Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Mutabaruka is in the spotlight as Jamaica Association of Dramatic Artistes turns the 'Spotlight on Poetry' at the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre, Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts, on Sunday. The event also featured The Nomadz and I AM. - ANDREW SMITH/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
WHEN MUTABARUKA sat on a chair onstage at the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, on Sunday morning, poetry was literally in the spotlight.
The Jamaica Association of Dramatic Artistes (JADA) figuratively put performance poetry into its bi-monthly 'Spotlight' series, with the focus being on Mutabaruka as well as on The Nomaddz and I AM groups.
Sonia Mills, JADA's chairman, helped the programme along from the opening clips of the film Sankofa, in which Mutabaruka has a prominent role, to Verene Shepherd's closing discussion of plans to mark the 200th year of the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
MOST SUCCESSFUL BLACK FILM
And he discussed the film, which he said had been called the most successful independent black film ever made, before giving a synopsis of his work in poetry, starting from the first one in school ("birds are beautiful things to see/just to see them flying free"). "She (the teacher) read it in front of the class and that started me out to say I am writing poems," Mutabaruka said.
From there, he developed in school and eventually had a poem published in Swing magazine about Festival ("yes me fren, a festival again/run come look, pot a cook"). "It was well received," he said. There was then his first book, Outcry, and he "started to read poems at little functions, any little activity".
Then, in 1981 Jimmy Cliff put on a big concert in Somerton, St. James, and "Mortimer Planno and some other Rasses knew of my poems and recommended me to perform". He did, and guitarist, Earl 'Chinna' Smith asked him to come to Kingston to record the poem, Everytime I Hear De Soun, which became the first poem to hit the pop charts in Jamaica. That led to the album Check It and a performance on Reggae Sunsplash. Some promoters of a concert in Los Angeles were there and asked Mutabaruka to perform. He did and the press was all over him after.
They wanted to know "who was this person, without shirt, without shoes, chain pon him han', an a Russian flag an' a American flag ..." Mutabaruka said.
PERFORMS MUSIC
He said these days he performs mostly without music, "just me, reading poems before 10,000, 20,000 people, sometimes 300, sometimes a classroom".
In the brief 'Tongues of Fire' performance segment, The Nomaddz employed a guitar, one of them singing and the other three delivering poetry in the "ballad of a misled boy" whose "father is a cokehead/mother is a whore". The I AM trio did an excerpt from the production Sextra, warning about sexually transmitted diseases, and Mutabaruka used excellent body language to do the wordless, How To Write a Poem.
Shepherd outlined plans for the bicentenary of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade's abolition, which begins on January 2, 2007, and ends in January 2008, noting that there will be arrival point monuments placed at major ports in Jamaica where ships arrived with enslaved Africans.
