Protest in West Indian Folk Poetry‪.‬

Folk poetry is simply poetry that takes for its theme, the aspirations, problems, plight and general concerns of the folk, and it is articulated in their own voice with the attendant speech rhythms. To protest against their plight in their own language is to bridge the gap between poet and people. In folk poetry, this gap between audience and poet is bridged by the use of dialect and the actual audience /poet response. Therefore, the dialect poems of Claude McKay or Linton Kwesi Johnson have a way of creating an immediate intimacy between poet and people. This is enhanced even further when the poet is or used to be a member of the same socioeconomic class as his audience--the folk. Thus Walcott's language is decidedly different from that of Evan Jones or Paul Keens-Douglas. The atmosphere of communality in the poems of Evan Jones, for example, "The song of the Banana Man" and Paul Keens-Douglas' "Tim Tim." is in a sense not too far removed from the lyrics of reggae and calypso; they are all residues of an oral tradition. Prior to slavery and colonisation, the oral tradition in Africa was an intrinsic pan of its cultural fabric. The assimilation forced by colonialism substantially altered the African culture of the slaves. When Derek Walcott contends that "to change your language/you must change life," he is metaphorically expressing the loss of a rich oral tradition as the slaves entered the New World. With the new language they learnt a new culture. This is Walcott's "false folklorique" which follows. What the transported African lost was "the technique of expression central to entertainment. The verbal techniques or oral art embodied in the speaker-audience relationship of the poet." (1)