Kwame Dawes

"I have been trying to remember when last I introduced an Emmy award winner," Professor Edward Baugh said with marvellous understatement in the Institute of Jamaica's lecture theatre last Sunday afternoon, and the members of the audience laughed.

The Emmy winner, Professor Kwame Dawes, was among the laughers for the moment, although he would soon be at the podium to make his input in the National Library of Jamaica's distinguished lecture series. He spoke about a topic and person close to his heart, as he expounded On Being a Great Minor Poet and Writer: The Importance of Neville Dawes.

Neville Dawes is his father. He was not in the audience. He died 25 years ago.

Unusual for him, by his own admission, Dawes read most of the lecture, saying he wanted to get it down right. Occasionally, though, he broke into his preferred mode, speaking without referring to a pre-prepared text. It was delivered on ground that would have been familiar to Neville Dawes, a former director of the Institute of Jamaica.

The 'minor', it appears, came from what Dawes said was his father's relatively small body of work ("Neville Dawes did not generate a lot of inches, as they say"), among them the novels Interim and The Last Enchantment and the poetry collection, Sepia. A Peepal Tree Press collection, Fugue and Other Poems: Poems on Other Poems covers the material from Sepia, along with an introductory essay by Kwame Dawes. The greatness stems from the quality of that work and also the contribution he made to shaping other writers.

a good poet

"I always remember my father as a good poet," Dawes said. However, when he turned to prose, Neville Dawes' explanation was "I had outgrown verse".

As he grew as a writer Kwame Dawes penned plays - which his father did not - and he never invited his father to see the productions at the then Creative Arts Centre at the UWI's Mona Campus. "I was intimidated by his stature," he said. He never showed his father his verse as "his only response would be 'needs work'".

His father's work

When Kwame Dawes was ready to show his father his work, Neville Dawes was dead.

His father's work, though, caught up with Kwame Dawes on tapes of a reading of his work by several noted writers, among them Edward Baugh reading from The Last Enchantment. Listening to it, Kwame Dawes said it struck him his father had not abandoned poetry.

"He had simply shifted the superficial framing of his verse," Dawes said, reading from the novel to illustrate his point. He also read one of his father's poems from the same moment that the extract from the novel dealt with, commenting on the quality of the verse with "that's massive stuff".

"My father's poetic centre was Sturge Town," Dawes said.

Neville Dawes died when he said he was working on his third novel. Kwame Dawes has not been able to locate "even a fragment" of it.

Although, "as a writer my father was modest to a fault", Dawes said, "I could tell that my father was not intimidated by any other writer." Others were impressed by him, among them Edward Brathwaite and Andrew Salkey.

"He believed that his writing was secondary to his family, work with other writers and work with the Institute of Jamaica," Dawes said. That has influenced his own perspective of placing people, relationships and family above the idea of getting the writing done.

Also, Dawes said, "My father was a teacher, a really good teacher. I never forget that."

He spoke briefly about his father's "untimely departure" from the Institute of Jamaica, saying "We lost something in the process." However, he said, "We can retrieve that."

what writing can be

In the end, Dawes said, the 'minor poet' has left us the aspiration for what our art and our writing can be."

He thanked the audience for listening to him stumble his way through "this talk", closing with, "hopefully it has done the old man some justice".

The event was hosted by Professor Carolyn Cooper, Winsome Hudson from the National Library of Jamaica, outlining the lecture series' purpose. Among them is to revive the tradition of going to downtown Kingston on a Sunday afternoon. Tanya Batson-Savage, speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Information, Youth and Culture, said that while the future of publishing is uncertain, it is clear that the lives of stories are not. "Whether you twitter or tweet, stories will continue," she said. Speaking to the writer's role in telling our story, she said, "Each time a Jamaican picks up a pen one less grandmother is forgotten."

Members of Jamaica Youth Theatre, directed by Carolyn Allen, put drama into an excerpt from Interim, and dub into the poem 'Fugue'.