A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative

Front Cover
"After a dozen years of living and working in South Carolina, of trying to manage a writing career that spans the USA, the UK and Jamaica, of growing up in Jamaica, but hanging onto the Ghanaian passport of his birth, the question 'Where is home?' became ever more insistent. Part of him embraces the New World condition of being Brathwaite's 'poor harbourless spade', but America has entered his psyche and his children are becoming Americans. Yet the thought of becoming an American citizen is too uncomfortable to contemplate. In a rich piece of writing that has the immediacy of a man thinking aloud and the careful structure of art, Dawes explores the experiences that bring him to this state of indecision. In the process, he writes about the things that matter to him as writer, husband, father and active citizen: place, race, nation, religion, childhood, family and parenthood, sex and death." --Book Jacket.

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Contents

O Dreams O Destinations
7
Passport Control
23
Resisting the Anomie
36
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, and studied and taught in New Brunswick, Canada. In the UK he has published five volumes of poetry, an anthology of reggae poetry, and a critical volume on reggae music and literature. His first book of poems, Progeny of Air, won the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.