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Slave Song by David Dabydeen

eveningreverie's review

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challenging dark fast-paced

5.0

I reference Dabydeen's Slave Song pretty regularly as one of the greatest examples of an author completely lampooning the literary establishment through a classic bait and switch: the "translation" of another language or dialect into English. Every single scholar who read this book when it was released seemed to only pay attention to the "critical apparatus:" the "English translations" of the Guyanese Creole that Dabydeen initially wrote Slave Song in. Considering these translations aren't... well... accurate (and we can talk translation theory all day, but I mean literally not accurate), it's a fairly easy reach to conclude that most of the literary establishment made no effort to read and contend with Dabydeen's original creole. The poems themselves are fantastically written and make use of a lot of cultural knowledge, which is fantastic in its own right. There's a lot here to be unpacked, all owing to the brilliance of Dabydeen's writing and his brilliance in highlighting the double standards nonwhite authors face in the literary community.

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