“Mek Wi Talk Bout de Bottom a de Sea”: Mutabaruka's Submarine Poetics

Abstract

IN HIS MULTIPLE ROLES AS POET, performing artist, philosopher, lecturer, motivational speaker, film star, television and radio show host, BlakkMuzik selecta, soundscape designer for Caribbean Fashion Week and himself a fashion icon, Allan Hope inhabits a world of endless possibilities in which the power and authority of this extraordinary Rastaman are fully manifested. Of these many intricately connected roles, it is Mutabaruka's calling as poet that I highlight here. In the tradition of thegriot, the oral historian who poetically documents the history of his community, Mutabaruka writes and speaks into conscious memory our collective narrative of survival in the African diaspora. Indeed, Mutabaruka feeds us life-sustaining spiritual food for he is also, literally and metaphorically, a master ital chef.From Mutabaruka's broad poetic repertoire I have selected a single album, Melanin Man, released in 1994, as the subject of this essay.1 The body of work collected there represents the wide range of the poet's preoccupations: race and pride (Garvey); black nationalist politics (Beware); the legacies of colonialism (People's Court II); regional integration (Haiti); and cultural resistance (Miss Lou). In the latter poem, Mutabaruka celebrates the sweet sounds of Louise Bennett's affirmation of Jamaican cultural identity through nation language:Miss Lou, Miss LouWi love yuh fi trueWhen yuh chat it soun' so sweetAn' all a Jamaica jus a skin dem teeth.The themes of Melanin Man recur on Mutabaruka's radio and television programmes, in the many motivational talks he has given and on the tracks he skilfully cuts and mixes as the selecta for his BlakkMuzik sound system. The fourth track on the Melanin Man CD, Killin, is the source of the title for this essay, Mek Wi Talk Bout de Bottom a de Sea. In an informal interview, Mutabaruka disclosed that the poem was inspired by a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which opened in 1993, a year before the album was released. This visit explains why Mutabaruka frames the performance poem with a brief meditation on the role of museums, libraries and public monuments as sites of communal memory and formal education:Everyone remembers their pastBuildin monuments museumsWritin booksSo that their children children will never forgetWe must all learn from de pastSo as not to repeat those thingsThat have kept us back for over five hundred years.Having established in the opening verse the human need to memorialise the past - especially to document those historical facts that can be so systematically erased from collective memory by the perpetrators of horrific crimes - Mutabaruka repeatedly invites us to talk. This is not idle chatter. Talk is an incantation, a mystical vibration, an intellectual engagement, a reasoning that dispels lies and reclaims truth:Mek wi talkMek wi talkMek wi talk, mek wi talk, mek wi talkMek wi bout de killinDe killin dat dem neva mentionKillin was their intentionFor Mutabaruka, seemingly immaterial talk becomes the potent ideological equivalent of imposing material structures such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This, of course, does not mean that Mutabaruka would disdain the building of museums to house our history. I am sure he would honour the sustained work of Donna McFarlane and her colleagues at the Institute of Jamaica who have rehabilitated Garvey's Liberty Hall in downtown Kingston, transforming it into a world-class museum and living cultural centre. I, myself, look forward to the day when there will be an equivalent museum on Rastafari in Jamaica. Under the leadership of Dr Jake Homiak, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in the US capital has made a start to exhibit Rastafari. But that is certainly not enough. The very title of the exhibition is problematic: One Love: Discovering Rastafari! …