Frame

DU: Jamaican writer Kei Miller (b. 1978) has received international recognition for his poetry, essay collections, short stories and his recent novel, Augustown (2016).  This poem – and his work generally – may serve well for any lessons on postcolonial studies, multilingualism or the “politics of knowing.”  Instructors will find generative points of comparison with other entries in this reader.  His works explore the relationship between sound, power, otherness, and alternative epistemologies.

“Oracabessa” is part of a sequence of poems called “Place Names” from Miller’s The Cartographer Tries To Map a Way to Zion (2014).  Generally, this collection narrates what happens when one system of knowledge or one way of seeing confronts another.  The main sequence in this collection is a dialogue between a Western “cartographer” and a Jamaican rastaman.  The cartographer purports to measure, map, categorize – and by implication, control and violate – places in the Caribbean while the rastaman counters by arguing for a different way of seeing and experiencing place or space.  In a sort of symbolic reversal of the colonial experience, the cartographer eventually concedes to the rastaman’s arguments to experience place “from within,” without importing epistemological frameworks that are out of tune with the concreteness and particularities of any place that is newly encountered. The cartographer eventually learns that every place name is full of histories that require a more careful kind of listening for benign access and that “not every place that can be named can be found.” Miller asks the reader to pay attention to what stories are hidden in the naming of one place.

The “Place Name” poems like “Oracabessa” are interspersed throughout the dialogue of the rastaman and the cartographer.  As Miller explains in the accompanying video, “good poetry always exposes the world as insufficiently defined … good poetry expands our way of knowing the world.”  Each of these place name poems attempts to attune the reader to acknowledging that the “half has never been told” – a biblical phrase often invoked within rastafarian cultural production and popularized by Bob Marley – and that any one place is full of stories that would otherwise be lost if we insist on monoculturalism, monolingualism, and epistemological paradigms that pretend to be “universal.”

In an essay on power, sound, and publishing as a black Caribbean writer in the UK, Miller writes, “I live … in a deeply conflicted state, recognising that I have been able to flourish artistically within a system that was constructed to exclude me, and my body, and the sounds that come out of black mouths …. I try to write poems that gradually turn up the volume. I want to adjust my readers’ ears, slowly, slowly, to a world of sound and beauty that they had not been capable of hearing before.”^[1] Writing political/protest poetry masked as lyricism (such as Miller’s poem “The Law Concerning Mermaids”), and raising questions about cultural conflict, naming, history, and the complexities of language and sound, Miller is a new, compelling voice in the long tradition of anti-colonial Caribbean literature.