School of Instructions: A Poem

by Ishion Hutchinson

A stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I.

Deep-dyed in language both sensuous and biblical, Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions memorializes the experience of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The poem narrates the psychic and physical terrors of these young Black fighters in as they struggle against the colonial power they served; their story overlaps with that of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, in which the horizontal, documentary shape of the narrative is interrupted by sudden lyric effusions, unsettles both time and event, mapping great moments of heroism onto the trials of everyday existence It reshapes grand gestures of heroism in a music of supple, vigilant intensity.

Elegiac, epochal and lyrical, School of Instructions confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and weaves shards of remembrance―"your word mass / your mix match / your jamming of elements"―into a unique form of survival. It is a masterpiece of imaginative recuperation by a poet of prodigious gifts.

Genres: Poetry, History, World War I, Nonfiction

112 pages, Hardcover

Published November 21, 2023

About the author

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections, Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Reviews

[nika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dub pogłębił jego strach i melancholię.

[Carmijn Gerritsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a highly experimental and beautiful collection which explores the history of displacement in and across Britain. It does by incorporating discussions of religion, race and belonging into a long poem. In particular, we follow two different timelines: Black British soldiers in the WWI, and a character 'Godspeed' in a Jamaican secondary school. It then traces the different similarities in racist rhetoric and 'instructions'. Overall, a very provocative collection that I would like to analyse further. I especially liked the metaphorical allusions to Britain as Albion and Brittanica. This connects it to an older legacy of Britain as the 'chosen land'.

[Eavan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A classic issue of a probably above-decent book of poetry not finding its perfect reader. I was drawn to this as I enjoy war narratives (especially those centering WWI), big Biblical allusions, and critiques of colonialism. I do not enjoy, however, contemporary poetry very much, no how much I try. The lack of explanation for non-Jamaican readers about what was referenced also left me utterly confounded and unable to engage with this is any way.

What’s up with contemporary poetry, and why does it seem like such a monumental cult of the impenetrable? Why do I feel like I need to have drunk the ambrosia of the tertiary-educated, upper-class avant-garde to buy into the hegemony of their post-verse art form?

Anyway, enough bitching. I'm not the audience for this. If you want a story looking at the psychic stress of colonial warmongering in the First World War, check out At Night All Blood is Black.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

School of Instructions is an epic narrative around the character Godspeed and his West Indian regiment in the First World War. Within this narrative, time is never linear, as Godspeed's youth in Jamaica occurs simultaneously to the battalion in the desert, and some soldiers even report seeing Hannibal crossing the Alps, as history coalesces in the poetic space. 'HOLY PLACES' are designated in all caps, creating a map-like quality to the poem, as 'JERUSALEM', 'BABYLON', 'MOUNT ZION', 'KINGSTON' and 'ENGLAND" are all mapped out in the journey of the battalion. There is a Blake-like tone and style, as reading the poem is like reading both history and prophecy at once, and dub deejay becomes Blakean prophet, whose reverb-heavy words echo: 'And some there be which have no memorial / And some there be which have no memorial / And some there be which have no memorial’ towards the poem's close. The poem is also stylistically filled with moments of pure linguistic rhythm making (e.g. 'lickety lickety boom boom' or 'Yah ho') and a dub poetics of doubling lines and rhythmic repetition results in a musical core to the struggle of war.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

from His Idylls at Happy Grove
Later they will climb the sea-charged cannons
and look up the school’s purple and grey wall,
huddle in the breeze, quiet, awaiting
the bugle. Brass rasps the air iodine.
Then their scurrilous voices cross strict waves,
bound by an ardour to move while crouching
hidden in the open, an infantry
stalled in the holy metal of the sun.

Flecked dust and heat. Melting vellum. Lament. (8)
[…]
They shovelled the long trenches day and night.

Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.
Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Hun bait mud. Mating mud.
1655 mud: white flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chilblain mud.
Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha mud. Amnesia mud.
Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud.
No-man’s-land’s-Everyman’s mud. And the smoking flax mud.
Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hogpen mud. Nephritis mud.
Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud.
Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud.
Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin mud. Civil war mud.
And darkness and worms will be their dwelling-place mud.
Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.
Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud.

They resurrected new counter-kingdoms,
by the arbitrament of the sword mud. (13)

from The Anabasis of Godspeed
Some nights from his hole at BARRACKS LANE as the sugar
factory purred to sleep and the canes curled their tails
like fields of kittens he polished the moon to better
see Rosalie’s face. Then proceeded to ROMANI in the
morning and moved to MAGDHABA by rail in the
afternoon. Two platoons formed escorts to prisoners
of war passing through the immemorial shade of the
staffroom. Their carbines shook flares out of the cherry
tree into his hair.

It was around this time a man named Pipecock Jackxon cut
off his ears at least that was what some boys mimed to
Godspeed in the chapel one devotion morning. The
broken fan was whirling like a lopsided angel. While
their heads were bowed for prayers Godspeed unclasped
his hands and threw a nub of magnet to the blade.
It stuck there uncertain as the destiny of the child. (23)

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

...to puncture
these poppies blackened with the unknown names
stung to their chests each morning like courtiers
of empire, primed to rake playfield
where small wars erupted noon: 'A Ras! A Ras!'
aimed at the Zion-haired boy, who mirrors
the sound, that broken water place gurgled
from poppies: the dread Arras."

This is an interesting long poem that weaves the story of Godspeed, a young Jamaican man at school in the 1990s and the story of the West Indian volunteers who fought for the British during World War One.

I'm not sure I entirely understood that choice so perhaps I didn't understand the whole collection. I sometimes feel, when analysing poetry, that I don't have the tools to adequately explain what I've read. Combine that with the fact that I am a bear of very little brain I sometimes feel I've missed the point.

For me though this is about how we've forgotten the contributions of the people's of Empire to our wars. That even though they fought for us, they wanted rid of us. That even though the fought for us, we didn't want to remember that except in some propogandist way at the time. That once the war was over everything could be quietly glossed over and Empire could carry on as before, even though the Empires of the Dead - to steal David Crane's book title - meant that the Empire could not and should not ever be the same. Still we tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle.

If this book does anything it helps bring back the memory of those men who died for an Empire that treated them as second class citizens and a country that continues to treat their descendants as a ungrateful inconvenience. Or to quote W. B. Yeats men who might have echoed the Irish Airman foreseeing his death:

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love

I will come back to this collection because I feel I need to understand it better. The three stars are a sign of my failing rather than the poets. I can see myself coming back to it. Adding it alongside 'In Parentheses' as a book to read in November.

[Aidang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enriched by it's contraposition of a schoolboy and the WWI warpath, this long narrative poem explores the subjugation of a people through a force of war. The long narrative poem is impressive in it's poetics, omitting commas and capitalizing the names of cities, it's biblical locus of diction and long lines, and Hutchinson's keen and strange sense of sound. A departure from the more traditional first and second collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons, the form is an exciting growth on the work the Jamaican poet has already accomplished.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Standing as it does - both WWI anthology and singular poetic narrative, IH’s adjective-rich homage to those who fought and perished, and to those who fought and returned home, is hewn from imagery-rich experiences and writing, whilst bearing testimony to the people of West Indian heritage in his beautifully unique and expressive way.

The final pages are evocative of pathos and the author’s soliloquy, providing both truth and allegory in a way that embraces your soul and engages your imagination, leaving you lost in the sonic effect of his artistry when it concludes

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical, painful, and beautiful, this book is as interesting as it is difficult. The lines themed "the strength of the battalion" tell a story in themselves, but the poem makes me want to read a thousand page history of the West Indian soldiers who fought in British regiments during WWI. Because contrasting the familiar place names of the middle east battlefields with biblical allusions captures the imagination, but deep and detailed as these poems are, for someone as wholly uneducated on the topic as I, learning more would be welcome.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a true pleasure to live when Ishion Hutchinson is writing. More than the historic legacy and family memoir Hutchinson is engaging in this text, there is a sense of vivid and lively quality to the poems. Whether it's the use of ootomonopeias or locational directions, Hutchinson roots us in a very specific place and time while allowing us to sense the very impetuous nature of memory. I enjoyed this collection greatly!

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unusual book of poetry, using the mechanisms of modern poetry to create a historical recounting of the early twentieth century. Scenes switch back and forth in feverish fashion between a youth spent in Jamaica and the World War I campaigns in Palestine and the Middle East, where disease claimed huge numbers of victims. Being devoted to a single theme, the book is repetitious but gripping.

[Leila]

learn to attend class & listen to history's instructions

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's certainly no more challenging or heady work of poetry this year, but if you are able to fall into Hutchinson's writerly and metaphorical rhythms, there's also few that are better.

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the idea behind the poem and the language is great, it just never quite came together for me.

[Maddie Fitzherbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I beautiful poem that ties in the cyclical nature of life inwards on itself. Each simile refracts nature, life, and human existence in a way that reminds us everything is comparable and contradictory at the same time. Everything is always waging war, both giving and taking in a way that commanders life and death to be the same thing. Truly some one of a kind prose. Absolutely obsessed with the lines and concepts on 81 and 88.