COLONIZATION IN REVERSE

By Louise Bennett
Tuesday, May 6, 2008.

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse

Be the hundred, be de tousan

Fro country and from town,
By de ship-load, be the plane load
Jamaica is Englan boun.

Dem pour out a Jamaica,

Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.

What an islan! What a people!

Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An turn history upside dung!

Some people doan like travel,

But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-England agency.

An week by week dem shipping off

Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.

Oonoo see how life is funny,

Oonoo see da turnabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout’.

For wen dem ketch a Englan,

An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.

Jane says de dole is not too bad

Because dey paying she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
dat suit her dignity

me say Jane will never fine work

At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay popn Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.

Wat a devilment a Englan!

Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wondering how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.

Louise Bennett was a Jamaican poet and cultural icon. She was born
on September 7, 1919, and has been described by many as
Jamaica's leading comedienne and the "only poet who has really hit
the truth about her society through its own language".

Through her poems in Jamaican patois, she not only raised the
dialect of the Jamaican folk to an art level but also captured all the
spontaneity of the expression of Jamaicans' joys and sorrows, their
ready, poignant and even wicked wit, their religion and their
philosophy of life.

Her first dialect poem was written when she was fourteen years old.
A British Council Scholarship took her to the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art in London, where she studied in the late 1940s. After
graduation, she worked with repertory companies in Coventry,
Huddersfield and Amersham as well as in intimate revues all over
England

In 1974, she was awarded the Order of Jamaica. She

also received the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in the arts
and a honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of West
Indies. In 2001, she was made a Member of the Order of Merit for
her contribution to the development of Jamaican Arts and Culture.
She died on July 26, 2006, in Toronto, Canada.
https://www.benjaminmadeira.com/2015/03/bans-killin.html

Civilian and Soldier by Wole Soyinka

My apparition rose from the fall of lead,

Declared, ‘I am a civilian.’ It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.
You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your training sessions, cautioning –
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth
From the lead festival of your more eager friends
Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.

I hope some day

Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair
With meat and bread, a gourd of wine
A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question – do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?

I Think it Rains

I think it rains
That tongues may loosen from the parch
Uncleave roof-tops of
the mouth, hang
Heavy with knowledge

I saw it raise
The sudden cloud, from ashes.
Settling
They joined in a ring of
grey; within,
The circling spirit.

O it must rain
These closures on the mind, blinding us
In strange despairs, teaching
Purity of sadness.

And how it beats

Skeined transperencies on wings
Of our desires, searing dark longings
In cruel baptisms.

Rain-reeds, practised in
The grace of yielding, yet unbending
From afar, this, your conjugation with my earth
Bares crounching rocks.

Wole Soyinka

file:///E:/SHAZIA%20MUZAFFER/POST-COLONIAL%20STUDIES/A.K.%20Ramanujan's%20Poems.pdf