Kwame Dawes is a poet, actor and musician whose work is shaped by a journey that started in Ghana, where he was born, all the way to Jamaica, where he was raised. Dawes, who joined the staff at Brown University in 2024, was recently named the poet laureate for Jamaica. Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Dawes about his journey, his poetry, what it means to be a poet laureate, and the current environment on college campuses.
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: You were born in Ghana and you now live in Rhode Island. How did you become the poet laureate for Jamaica?
Kwame Dawes: It’s one of my great magic tricks. I was born in Ghana to a Jamaican father and a Ghanaian mother and when I was about eight years old, I moved to Jamaica. We all moved to Jamaica, so I grew up in Jamaica until I was about 30. From Jamaica I studied in Canada. I’ve lived in the U.S. since 1992 and now we are here in Rhode Island. So those formative years have positioned me quite clearly as a Jamaican, and my work seems to be really connected to that idea.
Hernandez: By the way, how did you find out about the position and what does it mean for you to be a poet laureate?
Dawes: It’s an exciting thing. It’s an honor. Sometimes later on I’ve kind of reflected on it. The poet laureate is the top poet in the country. And of course, it’s also a position that is a government stated position. I mean, the Governor General puts on my sash and the whole nine yards. But for me, it means that I’m part of a service to the community in promoting and celebrating poetry. It certainly has put me in the company of really remarkable poets like Lorna Goodison or Mervyn Morris, Olive Senior. These are the poets that preceded me. And those are poets that I’ve always admired and had a great deal of respect for. So it was a great honor and it remains that. I mean, despite the work that is involved, it’s actually quite an honor.
Hernandez: Yeah, I was looking at the description for this position, and I find this really fascinating and I want your take on it. It says, “You are charged with stimulating a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry while trying to develop mass appeal for poetry as an art and medium for developing and disseminating our cultural heritage.” Okay, so what does that mean to you? How are you gonna approach this?
Dawes: It sounds daunting, although the truth is that that’s been done already, so I’m just keeping it up. I’ve always felt that Jamaica is a place in which poets are valued, or at least poetry is valued. People talk in poetic ways in Jamaica. So one of my greatest tasks – I have a twofold sort of things. One is very much about establishing a kind of infrastructure for archiving, for finding a way to keep in the public eye the work that Jamaican poets have done over the centuries, and at the same time to help Jamaicans to recognize their own poetic instincts and the way that poetry permeates the whole society. So to do that, I’m doing projects that involve musicians and songwriters. I’m doing projects that involve spoken word artists, and I’m doing projects that involve ambitious kids who want to write and publish and so on. I have a fantastic team that I’ve formed of folks in Jamaica who are placed in media, in the arts and so on, and we’re working together to make sure that we do something exciting in the three years.
Hernandez: As a professor, you teach poetry, but your audience is captive.
It’s students. They have to listen because there’s a grade involved, but how do you get the average person interested in poetry?
Dawes: It’s a tough one. Part of the reason is how people came to poetry and then it got messed up. There’s a sense in which growing up you love poetry. You sing, “Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow.” Nobody asks “why did Mary have a lamb?” You know, nobody asks any really profound questions. You enjoy it, you sing it, and so on and so forth. And then one day in school, somebody then asks the question, “What does this mean?” And that’s the end of it.
What it does is it creates this antipathy between the poet who is saying stuff that has to be explained and the reader who is saying, “Why don’t they just say what they mean?” And I think the pressure of the education system with poetry has been such that everything you read in a poem feels as if there’s a time clock ticking that says “in three months you have to write an essay on this” or “in two minutes, you have to explain what this means.” This is not an attitude that we have to other forms of poetic expression. We don’t worry about a Bob Dylan song the first time we hear it. Otherwise, we’ll be all a mess. I mean, sometimes we’ll stay there for 20 years before we go, “Oh, so that’s what it means.”
And the point I’m making is that one of the things that I’ve always been interested in, even as a teacher in high school and so on, was to get the kids to see the fun part of poetry – its sound, the use of language – to excite people, the use of language to convince people of beauty and the ideas that they have, things that they grasp and understand. How do you do a pickup line interestingly to be successful? These are elements of the poetic experience that I think are important. So my goal is to tackle the miseducation of the world about poetry and then finally to celebrate what poetry they know and what they understand in their own poetic experience. So yeah, big task, but a good fun task.
Hernandez: I wanted to know about that time when you arrived in Jamaica and the time you spent there, how that influenced your work. My understanding is reggae played a big part of that.
Dawes: Yeah. It was a massive thing. Reggae and all that attends to reggae was very important to me, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. We got to Jamaica in 1971. If you think about it, it’s the beginning of that incredible decade of reggae music that exploded into the world. Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Judy Mowatt, you name it, they were all emerging at that time. But what was happening, which was really fascinating, was that the very middle-class attitudes that existed in Jamaica – a kind of mistrust and an antipathy, a self-loathing about the relationship to Africa – was being challenged by reggae music and by Rastafarians who were embracing this historical connection to Africa. This was happening in the culture and even in the schools. So while I’m in school learning about West Indian history or slavery and the Middle Passage and Christopher Columbus, on the radio while I’m taking the bus to school you could hear Burning Spear singing “Christopher Columbus was a damn blasted liar.”
So you’re dealing with these two conversations going on. You could hear Bob Marley singing, “Every time I hear the crack of a whip, my blood runs cold. I remember on the slave ship, how they brutalized our very souls.” So the poetic moment of contending with this music that is feeding you and that you’re wrestling with and then going into the classroom and listening to these discussions was, for me, very formative.
And I’ll say this. I came to Jamaica as an African. And that meant a lot of teasing. I mean, I can’t explain the absurdity of the teasing that we – my siblings and I – went through at school, about whether we are comfortable in shoes, and whether we lived with monkeys and so and so forth. This is among Black people, so this was not even, sort of, racially constructed between people, but it was part of this strange attitude to Africa. The people who embraced me, people who, sort of, valued my Africanness were the guys selling peanuts on the street and oranges, and the Rasta men who said, “Come and tell us about Africa.” I never forgot this. I never forgot the way in which the working people were interested in that lineage and in that positionality. And so that transformed me. That made me become a kind of Jamaican that was acutely aware of the connections between Africa and Jamaica, and that has never left me at all.
Hernandez: All right, I wanted to jump in and talk about your work, and talking about your last book, the poem “Light Home.” This one really jumped out at me. But you know what, if you don’t mind, could you read it for us?
Dawes: Sure.
Light Home.
Build me a house of light,
stretches of emptiness glaring
into an open sky calling
the colors in; but mostly
the white light that consumes
shadows, that turns this body
of riverbed brown into something
transparent like an ochre-
colored piece of cotton flapping
in the air; build me a house
of new light, the daily whisper
of dialects crawling across
the cedar and tamarind
woods; build me a house
where the rain beads the glass
panes over us, the fragile
membrane separating
us from the chaos
of the other side; furnish
our cabin with the white
and sepia brown of things—
the dull pewter of ancient
lead; the gleam of decanters,
hundreds of them, lining
the walls; build me
the house for my musty
eyes; the house where
faces, illuminated, reveal
themselves to be familiar
as a plain book of poems
opened out—call it splayed—
on the table, my desk,
the scene of such terrible crimes.
Hernandez: What’s the inspiration behind this one?
Dawes: There are two things in the poem that are recurring themes for me: light and my musty eyes. And in a sense, I’m preoccupied with this idea of sight, sightlessness, and light. And therefore, this quest for a house of light is not just a fantasy, it’s like a reality. I love light, I need light, I need a lot of light. The poem then begins to talk, it seems to me, about the idea of home. I think you get the sense that in this house of light, this is almost like a greenhouse. The panes, the ceiling is glass and the rain is hitting it. I’m trying to find my own way and the way the poem ends is really the making of poetry, right? The book that I’m writing is splayed. It’s the way in which I, my body is opened up when I write, and torn apart by what I write. And as much as I’m writing towards beauty, I’m also failing. You know, there’s this allusion to this idea of the crimes that I commit as a writer and so on.
Hernandez: Thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. You are new to Rhode Island. I’m wondering what drew you here? What drew you to Brown?
Dawes: Partly because of the work that I do with African poets and African poetry. I run an organization called the African Poetry Book Fund. And frankly, Brown was very interested in seeing that settled here. It’s a massive outfit. We’ve had great support for it, and it’s transforming the position of African poetry in the world. What moved me especially was the recognition of its value here at Brown and the desire to have that work that we are doing exist here.
Hernandez: You come here at a very interesting time. What’s going on on the campus, what’s it like for you, considering that the current administration is attacking Ivy League schools right now? What’s happening?
Dawes: It’s a little absurd. I came from the University of Nebraska, so we were experiencing this two years ago. I was on the search committee to hire the DEI person – I was chair of the search committee that hired the DEI person – in Nebraska about six years ago. And now it’s all shut down.
So we were watching this happen. Coming here to see that whole pressure happening here is unsettling and I’ll say why. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think as a teacher, my goal is never to, sort of, change people’s mind about things. My goal is to give them access to information and knowledge. And what bothers me significantly is the suggestion that information becomes hurtful just because it’s uncomfortable. I mean, knowledge is going to disturb because ignorance is comfortable.
You know, I come from a culture in which the erasure of our presence in the world was systematic and intentional. In other words, when I write, I am writing against silence. I’m writing against a willful silence. I’m writing against the notion that says when I try to trace my own ancestry and I run up onto the Atlantic Ocean, I don’t know who to go to, where to go to, except this grand space called Africa. There is no writing, there’s no source that would give me the information that would take me beyond that. That kind of erasure is a culture that we came out of – I certainly came out of – and that I’m trying to write against.
This is not even political. This is just a fact of remembering the dignity of humans in the world, and understanding the dignity of humans in the world. So I will always write poetry because in a sense, for me, the poet is the chronicler of the sentiment of our time. And whatever I say in this moment, if somebody comes back to look at it a hundred years from now, they will at least know that this Black man was standing here saying something in the world.
