2021

 https://www.facebook.com/christopher.bryan.188/videos/10225207011466099

  K ei Miller's superb  Forward prize-winning  collection puts two different types of knowledge – represented by the figures of the western cartographer and the Jamaican rastaman – in conversation with each other. Where the cartographer assumes that he can approach his work without bias, the rastaman expounds the inextricability of Jamaican history, place and people, an argument that the cartographer eventually concedes. The struggle is also one between the world as it exists in the form of the corrupt and corrupted Babylon, and the idea of a fairer, kinder place in Zion. While not minimising the racial aspects of this division, Miller's structuring of the book, and allowance for the cartographer's growth, puts broader issues before relations between races or nations. The link between knowledge and language, native land and native tongue, emerges in the interchange of the cartographer's grammatically correct English and the rastaman's mix of Rasta...