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#BTEditorial – A libation for Kamau

by Barbados Today
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It

It

It

It is not

It is not

It is not enough to be free

of the whips, principalities and powers

Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy

Over the long course of his storied career as one who was present at the creation of what would be called West Indies Literature, now post-colonial literature in English, the Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB, became not merely one of the most original and inventive writers in the English language but a philosopher-king of Caribbean identity and consciousness.

A pioneer thinker on Creolisation, he coined the term ‘nation language’ to describe the unique tongue created out of a violent clash of civilisations – words and forms that he and the post-war generation of Caribbean writers began to use freely in their work. For him, the disdainful term, “dialect”, is rooted in self-loathing and self-denial by the descendants of the oppressed. He argued that “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters”.

In his History of the Voice in 1984, he explained: “It is nation language in the Caribbean that, in fact, largely ignores the pentameter.

“Nation language is the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features.

“But in its contours, its rhythm and its timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree.”

He insisted that Barbadian and Caribbean people should see themselves not as victims or even survivors but as ultimate victors of one of the most traumatic holocausts in human history – the enslavement and transport to the Americas of millions of African peoples and the deaths in captivity of unknown numbers on the Middle Passage and in bondage in the West Indies.

Even with the settlement of European and later Indian and East Asian peoples in the plantation economy, then the world’s largest capitalist enterprise, Brathwaite remained firmly rooted in the mythology and message that a brutal system could not erase.

The Arrival: A New World Trilogy is a landmark oeuvre of long-term poems – Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969) – that was created following his sojourn in the new nation that was once the principal exporting colony of enslaved African people – the Gold Coast – which became independent Ghana in 1957.

Kamau Brathwaite was there as an educator, but himself received a vital education in a rare return journey of a descendant of the enslaved Africans. A circle broken by time and tide could now be completed.

It is as fitting as it is profound that he received the name Kamau from Kenya’s own Great Man of Letters and a fellow leading theorist in postcolonial literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Brathwaite’s books of poems, accompanied by spoken word recordings in his sonorous timbre, emerged as the newest, most exciting and most significant voice in post-colonial writing. At a time of fever and fervour of political independence, new nations sought to wrest minds from bondage to a ‘mother country’ and reacquaint them with our Motherland through his poetry and writings and thought.

We, the descendants of those arrivants are ourselves conquerors and masters of the tongue that tried to vanquish our forebears, Brathwaite argued.

As Noah Webster did for what became American English, Kamau Brathwaite’s innovation, grounded in the Creole language of Caribbean people, revealed that this region has its own own distinctive voice.

For we have something to say. Brathwaite’s Caribbean story is not merely of survival but of conquering the manifest destiny of colonisers, and creating an opportunity to be guided by a new North Star – like the Black Star in the Ghanaian national flag.

Kamau Brathwaite sought to rebuild the foundation of the Caribbean experience through ideas, imagery and idiom that would be a wellspring of wisdom for all the ages. He wrote our redemption songs.

But this prophet was honoured everywhere, save in his own home.

Despite being lionised by many of the great and good in Barbadian politics and culture, he remained our unnamed Poet Laureate.

Lorna Goodison, the poet laureate of Jamaica, said of Brathwaite: “I admired his refusal to play it safe.

“He took chances and always exhorted younger poets to try new things…not to play it safe.

“He was always exhorting the poets who came after him to launch out into the deep, take on the unknown.

“He was truly a poet of mystery and we will not see a light like his for a long long time.”

He was not garlanded with Nobel laurels, though he was certainly worthy. But along with Derek Walcott, he remains as significant and as original a figure for the Caribbean in the world of English literature as Seamus Heaney was for the Irish and Joseph Brodsky for the Americans.

He has something to say, in a way that had never been heard before.

It will not be enough beyond a few selections to Caribbean anthologies for Brathwaite’s legacy to be secure.

There is no sustained study of Brathwaite in either formal or informal education system.

We must work harder to embrace and internalise this visionary prophet’s message to us all – to once and for all remove the vestigial shackles of slavery, racism, oppression and denial of self.

The Great Drummer of Odomankomo says

The Great Drummer of Odomankomo says

That he has come from sleep

That he has come from sleep

And is arising

And is arising

Like akoko the cock

Like akoko the cock who clucks

Who crows in the morning

Who crows in the morning

We are addressing you

Ye re kyere wo

We are addressing you

Ye re kyere wo

Listen

Let us succeed

Listen

May we succeed

‘Libation’ from Masks (1968)

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