Andrew Mbaruk is a poet, rapper, and producer from Vancouver. We first met in 2024, at a reading and open mic event that I organized at 648 Kingsway (RIP). What immediately caught my eye were his rubber boots and incessant pacing. When he name-dropped Rae Armantrout in one of his poems, I knew that I needed to introduce myself.
The spur to this interview is his long poem Slavespeare. As prolific as he is inventive, however, Andrew is the author of many other texts of note. Like Slavespeare, some of these texts are available for purchase through the wonders of Amazon self-publishing. Others appear in various forms—glimpses, piecemeal, but also complete—on his social media. Three poems are to appear in the compilation Book Your Own Life, forthcoming this summer from Publication Studio Vancouver.
As for his raps, these are most readily available on Bandcamp (which has thrice included one of his albums in its monthly “The Best Hip-Hop on Bandcamp” column). In mass and scope alone, Andrew’s prodigious musical output and dense, oblique lyricism has the potential to overwhelm. For newcomers, I’d recommend Black Squirrel, Papier-Mâché Chalet, or Purple Dirndl. Like his page poetry, however, all of his recordings are wildly creative and rewarding to engage.
To listen to the audiobook version of Slavespeare, go here: andrewmbaruk.bandcamp.com/album/slavespeare.
Here’s the interview:
Scott Inniss: How did you come up with the neologism Slavespeare? What work does it perform as the poem’s title? What is the poem about, as you understand it? What thematics and social concerns does it mobilize or address?
Andrew Mbaruk: I like "Shapesphere" in Finnegans Wake and I might have been thinking of that when "Slavespeare" occurred to me. I wrote it down on an index card several different ways ("Slave Spear," "Slaves'-spear", etc.) but chose "Slavespeare", the obvious spelling.
The entire poem came out of the title. "Slavespeare" is a one-word abstract. It refers to a dialectic of
mastery ("Shakespeare" is a metonym for the English literary canon,
high culture) and slavery. It represents a bipolar range of delusion, from
utmost inferiority ("Slave") to grandiosity
("Shakespeare"), poles of my own personality. It merges the supposed
universality of the Human person (I'm thinking of an epigraph in Sonnet L'Abbe's Sonnet's Shakespeare from Emer O'Toole, which
perfectly summarizes how there is an idea, originating in colonialism, of Shakespeare’s work
as universal) with the Slave's experience (I'm thinking of the Human/Black
antagonism in Afro-pessimist theory). The poem is about the voice of
traditional poetry (Shakespeare-y-ness) and the place of the Slave therein. It
is obscurely a confessional poem, its hero a
"Freewilliam Slavespeare" (also the poet, also me).
Scott: Why Early Modern English (pseudo or otherwise)?
Andrew: I've always loved, more than Shakespeare, poetry indebted to Shakespeare–Berryman is my favourite example. In my MCing I've sometimes adopted a similar, "Shakespeare-y in modern times" voice to Berryman's. But I thought I'd make archaic my English throughout this poem, originally because the concept of Slavespeare seemed to demand it. It led to my trying to prove Charles Bernstein wrong about "Island English."
In "Time Out of Motion," Bernstein separates "etymologic" English (the English of England, of Shakespeare, "Island English") from "associational" English (the Zukofskian, Steinian English, an English of non-native speakers, immigrants to America). One English is metrical and perfectly rhymed, the other is free of strict metre and imperfectly "off-rhymed." During the composition, I saw Bernstein's separation of freedom in versing from "Island English" as provably (via Slavespeare) false.
Crucialler than the Early Modern English spellings and occasional grammatical archaisms is the rhyme—Slavespeare is densely slant-rhymed.
Scott: The poem begins as a dramatic performance or play of some sort, with clear references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Why do you decide to begin the poem in a more-or-less narrative or dramatic mode? Is Césaire’s Une Tempête an important intertext for you here? Is Slavespeare a "postcolonial" text?
Andrew: The dialogue of master and slave is a parody/fulfillment, temporarily, of the reader's possible expectations of a poem titled Slavespeare, and it illustrates my poem's twin themes of slavery and mastery. There's also a long monologue in the middle of the second volume, and two dramatic pieces in the third. These clearly performable pieces emphasize the poem's orality—the entire poem, though, is born of MCing and needs to be heard aloud.
Scott: Intertextual reference, citation, and appropriation are very important to the poem, both as formal techniques and as material content. Is there a relation between how the poem takes up the work of a range of writers from different historical periods and its thematic and political concerns?
Andrew: I was and am interested in collapsing time, jumbling epochs, here setting side by side slavery and capitalism e.g.—a crucial point of Slavespeare is that rhyme in particular reveals interconnectednesses. Even the title Slavespeare collapses the polarities "slave" and "master." To understand things as inseparably interconnected—surly that is the poem's religion, its politics and its aesthetics.
Scott: The poem references contemporary figures like Trump, Musk, and
MAGA almost as often as it adduces canonical names like Hegel, Voltaire, and
(most obviously) Shakespeare. How to you understand the poem and its
exploration of the dialectic of mastery-slavery in relation to the politics of
the present?
Andrew: I think it's appropriate in a poem echoing Pound's Cantos to write about MAGA and all our current rightward world. In Slavespeare, I associate MAGA and Nazism with the great canonical "masters", I hope raising the questions, "What is mastery (especially to the slave)?" "Are Shakespeare-y-ness and MAGA incompatible?" "If not, what value is there in ’Shakespeare’ (i.e. the canon), in a voice like the one I've adopted in this poem?"
Scott: The density of reference within the poem, in concert with its parody of Early Modern English, presents readers with a prickly, potentially disconcerting textual “exterior.” How do you understand “difficulty” as a formal or social strategy in Slavespeare and in your writing (and music) more generally? Do you imagine the poem as having an "ideal" reader of some sort? Who are you writing for?
Andrew: My goal is to baffle enjoyably, in the raps. I aim for an obscurity so densely rhymed it is fun to hear, a synthesis of postmodern methods (anacoluthon, e.g.) and ancienter formalism (especially rhyme).
In poetry I have often aimed for more precision and simplicity.
With Slavespeare, I think the key to understanding the work is to read it aloud. Beneath the archaic spellings there are a lot of fun slant rhymes.
I imagine a reader familiar with but losing trust in, or already fully betrayed by, the European canon. But I also imagine a reader unfamiliar with the canon. I think we've all read Shakespeare in school and can maybe appreciate a parody, or whatever exactly Slavespeare is, of such writing.
The third volume is mostly "NOTES (A Guide to Slavespeare)"
clarifying the poem so that perhaps more people can enjoy it.
Scott: Slavespeare is turning into a
very large and structurally complex long poem. What motivates the poem's
tendency in this direction as you understand it?
Andrew: Slavespeare is now published—it is 222 pages. The title already suggested it'd have to be larger, grandioser than a short poem. The title Slavespeare suggests ambition. I do have some of that in my personality—I am a prolific rapper—and I thought the book should reflect that, since it is in part a confessional poem! That was some of my reasoning in aiming for 666 pages originally, though I suspect, too, that unconsciously I knew if I'd aimed for 222 pages I could've end up with only 77—a decent enough number but not quite novelistic enough for Slavespeare (which might in fact be some kind of a novel in disguise).
Slavespeare (Short Excerpt)
The verie Idæa of a minimum Wage
implieth a Loue and Desyre for
Slaverie ’mongst th’ Capitalistes,
the yonge Streete Cleaner thoughte,
pluckinge uséd Condoms &
Needles off of Toronto Streetes
’neath th’ grey Welkin’s highe
indifference, a ’Plane in Heaven
silentlie adrift . . . If—and onlie
if—as most believ’th, Slaverie’s a
brutall necessitie—as th’ villayne
Hitler writeth in hys Mein Kampf,
& as disgrac’d Comedian Louis CK
suggesteth in hys 2013 speciale Oh
My God—onlie then could a
Revolutionarie Thinkinge
reasonablie verboten be.
Scott Inniss is a poet, researcher, and organizer who lives in the Strathcona neighbourhood of East Vancouver. Recent texts include Book Your Own Life (Publication Studio), “From Vancouver to New York City: Catching Up with Kevin Davies” (Jacket2), and "Every Syntagm on 100 West Hastings," an unpublished poem of some length.
