and a grandmother who “collared [her husband] in her massive stone fists // and heaved him into a corner, so my mother could not be abused.”
We shouldn’t be beguiled into thinking that the mother’s lesson in manhood is just in fists, for these are the violent exceptions to an education she gives the speaker about agency, power, and the beauty of one’s own dark body. She chastises a sister (or cousin) who has shaved off the speaker’s hair:
This is when I knew black was a city
whose walls were constantly under siege.
This is when I knew what hymns
were meant for—that they were
songs of anoint for the body
that was constantly at war
And then my mother rose up saying:
♦
Of course it’s wooly. I have lain only with black men, men whose skin was the darkest black, men whose hair was the roughest wire and they were beautiful, and my child’s hair is this way because I have never, like you, lain with anyone light skin or even remotely Chinese. And my child is beautiful, wooly, black
This book is about the way a generation passes knowledge along to the next—or how they keep knowledge to themselves. The men and women who raise the speaker from childhood to manhood belong to the same generation as Growling Tiger: “When I dead bury me clothes.” The clothes are this calypsonian’s style, his look. And the commerce of the Western world has made him want to own it, to make sure no one else can lay claim to it. It didn’t always have to be that way. Knowledge, style, song—they all used to be passed down. But now—bury the body. Bury the clothes. Even bury what the singer and fighter can no longer wear.
Of course, Bonair-Agard was raised during the rich early days of hip-hop. And what do DJs—the grand conductors of the cosmic dance floor—teach us? The art of digging. In some ways, it’s a shame we now use the word remix or mashup. The epic sets of Marley Marl, Kid Capri, the Latin Rascals, and many, many other DJs used to be called mastermixes, so named because of the DJs’ mastery—their excellence in mixing sounds and beats from different recordings, vinyl, tape, found sound, et cetera. However, those DJs were also mixing the masters: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. This European music—called virtuosic, sophisticated, and “classical”—was also the arsenal used by critics to disparage the abundant musical invention of people of color. But if they put the masters on wax, it was the DJs who could scratch, fade, chirp, chop them into something new.
In this way Bonair-Agard’s poems are an ode and a contradiction. The poet honors the tradition of Growling Tiger, but in redeeming and recalling it must challenge it. The DJ digs through crates and closets and basements, through trash piles—cemetery after cemetery of sound. What the world has rid itself of, condemned to obsolescence, buried, the DJ revives, reuses, remixes. This is to say, Bonair-Agard draws from so many varied sources; he samples from a variety of texts. Roger Bonair-Agard digs. You could say he unburies.
You could say he also mixes the masters. He writes in English. He makes references to Shakespeare. But the lines are enjambed against convention; Lil Wayne keeps showing up, so do signifying penguins; images of the body in making love, violence, silence, and speech abound. This is the tradition of hip-hop—to juxtapose the unlikely—but it is also the tradition of calypso. Where the steelpan was once an oil drum, it is now cut open and contains all the desire, ache, fucking, hollers, tenderness, hymns, and mischief of a people: “That quietness underneath the bamboo knocking, the steel have that too, so the steel is my master.”
And steel, which was retooled to make music (and which therefore remixed its own master: oil), is part of Bonair-Agard’s own remix. So whenever the masters show up in these poems, one gets the feeling they are going to get put on a platter and crosscut to new acoustics:
The cicadas in the trees? God can’t send enough
crows to silence their plague. They’ve been singing
since May. They know who their master is.
Is that cicada chatter a sound of terror or is it an uprising against the seasons? The seasons are their master, but the cicadas have also mastered the seasons. And they make ruckus in their mastering.
Then there is this other thing I learned about the etymology of the word calypso. It may also come from a French word—or it might come from a Spanish word. It’s also likely it comes from a word in Efik or Hausa or Ibibio, a word—spoken, shouted, and sung during gayelle—used to urge stick-fighters on. The rhythms, call and response, and melodies that we hear in “When I Dead Bury Me Clothes” are derived from the stick-fighting circle. Growling Tiger’s song is a battle cry. I don’t know who the song is being sung for—the calypsonian himself? the fighter in the gayelle? or for the poet? This is significant, because the very tension of history resides inside the etymology of the word calypso: to conceal and unveil and urge forward and call toward. It means many things at once. Inside the history of a word for a music that is both a song and a fight, there is a history of our own submerged wonder, our most awful selves. It’s a good thing, then, that the poet “knows the code” and
knows what
it means to have six simultaneous melodies
locked away forever. It is deep
in the calypso, this burying
of one’s best clothes.
It is good that Roger Bonair-Agard has inherited the US tradition of digging. In Bury My Clothes he proves, in order to reveal something of our most beautiful and banged-up selves, he is willing to go down into history time and time again—even through hell, even through a fight, and especially at the cost of singing. What follows in these pages is both the cost and the song.
Patrick Rosal
Brooklyn, New York
October 28, 2012
Preface
Bury My Clothes is a meditation on violence. It is a meditation on race. It is a meditation on the places at which they intersect, politically, culturally, and personally. This collection of poems seeks to explore the history of violence in the development of Trinidad and Tobago’s steelpan culture in parallel to the history of violence in the development of America’s hip-hop culture. In both thought and poem I went down the “rabbit hole” and what the poems discovered was a fundamental difference in the reasons for the creation of art in the world. Among oppressed communities of color, it is about survival. It is about establishing personhood in the world, where everything around suggests nonpersonhood. And as such, it establishes legacy in a culture and history of nonownership, through the ownership of idea and ideal. The individual’s currency of personhood is only the art, and as such it must be marked as his/hers. The calypso, the new instrument, the new riff, the break beat, the graf tag must be recognized as that person’s. It isn’t to be handed down or memorialized in monuments. In protection of this ownership, we’ve made music in secret, drawn guns in beef about who stole whose rap flow. We’ve pulled cutlasses on other crews and stolen a prized tenor pan in the middle of the night. We’ve died with the secrets of wire bending and we’ve soaked records to remove the label, to make the break unreadable. All this while moving, changing, reinventing, and disrupting the overall cultural and artistic landscapes. Indeed, we’ve made ours ours, in personal style too, a tilt of hat here, an extra pleat there, a shirt open down to a navel, a massive medallion in leather or gold.
At the root of this violence is a violence done to us, and that continues to be done to us. And where this violence is real to us, where the ways in which our ability to move and live are under constant siege, so the ways in which we rebel must be constantly shifting. The art is always “next.” It is always new. It is always “fresh.” At the heart of this is a violence we perpetrate: against ourselves, against others, in retaliation. And at the outer reaches are the myriad personal violences of the heart, of the personal, in the quest to be eventually most fully