Tides of voice : nation language as political resistance in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Bill Griffiths

Martin, Matthew James (2024) Tides of voice : nation language as political resistance in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Bill Griffiths. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis connects two poets, Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020) and Englishman Bill Griffiths (1948–2007), both noted for use of subaltern speech. Brathwaite is a celebrated practitioner and theorist of ‘nation language’, his term for Caribbean speech-forms. Griffiths’ poetry and research explore numerous marginalised communities’ voices, but particularly North East English dialect. Both poets employ nation language or dialect to subvert centralised, metropolitan politics associated with standard English, and both experiment with performance techniques, visual layout, and community formation. However, there was virtually no contact between the two during their lifetimes, and little between their respective milieus as poets. By bringing these bodies of work into conversation, new routes can open for English dialect poetry to learn from Caribbean innovations. ‘Tidalectics’, Brathwaite’s theory of cultural interchange that allows communities to share ideas without colonialist hierarchies emerging, offers a framework for such learning. Indeed, Caribbean nation language’s historical development was a tidalectic process. Brathwaite himself identifies tidalectic features in North East England’s history and culture, licensing a view of North East dialect as nation language, with the subversive politics that this entails. Griffiths’ work is well-suited to be read in this light, given his own interest in Black and Caribbean cultures. I survey and compare the two poets’ experiments with nation language: live performance, alternative lexicons and syntax, innovative wordplay, richly visual text formats, documentary poetics, and responses to new technologies. Throughout, Brathwaite’s example helps to identify underappreciated innovations in Griffiths, and to suggest new directions for English nation language writing. Through increased awareness of each other’s shared difference from standard English and the political orthodoxy that it furthers, Caribbean and English nation language communities (poetic and otherwise), as well as similar groups worldwide, will be better able to support one another’s political and aesthetic struggles.

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