ABSTRACT
Brathwaite exploits a range of moods and voices in the remainder of the poem to convey the traumas of history which make such an articulation necessary. More recently, David Dabydeen, in Coolie Odyssey and Slave Song, frequently deploys what he describes as ‘the erotic energies of the colonial experience’.10 Dabydeen configures this as a fraught encounter between the black man (in Dabydeen’s poetry, ‘black’ encompasses both ‘Indian’ and ‘African’) and a Miranda figure who functions as the ‘forbidden fruit’ or prized possession of the white man. So, in ‘Slave Song’, the speaker fantasizes, or boasts:
Is so when yu dun dream she pink tit, Totempole she puss, Leff yu teetmark like a tattoo in she troat!11
