My Poetry Corner August 2024 features the poem “Work” from the poetry collection Sturge Town by Jamaica’s Poet Laureate Kwame Dawes, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). A writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962. When he was nine years old, he moved with his family to his father’s ancestral home of Jamaica. He became a naturalized citizen, having spent most of his childhood and early adult life in the Caribbean Island nation. Since then, he has lived most of his adult life in the United States.

In his poetry collection Sturge Town, the then sixty-year-old poet reflects on his journey from his childhood in Ghana, through Jamaica, and on to South Carolina and Nebraska in the United States. The eighty-six poems offer a compassionate insight into history and identity, triumph and loss, joy and grief, love and relationships.

I connected with his loss and own mortality expressed in the poem “Condolence” (p. 66): Thrice this week, I send condolences to acquaintances / whose intimacy has grown the more by empathy – we are of an age / of sudden deaths, or the prolonged and painful passing of loved ones. / It is fall, and I know that we are all, in our small boxes, / dreading the dusk, knowing that trees turning orange and crimson, / will be, for years to come, the way we see our losses, / our complicated loves…

“Sorrow,” the poet says (p. 81) is the woman I met in Ganthier, / staring blankly into the cane fields, her feet dusty, / her skirt stained, her breath heavy with hunger. / She has nothing left; the litany of her losses / so epic, one cannot repeat in a poem. / Mine is the insipid persistence of regret, / or perhaps the feeling that happiness is / the prelude to tragedy, or having an ankle / that sends sharp pains up my body / every few steps I take…

[Ganthier is a small rural village outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where many people sought refuge after the 2010 earthquake.]

Sturge Town is Jamaica’s second oldest “Free Village” in the hills of Saint Ann Parish, established in 1838 by a Baptist missionary, Reverend John Clark, and Joseph Sturge, a Quaker philanthropist who was a vocal opponent of the apprenticeship system that followed the end of slavery. In secretly buying land through agents in London, without the knowledge of the plantation owners, they made the land available to the freed slaves. In this way, the freed slaves could provide for themselves without control by their former plantation masters.

Still standing in Sturge Town is the now dilapidated ancestral home of the Dawes’ family where the poet’s father, grandparents, and great grandparents lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the family lived in the capital, Kingston, where his father worked as director at the cultural Institute of Jamaica, the village loomed large in the young Kwame’s imagination. In his early 2024 interview with Tryphena Yeboah, University of Southern Indiana, Dawes said:

“Growing up in Ghana, Sturge Town came into our imagination as the symbolic site of everything Jamaican, and my father told us rich stories about the village, the rural existence, and much more. Sturge Town represented the “other” home for us—we being both Ghanaian and Jamaican, and Jamaica being our “other” home. Of course, over the years I have learned a great deal more about the village, about my ancestors, and about what it all means, and I hope much of this is what comes through in these poems. The house is currently in an exquisite state of disrepair, and there is a haunting reality in the lingering beauty of its seat on the hill, the riotous vegetation, and the “good bones” of its structure. But as you can tell, Sturge Town is both rooted in historical and familial reality and the poetic possibilities of myth and invention.”

In the poem “Sturge Town,” Dawes speaks of his return to his father’s ancestral home as an adult (pp. 32-33): My father is long dead, and I was / faithful to the last. Still, postcolonial / that I am, I built my own myth / of departure, set aside the romance / of the exile for the pragmatics / of family and mission. Return / was to what might have been / had my ancestors lived longer, / had they held on to the cottage / on the hill…. Still, my heart / goldens in warmth to see / the grey slab with DAWES / etched in stone.

The sixty-three-line featured poem “Work” (pp. 82-83) was inspired by the verse Five days to go, working for the next day from the song of the same name by Bob Marley (1945-1981), released in 1980. Considering that Dawes was an adolescent when the Jamaican reggae singer, guitarist, and songwriter rose to national and international fame, it’s no surprise that the poet developed a “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music,” as cited in his extended bio.

The first nine lines establish the poetic persona as a male hand laborer with tough hands:

It is easy to slide over the word work;
take it to mean what it isn’t.
Look at this man’s hands, look
at the toughness in his fingers,
the way his nails darken at the edges,
the way his skin is marked
by old scars, the way his palms
are leather-tough – a grater of skin
if he drags them over your arm.

In the following fifteen lines (10-24), we learn that the man works on the plantation on James Island, South Carolina. [Established in 1851, this former cotton plantation is now the McLeod Plantation Historic Site.] Regardless of the harsh working conditions in the cotton fields, he must work to survive:

Those hands still remember
the grooves where the blisters
would settle and then harden
to toughness from holding the handle
of the clumsy seed-planter
bouncing on the uneven furrows,
planting, planting. Sometimes it’s easier
not to know that on the plantation
out there on James Island,
every morning, seven days a week,
a bell sounds out, just thirty minutes
left before you line up by the fields
to start to sweat all day
to pay rent on that wood shingle
and mud chimney that they’ve given you.

Without a living wage, the plantation worker could ill afford to take a day off, as we learn in the following eleven lines (25-35):

And if you miss a day, your family
will lose shelter. That is work,
keeping the wolves from your door,
the left foot following the right,
the sickle swinging, the dirt
on your skin, and the shadow
over you when the script runs out.
Work is always behind, always owing
somebody something – payment in June
for the debt from December when the cold
reached into your gut, held you down.

In the final eleven lines (53-63) of the poem, the black farm worker defines the drudgery of work upon which his every breath depends:

Work is the time you spend trying to eat away
the time you owe; work is all a nigger has
for sure, and work tells you that nobody,
nobody is going to give you something
for nothing. Work is like breathing,
but after a while there is no more
breathing left, and every breath
is a loan, and your pocket is empty,
and you will never pay it back. Work is all
a man has, and work is nothing,
nothing at all; work, work, work, work…

To read the complete poem and learn more about the work of Jamaica’s Poet Laureate Kwame Dawes go to my Poetry Corner August 2024.