The Poetry of Brathwaite by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

First published:Panda No. 349, 1969; The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 1973 (contains Rights of Passage, 1967; Masks, 1968; Islands, 1969); Days and Nights, 1975; Other Exiles, 1975; Black + Blues, 1976; Soweto, 1979; Word Making Man: A Poem for Nicólas Guillèn, 1979; Third World Poems, 1983; Jah Music, 1986; Korabra, 1986; Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations, 1989; Shar, 1990; Middle Passages, 1992; DreamStories, 1994; Trench Town Rock, 1994; Barabajan Poems, 1492-1992, 1994; Words Need Love Too, 2000; Ancestors: A Reinvention of “Mother Poem,” “Sun Poem,” and “X/Self,” 2001; Born to Slow Horses, 2005; DS (2): DreamStories, 2007

Type of work: Poetry

Caribbean Traditions and Caribbean Themes

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a major Caribbean writer of African descent, was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in 1930 in Bridgetown, Barbados, a British colony until 1966. A prolific poet of international stature, he has received broad recognition for his work, including the 1976 Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry for Black + Blues (1976), the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize for Born to Slow Horses (2005). Brathwaite employs Afro-Caribbean cultural forms such as myths, cults, rituals, music, dance, speech, and creolized expressions to explore themes ranging from the Middle Passage and exile to national identity and the anticolonial struggle for freedom. His poetic works are central to the emerging canon of West Indian literature. Also recognized as a scholar, critic, storywriter, playwright, editor, historian, professor, and educator, he has a long list of publications that reflect his efforts toward the establishment of a national cultural identity for the Caribbean.

Brathwaite started publishing poems during the 1950’s, when he was a student on scholarship at the University of Cambridge. While in England, Brathwaite realized that the Western culture that was imposed upon him as a black man in a British colony would be denied to him once he presumed to claim it as his own. The resulting sense of rootlessness led him on a quest for cultural identity in Africa, where he served as an education officer in Ghana (1955-1962) under Kwame Nkrumah. His African experience proved to be a turning point in his career. Reassuring him of a cultural home in Africa and inspiring him to unearth the African heritage of the Caribbean upon his return in 1962, it shaped his vision of a national culture. The encounter had a definite impact on his poetry, scholarship, and literary criticism. In particular, African cultural forms such as rituals and oral performances gave him insights into the type of holistic poetry he would need to write in order to overcome the problems of fragmentation with which West Indians were burdened.

A Poetics Against Fragmentation

Throughout his career, Brathwaite has developed a series of cultural concepts that shed important light on his poetry. The most important is the notion of fragmentation, by which he refers to the geographical, historical, cultural, political, ethnic, and linguistic realities of the West Indies. To deal with fragmentation, Brathwaite believes, a West Indian writer’s mission is to establish political and ethnic unification by helping forge a national culture.

Connected to fragmentation is the idea of “the submerged,” by which Brathwaite refers to the “base” of the fragments preserved in the racial memory of Amerindians and Afro-Caribbeans. This submerged culture, similar to the geographical formation that connects the individual Caribbean islands at the base of the ocean, is a potential force for the sea change of unification. Brathwaite sometimes personifies the submerged as the untamable and uncolonizable Sycorax, the mother of the colonized subject Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623). On other occasions, he calls it nam, which he defines as “secret name, soul-source, connected with nyam (eat), yam (root food), nyame (name of god)”; nam is “the heart of our nation-language which comes into conflict with the cultural imperial authority.” As the “core” inside the protective mask, nam represents the survivability and spirituality of the Afro-Caribbean.

In literary terms, to overcome fragmentation by means of the submerged entails a conscious effort to develop what Brathwaite calls the “creole aesthetic” to counteract the “missile,” or Eurocentric, aesthetic. For Brathwaite, creolization is an organic process that involves imitation (regarded as initiation) and invention. Because creolized cultural forms, such as the jazz novel, are creative appropriations rooted in folk tradition, it is through the creole aesthetic that Caribbean artists and writers can create, or “possess,” their own national culture.

As Brathwaite writes in an editorial titled “Timehri,”

The recognition of an ancestral relationship with the folk or aboriginal culture involves the artist and participant in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future.

He states that “through this movement of possession we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for the Word.” Integral to Brathwaite’s creole aesthetic is the idea of possession, which he explains in terms of kinetic energy:

In Africa, the more energy you can accumulate and express, the nearer you will come to God. . . . I’m using the concept of kinesis to make us aware of the things that we do possess, and the people who write the poetry of kinesis do actually in themselves enact a religious process whereby they become aware of certain omens and icons that are vital to themselves.

Practicing what he preaches, Brathwaite has employed in his poetry a great variety of creolized cultural forms, such as rasta, reggae, limbo, calypso, ska, jazz, blues, the yard theater, and the drum, in order to achieve the condition of possession. As the culmination of the aesthetic-religious experience, this would allow West Indians to come to terms with “dispossession” and other problems associated with the legacy of colonialism and slavery.

Of the more than one dozen books of poetry by Brathwaite, arguably the most important are The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) and Ancestors (2001, also known as the Bajan trilogy). Because both works share Brathwaite’s search for identity as an Afro-Caribbean, they can be regarded as constituting an autobiographical record of the poet’s inner experience. Insofar as they exemplify his efforts to establish, or “possess,” a national culture for the West Indies, they can also be seen as the epic of a nation. This duality is by no means a dichotomy, because the personal “I” and the communal “I” found interspersed in these two works constitute a united rather than a divided consciousness. Sometimes known as the collective voice of the African diaspora, this consciousness is developed into an archetypal voice with mythical implications. On the whole, Brathwaite’s works follow this pattern.

The Arrivants

Brathwaite started working on his first trilogy upon his return to the Caribbean in 1962. The individual works of the trilogy were published in England while he was pursuing a doctoral degree in history at the University of Sussex (1965-1968). The three parts—Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)—were republished collectively in 1973 as The Arrivants. This new edition was preceded by a quotation from the Kumina Queen of Jamaica, in Creole, about the “arrivance” of her ancestors as “arrivants” from Africa. The epigraph sums up concisely the theme of the trilogy, in that the narrator not only acknowledges her African heritage but also asserts her West Indian identity in the present. This discourse of acknowledgment and assertion constitutes a double movement between past and present, between Africa and the West Indies, between personal experience and communal history, and between dispossession and possession.

The double movement of The Arrivants is immediately evident from the title of the first book, Rights of Passage. “Passage” refers not only to the Middle Passage of African slaves in the past but also to the exile of West Indians in the present. “Rights,” a pun on “rites,” refers not only to the “rites of passage” marking the growth of a person and a people through ritualistic ordeals but also to the “rights” of “possession” to be gained through such rituals. The title hence encapsulates the main theme of the collection, the individual poems of which deal with major aspects of the double movement and the rights/rites of passage of the Afro-Caribbean. The double movement is also structured into the four divisions of Rights of Passage, the overall action of which begins in Africa, shifts to the Americas, and then bounces circuitously through Europe, back to Africa, and once more to the New World.

Masks, the second part of the trilogy, continues the double movement, but the action lingers at the pivotal point of Africa, particularly Ghana, home of the Akan. The title, Masks, also implies nam, or the core behind the mask. The collection opens with an Akan proverb, “Only the fool points at his origins with his left hand,” thus making explicit that the subject is the quest for ancestral origins in Africa and that the search itself has to be conducted with the deepest reverence. All the poems deal with aspects of African culture, such as myths, cults, rituals, ancestors, and heroes, which in turn are all “masks” behind which is to be found authentic African identity. The overall action of this collection, following the pattern of a rite of passage, also involves a journey. The journey takes place in Africa itself and culminates in a return to, and arrival at, the cultural home.

In Islands, the double movement comes full circle as yet another sort of middle passage. The poet focuses on the Afro-Caribbean person’s physical and spiritual return to the West Indies equipped with a new sense of home and belonging that makes the possession of a national culture possible. Paralleling somewhat the concept of nam that is central to the theme of Masks, the poems in Islands, by dealing with the colonial experience as well as the racial memories and cultural practices shared among Caribbeans, also point to the submerged formation that is the common core of the West Indian community. Although the cycle is complete, the epigraph, from James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), makes it clear that the double movement will be reenacted as necessary.

Although the three books of The Arrivants are best read together, each exhibits a character of its own and contains a variety of points of interest peculiar to its design and locale. In Rights of Passage, the predicament of black people in the United States prior to and after emancipation is given much attention. The portrayal of Uncle Tom is especially poignant. He is endowed with a psychological depth that evokes both pity and compassion; despite his sufferings, he is given colossal qualities reminiscent of Job in the Old Testament. The “angry Negro” of the late 1960’s, as a counterpoint to Uncle Tom, is portrayed vividly as a self-exiled Odysseus who, upon the discovery of Rastafarianism, begins to jive in dance and song.

Whereas Rights of Passage is characterized by its lively sociohistorical drama, African cultural forms dominate Masks, to the extent that the whole collection resembles a re-created ceremony replete with libations, invocations, incantations, sacrifices, drum rhythms, and other related rituals, all of which contribute to the religious and performative qualities of the book. In Islands, the primordial past and the colonial past exist alongside the present, when the fragile postcolonial nation is still in its infancy.

Islands evinces an impulse to synthesize the religious and performative qualities of Masks and the sociohistorical drama of Rights of Passage. This synthesis is best epitomized by the poems dealing with the limbo dance, for example “Caliban.” Said to be derived from physical exercises Africans conducted in the crowded space of slave ships, the limbo is symbolic of not only the brutal experience of the Middle Passage but also enslaved Africans’ desire and strength to rise above such humilities. Furthermore, as if to suggest that the national culture of the West Indies must be derived from the African tradition as rejuvenated by West Indians, Islands is populated with an entire pantheon of African deities, whom the poet both invokes and transforms in order to counteract the myths of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions.

The Bajan Trilogy

Brathwaite’s New World trilogy has demonstrated eloquently to skeptics, including his Caribbean compatriots, that it is possible to create something out of the apparent nothingness of West Indian culture. Because the mythmaking project he began in The Arrivants offers promises of a national culture that Afro-Caribbeans can call their own, that trilogy came to be regarded as a prelude of sorts to the second, or Bajan, trilogy, which attracted attention even before it was completed. Comprising Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987), the Bajan trilogy was revised, expanded, and republished as a single volume titled Ancestors in 2001. It focuses on the national character of black Bajans as it is shaped by the social, historical, cultural, and anthropological forces of the Caribbean, Africa, and the West. As “Bajan” means “Barbadian,” the trilogy is apparently meant to have national significance.

Barbados as the mother-island is epitomized by the figure of the subjugated woman in the text, in which readers see her conduct daily chores, undergo various ordeals, and harbor uncertain hopes with regard to the future of herself and her children. The futility of most of her efforts is symbolized by the “rock seed” that fails to germinate. The reason Brathwaite focuses on such a downtrodden figure is that slavery had extremely debilitating effects on what he calls “the manscape,” the character of the Caribbean men who, while victims of slavery and colonialism, also contribute to the victimization of black women. These women survive in spite of their hardships because of their nam, thus making it possible for the new generation to emerge.

As a counterpoint to the geological symbolism and feminine realism of Mother Poem, the focus in Sun Poem is astronomical and masculine. The figure of the black male is rendered as the sun, which is both the son of creation (Adam) and the father-sun, as opposed to the mother-island. The sun is also connected with the rainbow, the agent that joins the earth and the sky. The poem is ingeniously organized so that the action is structured according to the cyclical trajectory of the sun, from dawn through dusk to dawn. Each of the episodes also links a certain human action to the cosmic action. For example, “The Crossing” refers both to the movement of the sun toward the meridian and to “the Middle Passage in reverse,” whereas “Return of the Sun” refers both to the reemergence of the sun (after an eclipse) and to the return of the prodigal son. Sun Poem hence reenacts the double movement of The Arrivants, but it goes further by recasting it in cosmic terms. This cosmic dimension of the poem also turns the poet into a godlike creator.

With parental archetypes thus set up by the mythical framework of Mother Poem and Sun Poem, the last work of the trilogy, X/Self, is designed to complete the project by portraying offspring. In this puzzling poem, that offspring turns out to be a transhistorical figure called “X/Self,” whose name may designate a crossed-out self, a former self, or a creolized self. In the poem, X/Self, not unlike the visionary Greek prophet Tiresias, has witnessed many episodes in history. These historical events are mostly concerned with the conflict and interplay between the descendants of the Roman Empire—the white race—and the nonwhite races.

The lines “rome burns/ and our slavery begins” serve as a leitmotif throughout X/Self and point to the dynamics of history that led to the rise and fall of civilizations and empires. Although the poem’s action centers on Europe, the main thrust is anti-Eurocentric, because the mission of X/Self, a voice representing the postcolonial consciousness of the developing world, is to offer a relentless critique of Western ideology. The poem that concludes the book, in which X/Self invokes Xango (“Pan African god of thunder, lightning, electricity and its energy, sound systems, the locomotive engine and its music”), celebrates the triumph of the mission.

The Bajan trilogy embodies the major themes that Brathwaite has been exploring throughout his career. In it, he achieves a formidable level of complexity and depth appropriate for his mythmaking task. Brathwaite’s capacity as a scholar plays a prominent role in this tremendous project, but at the same time the poems are impressive as being intensely personal. As was the case in the first trilogy, the personal voice and the communal voice converge in the Bajan trilogy into a collective voice. Because of the mythological design of the work, however, on top of the collective voice emanating from the human characters and the personified landscape, a sacred voice also emerges that belongs to the cosmic process of creation.

The New World trilogy and the Bajan trilogy, because of their epic proportions, rightfully established Brathwaite as one of the most prominent poets not only of the West Indies but also of the developing world. In his poetry as well as in his other writings, by focusing on the reconnection of the West Indies’ submerged African heritage with the indigenous traditions still alive in postcolonial Africa, Brathwaite has created an idiom and a vocabulary that allow not only himself but also other writers to address and redress the problems of dispossession and fragmentation resulting from slavery and colonization. Brathwaite’s contribution, in this light, is exemplary in that it goes beyond poetry per se and enters the realm of history itself.

The Tripartite Structure of Other Works

Many of Brathwaite’s short poetry books are offshoots of the two designated trilogies, and the use of the tripartite structure as a literary form appears to have an important place in his poetics. Beside Arrivants and Ancestors, one could also considered a trilogy to be constituted by Black + Blues (1976), Third World Poems (1983), and Middle Passages (1992).The tripartite structure is also often used within a single volume, as for instance in Black + Blues, which consists of three sections (“Fragments,” “Drought,” and “Flowers”) suggestive of a progression.

In the case of Third World Poems, the tripartite division represents a movement in reversal of the slaves’ journey across the Atlantic, taking readers from the Caribbean (the section “L’Ouverture” alludes to the Haitian revolution and includes a poem about the slave rebel Bussa), through colonial Africa (the section “Ashanty Town” alludes to Ghana), to the independence of African and other developing nations. The section “Irie” includes “The Visibility Trigger,” a tribute to preeminent African leader Kwame Nkrumah, and “Poem for Walter Rodney” in honor of the Caribbean pan-Africanist. The indications are that trilogies and tripartite structures represent Brathwaite’s attempt, as a “black Atlantic” writer, to reconstitute the Middle Passage experienced by African slaves. In the volume Middle Passages, the hint is that the traumatic Middle Passage will need to be reconceived as a wound to be healed and a gap to be bridged by means of the music, language, culture, and the political struggles of the people of the African diaspora.

In the poetry of Brathwaite, the private individual as a person is in the main blended into the public persona of the cultural historian and postcolonial agency, but from the mid-1980’s on, the intensity of the personal voice and vision become heightened, in part as a result of unfortunate circumstances. During the period of what Brathwaite calls his “Time of Salt,” the poet suffered traumatically as a result of the death of his wife, Doris Monica (1986); the near destruction of his home, library, and archive of documents in Irish Town by Hurricane Gilbert (1988); and a home invasion by armed robbers (1990) so life-threatening that he considered himself to have been “killed” metaphorically. These events are captured in an autobiographical series of books, which may be regarded as a “Salt Years” trilogy that chronicles the poet’s journey through the dark night of the soul.

The Zea Mexican Diary (1993) is a “transboundary,” mixed-genre collection incorporating journal entries, letters, and poetry. In it, the passing-away of the poet’s wife (“Zea Mexican”), who was then completing a major bibliography of the poet’s oeuvre, is associated in a symbolic way with Brathwaite’s notion of “middle passages,” thus adding a spiritual dimension to the term. In Shar (1990), woven into the descriptions of the devastating Hurricane Gilbert is an allegory for the deracination of the history of slavery.

Trench Town Rock (1994) deals with the violent break-in but situates it against the larger backdrop of pervasive crime, violence, poverty, and injustice with which many slum communities are afflicted. The volume offers to treat the break-in as a kind of “Middle Passages Today”; the work’s title also alludes to the lyrics of reggae musician Bob Marley’s song, “Trench Town Rock,” which contains the lines: “You reap what you sow,/ and only Jah, Jah know/ I’d never turn my back,/ I’d give the slum a try/ I’d never let the children cry,/ ’cause you got to tell Jah, Jah why.” (The book’s epigraph quotes a variation of these lines.) The poet thus transcends his experiences of personal trauma and transforms them by means of perspective and perseverance.

Formal and Generic Experimentation

During his later career, especially during the Time of Salt, Brathwaite has employed two signature styles in the writing and publication of his work. The first is the “transboundary” style, or mixed use of genres including documents (letters, diaries, and so forth) and creative writing (in prose and in verse). Brathwaite’s second signature style is the printing of his work using the “Sycorax Video Style”—typographic fonts of various sizes and shapes generated by computer. Brathwaite has been fascinated by computer technology due to its associations with memory-ghosts in the machine, which the poet relates to Sycorax and accordingly invokes as his muse.

These aesthetic experiments have led to a proliferation of “dreamstories” (collected as separate volumes in 1994 and 2007 but ongoing), which apparently break down boundaries of genre as they are predominantly prose-poem stories that are also partly conversations, memoirs, fables, allegories, and dreams. Large doses of wordplay, verbal slippage, and neologisms also conspire with the deliberately jarring “Sycorax” typographics (and peculiar orthography) to evoke the voice of Caliban and the rhythms of the “nation language” developed from the African diasporic experience. They create a heterospatial reality that is embedded in the realism and Magical Realism of the poet’s postcolonial imagination.

It is significant that the figure of “Dream Chad,” who emerges in one of the “dreamstories” as the composite of an African woman and Lake Chad, has become the new inspiring muse for Brathwaite in Words Need Love Too (2000), a volume written “for Dream Chad” and in acknowledgment of “the yamFestival of three DreamChad years of love and understanding.” The title poem, written as an epithalamium, represents the thanksgiving musings of a resilient poet. Having survived trauma, he appears to be paying tribute to Africa (Dream Chad) as the bride of his love; in repeating the phrase “Words Need Love Too” as a refrain to the wedding song, the poet highlights language (and culture) as the forces that transform the lover and sustains his spiritual union with the bride.

For Born to Slow Horses, when it won the coveted Griffin Poetry Prize, Brathwaite was cited as the creator of “an epic of one man (containing multitudes) in the African diaspora” and recognized for “what may well be the first enduring poem on the disaster of 9/11,” a poem that turns Manhattan into “another island in the poet’s personal archipelago.” The volume also contains a tribute to Brathwaite’s departed wife, “Kumina,” which refers to “the most African” of wake ceremonies. Oral performance is an integral aspect of the book, which appears to belong to a new phase in Brathwaite’s poetic output, as he concentrates on applying the concept of “tidalectics” in further “transboundary” developments. Positioned as a continuation of Words Need Love, there are hints that Born to Slow Horses could very well be central to another tripartite exploration characteristic of Brathwaite’s epic journey through the African diaspora.

Bibliography

Breiner, Laurence. “The Other West Indian Poet.” In Partisan Review 56 (Spring, 1989): 316-320. A review of X/Self.

Dash, Michael. “Edward Brathwaite.” In West Indian Literature, edited by Bruce King. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979. One of the best earlier studies of Brathwaite’s poetry.

Gowda, H. H. Anniah. “Edward Kamau Brathwaite: A Profile.” In Literary Half-Yearly 23 (July, 1982): 40-46. Encapsulates the most important aspects of Brathwaite’s career.

Martini, Jürgen. “Literary Criticism and Aesthetics in the Caribbean, I: E. K. Brathwaite.” In World Literature Written in English 24 (Autumn, 1984): 373-383. Discusses the major aspects of Brathwaite’s cultural position.

Pattanayak, Chandrabhanu. “Brathwaite: Metaphors of Emergence.” In The Literary Criterion 17, no. 3 (1982): 60-68. A report based on Brathwaite’s lectures given at the University of Mysore. Concise and excellent introduction to his poetry.

Thomas, Sue. “Sexual Politics in Edward Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and Sun Poem.” In Kunapipi 9, no. 1 (1987): 33-43. A feminist critique of the visionary voice in the two poems.