Marriott, D.S.: Before Whiteness

City Lights, paperback

Publication Date: April 26, 2022

Publisher Marketing: A searing indictment of anti-Black social and political violence by British Jamaican poet and leading scholar of Afro-pessimism D.S. Marriott.

"Like Aimé Césaire, whom he sees as a revolutionary black modernist who delegitimized modernism’s imitative structure of readymade experimentation, Marriott’s work resists categorization."—Sandeep Parmar, author of Eidolon

A book that turns Blackness into a question of reading, seeking to at once destroy and reimagine the various traditions of inscribing and decoding Blackness in poetry, Before Whiteness draws on a sweeping range of cultural references from the medieval Beowulf to 19th century German Romantic poet/philosopher Hölderlin to contemporary UK grime rapper Stormzy. Born in Britain but now living in the U.S., Marriott trains his analytical gaze on such grim American subject matter as the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade and the lynching of Melby Dotson in Louisiana, yet also finds inspiration in African American poets Stephen Jonas and Bob Kaufman and the artist Kara Walker. Other works find him celebrating fallen poetic comrades like Sean Bonney and Dambudzo Marechera.

The book ends with "Another Burning," an ambitious and agonized memorialization of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where an out-of-control fire spread throughout a high-rise building of council flats due to neglect and unsafe materials, resulting in the deaths of 72 poor, largely ethnic minority residents. The poem is both a mournful elegy for the victims and stirring rebuke of the structural racism of contemporary UK society that allowed such a preventable and even forewarned-of tragedy to occur.

With its necessarily critical transatlantic perspective, Before Whiteness provides poetic resistance to the injustices experienced by people of color in the postcolonial Anglophone world.