Wayde Compton
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Wayde Compton (b. Vancouver, 1972) is a Canadian writer. He is the author of two collections of poetry, 49th Parallel Psalm (Advance Editions, 1999) and Performance Bond (Arsenal Pulp, 2004); he is also the editor of Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (Arsenal Pulp, 2001). Compton is co-founder of Commodore Books, the first press in Western Canada devoted to publishing the work of black writers. He teaches at Coquitlam College, Kwantlen University College, and Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program, in Vancouver.
All of Compton’s work is concerned, in particular ways, with delimiting British Columbia as a historically black space. In 49th Parallel Psalm Compton merges hip-hop lyricism, voodoo, the King James Bible and turntablism with the history of the Pacific coast to sound the arrival of the first black settlers from San Francisco to British Columbia in 1858. Working with recurring images of border crossings, the cross-roads and tricksters, Compton figures blackness on the west coast as a migratory phenomenon.
In Performance Bond Compton continues the work of sounding the black geography of the west coast. A CD titled "The Reinventing Wheel," with music by Trevor Thompson and lyrics by Compton, accompanies the collection. A meditation on textuality and orality, presence and absence, flight, and the perils of becoming landed, Performance Bond considers the textual and actual deconstruction of Hogan's Alley, a black neighbourhood in Vancouver which was demolished in 1970 to make way for an overpass.
Bluesprint is the first comprehensive anthology of British Columbia’s black cultural archives. Compton traces the development of black British Columbian writing from 1843 to 2001, and anthologizes a wide range of work, from the journals of Sir James Douglas, the first governor of B.C. whose mother was designated a "free coloured" woman, to the writing of the nineteenth-century black pioneers, to the oral narratives from former residents of Hogan's Alley, to contemporary writers and spoken-word artists. By including work that has traditionally been excluded from British Columbia’s regional anthologies and literary histories, Compton challenges the province’s official self-representations, which have largely excluded the work of black writers.
Along with Jason de Couto Wayde Compton forms the Vancouver-based hip-hop performance group The Contact Zone Crew. He is also a member of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, a group dedicated to memorializing Vancouver’s historic black neighbourhood.
