FROM WHY WE WRITE: CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN CANADIAN POETS AND NOVELISTS, INTERVIEWS

H Nigel Thomas:
Some of your poems interrogate the way Western languages have sullied Blackness.  I wonder whether you would like to comment on this.

Wayde Compton:
For me, the way that I have been playing with languages reflects the way that I received Black English.  At home my father spoke a kind of Black English.  He has lived in Canada longer than he lived in the States, but he still has the accent; but my knowledge of it comes also from records and mass media.  I speak standard English and most of the people that I knew growing up in Vancouver—other than my friends’ fathers who were from somewhere else—would speak as their neighbours do, which is a kind of standard English.  I think I address that in the book [Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2001)] through certain characters that are dealing with a second wave of Black English through hip-hop.  In a certain way, it’s an ironic position to be in: your father speaks a certain language, you lose it, and then try to readopt it in your twenties.  There’s that.  But looking at the literary aspect, and taking into account all the stuff that I’ve read, probably my biggest influence in this has been Kamau Brathwaite: his way of using rhythm and breaking words on syllables.  I would read half of his poem and stop and go back and read it out loud.  The Arrivants was a book I was reading over and over again.

[And later on the Brathwaite audio/visual style of breaking words on syllables:]

...you read a line through once and you have to read it again. I like that splitting, that continual splitting, those forks in the road. It's disruptive. It forces a slower reading, and suggests multiple meanings, and asks for full reader participation.

—
Wayde Compton’s latest books are After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award) and The Outer Harbour: Stories. He co-founded the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project in 2002, to help preserve the public memory of Vancouver’s black community, and is the program director of Creative Writing in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser University. This excerpt is from Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists, edited with an introduction by H Nigel Thomas (2006).