This film is the third in his famous “gypsy triptych”.)

Though Nora eludes him, Stephane discovers something more intangible – his natural affinity to the culture his father left behind. He puts down roots in a small village where most of the inhabitants suspect he is a chicken-thief. A grubby old lecher, Izidor (Izidor Serban), treats him as a surrogate son, and a local divorcee, Sabina (Rona Hartner) takes a more carnal interest in him.
But the plot isn’t the remarkable thing about this film. By the conclusion of the movie, it has degenerated into the barmiest melodramatic excess. Up to this point, however, it is absorbing ethnographic film-making with a tender, mischievous eye. Gatlif’s bawdy sense of humour prevents it from turning into a National Geographic film, and his unpatronising attitude to the gypsies – many of whom appear in his film as themselves – ensures that there is no uncomfortable disjunction between the power of the camera and that of its subjects. Sabina may be the stereotypical gypsy passion queen – all flashing eyes, floating hair and tigerish libido – but it’s Stephane who remains the Gadjo Dilo (“funny foreigner”) of the title.The pleasure is in the detail In one scene, Stephane attends a wedding.

We see the groom’s party marching up to the front door of the bride’s house, where her father waits with an axe in his hand, yelling his opposition to the match. Then the groom’s father brings out of bottle of Russian vodka. Suddenly, the pair are embracing like brothers, and you realise that the whole confrontation has been an elaborate nuptial ritual. Never mind the ending – which makes Brazilian soap opera look understated – just enjoy the journey towards it.Philip Saville’s Metroland (15) isn’t half so interesting, possibly because its anthropological focus is upon a culture that’s difficult to take seriously – the English middle classes. Based on the novel by Julian Barnes, Saville’s film follows two suburban boys, Chris (Christian Bale) and Toni (Lee Ross) from their idealistic teens to their compromised thirties. The film opens at the ends of this process, when the year is 1977: Toni is a drunken, unsuccessful poet and Chris – after a brief spell being artistic in a Parisian garret – has settled in “Metroland”, the mock-Tudor ghetto at the end of the Metropolitan line.The film works best when sending up its characters.

But where does one stop and the other start?”The most important thing for me to teach is the way to think – how people can think critically and independently, how people can, in a kind of activist way, not be duped by the seduction of writing, of the craft behind it,” he states emphatically. In the same way that Dawes draws no line between literary and performance poetry, he also blends art and education quite seamlessly. He might talk about how Bob Marley’s wife, Rita, was beset with controversy following the superstar’s death or how crucial Ernest Ranglin was to Lee Perry (the former is one of Jamaica’s greatest guitarists, the latter its greatest studio producer and one of Marley’s early collaborators) or explain the indelible reverberations of the middle passage of the slave trade. When he performs his work on stage there are often potted history lessons in between the poems. I like to hear ideas coming through.”Dawes the pedagogue and Dawes the poet are seemingly inter-changeable beings. He left it like that, sat down and finished his cigarette.”That day, in 1975, when he first heard “Natty Dread” has been with Kwame Dawes for the last 20 years.

It has shaped him in many different ways, plugging him right into the reggae aesthetic and giving him a clear sense of direction as a writer. However, the relentless production of his own literature is only one half of the Kwame Dawes story The other is a passion for education Dawes is a teacher. He graduated from the University of the West Indies, taught at the University of Warwick and currently holds the post of Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina “At the bottom of it all, I’m a teacher and I like teaching I don’t just do it, I like it!” he says with relish “I like getting vibes back from other people. “‘Natty Dread’ starts to play and it stops, so he says wheel and come again! It stops, we play it again, and after the third time, he says this is one of the most important things you’ll ever hear. Dawes senior, to quote Dawes junior, was “strictly Oxbridge, Pan- Africanist, a very serious man”.

But he was very much aware of the tremendous significance of an artist like Bob Marley, and showed a great sense of purpose in the way he conveyed that to his son. “My father came home one day in Jamaica with Bob Marley’s “Natty Dread”. He put it on this wooden gramophone and said ‘listen to this’.”The Dawes household was ruled by the sound of jazz pioneers like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. In Tentative Definitions, he uses great evocative power to convey how reggae’s drum-and-bass alchemy affects body and soul; Shook Foil is a collection that presents key scenes in reggae culture, and the more you look at Dawes’s output to date, the more you realise that reggae has been a defining theme, a kind of rock-steady bass-line in his cultural and creative life.He has written extensively on reggae as an artform – the more academic cousins of Shook Foil are Wheel And Come Again and Natural Mysticism. Walcott drew me in first as a playwright – when I read Dream On Monkey Mountain and Ti Jean, and saw the productions, I saw the poetic appearing on the stage powerfully and dramatically, and that just blew me away.” As for the discovery of Marley, it was very much a family affair. At first sight, Walcott, the archetypal man of letters with the neatly trimmed moustache, and Marley, the pop icon crowned in dreadlocks, seem like unlikely artistic allies, but they are both highly appropriate markers with which to frame the creative pulse of Dawes.”These two people move in very different ways. Dawes reminds me that one of the Caribbean’s foremost writers, Derek Walcott, chose Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” and “Redemption Song” when he appeared on Desert Island Discs, and that Marley’s power as a lyricist has also been remarked upon by several literary critics.