The Rain Review of Books
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Wayde Compton, Performance Bond.
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Reg Johanson
The Rain 3:3 (August-October 2005): 1
People want different things from Wayde Compton. Some want him for hip
hop, some want him as an activist, some want him as a community
booster, some even want him as the saviour of poetry itself. Writing in
the Georgia Straight, Jim Christy asks, “Does [Performance
Bond ] revive poetry? Rescue it from the smothering grasp of the
academics, on the one hand, and the know-nothings on the other? The
answer is, unfortunately, no” (Georgia Straight 10 February
2005). I can’t decide whether inviting the punch-drunk Christy—whose
understanding of poetry ends with the Beats—to review Performance
Bond was an act of ignorance or spite on the Straight’s
part.
But the ambitions of Compton’s work do inspire high, if sometimes
bizarre, expectations. His first two books conjured something new: a
literary history of black BC (Bluesprint: Black British Columbian
Literature and Orature, Arsenal Pulp 2001) and a history of black
BC as epic poetry (49th Parallel Psalm,
Advance/Arsenal Pulp 1999). Compton’s imagination of history in these
two books is inspired by Kamau Braithwaite’s “tidalectics”: “a way of
seeing history as a palimpsest, where generations overlap generations,
and eras wash over eras like tides on a stretch of beach. […]
Repetition, whether in the form of ancestor worship or the
poem-histories of the griot, informs black ontologies more than
does the Europeanist drive for perpetual innovation […] In a European
framework, the past is something to be gotten over […] in tidalectics,
we do not improve upon the past, but are ourselves versions
of the past” (Bluesprint 17). Thus the images in Compton’s
poetry of wheels, discs, records; the anachronisms; the name-checks,
roll calls, avatars, ghosts, haunts; possessions by and masks of Voodoo
deities; the playing with and among the fantasies of Afrocentrist
history; and the fascination with crossings and “the mix”, which for
Compton always point to the creative impurity and generative
instability of diaspora.
In Performance Bond Compton continues to work with history,
most notably in “Rune”, “a poem about Hogan’s Alley, a neighbourhood in
which most of Vancouver’s black residents lived during the first
two-thirds of the twentieth century. The core of Hogan’s Alley was
demolished in 1970 by Vancouver City Council to make way for an
overpass [the Georgia Viaduct]” (10). As in previous work, Compton is
trying to write, or conjure, a black community into existence, not only
to re-present what the City has attempted to erase, but also to create
something that wasn’t there before. In “Lost-Found Landmarks of Black
Vancouver”, for example, Compton offers portraits of black community
institutions that never existed. Photographer Robert Sherrin and artist
Mykol Knighton collaborate with Compton to produce photos of (real)
buildings bearing (fake) signage that reads “Strathcona Colored
People’s Benevolent Society of Vancouver” at 227 Union Street, “The
False Creek Moslem Temple” at 315 Prior Street, “The Pacific Negro
Working Men’s Association” at 221 East Georgia Street. These
organizations never existed, but they do now. This is why I like the
notion of conjuring to describe Compton’s historical work: he knows
that remembering is inventing. He invents a past which locates Hogan’s
Alley within the larger context of black migrations, settlements and
un-settlements. Compton’s conjuring of the past makes something new in
the present, sends it back in time, and offers a community to the
future. His writing strives toward the condition of the veve,
“part
of a Voodoo ritual in Haiti. The person doing the ceremony takes
a handful of something and draws an image on the ground or on the floor
of the temple” (117). The veve “has the power to actually
invoke
[…] It’s magic. It’s more than language, it’s sorcery, or worship. It’s
a portal between worlds” (118).
But this notion of the veve also makes a problem for
Compton’s urbanism. The veve appeals for its ability to
make-present, but it is also “ephemeral” and “can drift away in the
wind or be eaten by birds” (121). What are we to make of this in the
context of pre-Olympic, condo-crazy Vancouver? Strathcona is now a
gentrified and security-patrolled suburb of the downtown business
district, and the Downtown Eastside itself is always threatened by the
same narratives that buried Hogan’s Alley under the Georgia Viaduct,
and before that, the communities of the Coast Salish—narratives of
“economic
revitalization”, “highest and best use”, and of
out-of-control criminal activity that threatens property values and the
people who value it. As Compton imagines a black Strathcona resident
saying in 1970, “They are writing us out of this part of the City; /
they are reporting us away; they are bylawing us blank” (148).
Compton’s
own efforts with the Hogan’s Alley
Memorial Project to embed physical memorials to the
black community in Strathcona suggest the importance of a record that
doesn’t vanish so easily.
But that’s not all. You get a lot of value for your money in a Wayde
Compton book. Performance Bond also contains a CD, an
incarnation / avatar / remix / variation / tidaletic revision of “The
Reinventing Wheel”, a turntable performance “involving two turntables,
two dub plates and various pre-recorded vinyl” (9). “The Reinventing
Wheel” has been remixed twice before as “The Cargo Cult Mix” and “The
Rolling Wave Mix” with Jason de Couto. The version presented in Performance
Bond is the “Ouroboros Mix”, with Trevor Thompson of The Rain
and
The Sidewalk. In “The
Reinventing Wheel” Compton is interested in the meaning of hip hop as a
representation of blackness and resistance within a global economy:
“Act like you know./ I take my cue out of crates and boxes / speak by
outfoxing rock. That’s hip hop / in the boondocks, / the relief package
drop zone” (108). Compton imagines hip hop—music developed and
signifying within a specific time and place, New York and L.A. in the
80s and 90s—as a “cargo cult” in which local conditions beyond those
centers alter and renew the meanings of the music: “I echo New York
back / like a code-cracker. / Reality hacker. A Crusoe” (108). He’s
critical of the limited identities offered by hip hop—“The age /
demands bling bling, not Mau Mau” (102)—but ultimately it’s the Spirit
that Compton is interested in, the Spirit African-American writer
Ishmael Reed called “Jes’ Grew”, the multiple and hybrid yet constant
and continuing forms the music takes, “the ghosts in [the] Technics.
There is immortality / in the track. A snake / chasing its tail. The
groove / moving the text. The descendant’s speak / unsheathing the
record. The beat / of skin remembered. The donning / of masks we
become, membered” (103-4).
Maybe the best move Compton makes is to show how the experience
of
migration, settlement, displacement, and diaspora—of music and of
people—is not limited to black folks but is shared by the millions of
people who suffer the cruelties of capitalist globalization. People are
driven from their homes by the effects of SAPs (Structural Adjustment
Programs) which are sponsored by wealthy nations, then the wealthy
nations close their borders to the people they have displaced: “if you
arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to
outlaw you. […] there is no […] hope of consistency in foreign and
foreigner policy or obduracy of floodgate metaphors and death sentence
deportations. the backbeat back-bone of the chorus that screeches
‘back
home!’ is the drum and bass treble track alliteration of
Koma-Koma-Komagatamaru” (31). The distorting fantasy of Canada as a
primarily “white nation” that should be proud of itself for “tolerating
diversity” is challenged in Performance Bond, which offers many
different, overlapping Columbias to displace the primacy of whiteness:
“Chinese Columbia / Haida Columbia / Punjabi Columbia / Japanese
Columbia / African Columbia / Vietnamese Columbia / Squamish Columbia /
Jewish Columbia / Salish Columbia” (44). This list reminds me of Che
Guevera’s call for “One, two, three, many Vietnams!” In both there is
the call for a structural adjustment different from the one imagined by
World Bank economists. The irony, however, is that unlike Asian,
African, and South American countries, North America never had its
“Vietnam”. The colonizers still rule, the indigenous people whose land
was stolen from them have no share in its wealth. Does the
re-colonization of the world by global capital mean that aboriginal
claims are obsolete? That the need to decolonize has been overtaken by
History? Or is, as the Anishinabe poet Annharte says, “first a first
for first nations?” This situation makes Compton’s vision of multiple
shared Columbias more problematic.
Compton’s project is incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging. Performance
Bond moves it ahead through collaboration with other artists and
the exploration of the mediums of photography and music. In partnership
with Karina Vernon and David Chariandy, Compton has also become a
publisher, founding Commodore Books to publish black writers.
It’s
enough.