Slade Hopkinson, Poet

Hopkinson wrote a couple of short stories, and his poetry was widely published in journals such as Bim, Savacou, New World and in anthologies such as Anansesem, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse and Voiceprint. Snowscape With Signature, from which “The Jaguar and the Theorist of Négritude” is taken, was published by Peepal Tree in 1993, with an introductory memoir by Mervyn Morris.

The Jaguar and the Theorist of Négritude
The Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, apropos of the literary movement known as Négritude, has said somewhere that a tiger does not go about proclaiming its tigritude: it just pounces.
The jungle, grown impatient with us all,

Has marched on military feet,

Has assaulted the rice and sugar coastland,

Checkerboard of historical habit.

The jungle’s retribution

Has invaded the capital.

In every street, branched giants have uprooted houses.

Monkeys with green faces and critical eyes

Open doors or climb into windows.

Terrible is their barking laughter.



Contrivances of our desperate spirit fail.

The sham we thought was our reality boils,

Evaporates, is gone, not even a fume

Remains. Inside each hollow skull

Something rattles - perhaps a knuckle

Of the dead, still weeping man, that, as he rubbed

The dusty trickle of his tears, became unhinged

And fell behind the absence of his eyes.

Ant-bears scribble with their snouts and tongues

Daintily on the infested skin of corpses.

Fleshy flowers, beating like live hearts,

Decorate the starkness of our pavements.

Troops of vipers move deployed, my love.

Essential horror has occurred, my love.



In the middle of an important street

An inventor of the black man’s soul lies dead.

His fingers clutch neither machete nor bomb,

But an anguished book he wrote - published in England.



O jaguar, lady, muse, teacher, it was you

Who banged your jaws into his throat, then ripped.
***

Courtesy of Peepal Tree Press