Bluesprint Black British Columbian Literature and Orature

Wayde Compton is the author of two poetry collections: 49th Parallel Psalm, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Performance Bond, and the editor of Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, all published by Arsenal Pulp Press. He is also a founder of Commodore Books, a new publishing venture. He lives in Vancouver. As a child, Wayde Compton's father would take him to swap meets and garage sales. "My Dad would flip through the records," he recalls, "and whenever he saw a black face on the sleeve, he'd buy it." Once, Wayde's father picked up a Jimi Hendrix album. He didn't like it but Wayde did. He started playing the guitar. Hendrix seems like an obvious hero for a young black kid from the West Coast, but there was more to it than simple idolatry. "Hendrix was a weird, hybrid artist," says Wayde; self-conscious that he was being marketed to a white audience, while he thought of himself as a blues guitarist. "That tension is cool." Wayde believes the same thing happens today: "If you're a black artist, you're supposed to be purely polemical," he maintains. "That's bullshit." The black arts movement, which came out of civil rights activity, was always a literature of complaint: protesting and petitioning. But in 49th Parallel PsalmWayde is "messing around with form, something that's only been expected of white people." His first book, 49th Parallel Psalm, wasn't written so much to "empower" as it was to take up a certain kind of poetic space that hasn't yet been filled. "I wrote what I was looking for in university," he insists. There wasn't much in the way of black Canadian writing then. "In a way," he says, "I was writing to a vacuum." It's a switch, that's for sure. Usually it is black culture — especially music — that has been co-opted by white culture. "Hip Hop is the first form of black music that was made with the consciousness that white culture would try to appropriate it," explains Wayde. "All forms of black music have been distilled into white culture. It's inevitable."Compton, Wayde is the author of 'Bluesprint Black British Columbian Literature and Orature' with ISBN 9781551521183 and ISBN 1551521180.