Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020)

41/2021. This is a 1969 collection of work by Alan Bold, Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite, and Edwin Morgan. This is at least a partial re-read for me. Alan Bold's work is justly neglected now, while Brathwaite has achieved classic status as a Caribbean poet, and Edwin Morgan is a national treasure in both Scotland and the rest of Britain.

Firstly, my review of the 60 page selection of Alan Bold's poems: no. 1*

Next, the 50 page selection of Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite's poems from his first three books Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands, had a few good lines but on the whole they didn't make me want to re-read any further into his works. 3*

From The Emigrants: "In London, Undergrounds are cold.
The train rolls in from darkness
with our fears."

From South: "And gulls, their white sails slanted seaward,
fly into the limitless morning before us."

Lastly, the 50 page selection of Edwin Morgan's poems: YES. 5*… (mere)

Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930, and found a rootedness in Africa that would sharpen his sense of "wholeness" and shape his awareness. His published works have surged his international standing, but since MIDDLEPASSAGES (1992, also available from SPD), the literary world has seemingly been expecting another major volume of poetry from him. WORDS NEED LOVE TOO represents that long awaited collection, and is, perhaps, Brathwaite's most concentrated effort at fashioning a new literary tradition out of the fragmented pieces/rhythms/nation languages that form the New World. The poems in this volume are "dreamstories." It is a harvest of dreams of a new word, cleansed in ancestral blood, loved without reservation by those born into it and with it, so that through it, they can shape a new reality, a new destiny. No other poet, living or dead, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of, the liturgy of the word like Brathwaite. Published by House of Nehesi Publishers in St. Martin. Introduction by Fabian Badejo.… (mere)

Brathwaite's trilogy The Arrivants was something of a breakthrough work for him and for Caribbean poetry in English when it appeared in the late sixties. Unlike Walcott's long poem Omeros, this is a sequence of linked poems, rather than a single continuous narrative. Brathwaite makes extensive use of the poet's freedom to be in more than one place or time at once, and there is only very limited use of named characters. The first part Rights of Passage deals with the slave trade and the modern African diaspora, Masks takes the poet - physically and spiritually - back to Africa, whilst Islands looks at life and landscape in the Caribbean.

Book-length poems often seem rather intimidating, and it doesn't necessarily help when you know that Brathwaite cites the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance, Miles Davis and Aimé Césaire as major influences. You come to this book expecting rant, sprawl, and unintelligible Africanisms, but what you actually find is a remarkably well-disciplined bit of poetic engineering. There are apostrophes to African gods, to James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre, there are episodes of calypso, limbo and cricket, there's even the occasional bit of good-old-fashioned Pastoral, but it's always there for a good reason and as you read, you can see the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place around you and building up a complicated multidimensional picture of the world that slavery has made.

This is very oral poetry, which you should probably try to imagine being performed in a pub in Brixton or a basement in Greenwich Village. Brathwaite makes use of a very wide range of language registers, from formal academic English right through to patois, creole, black American English, and fragments of African languages. He provides a short glossary of the most important African terms, but most of the time you're on your own (but with enough clues in the context not to lose track completely). Masks is the most difficult part from this point of view, as you need to have at least a general idea about African religious beliefs and the way they are reflected in Caribbean traditions to make sense of what Brathwaite is trying to say. The endnote is quite helpful for this. Rights of Passage and Islands are both much more accessible.

One thing in particular you need to come to terms with is Brathwaite's habit of writing long passages in very short (one or two stress) lines. This might look like sixties affectation on the cold page, but it makes complete sense when you realise how it's meant to be read with a strong drumbeat rhythm behind it. It's really useful to listen to a recording of Brathwaite reading it (there are some on Poetry Archive).

Rant? You want rant? Well, there is a bit, but it's very cool, organised rant:

So went the black
hatted zoot-
suited watch-
chained dream
of the Panama boys
and the hoods
from Chicago.

Yeah man!
the real ne-
gro, man, real
cool.

Broad back
big you know what
black sperm spews
negritude.

… (mere)