The Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Visual Poetry of Wayde Compton's Performance Bond: Claiming Black Space in Contemporary Canada

Wayde Compton's poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of hip-hop aesthetics and visual poetry to create a space for Vancouver's black community.Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book.Compton creates his visual poetry by including such materials as photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudo-concrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters that do not necessarily form words.Despite a contemporary population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Toronto, or Halifax.To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity.The similarities between visual poetry and hip-hop culture, particularly their emphasis on spatial representation, facilitate Compton's continuing project to create a place for the black community in Vancouver.Wayde Compton's poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of contemporary visual poetry and hip-hop aesthetics.Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book, including such matter as the staged photographs of the artificial doorways and step of "Lost-Found Landmarks of Black Vancouver," the mirror images of "Forme and Chase" and the photograph titled "Vividuct," and the graffiti tag of "Rev.Oz" across an otherwise white page.Compton combines words and images in Performance Bond via photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudoconcrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters (some that combine to resemble words and others that do not), all influenced strongly by hip-hop aesthetics.The spatial emphasis found in both hip-hop and visual poetry facilitate Compton's continuing project to create an imaginative place (and reclaim the geographic space) for the black community in Vancouver.Despite a population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, or Halifax.To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity in a way common to hip-hop practice, as will be discussed later in this paper.Performance Bond follows a similar vein to Compton's previous poetic, academic, historical, and activist work, which focused on historicizing and marking the contemporary presence of black people in British Columbia, thus attempting to address the situation that Rinaldo Walcott points to in claiming, "National historical narratives render these [black Canadian] racial geographies invisible, and many people continue to believe that any black presence in Canada isrecent" (277).Compton's anthology Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature aims to illuminate the "144-year history of [black] presence in the province" (27) through a catalogue of black British Columbian writing.Compton's anthology is modeled after George Elliot Clarke's two-volume anthology of Black Nova Scotian literature, Fire and Water ("Crime" 61) and functions to promote the recognition of what Clarke calls an "aboriginal blackness" ("Embarkation" 13) in Canada.Similarly, Compton's first book of poetry, 49 th Parallel Psalms, represents a "historical revision of the migration of blacks to Canada" (back cover).Compton's academic work is also designed to raise awareness of the

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