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Q&A with Kwame Dawes

Ghanaian-Jamaican poet and author Kwame Dawes might just be literature's Commitments - the hardest-working writer in the world. Now a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, after doing the same job at the University of South Carolina for nearly two decades, and editor of literary journal , he is also the author of 16 award-winning volumes of poetry, plus numerous novels, non-fiction books and plays. Born in Ghana, he lived briefly in London before moving to Jamaica aged nine and staying there until his mid-20s. In Hong Kong for a residency at City University, he spoke to .

I'm driven by two basic things. One is deadlines. But also, I've come to trust that I'm processing several things in my head at the same time. I just know when something seems ready to be put down.

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The making of poetry is something of a freak show. The poet must understand empathy - the process of becoming but not totally becoming, identifying with someone but not being so wrapped up that they can't imagine a way out. As a young poet, I was worried that I was exploiting people and their lives - that they'd see themselves in my work and be offended. That was my hubris. I thought I was writing them, but I wasn't - I was writing poems. I have absolutely no ability to reproduce these people in poems. Poems have shape and form. Their lives do not. A poem is not what a person is.

Fiction for me is very interesting. In a sense I'm trying to do the same thing [as in poetry] but taking a lot more words to do it. The impulses are quite similar, whereas non-fiction is a different impulse. You ask a woman, "How does it feel that you gave your son HIV at birth?" and she says, "It's OK". I look in her eyes, and it's not OK. She knows I know it's not OK. But in a journalistic piece I can only say it's OK. I'd have to press for a quote: "Are you sure?" As a poet I've got enough - I can create that moment in all its truth without having the facts.

Jamaica is really important, but a lot of the defining moments of who I am come from being a Ghanaian, and a Ghanaian in Jamaica. Being on the outside is not a negative for me - it's productive. And my writing is almost always reflective - my understanding of who I am came through writing. I realise that most of my life is spent not so much in a process of becoming but in understanding who this person is. That's the burden of being a writer.

I was doing my A-levels in Jamaica in 1978, studying [T.S.] Eliot, [Gerald Manley] Hopkins and so on, and applying all the practical criticism I'd been taught. Bob Marley's album came out. I heard and I thought: I'm not sure I understand this. But I used the same practical criticism skills to understand his lyrics, and I realised I was listening to a poet. Marley did something really extraordinary: he expressed himself politically, but he was spiritual. He allowed for contradiction.

About five years ago, I was approached by the Pultizer Centre, which has a remit to present foreign news to a US audience, with a proposition and I said no: "One, I'm not a journalist, and two, I'm not an expert on HIV/Aids. Tell me: why would you come to me?" They said: "We want a writer, not a journalist, and we need someone who understands that society - the HIV/Aids community is the hardest section of any society to break into." With Haiti, I felt like I was walking into a familiar place, with a culture I could understand. But what was different was that a catastrophic earthquake had just taken place. HIV/Aids sufferers there had created a remarkable network of support systems. Everyone expected HIV to go up after the earthquake, and remarkably it didn't happen, because the network was underground so it was built for a crisis. I think of that work as beautiful. What stood out was the trust that people showed me. I am grateful for that - it was a gift.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: A constant quest for truth and identity across many formats
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