Sandwich - The Analysis

SANDWICH – AN ANALYSIS

Someone once remarked that I write a lot of poems about food and though I don’t consciously set out to do so I realised that it is true.  I thought about the reason for this. I am not particularly obsessed with food, but it is a fact that the preparing and serving of food is an important part of Jamaican life.  The kitchen, or the outside fireplace (a kind of barbecue) was always a hub of activity.  All the women and older girls in the home were involved in preparing the main meals of the day, but on special occasions such as ‘send offs’, funerals and ‘nine nights’ or wakes, the men would join in.  Visitors were always welcomed with a special spread.  I suspect that in writing about food, especially in the Jamaican setting, I’m trying to recreate the community and camaraderie I associate with food preparation.

Sandwich started out as a completely different piece from the one reproduced here.  In the early nineties, I attended a multicultural day at my children’s school.  It was a truly cosmopolitan school and there were foods from all corners of the globe.  I had the idea then of writing a poem about the day, and specifically about the way people were willing to try foods they had never tasted before. 

The first attempt resulted in a couple of lacklustre stanzas which refused to be shaped.  The poem wasn’t going anywhere and so I put it away and didn’t think, consciously about it for a while.  A couple of years later, I took it with me when I was going to an engagement in the North of England, and on the train I started working on it.    To my surprise, the poem flowed out without a hitch and in no time I had finished a first draft.  It was a very different poem from the one I had set out to write, but I felt a better one as well.

Sandwich is a performance poem, and I invite the audience to join in the last word of each stanza, 'Sandwich'. Audiences enjoy being included in a performance and invariably respond well to an invitation to participate. However, there can be an element of tension if they feel their part is complicated and that they may get it wrong. Here, however, their role is so simple that there is no fear of that. The tension is created by wondering how each stanza will end with the same word without becoming repetitious, so the tension gradually builds the longer the poem continues. There are fourteen stanzas in all, and apart from the first two, when the pattern is being established; none of the last lines repeat themselves. This has the effect of moving the story along each time it’s repeated.

The rhyme scheme of the poem emphasises its humour. Each six line stanza comprises a rhyming couplet followed by a rhyming triplet and is completed by a line ending in the word 'sandwich'.  This pattern has several effects. The immediate gratification of the initial completion of a rhyming couplet is then repeated with added comic effect as the couplet becomes a triplet. Attention then switches away from the need to create a series of rhymes to the previously mentioned need to create a satisfying context for the repeated final 'sandwich'.  There are some 'cheeky' rhymes such as: 

 '…an’ some ched
 ar cheese…'

and later:

'Ah wave goodbye to me street cred,'

Both of these occur when the rhyme is with 'bread', the basic component of a sandwich. In a way, the sandwich is being subverted by the rhymes at the same time as its position as king of the picnic is being subverted by the poem itself.

Different audiences laugh at different moments, but the most frequent points are Gran’s rejoinder to Neil’s supplication:

 'Gran, yuh have enough to feed the whole class dere,'

with a totally undaunted,

 '…dat is right, you must learn to share'.

There is another frustration of expectations when the last line disrupts the pattern of rhymes in the preceding lines, echoing the thwarted expectations in the poem.

Later, Neil’s attempts at denial often evoke laughter, perhaps partly as the audience remember their own attempts to ignore an embarrassing reality in the hope that it will simply disappear. The humour of Neil’s attempts at denial is reinforced by use of personification.
 

'All day ah try to pretend
Ah didn’ know dat basket…'

Which is followed in the next stanza by:
 

Teacher say, ‘What have you got there?’
 Ah pretend ah didn’ hear,
But dat basket wouldn’ go away'

The ending is not exactly a surprise but there is a feeling that Neil has learned a lesson. The poem works on two levels. There is the simple story of Neil’s wish to do just what the teacher said, to do the same and be the same as his friends and not risk ridicule for being different. The structure of the poem builds up this fear and resolves it at the end, when, far from being ridiculed, Neil’s different contribution to the class picnic is fully appreciated.  The picnic also has a symbolic role in that Neil’s wish to conform involves denying part of his Jamaican heritage.  

Neil is likely to be a healthier individual, not merely through an improved diet, but also because he is fortunate to have friends who will accept and welcome the different culture he brings to their group. We also feel that Neil will in future be more comfortable with his dual heritage. This may or may not be totally realistic. Pupils are not always as adventurous in trying new foods as we would wish.  However, I hope the poem convinces us, and the audience admires the underlying confidence in the fact that the food, and by extension the Jamaican culture deserve the admiration they receive.

However, the tone of the poem is not essentially competitive or triumphal. The 'message' is that sensible people will have no difficulty enjoying the best of both worlds. This is reinforced linguistically, where the movement is in reverse. Whereas for most of the poem the existence of the Jamaican food is successively resisted, denied and even ignored by Neil, the dominant language is Jamaican patois. However, towards the end, and particularly in the last stanza, thanks to the extensive use of dialogue, there are three separate appearances of Standard English, firstly in the teacher’s formal, 'Thank your grandmother for us', followed by her own attempt to be less formal, 'That was a really super meal,' and culminating in the pupils’ most valued way of expressing their acceptance, 'Yeah, that was well cool, Neil.'

I am not used to putting my own poems under a microscope, and there are times when I’m not sure myself why I’ve done something.  I only know I had to do it.  One instance is in the sixth stanza where I used ‘specifickly’.  I wanted to underline Neil’s youth and felt the word spelt like this would do it.  Then I thought that would make him too young, but the word resisted all my attempts to change it.