5 months ago
38
On the morning of January 22, about 10:55, Professor Kwame Dawes, was properly pinned and sashed by acting Governor General Steadman Fuller, at a ceremony of investiture at King’s House.
Dawes, Jamaica’s newly appointed Poet Laureate, started his acceptance speech with a poem, “because we are, as it happens, celebrating poetry”.
The poem, “written by a great Jamaican poet … a poem of great skill and beauty and a poem that I have considered my lodestar as a poet” is titled Acceptance and the author is Neville Dawes .
Kwame is the son of the late Neville Dawes and what better way to acknowledge the man who he chose to honour than by invoking his presence at King’s House through his poem.
A celebration of the joys of country living, couched in words that can only come from the pens of poets, the poem was certainly “poeming” as Gen Z would say.
The professor stated, “At the heart of this poem is praise and praise is the gesture of the poet [who] I want to honour this morning.”
In his brief and intense speech, Dawes, the holder of the nation’s highest literary title, waxed lyrical. He took listeners through the complexity of what it means to be appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica, while affirming the role of poets as “chroniclers of their time” and the keepers of the memories which some would like to erase.
“They [poets] are not historians in the strictest term but do something even more critical, they leave evidence of the human feeling ... the human imagination … the quotidian human life in the world and if they allow themselves to do so they chronicle the natural world that has shaped them,” Dawes told his audience.
With his ability to make prose flow like poetry, Dawes declared, “We know that society can conspire to silence and even erase the voices of whole swathes of humanity. We know that it is possible to leave a people bereft of their knowledge of who they are and where they have come from. To silence poets … to deprive poets of the freedom and the means to make and share poems is, in essence, to deprive society of the memory of its most intimate selves ... its most vital self.”
He continued, “And I consider my role one of affirming this nation’s desire to resist that erasure, to facilitate and make possible room in which any one caught in the dream and desire and compulsion to talk dem talk, to articulate experience with the beautiful execution of language to remain available to them.”
STIMULATE APPRECIATION
The Poet Laureate Programme has a focus to “stimulate a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry while aiming to develop mass appeal for poetry as an art and a medium for disseminating our cultural heritage”. The Poet Laureate is generally selected from among a country’s most esteemed and accomplished poets. Nominations are made by public votes submitted on a prescribed form. Those meeting the stated criteria are then considered by a nine-member committee, with the successful candidate being selected via secret ballot. Previous Poet Laureates post-Independence are Mervyn Morris, Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior.
Dawes will serve from 2025 to 2028.
“I think this is very exciting, but most of all I am looking forward to the work that we are going to do. And we are going to do really exciting work ... and we have three years to make it happen. Most of what we want to do is solidify opportunities for writers in Jamaica for poets and to create institutions that will have a long-lasting impact on preserving writing and celebrating writings. And I have some plans in that direction,” Dawes told The Gleaner.
Dawes, who was born in Ghana to Jamaican parents, and grew up in Jamaica, is currently a lecturer in the Master of Fines Arts programme at Pacific University, as well as a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University in the United States. He is not based in Jamaica, however, he told The Gleaner that he “will be here very often, back and forth”.
A past student of Jamaica College (JC) he was surprised by representation from his alma mater at the ceremony. His closing were to his audience, were “and to di JC man dem, give thanks”.
The ceremony was organised by the National Library of Jamaica, a division of the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport. Portfolio minister, Olivia Grange, was one of the speakers. Remarks were delivered by national librarian, Beverley Lashley, and other NLJ executives.
English (US) ·