reviewed on September 4, 2024
In Sturge Town, his twenty-second book of poetry, Kwame Dawes returns to the eponymous ruins of his family’s ancestral home in Jamaica, one of that nation’s earliest post-slavery free villages. A place-study in the most capacious sense of that term, the collection situates Sturge Town as a nexus from which Dawes traces lines of flight backward and forward at once, to Ghana and the United States, to a familial and cultural history which remains inextricable from the present moment.
Though such material might easily have leant itself to documentarism, Dawes works in the confident descriptive mode on which he has relied for much of his career, attuned as he is to the subtle music and quiet epiphanies of everyday life; those epiphanies register clearly in the endings to these poems, which close like the snuffing out of a candle in a nineteenth-century garret, with words like “shadow,” “sleep,” “vanishing,” “forgetting” (twice), “dead” (twice), and “night” (twice). Sturge Town is more Eavan Boland, that is, than Martha Collins, more Peter Balakian than Henk Rossouw, domestic in both its aesthetics and subject matter. Dawes even takes a lovely little sideswipe at ostensibly more radical modes of writing family and cultural history:
By what obscene delusion
are we turning erasure
into an art, we the silenced
and erased ones,
we the descendants
of those whose records
were stolen?
Why, instead, should we not
write, as keepers
of history in our art,
such lines as,
‘On such-and-such a date
I found in such-and-such a desk
of such-and-such a general
the truth of my ancestors in ledgers,
in ink and in songs and symbols
and stamps and bones?’
If at times such ledger-ransacking mires Sturge Town in the prosaic—the book is long by one-third, and overly fond of the catalog—Dawes nonetheless insists that it is precisely one’s attentiveness toward the prosaic that brings one nearer the past. “History,” he writes, “is easier when seen up close.”
That closeness of attention becomes an ethic in Sturge Town. Rather than fetishizing Caribbean and African cultures, Dawes shows them mediated through his own post-colonial curiosity, setting local color alongside those economies of travel and tourism in which he is implicated. “We land on the last stretch of land / before the Cape of Good Hope,” he writes in the poem “New Revenant,” “where I await the scrutiny of my papers.” Here, a winking ars poetica marks Dawes’s geographical, national, and literary alienation from his familial homeland, a gulf which becomes economic as well when, as his plane circles Johannesburg, he vows “never economy, not any more.” Sturge Town may be filled with “jerk pork pans, / red stripe, rum and the flat screens,” but it is also a place Dawes encounters only through intricate systems of logistics and through the physical and psychological torments of long-distance travel.
Like Derek Walcott, moreover, a figure to whom he has been compared throughout his career, Dawes balances reverence for the Caribbean and Africa with examination of the colonialist violence of those places, so that “the way the brine in the lagoons thickens in the air” is shadowed by “the blood that has been shed there, the sadness / that will always haunt the laughter of this place.” Like Walcott, too—though with his own graceful lyricism—Dawes self-reflexively theorizes his own poetic myth-making, imagining the line of the poem, for instance, as a way to see beyond “the single file / of shackled children,” an impossible task.
Perhaps Dawes’s strongest, most clear-eyed collection yet, Sturge Town is a moving historical reckoning, one grounded in the richness of place—in “the ground / beyond the thin lip of beach,” as Dawes evokes it—yet which moves deftly across both place and time, enacting both a global and trans-historical memory.