Duppies by D.S. Marriott

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*Duppies is out of print*

In Duppies, D.S. Marriott writes a poetry of grime, the London street music, one that is “late shift, zero hour.” Mixing lyric tonality with grime’s aggression, grit, and speed, this is a coruscating study of the racial politics of austerity. And it is an erudite lyric, one attentive to the continuing legacies of slavery, how this history shapes and defines everything from the law to the understanding of who or what is human.

D.S. MARRIOTT is originally from the UK, but now lives in Oakland, California. His poetry is often associated with the Cambridge school of poetry. And as a scholar, he has been a leading theorist of afro-pessimism. Recent books of poetry include: Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being, is forthcoming from Stanford University in June, 2018.

Excerpt

PREFACE: 16 BARS

Grime is late shift, zero hour, it makes a beeline for bare life, but what it lays bare leaves everyone cold. Grime is the thread that links afro-pessimism to afro-futurism, but its role proceeds without ties or duplicity.

Grime is post-work and post-brexit, its riddims respond to the necessity in which I exist – see these wheels, they may be brand spanking new, but under the bonnet there is fever and anguish.

Grime is last orders, a mugging made up by thefts, an evocation stripped down to the bone. It expels pagans with a fierce rigour and method in which only the coldest excel.

Grime is disjunctive, a useless meditation on parataxis; think of the absolute having to earn its living, but finishing up with hardly anything at all.

Grime is payback for n-words and asboes. It has dominion but no license for each dissolve is charged with browns and the blacks. It makes music from a manor that is not-me, but what it gives has neither use-value nor beauty.

Grime is a medium of the unknown, it refuses everything but possibility: its violence is one without immunity, but its real is dispossession, and is inconsolable without knowing it. Black-owned the skin, the strut, the churches, and emcees.

January 8, 2019

$18.00 | 9781934639269

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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

Marriott’s poems broker a profound engagement with the violence involved in the jurisdiction of love as well as the jurisdiction of colonialism… These poems are something else. –John Wilkinson