INTERVIEW: DENNIS SCOTT TALKING TO MERVYN MORRISAuthor(s): DENNIS SCOTT and MERVYN MORRISSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, Poets and Poetry (MARCH, 1984), pp. 48-50Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653520 .

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INTERVIEW: DENNIS SCOTT TALKING TO MERVYN MORRIS

MM: I notice that in a recent conference paper Ian Smith quotes you as saying that your poetry "is far more political [now] . . . and simultaneously far more personal". What are we to make of that? You called it a paradox.

DS: Perhaps it's not a paradox at all. I think at one and the same time my own sense of self and my sense of where that self is located in terms of the society have been intensifying, getting clearer; to me, at any rate. And therefore I feel much more comfortable making statements about myself in the society, and therefore political statements, than before when I was less concerned with, less aware of, the relation- ship between self and society.

MM: Isn't there a sense in which one of the things you're doing is creating several dif- ferent selves through different personae? Or is there a consistent position which you think you are adopting, politically, throughout the poetry?

DS: No, I think that's absolutely accurate. The psycho-analytic cliche that one in fact is several - that there are several parts to one's self and that the healthy self is an integrated collection of those various personae is absolutely right; and I find it useful as a way of viewing people and behaviours. So that really each poem is an attempt to come to terms with, to distinguish, define, and locate a self in relation- ship to all the other selves and to the context of each of the selves. One agglome- rates, accumulates, statements about the world. Hopefully, as each statement ties on to the next few you develop a clearer sense, a clearer set of statements, about the whole situation.

MM: .You've called your latest collection Dreadwalk, and the title poem actually deals with an encounter between a Rastafarian and a non-Rastafarian - a non-Rastafarian creator, perhaps poet. To what extent do you find you are specially interested in Rastafarians and for what purpose, really, in your work?

DS: I'm interested in them because they seem to me one of the healthiest phenomena that the New World has thrown up: healthy in the sense of choosing a life-enhanc ing value system which refuses to tolerate the destructiveness of most of the West- ern civilization's beliefs and practices; healthy also, in a sense, because they are, so interestingly for me, a creole development - a group, people, who can trace most of their roots to another continent, to other continents; have had to come to terms with an environment which is essentially strange to them - that is, we're not indigenous here - and to forge some kind of world -view. It seems to me (and to others, who are more qualified to talk about these things) that every time a New World man has chosen to swallow the value systems, the culture, wholesale of the Old World or - in the Caribbean - to take on the culture of the metropolitan areas

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of the New World we've gone awry, we've gone amiss. The Rastas seem to me to have opted - for good and bad reasons - for (logically, and irrationally, and a-rationally - a mixture of these things), for seeing themselves and seeing the world in a certain way which at least says we have to deal with ourselves, there's a possi- bility, a hope, of saving ourselves, no matter what. And this, I think, is a very important thing to have happened. In so doing they have manipulated, changed, influenced the culture around them to an amazing extent - particularly, of course, in language; which is what interests us, more, perhaps. And I'm intrigued, fascinated and excited by the kind of strategies - linguistic strategies - that they have used to redefine themselves in the world. So that they're one way of attempting to specify self. And since I regard art as a process of attempting to define, to specify, oneself in relationship to the world, then this strategy is particularly interesting to me and useful for my own work sometimes.

MM: Could we extend a little bit that last remark? You "regard art as ..." What do you see as the function of the Jamaican or Caribbean poet?

DS: The function for him (or her) self is to find out as much as he can about him (or her) self as possible and to record it, for his own - her own - self and for the enter- tainment and assistance of others. The function for the society is to provide infor- mation about the possibilities of being a human being in the society that other people may find interesting and/or useful.

MM: In your first volume, Uncle Time, there seemed to many readers to be a predomi- nant influence of theatre; a sense of a persona that had a theatrical element in the way in which he presented himself. It seems to me that in Dreadwalk that element of theatricality has been somewhat diminished, and that one of the things very noticeable here - though there were bits of it in Uncle Time - is a greater interest in relating to the visual arts. Is there a development of that kind between these two books?

DS: For one thing: during the period in which the poems of Uncle Time was being written I was - far more than I have been since then - a performer, literally on stage: a little bit as an actor, and certainly as a dancer; and I'm sure that this in- fluenced the way in which I tended to express and, perhaps, see the world. Since then I've been more a director and a playwright, so there is less a sense of feeling and being on stage in the work. For another: during that period in which Uncle Time poems were written I was doing a lot of reviewing of the arts. I think that the pay-off to some of that reviewing happens in Dreadwalk poems, in that there is more a sense of the observer and less of the performer observing himself. Also I think as my sense of where I am in the society and where I choose to be in the society got stronger there was less felt need to write about observing myself; I am much more comfortable now simply existing there and observing the society itself. Also, of course, the craft, I think, has been growing: I've been experimenting a lot with ways of drying out the lushness of some of the earlier work, and I'm getting a crisp, cool, conversational style in which images are shocking but you don't quite realize how shocking they are until you think about the actual picture that the

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words are making a second time. "Apocalypse Dub", for instance. Images of wounding, of body hurt, are being very much underplayed now in the poems -

increasingly so; even more so in the new collection that's coming together. MM: You talked just now about shocking images and so on. Many of these images seem,

to some of us, surreal. Have you been influenced by Surrealism?

DS: One of the strong influences, I know, is science fiction, science fantasy, the whole genre of literary fantasy - which I've always enjoyed, purely as entertainment, and which I've learnt a lot from, I think; which attracts me as a mode of describing reality. The disjunction between practice and precept in the world as I am growing older also, I think, jolts me into a sense of the strangeness of people's behaviours; and this maybe is a step-off point towards creating stories - pictures and stories - in the work which are very odd, which are (for want of a better term) surreal. I also am very interested in the way in which stories can be told economically not by representationally chronicling the world but by metaphors that function interest- ingly because of their strangeness but also satisfyingly because of the way they echo and distort reality. I'm not sure if that's not a circular definition, but never mind.

MM: One of the recurring metaphors in your work is bird. Would you say something about why the metaphor of bird recurs so often in your work, and something about the multiple significances that you are, at the moment, aware of?

DS: I don't know where that image started. It may have to do with my sense of space. There definitely is a connection with theatre, and probably also with dance, both of which (as far as I'm concerned) are intimately concerned with telling stories that happen in space and time. And there's a way in which, for me, a bird - movement of birds - itself provides examples of a body existing in space and time interest- ingly. It defies gravity, falls at will. It refuses to fall. There's a sense of lightness combined with mass, a sense of vulnerability combined with the possibility of the kind of strength you get in birds of prey. They are very attractive to me, in the same way as bodies moving in space are attractive, because they are interesting to look at, and they tell stones, whether they want to or not.

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