In Performance Bond, Wayde Compton, among the most progressive and experimental poets in Canada, defiantly and eloquently confronts the globalization and commodification of black culture.
With poetry inspired by the insistent cadences of hip-hop and jazz, Compton fuses language, history, and contemporary black politics. He deals with black diaspora at the outer rim of geography and culture, concerned with the legacy of the slave trade, the memory and origins of hip-hop, and the ramifications of urban renewal on North America’s inner cities.
Performance Bond is supplemented with a CD that is a recording of Compton’s musical performance of one of the book’s sections, “The Reinventing Wheel,” featuring the turntable mixing of his reading of the poem, pre-recorded on vinyl, with musical beats, breaks, and samples.
From “To Poitier”:
You, Sidney, dark, nappy, and representative,
fluent and fine,
were all of us at once;
his, hers, theirs, and mine.
You were cool and stoical enough
not to throttle Tony Curtis
after being chained to him for ninety minutes.
You colonized England in reverse, teaching
a classroom full of Cockney racists
how to speak BBC English.
You came to dinner and ate your fill: Veni, vidi, vici
:you came, they saw, and we got to move to the suburbs.
Wayde Compton is a poet, turntablist, and Black historian born and raised in Vancouver. He is the author of the poetry collection 49th Parallel Psalm and the editor of the anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature.
