Edward Kamau Brathwaite: Subversions of the Caribbean Creole Griot
By Romain Khan
If the repute of a poet is measured by the reverberations of his name in the vestibule of the Western Academy then Edward Kamau Brathwaite would ring faintly relative to Derek Walcott, whose poetry has been glorified in the Western canon. Yet, the magnitude and gravity of Brathwaite’s historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic output matches and possibly exceeds that of his Caribbean compatriot as well as that of other literati anointed by the West. The Arrivants- A New World Trilogy, arguably Brathwaite’s magnum opus, is a poetic trilogy comprising the Rights of Passage, Masks and Islands, which individually function as poetic signposts along the poet’s actual and psychic pilgrimage from the New World to Europe, onward to the ancestral homeland of Africa, and back to the Caribbean. Brathwaite’s journey, which re-enacts the course of triangular slave trade, or in Gilroy’s terminology, the Black Atlantic, allows him to confront a history of colonial dispossession and fragmentation of black culture, and awaken a renewed consciousness for reconstituting his identity. In this quest, his poetry transgresses the norms of literary, linguistic and cultural propriety established by Western imperial power, and thus plummets into disfavour with the Western academic tradition founded upon such mores. As John Thieme (2001) contends, the argument should not center on the perceived oppositionality between Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s craft, but rather on the merits of Brathwaite’s “unorthodox” poetic sensibility. This essay adopts a similar standpoint, exploring Brathwaite’s subversive poetics through a brief panoramic sweep of critics’ analyses of his poetic sensibility and craft.
Common to all of Brathwaite’s poetry, no less The Arrivants, is the cogent preoccupation with “recover[ing] the ancestral domain of Africa” (Irele, 1994, p.721), which Abena Busia (1994) explains is a necessary ritual return for the contemporary Afro-Caribbean person to reconcile their fractured and alienated identity in the New World. Busia (1994) observes that Brathwaite is cautious not to romanticize Africa, which is “both as glorious and compromised as that of the rest of humankind” (p.742), but she maintains that the poet is avowedly committed to excavating the subterranean African cultural retentions that were calculatedly repressed by European cultural domination. Thieme (2001) elucidates Busia’s (1994) and Irele’s (1994) positions, arguing that in Islands, Brathwaite rescues Ananse, the spider hero of the Akans, from his relegated role in the New World as the “hero of children’s tales” (p.3), and restores this figure to its original conception as the personification of guile and artistic creativity. Ananse, thus, is re-animated as a “rallying point for creative resistance” against the “cultural norms of colonial and neo-colonial Caribbean society” (p.4), thereby assuming more robust cultural significance. Brathwaite’s subversive consciousness is not limited to translated citations of African mythologies, for he deftly incorporates even the tonal inflections of ancestral languages. In Masks, Irele (1994) asserts, Brathwaite’s poetic vernacular is strongly influenced by the “esthetics of African orality” (p.721) which echo the atumpan drum of West Africa, while Busia confesses her admiration for the poet’s mastery of “rhythms and cadences of a language not his own” (p.743). Brathwaite’s immersion in the cultural and linguistic facets of his African heritage prompts Irele 91994) to classify his poetry as embodying the “Negritude consciousness of race, history and language” (p.719), but Busia (1994) disagrees, seeing only “the pain of a personal return into a catharsis of understanding” (p.743).
Not every critic is as dismissive of Brathwaite’s Afrocentric poetics of as Busia is. On the contrary, others endorse Irele’s (1994) assertion that Brathwaite’s poetry echoes the same “affective response” (p.719) to the alienation of the black slave and their New World descendants as Aime Cesaire’s and Nicolas Guillen’s, two of the Caribbean’s most acclaimed negritudinist thinkers. Curwen Best (2001), for instance, asserts that there is “an intertextual play between Brathwaite and (contemporary) Barbadian writers” (p.48) that invigorates a specifically Barbadian cultural politics defined by thematic concerns of social class tensions, racial identity, and resurgence of sedimented African cultural residues in Bajan folk culture. In the local calypsonian, Gabby’s, “Black Man Wake Up” and writer, “I” Farrell’s reprising of the Barbadian tuk band, Best (2001) discerns burgeoning black nationalistic pride that both amplify Brathwaite’s postcolonial critique of white hegemony, particularly via the hybrid vernacular of what he terms “nation language,” and the celebration of ancestral drumming captured in the poem, “Ogun”. Best’s (2001) overriding thesis seems to be that there is no dismissing the continuity of the subversive cultural politics of Brathwaite in the artistic creations of the island’s contemporary cultural practitioners, who perpetuate their precursor’s search for a distinctly Caribbean folk aesthetic. Insightfully, Silvio Torres-Saillant (1994) detects in Brathwaite’s verse a concerted effort to dismantle onto-epistemic structures of Western imperial domination. He (1994) affirms that Brathwaite pursues an indigenous or “autochtonous” (p.703) vision of Caribbean identity by inversing Shakespeare’s Prospero-Caliban trope, or the master-slave dialectic of European colonialism. Negritude itself is constructed on the reversal of this dialectic—a point further explicated by Mary Morgan (1994), Brathwaite’s sister, who argues that “Tidalectics” is her brother’s “way of interpreting our life and history as sea change” (p.663). Tidalectics seems to be Brathwaite’s epistemological counterargument to Europe’s Hegelian dialectics that envisioned reality as antithetical, thus enacting a gesture of poetic and philosophical subversion from the New World Caribbean and validating some critics’ position that Brathwaite’s poetry is palpably negritudinist.
The Arrivants overwhelmingly enunciates Brathwaite’s opposition to Western ideological and epistemological imperatives, and this is undergirded by specific disruptions of English canonical poetic forms, styles and genres. Torres-Saillant (1994) explains that the poet’s pursuit of an authentic Caribbean voice is characterized by experimentation with syntax, orthography and a “Sycorax video style” (p.700), which altogether imbued with extractions from the local creole dialect or nation language, mount a literary, cultural and political offensive against the dominant Western models of poetic form and aesthetic respectability. For Nathaniel Mackey (1999), the poet’s “fractured wordscape”, epitomized by “idiosyncratic line breaks and syllabications”, complements and is even inspired by the “fragmentariness of the insular topography” (p.733) of the Caribbean. The latter point finds resonance in Morgan’s (1994) position that her brother’s reference to the image of the stone (“The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands”) underscores the influence of a “fractured” geography on his rent verse style. Mackey (1994) further argues that the poem, “Pebbles”, performs the dual role of disrupting European “elocutionary norm[s]” of “linguistic propriety” (p.734), while simultaneously expressing the collective pangs experienced in promoting nation language, the local linguistic register that Brathwaite uses to confound and countermand the dominance of the West. Torres- Saillant (1994) explains that Brathwaite’s refusal to ingratiate himself, or render “palatable” (p.700) his poetry to the ear of the Western audience is partially the reason his works have had limited exposure.
Brathwaite’s dissident poetics is also anchored in the authority of the spoken, and not just the hegemony of the written word. Timothy Reiss (1994) believes that Brathwaite incorporates “jazz forms, local sounds and images, and rhythm of the drum” (p.687) to displace the canonical sovereignty of the iambic pentameter. The “musical sensitivities” (p.744) or dramaturgical qualities which Busia (1994) recognizes in The Arrivants are largely attributed to Brathwaite’s enduring appreciation of jazz. According to Norman Weinstein (1994), Brathwaite’s transgressive poetic persona was shaped by the influence of Sonny Rollins’, John Coltrane’s, Albert Ayler’s, and Duke Ellington’s “highly dissonant and free-form [jazz] style[s]” (p.717). In the subversive musicality of these performers Brathwaite witnessed rebellion against European colonial mercantilism, the embodiment of a “strong historical racial consciousness” (p.718), and “a path to spiritual transcendence” (p.716). What Morgan (1994) perceives as the “sound and rhythm, the movement, the restlessness of the Caribbean Sea” (p.663) in her brother’s poetry issue also from cultural pulsations of “rhythms and cadences” (Busia, 1994, p.743) of Africa, and the black musical diviners in North America. Brathwaite’s journey through The Arrivants thus mines the entire Black Atlantic in search of a creolized model of perception to reconstitute the fragmented identity of the Afro-Caribbean person.
Where the argument of Brathwaite’s negritudinist approach is brought into question is when the poet uses the very shards of language, the vestiges of Africa, and the varied rhythms to fashion a renewed unity, or as Reiss (1994) describes, “a cultural space that is, precisely, Caribbean—home space” (p.685). Irele (1994) discusses that Masks is “a narrative of the poet’s pilgrimage…to the sources of self” (p.721), or Africa, but Islands is the return, physical and imaginative, to reconstitute self. There is thus no stark opposition between Europe and the New World, only a coalescing of both and the creation of a new, distinctly Caribbean creole identity. Neil ten Kortenaar (1996) demonstrates this unity in citing the cross-pollination of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. Kortenaar (1996) argues that Eliot is Brathwaite’s “poetic precursor” (p.16) whose use of the rhythms of jazz connects the Euro-American form of creolization with the Caribbean creolization aesthetic. The channeling of multiple voices that “favored… ventriloquism” (p.20) and the invocation of foreign, ancestral languages and rhythms are additional points of similarity, which Kortenaar (1996) concludes engineers an interpenetration of Eliot’s White Atlantic and Brathwaite’s Black Atlantic. Thieme (2001) maintains that Brathwaite refashions the “ossified cultural formations” (p.2) and engenders, like the skidding stones creating the Caribbean archipelago, creolized forms with their own claim to originality in Caribbean cultural life.
Ultimately, The Arrivants does not entreat Western cultural and economic approbation, but as Mackey (1994) stresses, through the transgressing of aesthetic and generic boundaries, Brathwaite announces a “symbol of linguistic and cultural self-determination” (p.734). Busia (1994), perhaps, summarizes Brathwaite’s cultural and poetic mission best when she declares that The Arrivants is “an account of a personal odyssey, transformed into transcendent history myth, as the poet surveys the panorama of the history of black people in their manifold dispersals and faces the question of their role and identity in the New World” (p.742).
References
Best, C. (2001). Tracking a Tradition: Kamau Brathwaite and the Bajan Hardcore. Caribbean Quarterly, 47(4), 33-48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40654235
Busia, A. P. (1994). Long Memory and Survival: Dramatizing the Arrivants Trilogy. World Literature Today, 68(4), 741-746. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150618
Irele, A. (1994). The Return of the Native: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Masks. World Literature Today, 68(4), 719-725. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150615
Kortenaar, N. T. (1996). Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite's "The Arrivants" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Research in African Literatures, 27(4), 15-27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819982
Mackey, N. (1994). Wringing the Word. World Literature Today, 68(4), 733-740. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150617
Morgan, M. E. (1994). Highway to Vision: This Sea Our Nexus. World Literature Today, 68(4), 663-671. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150607
Reiss, T. J. (1994). Reclaiming the Soul: Poetry, Autobiography, and the Voice of History. World Literature Today, 68(4), 683-690. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150610
Thieme, J. (2001). Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. Bloomsbury Academic.
Torres-Saillant, S. (1994). The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite. World Literature Today, 68(4), 697-707. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40150612
Weinstein, N. (1994). Jazz in the Caribbean Air. World Literature Today, 68(4), 715-718. https://doi.org/10.2307/40150614
About the Author
Romain Khan is a Doctoral student who identifies proudly with his Caribbean roots. His research critically engages the confluence of decoloniality, racial subjection and the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to the ongoing modernist project in the Caribbean's newest petrostate, Guyana.