In adapting Kamau Brathwaite’s “Letter SycoraX,” my medium of choice felt immediate. Through immersing the reader in its spontaneous punctuation, opaque spelling, novel typography, wordplay, and neologisms, Brathwaite/Caliban’s poem builds an environment of improvisation that poises itself for translation into music. Following this, the aim of my piece is to form a musical stream of consciousness that retains the lyrical entropy of the original work; while based somewhat in the C natural minor scale, my recording is abound with accidentals, minor seconds, and tritones that echo the dissonant poetic voices of Brathwaite/Caliban. |
I rely on a variety of registers, leaving nearly no piano key unused: the medium of improv, as does Brathwaite/Caliban’s medium of the digital poem, renders a playground for self-expression. As I wrote in my essay on the poem and its creolization of Caliban, “Letter SycoraX” essentially records the speaker’s inability to reconcile his plantations of self-identity: the outer, fit with the material conditions presented by the plantation institution, with the inner, the mental inscape emergent from those material conditions. While Brathwaite’s Caliban is equipped with modern technology, as denoted by the role of his computer, and what modern culture offers to explore self-identity through the narratives of plays, television, music, and history, the modernity of this version of Caliban only makes clearer the fragmentation of his current self. This is shown through the recurrent exclamation of “mamma,” which I chose as my title. | "Yet a sittin dung here in front a dis stone face |
Nonetheless, I bring up the critic Stanley Fish's school of affective stylistics, formed around the notion that reading serves to not just extract meaning from, but in fact builds the text, alongside critic Norman Holland's related school of psychological reader-response thought that a reader's individualized motives necessarily impact their reading and so the psychological impact on the reader enables a unique method of measuring and interpreting a text. In the act of improvisation, I necessarily inflect my own musical proclivities and textual attitudes on Brathwaite's/Caliban's original work, and so is the case for any other improviser attempting what I did. While I imagine certain concepts of the piece would arise in most musical adaptations of "Letter SycoraX," such as the dissonant voices and chaotic use of language, any such attempt to adapt would still be structured around the unique, individual preferences and personality of the improvisor that are necessarily removed from what Brathwaite himself might envision. Especially in appealing to a completely different set of physical senses, my improv helps build my own rendition of "Letter SycoraX" infused with my particular interaction with Brathwaite's postcolonial and postmodern concepts; I would absolutely adore listening to another's improvisatory adaptation of the text and seeing what choices get retained and what gets completely transformed in comparison to mine!