, be it literary or linguistic, capable of counterbalancing so many gaps in knowledge and understanding. They offer rather a number of different forms of presence -auditory, visual

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S. Welsh and . Lawson, Experiments in Brokenness: The Creative Use of Creole in David Daydeen's Slave Song, pp.27-46

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J. Derrida and J. Lacan, Yet the West Indian teacher, with a minor and vulnerable status in the Western academy, knows with what his bread is buttered. And it's French butter. Instead of devising a West Indian poetic in which to read West Indian literature, the teacher reaches for brand names and market leaders -Lacan, Derrida et al." (45). For both Derrida and Lacan, the notion of absence, seen from a linguistic, philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective, is central, presence appearing as an illusion, The poet refers specifically to two well-known European figures who are present in current critical approaches to postcolonial literature

, Louise Bennett (Jamaica) and Una Marson (Jamaica) contributed to theorizing and practicing a poetry based on Caribbean experience and language before David Dabydeen began publishing poetry. However the difficulty these poets encountered in establishing the critical credibility of their endeavours, particularly in the use of Creole, suggests that Dabydeen's aesthetic approach in Slave Song can still be seen as innovative and therefore

, Apart from my early childhood in Guyana, I was brought up in England and no Caribbean literature was taught in schools. So I was wholly ignorant of the creole poetry of Edward Burns

, Dabydeen does not make any reference to this connection, either in the notes to the poem or in other writings. However intertextual echoes in a writer's work are not always explicit or identified

, Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain" (1997) and "From Care to Cambridge" (1998) as well as in the notes and postscript of the poems. This dimension has been addressed by critics dealing with the collection, notably by Lee M. Jenkins in a chapter, 2004.

, How did that interest in the visual come about?" he mentioned "the absence of the visual in terms of the fine arts in Guyana" (164) and talked about his discovery of the paintings of Paul Klee. He has written a book on Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth century English Art, a novel entitled A Harlot's Progress, revolving around Hogarth's prints, and a long poem entitled Turner inspired by Turner's painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). His discussion of Hogarth's painting A Scene from the Tempest, in his essay "Hogarth and the Canecutter, Dabydeen is interested in art and visual representations of slavery, as evidenced by his comments on art in his essays and in interviews, in particular in an interview with Lars Eckstein, in which, in answer to Eckstein's question, 2000.

. Long, She cries but the wind doesn't blow / And they're wrong and strong / And they work her and they break her till fowlcock's crow / Who sees, who hears when her belly bursts, when her mouth splashes blood? // Only the jumbie-umbrella that pokes up its white eye from the mud // Under the tamarind tree where the sun doesn't shine / They take up spade, they dig deep hole, they hide her from their minds / Her father searches the bush, how he hacks, how he's hoarse with calling! / Her mother calls a priest, kills a calf, prays to Krishna, Christ, Allah! / Nine months since they've searched and they've shouted

, Paul Alpers reviews some of the ways in which critics over the years have defined pastoral as a mode of expression: "we are told that pastoral 'is a double longing after innocence and happiness'[reference to Renato Poggioli's The Oaten Flute, 1975.

, that it is 'that mode of viewing common experience through the medium of the rural world, pp.437-445

E. Gray, Dabydeen talked about the authors he read while at Cambridge: "I dwelt mostly on Hardy, Lawrence, Strindberg and medieval poetry reading practically all I could, including the very obscure books (Hardy's play for mummers, for example, more or less forgotten by all" (63). In evoking Hardy, he went on to say, Victoria Dressed in Black: Poetry in an Elegiac Age

, Are you sick? What's the matter with you? What's wrong? / And your hands are weak, trembling, and your mouth moves / But there're no words, and your eye stares out at the field, long, long / But you do not see the calves stir and struggle to suck / And you do not hear the blue-saki's song high in the jamoon tree

, In Dabydeen's poem, the trochaic metre of the line echoes the nursery rhyme. interview: "David Dabydeen, looking back in 1990 on Brathwaite's use of nation language, calls it 'polite' and 'conventional' because, This counting rhyme exists in many versions and has been reproduced intertextually in numerous ways, as in Congreve's

, For a presentation of the phonetic representation of the sounds of Guyanese English Creole, pp.7-9

, One of the most striking examples of this can be found in Sam Selvon's use of Creole in The Lonely Londoners. As his narrator tells the story of trying to understand and adapt to London, his language, struggling to embrace a new world

, Marc McWatt has shown how the context of the poem is further complicated by the speaker's reference to his penis being "happy as a Hottentot," which "does not seem an image that would be native or natural either to the slave in Guyana or to the aloof translator

, Woodsmoke sweet in my nose like incense / Wake up, wake up the lot of you, wake up you children, wake up you man / With the sunshine in your eyes and the river flowing / And brown doves bursting from the trees, and the kiskadees / And the whole savannah swimming green and glowing! // Water to fetch, bottom-house to daub afresh, bucket to mend, clothes to beat / Wake up you children, work's not done, work's to do / Cutlass to sharpen, wood to chop, fence to rebuild that the bull broke down, / What's that man stretching his hand and yawning for! / Hear how the cows bawl in the yard, they're swollen with milk / The goats groan, they want to graze, and sheep keep coughing, Roll roti! roll roti! roll roti! roll roti! : Curry cooking in the karahie / Bora boiling with the bagee