LIMBO DAWN
I am suspended in between two worlds,
One clouded in dusk, other seeing dawn.
I look at them days rising to the morn
Wearing new robes, their self-endorsed
The Caribbean grows, roots in pre-identities
Its shoot of dewed new leaves, new identity,
They walk on fresh bridge-bar I hang on. I see
Them limbo-ing past me. Happy beings.
I see them and my mind meanders free
To traded souls who incepted in their misery.
Good ones upright, maimed prostrate, they
Fought agonizing life the limbo way.
Filial love pass it on believing re-assembly
From beast to man, man to better man as in
Egyptian Osiris, resurrected Son or the Kali.
Valiant, enduring they threw aside the chains
The slavery yoke transformed to limbo game,
They fought imperialism with imagination, I say.
They survived, now dawned through the limbo way.
EXPLANATION
I am suspended in between two worlds,
One clouded in dusk, other seeing dawn.
I look at them days rising to the morn
Wearing new robes, their self-endorsed
The Caribbean grows, roots in pre-identities
Its shoot of dewed new leaves, new identity,
They walk on fresh bridge-bar I hang on. I see
Them limbo-ing past me. Happy beings.
The poem is a take-away from Wilson Harris’s essay ‘the limbo gateway’ and various concerns expressed by him are represented through the means of a man who is in between two cultures or two worlds and its peoples. One world is the old Africa and its identity – burdened by slavery and degeneration, having no true essence of itself (as a result of years of servitude to others). It is “clouded in dusk”, referring to the fact that the older identity is primitive and it must give way to dawn, that is, the new world, the new Caribbean world with its new identity. People are moving towards this dawning age and the speaker is watching their progress. The speaker is the bridge here. He is hanging on a fresh bar- this fresh bar represents the gateway, the limbo gateway. People, to pass on to the rising world, have to limbo through a gap. It is not easy; it is a challenge that they face bravely and cross over to progress and happiness.
The new Caribbean is growing but its roots are still present in its tradition. They never forget who they truly are but they adapt and contribute to the new society whole-heartedly. They are progressive like new leaves and fresh like dew, they are working towards happiness. This limbo-ing becomes an important phenomenon of their progression and hence it becomes an important part of Caribbean identity.
I see them and my mind meanders free
To traded souls who incepted in their misery.
Good ones upright, maimed prostrate, they
Fought agonizing life the limbo way.
Filial love pass it on believing re-assembly
From beast to man, man to better man as in
Egyptian Osiris, resurrected Son or the Kali.
The speaker’s mind meanders. This is a reference to the importance of ‘imagination’ in Harris’s point of view. He believes that imagination is the one powerful element that has helped the slaves of Africa to come out and demand their identity, imagination has saved their race. Imagination has kept their minds intact in times of unfathomable sufferings and helped them derive a sense of themselves when they were traded like livestock or property. Here, their imagination gave birth to the famous limbo dance.
When slaves were crammed into ships, they sometimes did not have enough space (or were heavily chained) to stand and so they crawled like spiders (the reference to anancy – the spider hero in African literary tradition). Others could stand upright and to have something to take their minds off their plight, they invented the limbo dance where people move beneath a bar that is constantly lowered till people crawl like spiders, chest up, trying to cross the bar without touching or falling it. It was something original, something distinct to be saved and cherished. They passed limbo dance as a tradition.
The lowering of the body while crossing the bar and subsequent rising of the body is akin to progression from a primitive, subjugated race to being the people of the new world. It is what almost the whole world believes to be sacred like Osiris in Egypt, or resurrection of Christ, or the many-handed goddess of Hinduism- Kali who saves the world by creating a barrier between the devotees and evil, a symbol of remembrance of amputated limbs during slavery.
Valiant, enduring they threw aside the chains
The slavery yoke transformed to limbo game,
They fought imperialism with imagination, I say.
They survived, now dawned through the limbo way.
By inventing limbo dance in the circumstances of slavery, the courageous ancestors have turned the tables. They have turned their liability (of being a slave) into strength. Of all things, they have managed to bring entertainment and joy from slavery. Their imagination of limbo and seeing it as their medium of having a distinct identity and that has helped them move on from slavery to the world of progression and development. Limbo has thus become a gateway to reach the dawn from dusk, it is a bridge through which people have to pass (they have to realize it as their distinct identity) to reach the new world.
REFRENCES
· Harris, Wilson. The Limbo Gateway.
· McWatt, Mark. “Some observations on the notions of history, time and the imagination in the thought of Wilson Harris.”
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(dance)
· http://www.moadsf.org/about/themes.html : MOAD - museum of the African Diaspora.
