D'Aguiar, Fred
D'AGUIAR, Fred
Nationality: British. Born: London, 2 February 1960. Brought up in Guyana. Education: University of Kent, Canterbury, B.A. in English; Cambridge University (Judith E. Wilson fellow), 1989–90. Career: Trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse. Writer-inresidence, London Borough of Lewisham, 1986–87, and Birmingham Polytechnic, 1988–89; visiting writer, Amherst College, 1992–94; assistant professor of English, Bates College, 1994–95, and since 1995 University of Miami, Florida. Editor, Artrage magazine, London. Awards: Minority Rights Group award, 1983; University of Kent T.S. Eliot prize, 1984; G.L.C. literature award, 1985; Guyana Poetry prize, 1987; David Higham First Novel award, Book Trust, London, 1995, and Whitbread award, Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland, 1995, both for The Longest Memory. Address: c/o Chatto and Windus Ltd., 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA, England.
Publications
Poetry
Mama Dot. London, Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Airy Hall. London, Chatto and Windus, 1989.
British Subjects. London, Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Bill of Rights. London, Chatto and Windus, 1998.
Plays
High Life (produced London, 1987).
A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death. London, Methuen, 1995.
Novels
The Longest Memory: A Novel. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Pantheon, 1994.
Dear Future. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Pantheon, 1996.
Feeding the Ghosts. London, Chatto and Windus, 1997; Hopewell, New Jersey, Ecco Press, 1999.
Other
Editor, with Gillian Allnutt, Ken Edwards, and Eric Mottram, The New British Poetry 1968–1988. London, Paladin, 1988.
Editor, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, by Anthony Trollope. New York, Carroll and Graf, 1999.
*Critical Studies: Interview with Frank Birbalsingh, in Ariel (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 24(1), January 1993; by Michael Horovitz, in Poetry Review, 83(4), winter 1994; by M. Simpson, in Critical Survey (Oxford, England), 6(3), 1994; by Paula Burnett, in New Statesman Society (London), 22 March 1996; by Sean O'Brien, in London Review of Books, 18(11), 1996; "'Tricksters of Heaven': Visions of Holocaust in Fred D'Aguiar's 'Bill of Rights' and Wilson Harris's 'Jonestown'" by Hena Maes-Jelinek, in 'Union in Partition': Essays in Honour of Jeanne Delbaere, edited by Gilbert Debusscher and Marc Maufort, Liege, Belgium, L3, 1997; "Remembering Slavery: History As Roots in the Fiction of Caryl Phillips and Fred D'Aguiar" by Benedicte Ledent, in The Contact and the Culmination, edited by Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent, Liege, Belgium, L3, 1997; by H. Hathaway, in African American Review, 32(3), 1998; "Anonymity, Naming and Memory in Fred D'Aguiar's 'Feeding the Ghosts': Islands of Fiction in a Sea of History" by Carole Froude-Durix, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 21(1), autumn 1998.
* * *Fred D'Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents. His early years were spent in Guyana, but his secondary education was in London. He is a leading name among the now established generation of black poets who have contributed a wide variety of new energies and rhythms to British poetry during the 1980s and 1990s. D'Aguiar's poetry represents a cross-cultural synthesis of two traditions: one predominantly oral and belonging to the Caribbean, and the other the mainstream written literary tradition. The Caribbean has fostered major writing in both traditions, but its impressive performance-based oral tradition was not widely known in Britain until the 1980s, when it proved something of a revelation to many, especially younger, contemporary poetry readers.
The two traditions can be seen in D'Aguiar's first book, Mama Dot. Through the persona of Mama Dot, D'Aguiar creates a living metaphor for the Caribbean region, part possibly an actual person, part archetypal mother figure, but most importantly a spirit of place, as in the title poem "Mama Dot":
Born on a Sunday
in the kingdom of Ashante
Sold on Monday
into slavery
Ran away on Tuesday
cause she born free
Lost a foot on Wednesday
when they catch she
Worked all Thursday
till her head grey
Dropped on Friday
where they catch she
Freed on Saturday
in a new century
In "The Day Mama Dot Takes Ill," another poem in the sequence, "The continent has its first natural disaster: / Chickens fall dead on their backs, / But keep on laying rotten eggs …" When Mama Dot returns to health, the natural world celebrates: "She throws open her window / To a chorus and rumpus of animals and birds, / And the people carnival for a week."
The volume Mama Dot is divided into three sections, of which the title sequence is the first. The poem "Roots Broadcast," from which the second sequence takes its title, is written in the Caribbean and Guyanese oral vernacular idiom that was named by Edward Kamau Brathwaite "nation-language" (the book has a one-page glossary of these words):
No sun nah come up
dese days yet sun muss deh
some weh shinin pan somebady
else back wen all we gat
is hevy cloud redy fe bruk
pan we head an memry
of how sun wuk cawn dead
fo dis ya roots broadcast
pickin up pickin up
The third section of the book is taken up with "Guyanese Days," a long autobiographical poem on D'Aguiar's recollections of his early days in Guyana. It is written in Standard English, in itself a comment on his own mixed cultural and ethnic heritage. The poem is a tour de force and something of a virtuoso performance in language, equally eloquent and direct and providing impressive evidence of D'Aguiar's talent.
D'Aguiar's second book, Airy Hall, is also carefully divided into three sections. Although just as fastidiously written as Mama Dot, the volume has an altogether stronger feeling of magic realism. The first part is taken up by the "Airy Hall" sequence, which, like "Guyanese Days," seems based on the poet's early memories of Guyana, although the poems are altogether more mysterious and imaginative in their evocations. The sequence reflects different aspects of the place, with titles such as "Airy Hall's Dynasty," "Airy Hall's Dark Age," and "Airy Hall Isotope," where the Western world and the third world meet:
Consider our man in a hovel
With no windows, a shack our missiles
Sail through; cracks that do not interrupt
The flow of moonlight or sunlight,
Seen here washing or baking his floor
The second section of Airy Hall includes the poem "El Dorado Update," a title referring to the abundant unmined gold in the interior of the Guyanese rainforest. The poem comments on the financial and other problems of third world nations, and stylistically it is a new departure, mixing lines from children's rhymes with phantasmagoric imagery to create a dream atmosphere in which fantasy and reality coexist:
Riddle me, riddle me, riddle.
One people, one nation, one destiny?
Let's take a walk
not to stay, just to see
You pass a man at Customs,
returning from an island;
he wears several tin chains,
tin rings on every finger,
and tin bracelets that jingle
as his arms swing.
Customs ensure
what he declares
tallies with their list made
when he departed
with identical amounts
of gold.
The third part of Airy Hall consists of the long poem "The Kitchen Bitch," which, more than any other part of the book, puzzled reviewers on its publication. The poem is complex, interweaving images of Guyana and the Caribbean with more phantasmagoric imagery and with dislocations of the narrative. A note to the poem explains that "kitchen bitch" is the name for a tin kerosene lamp used by Jamaican peasants. The poem tells the story of an expedition high up in the rainforest of the Guyanese interior, apparently following in the tracks of the half real, half legendary figure of Albert Collier. It is best read the way one reads, say, a Wilson Harris novel or a Jorge Luis Borges story, trusting to its own logic rather than to any linear narrative. Airy Hall is an ambitious and adventurous book that deserves to be better known, for it shows D'Aguiar broadening his range to look into the mysterious and enigmatic Amerindian past of Guyana.
D'Aguiar's British Subjects takes a long look at his birthplace of Britain, which he loves and yet where he most keenly experiences what he has called the black British poet's "sense of being 'other.'" The book does not have the brilliance of imagery of his earlier work and chooses to focus instead on the everyday feel of the "grey light and close skies" of urban Britain. In "Home" he explores his love for the red telephone boxes, "chokey streets, roundabouts and streetlamps / with tyres chucked round them" that he misses when he is away. His happiness as his plane touches down at Heathrow is short-lived when he arrives at customs "to the usual inquisition":
my passport photo's too open-faced,
haircut wrong (an afro) for the decade;
the stamp, British Citizen not bold enough
for my liking and too much for theirs.
"At the Grave of the Unknown African" is a moving and accomplished poem in couplets that is set in Bristol at the grave of a slave dead for 250 years. In the first part the poet meditates on the past "souls for sale in Bristol's port" and juxtaposes this with images of urban riots and skinheads in modern Bristol. In the second part an unnamed African slave answers the poet and urges him to
Say what happened to me and countless like me, all anyon.
Sry it urgently. Mean times may bring back the water cannon.
I died young, but to age as a slave would have been worse.
The tone of the poem is assured, and the quiet dignity of the slave is allowed to speak out plainly.
British Subjects also includes several sequences: "Sonnets from Whitley Bay," a series of well-wrought love poems; "Frail Deposits," a series of four poems for Wilson Harris; "The Body in Question," addressed to various parts of the body; and "Notting Hill," an evocation of the annual celebratory Caribbean carnival in the Notting Hill area of London.
In the 1990s D'Aguiar published three distinguished novels—The Longest Memory (1994), Dear Future (1996), and Feeding the Ghosts (1997)—that met with critical acclaim in Britain. The distinction of his prose writing might have led to the confidence of address that is found in D'Aguiar's book of poetry Bill of Rights, published in 1998 and his most ambitious work to date. The book consists of an interlinked sequence of poems that make up a single dramatic narrative of an event in contemporary Guyanese history, the mass suicide in Jonestown of the followers of Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of a doomed religious sect. Place-names and scenes shift between a remembered London and present-day Guyana, creating the feeling of a disjointed life. The book is told from the point of view of a member of the cult whose personal history is intermixed with that of the group and whose voice we follow through illness and the birth of a child with his partner. We are given glimpses of the warped sexual morality of Jones and see the chilling mass suicide of the group, "… an excursion to God's theme park," which, miraculously, the speaker survives.
The book reminds us how many dramatic voices we find in the poems of D'Aguiar (he also has written plays), and the dramatic voices in Bill of Rights lead the reader through the experience in a exhilarating progression. Yet craft is present throughout, and contrasting sections use both the oral and the literary traditions. The poem is full of echoes of other poets, including W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Benjamin Zephaniah, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Bob Dylan.
D'Aguiar's achievement is substantial, and he has shown himself to be an ambitious, original, and subtly experimental writer in the mainstream of contemporary poetry in Britain.
—Jonathan Barker