Talk This Way Key Quotes

“Dear boys on road, dear girls on bus top decks”

• Salutation “dear”, begins poem like a letter

• This adjective is repeated 12x throughout poem

• Constantly restarting letter, suggests losing track of his journey to find his own voice/identity and tries to get back on the right path

• Dear = both a mode of address AND an adjective (close to his heart)

“Dear hip-hop, dear love letters pressed deep into vinyl platters”

• Semantic field of music

• Reflects the title “Talk This Way” being a reference to Run DMC & Aerosmith’s hip hop track named “Walk This Way”

“dear Queen’s best cool and clipped as seams pressed sharp in spite”

• Refers to the idiom “the Queen’s English” which is used to describe ‘correctness’ and ‘proper grammar’

• “Cool and clipped” = alliteration to reflect the cold dark side of Colonialism

• Sibilance, short sharp alliteration also reflects Colonialism

• Juxtaposes with the next line describing the “sun high in a Guyanese sky”

“dear received pronunciation”

• Links to the earlier line about “Queen’s best”

• How you “should” speak

“dear raw, unfettered music of my motherland once removed”

• Unfettered = unchained, refers to slavery

“dear music smuggled in the old-fashioned way, beneath the folds”

•  Verb “smuggled” suggests identity carried with you

• He is a 2nd gen immigrant as his mother is from Guyana

“flying fish and guava cheese, cassava bread, in the notes of spilt casrip loosed from broken bottles”

• Long vowel sounds and sibilance

• Slows original fast pace, languishing on images of Guyanese food/culture = restarting

“dear music melting in the cauldron and pit”

• Alliteration

• London = melting pot of cultures

“dear molten brogue we birthed and spanked to wailing heights”

• tricolon of pushed language

• sounds like a cauldron

“dear empty spaces, dear silence”

• caesura slows down the pace even further, setting up the focus for the final line

“thank you for your many tongues. Now, to find my own”

• completion of sentence, main clause

• despite being letter format, he doesn’t sign off with a name

• perhaps he has not finished his journey to finding his voice/identity yet