in expanding my lens…