“Keeping my slave side well versed”: Fred D’Aguiar’s use of ottava rima in Bloodlines

Abstract

This article explores Fred D’Aguiar’s use of ottava rima in his novel in verse Bloodlines. It considers poetry as a minority genre within postcolonial writing and ottava rima as a minority form within the genre of poetry. D’Aguiar’s choice of form can be examined in relation to his subject, which is the rape of a black slave by a white man, the love that follows the rape and the consequences of their relationship. The article approaches the form of the poem from two perspectives. First, it contends that the deliberate foregrounding of form emphasizes the literary connection to the past, using figures of rhetoric to express the paradoxical nature of slavery; second, it calls upon the concept of voice, used in psychoanalysis as a notion covering both sound and sense, to show how D’Aguiar mobilizes the resources of sound and rhyme to explore the emotional impact of his story.

Keywords:

• Fred D’Aguiar
• Caribbean poetry
• postcolonial poetry
• ottava rima

Notes

1. This remark should not be interpreted as implying that Dabydeen makes a nostalgic use of forms like the work song. While his poems suggest indigenous forms, he explains in the postscript to the collection that while writing the poems he was “taken by the muscularity of the northern alliterative language” as he had been reading “Sir Gawain/The Pearl etc.” (Dabydeen [1984] 2005, 67). His use of the pastoral form in “Guyana Pastoral” creates a tension between form and theme similar to what is found in Bloodlines.

2. Ramazani (2014) compares Achebe’s novel and Okigbo’s poetic sequence in terms of “the literary representation of the British colonization of Igboland” (25). He points out, among other things, that while a reader might take Achebe’s novel for “a mirror held up to history”, poetry’s “more formal contrivances” will enable the reader to see “the affective and social worlds” that they embody (30).

3. Ramazani (2014) also discusses the trend toward writing novels in verse, mentioning, for instance, Vikram Seth’s use of Onegin stanzas in The Golden Gate (1986), although he does not refer to D’Aguiar’s novel. He sees them as somewhat imperfect forms of hybridization in which “their plots and characters seem like prosaic scaffolding erected to enable poetic construction, or to switch metaphors, novelistic hooks on which to hang poetry” (21).

4. This is the title of the Tanner Lecture given by Toni Morrison in 1988, published in 1989 in Michigan Quarterly Review. In a passage in which D’Aguiar’s narrator hesitates to describe the rape of Faith by six men, he explicitly refers to “unspeakable acts” ([2000] 2001, 37).

5. This is a reference to the final line of the poem “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats [1933] 1956, 214).

6. Slant rhyme (also called off-rhyme or near-rhyme) “substitutes similar sound for identical sound” (Turco 1986, 41; original emphasis).

7. In her analysis of a passage from Bloodlines, Catherine Addison points out that the couplet form of the ottava rima underscores “the proverbial quality of the utterance” often found in the final lines (2004, 143).