Kamau Brathwaite
Middle Passages
Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1992
New York: New Directions, 1993
published in Hambone (Santa Cruz, CA) 11 (Spring 1994)
Since they first grew apart long ago, poetry and history have seldom made a fruitful marriage. Their purposes seem almost irreconcilable---history as a discipline gives information through time, aspiring to narrate a complex web of events, whereas poetry cannot be burdened with too much information if it is still to resonate and take flight. In a sense, history illuminates the trail of deaths that lie behind us, while poetry may reveal the life that stretches before us. Poets who use history as part of their material play a risky game: too often, picking and choosing elements to suit them, they prove ill-equipped to handle the intricacies of history. Yet the will to form is a tenacious instinct and the poet cobbles together the pieces come what may. In the current century the temptation has been especially great to re-present history through the medium of poetry---regardless of a poet's lack of grounding---and so we have witnessed the rise of a new and problematic role of the poet as crackpot historian.
All this underscores by contrast a primary virtue in the work of Kamau Brathwaite: here is one of that very rare breed, a major poet who is also a trained historian. Moreover, the historical studies he has produced---The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Clarendon, 1971), Wars of Respect (API, 1977), History of the Voice (New Beacon, 1984), to name a few---show another uncommon distinction which joins with his perspective as a poet, in that he gives voice to the people he lives among (rather, he listens to the voices that clearly abound). That is, he recognizes the source of his authority as residing less in the lofty titles of Poet and Historian than in the people whose experience he shares. As a native of the Caribbean, specifically Barbados, he knows from inside the shattered legacy passed down from the time of slavery; his work seeks at once to articulate the shape of that loss and to mend the rent in the fabric of the African heritage.
For Brathwaite, the conflict begins in the collision of the missile culture of Europe with the circle culture of Africa. He lays out the dynamic of this encounter in "The Visibility Trigger":
and unprepared & venerable I was dreaming mighty wind in trees
our circles talismans round hut round village cooking pots
the world was round & we the spices in it
time wheeled around our memories like stars
yam cassava groundnut sweetpea bush
and then it was yams again
Into the wholeness of this life came the Europeans, who landed as upon a target:
and they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects
birth was not breath
but gaping wound
hunter was not animal
but market sale
The missile culture thus corrupts all it touches, looking only to reproduce itself, so that from this point on the African is drawn into the world of the European: "and our great odoum"---the cotton tree, seat of the ancestors---"triggered at last by the ancestors into your visibility // crashed / into history."
Transported to the New World both cultures suffered an irrevocable "sea-change," as Shakespeare called it in The Tempest: the Europeans went through an alter-Renaissance, in Brathwaite's term, where humanist values were overturned as greed and cruelty reached new heights, and the human machine that was plantation society burned out slaves like so many disposable parts; while for the Africans, in order to survive, all that was vital in their worldview became submerged, broken but alive under the heavy tread of the Christian conquerors. Brathwaite's abiding task since his first books has been to reconnect, to take up the wider circle that joins Africa with the Caribbean, and to assist in its reemergence. The Middle Passage then describes not only the route that the slave ships followed across the Atlantic but also the journey back with the discovery of Africa's survival in the New World.
The signal of this layered identity is to be found, of course, in language. It is no surprise, therefore, that the first poem in Middle Passages should be dedicated to the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, one of the first Caribbean writers to make the drum talk in his poems. "Word Making Man" celebrates Guillén's faith in his black roots and the spirit of resistance---as among boxers, musicians, political activists---which forges a new language bearing the force of Xango, god of thunder. "The sea between us yields its secrets" and enables the scattered islands to communicate, where "together we say wind / & understand its history of ghosts // together we say fire / & again there is a future in those sparks." Ultimately, the many islands merge into one: "we say this our land & know at last at last it is our home." In spite of history precisely, the world seems almost young, full of possibility, "'w/ the vast splendour of the sunshine & the sunflower & the // stars'."
This book occupies a special place in Brathwaite's oeuvre, being essentially a volume of selected poems but with a vision quite its own. Six of the fourteen poems in Middle Passages are taken from X/Self (1987), the last book in his second (Bajan) trilogy, whose "magical irrealism" traces the African Diaspora in all its complexity (both trilogies from Oxford University Press, although the second is nearly out of print). The new collection recasts the work in a dramatic sequence of praise and lament, protest and wonder, and finally prayer, as it shifts constantly between the Caribbean past and present, by way of Africa and Europe. "A splice of time & space," as he describes it, the book stands as a bridge toward a projected third trilogy and the "Sycorax video style" being developed in his latest work.
Here that style is most evident in the greater movement his poems show on the page, which is gained through several means: variations in font, size, and appearance (bold, italic); a streamlined punctuation where periods replace the commas of earlier versions but also fall in the middle of words, thereby interrupting their usual meaning; and the realigning of some poems to a justified right margin or centered down the middle. Even simple alterations prove effective, as in "Letter Sycorax," where the narrator speaking in nation language delights in the new possibilities of writing on a computer; Brathwaite redraws every letter x so that it will stand out in big bold type with added flair, and redesigns words to point up their embedded irony for a Caliban looking to avoid the examples of Prospero:
what is de bess way to say so/so it doan sounn
like
brigg
flatts or her. vokitz nor de
π.
san cantos nor de souf sea bible
Were it merely a video style that Brathwaite was exploring, one might say he was still at the first stage of computer love, flicking a few buttons and dazzled by the results. But calling it a "Sycorax video style," he sees the hidden potential in this new toy for subverting the staid presence of the printed word. His use of the style in Middle Passages foretells of bigger steps to come, but even the banner headlines jumping like trumpet blasts through "Duke," a tribute to Ellington and the only poem previously unpublished, barely hint at the great explosion of effects shown in his recent long poem "Trench Town Rock" (in Hambone 10). Nonetheless, the heart of his style remains deeply musical, as in the unadorned opening of "Duke":
The old man's hands are alligator
skins
and swimming easily like these
along the harp stringed keyboard
where he will make
of
Solitude
a silver thing
as if great age like his
could play that tune along
these cracks that flow
between their swing
without a scratch of thistle
sound
& whistle down the rhythm all night long
Brathwaite's poetic language, now heightened by the visual dimension, has always attained a certain richness of tensions and texture by way of his montage technique. With his thorough historical awareness he juxtaposes past and present or different points in time such that we may view their full circle, rather than as linear events in the way we usually consider history. "Colombe," the oldest poem here (Rights of Passage, 1967), plays on several ambiguities ('colombe': the dove is not Columbus here, although he has his chance), with the famous navigator poised aboard his ship, as if he might yet glimpse the ravages to come upon the pristine beauty of the island before him. As he watched "from his after- / deck," scanning the landscape:
. . . his eyes climbed towards the highest ridges
where our farms were hidden
Now he was sure
he heard soft voices mocking in the leaves
What did this journey mean. this
new world mean. dis
covery? or a return to terrors
he had sailed from. known before?
I watched him pause
Columbus has spotted a maroon settlement---the runaway African slaves who set up communities in inaccessible areas, the better to defend them---which in time did not exist until slavery. By taking "a pinch of time" (Brion Gysin's phrase), placing them both in the same space, Brathwaite emphasizes that the discovery and the resistance to slavery were part of the same gesture.
He also applies the montage to poetry through frequent interweaving between the King's English and nation language. Yet even when he seems to be writing like Prospero, it is not the tradition of English pentameter that concerns him but the Caribbean rhythms which have transformed that tongue. As for nation language---derived from an oral tradition and from native musical structures like calypso, as he explains in History of the Voice---its use by Caribbean poets was slow to take hold; early practitioners such as Louise Bennett in Jamaica (whose first book appeared in 1940) were not taken seriously by the literary establishment until the late 1960s when a new generation, Brathwaite foremost among them, revived Caribbean poetry with a native perspective. In the present collection, only "Letter Sycorax" and most of "Stone" are written in nation language, but throughout his work it remains like the other voice, streetwise and spunky, that can rear up at any moment through the measured articulations of the more literary voice. Even a single line may suffice to mark this contrast, as in the poem "How Europe underdeveloped Africa," which builds in its details of European ignorance and abuse, fueling the anger, until "these small miss/demeanours as you call them . . . be / come the boulder rising in the bleed // the shoulder nourishing the gun / the headlines screaming of the skrawl across the wall / of surbiton of trenton town of sheraton hotel // dat por cyaaan tek no moor." This last line, situated about a third of the way through the poem, stands as the sole occurrence of nation language, crying out in its rawness; its effect is further enhanced by the singular use of his video style where those several words are blown up big and bold but in completely irregular typeface, as though for once Caliban is speaking in the crude tongue Prospero expects of him, desperate to be heard.
The montage for Brathwaite is more than a poetic device; it goes back at the very least to the source of the Western tradition. In a note at the end of X/Self, he speaks of the "montage world of the Mediterranean (Norse, Byzantine, Afro/European)" which produced Aesop, Socrates, Cleopatra, Sycorax, Hannibal, Othello, and several of the Medicis. Just as moments in history are fused together in his poetry, and different registers of a language, so are some of the very words he employs---as though two or three terms crashed upon a single point in space. He bends words like one might bend a musical note, as in the title of one poem here, "Noom," which means fatal noon, of doom. The slave ships have arrived in Africa but the Europeans must be careful to ignore the natives' songs, "the sounds of their godderel / and don't try to learn their langridge." In "Soweto," he speaks of "that black bellied night of hell and helleluia," and in a passage recalling the German massacre of the herero in Namibia at the turn of the century, there are "the torn feet cracked and stacked and streggaed": this last word, in his note when the poem first appeared in X/Self, means "stripped with a sound like reggae guitar strings." But the most fluent use of montage through all its levels is to be found in "Stone," the powerful poem dedicated to Mikey Smith, the Jamaican sound-poet who was stoned to death one morning on Stony Hill in Kingston; here the voice hovers before death as consciousness runs in and out of place and time and language: "& it was like the blue of speace was filling up the heavens / wid its thunder // & it was like the wind was grow. in skin. the skin had hard hairs / harderin."
What all this comes down to for Brathwaite, as poet and historian, is the need to make order of the world---not from Prospero's viewpoint but from his own. In recomposing these Middle Passages, even the ordering of the poems bears a kind of inevitable music. So the stars glimpsed from the islands at the end of "Word Making Man" are the same stars viewed by Columbus at the beginning of the next poem, "Colombe"; where that ends he is walking ashore and early in the following poem, "Noom," another boat arrives "seeking harbour." At the close of that poem, the African noblemen/priests are to be tossed overboard from the slave ships to the sharks, but on the next page "Duke" begins with the wise old survivor.
Revisiting these poems written over a span of nearly a quarter century, Middle Passages achieves a new wholeness with them. The book offers a prismatic view of the New World's troubled birth, where again and again history is brought round in a people rising from the ashes.
* * *
Barabajan Poems
Kingston & New York: Savacou North, 1994
published in Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (New York) 51 (Fall 1995)
By its very appearance, hefty in size with a full palette of print styles, Barabajan Poems calls attention to its unique event. This is not like any other book, nor could it be, for it entails a voyage of discovery woven of many threads. The story of a life, a people, a place, it comprises the voices Brathwaite has carried with him and that have brought him home, and above all it follows the rising of his own voice. Marked by the star of return, the discovery is one of sources, the deep taproots that have always nourished his poems in the subsoil of Barbados---Little England, as it once was known, but geographically the closest Caribbean island to Africa.
Based on a lecture delivered at the Frank Collymore Auditorium of the Central Bank of Barbados in late 1987, the text might never have gathered its scope and impact had it been published by the Bank as planned. Autobiographical in nature, it merges with the history of the island as of the region, and sets the context for many of his poems from throughout his career, which are quoted at length here; the poems gain added dimension by this juxtaposition, in that he allows us to see the fruit as well as the tree, in the very details of the experience that is their basis. Brathwaite kept reworking the book, in that delay of editorial commitment, and eventually published it himself as the first title in a new series from Savacou, the journal and press he founded a quarter-century ago in Jamaica. Probably no other publisher could have gotten it right, to do justice to the density and complexity of this book as he has laid it out, particularly with respect to the "Sycorax video style" of his recent work, here given its fullest expression. Thus, in the weave of prose and poetry, invocation and reminiscence, reportage and protest and also song, all the visual elements are constantly shifting across the pages---pitch sizes, fonts, margins, spacing, bold, italic---spiced with occasional icons to underscore conceptual relationships (the train, for instance, denoting Shango, the Yoruba god of fire and thunder, but also by extension John Henry and the tradition of train songs).
From Brathwaite's first books of poetry nearly thirty years ago, as in his scholarly work as a historian, it has been his ongoing project to celebrate, and to bring light upon, the continuance of African traditions in New World cultures. The development of his video style arose from his encounters with the computer, in which he saw not just an office tool, but a new opportunity for transformation; it has enabled him to further engage in the "cosmological interfaces" that are to be found throughout our cultures. When he realized "that the computer cd write in light," he explains in a brief section at the end of the book, "I discovered a whole new way of SEEING things I was SAYING So that the video is the nearest I can get to what the athlete or the dancer or the actor says." Endless dramatic possibilities open up, therefore, by exploiting the rhythmic plasticity of the text. In the emphasis on their visual placement, the words can be heard for all their urgency or kept almost under breath or given the weight of pebbles like islands across the Caribbean itself. By naming it the Sycorax video style, he conjures the submerged mother of Caliban, she who speaks from inside the words---just as Brathwaite learned to hear the subterranean waterways beneath the riverless rock of his native land, and the culture of Africa at the heart of Caribbean practices.
Fittingly, it takes many pages to really enter the book, but this preparation is part of the event. Along the way, a quote from Miles Davis sets the tone: "Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yrself." Brathwaite opens with libations to friends, family, and dearly departed, then follows by defining his terms (poet, culture, Bajan culture), before starting at the beginning, his beginning, there in the landscape of his boyhood. The narrative yields easily to the poems, with snatches of songs and a loving litany of names, but hardly has the text commenced when we are launched into the back part of the book where fifty pages of notes, and an additional fifty of appendices (all presented in the Sycorax video style), engage in an ongoing commentary upon the lecture, expanding the dialogue of past and present, opening new connections. We soon understand that the voyage is circular by its very nature as text, sending us back and forth and ever deeper.
In seeking out the living current of African and New World traditions, Brathwaite has clearly run across many obstacles---not least of which have been Establishment attitudes sensing a threat to the colonial heritage. His discovery of jazz, as a teenager in the 1940s, opened him up "to possibilities & alter/natives within not only our developing Caribbean literatures, but within 'English' literature as a whole." The difficulty was, however, the music that excited him most, bebop, was almost prohibited by the self-appointed cultural censors, both Bajan and English, who were in a position to keep it off the radio and unavailable as imported records. What he heard as a glimpse of the future was considered improper for an educated young man. In a similar way, looking toward the past, he recounts how he had grown up hearing "Bajan had no culture," in a society that had long been trained to deny the African connection; he later found "this attitude, this platitude, this altitude" all across the Caribbean. Yet he saw that there was a native religious culture, evident from kumina in Jamaica, carnival in Trinidad, cumfa in Guyana, vodoun in Haiti, santería in Cuba, candomblé in Brazil, and so on. If these were often difficult of access, it was not just due to denial but out of an instinct for self-preservation. Herein lies the drama of survival for African culture in the New World, which Brathwaite distills into the crucial word nam:
At moments or times of crisis, man goes into implosion, disguise, defence, maroon profile, an alteration of consciousness - nam. By nam I mean grit sand pebble seed safe secret - unquestioned not necessarily visible - out of which the strength comes, where the heart of the culture resides . . . where it cannot any longer be destroyed.
By insisting, against the current, on the fundamental importance of folk cultures in the Caribbean, in the spirit of the maroons---with their renegade communities in Jamaica, Brazil, Surinam---he has celebrated that survival with impassioned eloquence, and as a poet he has unlocked those seeds and secrets at the heart of language itself.
The return, for Brathwaite, as in any great voyage, began the moment he started out. Like other young writers from the Caribbean, since there was no domestic tradition of higher learning (a matter of colonial policy), he went off to Europe for his university education. At Cambridge, it turned out, he was not the "citizen of the world" he had imagined, but a West Indian and far from home, despite making friends with British and other West Indian writers. The feeling of exile was too acute, and the prospects of his own survival in England too precarious, so after his degree he spent the next ten years in Ghana undergoing his "de/education." There he discovered a whole different way to live, where the meals were based on yam and other staples, in a "drum centred earth sounding culture." It was the arduous start of his "interior journey into the history & culture of our selves," and though he was welcomed, he was also distrusted as a "cane-sucker," a West Indian unaware of the past, searching for easy answers. But he stayed and learned, and it was there that he had a vision of home that could reconnect what was nearly destroyed in the Middle Passage. On his return to the Caribbean, where he ended up teaching in Jamaica for more than twenty years before coming to New York, he devoted his efforts to this new sense of continuity. As a poet he realized he was hearing not iambic pentameter but different rhythms in that terrain of sea and islands, and in this "rhythmic tidalectics" the entire Caribbean could be understood. Moreover, he found the connection right at home in the end, in the person of his great-uncle Bob'ob the carpenter, lame like Legba, god of the doorway and the crossroads, who on his own, hidden in the back of his shop, had all along been carving an African image; in that same spot, where the shop was converted into a Zion meeting place after his uncle's death, Brathwaite later discovered another connection, when he overheard a prayer meeting one night which soon turned into a ritual of possession, like those elsewhere in the Afro-Caribbean but never admitted to exist in Barbados. Everywhere around him, it seemed, the traces were rising to the surface, and he knew it was his task to sing of them.
For on this ground
trampled with the bull's swathe of whips
where the slave at the crossroads was a red
anthill: eaten by moonbeams
by the holy ghosts of his wounds
the Word
becomes again a god and walks
among us: look
here are his rags here is his crutch and his satchel
of dreams here is his hoe and his rude
implements
on this ground
on this broken ground
Middle Passages
Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1992
New York: New Directions, 1993
published in Hambone (Santa Cruz, CA) 11 (Spring 1994)
Since they first grew apart long ago, poetry and history have seldom made a fruitful marriage. Their purposes seem almost irreconcilable---history as a discipline gives information through time, aspiring to narrate a complex web of events, whereas poetry cannot be burdened with too much information if it is still to resonate and take flight. In a sense, history illuminates the trail of deaths that lie behind us, while poetry may reveal the life that stretches before us. Poets who use history as part of their material play a risky game: too often, picking and choosing elements to suit them, they prove ill-equipped to handle the intricacies of history. Yet the will to form is a tenacious instinct and the poet cobbles together the pieces come what may. In the current century the temptation has been especially great to re-present history through the medium of poetry---regardless of a poet's lack of grounding---and so we have witnessed the rise of a new and problematic role of the poet as crackpot historian.
All this underscores by contrast a primary virtue in the work of Kamau Brathwaite: here is one of that very rare breed, a major poet who is also a trained historian. Moreover, the historical studies he has produced---The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Clarendon, 1971), Wars of Respect (API, 1977), History of the Voice (New Beacon, 1984), to name a few---show another uncommon distinction which joins with his perspective as a poet, in that he gives voice to the people he lives among (rather, he listens to the voices that clearly abound). That is, he recognizes the source of his authority as residing less in the lofty titles of Poet and Historian than in the people whose experience he shares. As a native of the Caribbean, specifically Barbados, he knows from inside the shattered legacy passed down from the time of slavery; his work seeks at once to articulate the shape of that loss and to mend the rent in the fabric of the African heritage.
For Brathwaite, the conflict begins in the collision of the missile culture of Europe with the circle culture of Africa. He lays out the dynamic of this encounter in "The Visibility Trigger":
and unprepared & venerable I was dreaming mighty wind in trees
our circles talismans round hut round village cooking pots
the world was round & we the spices in it
time wheeled around our memories like stars
yam cassava groundnut sweetpea bush
and then it was yams again
Into the wholeness of this life came the Europeans, who landed as upon a target:
and they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects
birth was not breath
but gaping wound
hunter was not animal
but market sale
The missile culture thus corrupts all it touches, looking only to reproduce itself, so that from this point on the African is drawn into the world of the European: "and our great odoum"---the cotton tree, seat of the ancestors---"triggered at last by the ancestors into your visibility // crashed / into history."
Transported to the New World both cultures suffered an irrevocable "sea-change," as Shakespeare called it in The Tempest: the Europeans went through an alter-Renaissance, in Brathwaite's term, where humanist values were overturned as greed and cruelty reached new heights, and the human machine that was plantation society burned out slaves like so many disposable parts; while for the Africans, in order to survive, all that was vital in their worldview became submerged, broken but alive under the heavy tread of the Christian conquerors. Brathwaite's abiding task since his first books has been to reconnect, to take up the wider circle that joins Africa with the Caribbean, and to assist in its reemergence. The Middle Passage then describes not only the route that the slave ships followed across the Atlantic but also the journey back with the discovery of Africa's survival in the New World.
The signal of this layered identity is to be found, of course, in language. It is no surprise, therefore, that the first poem in Middle Passages should be dedicated to the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, one of the first Caribbean writers to make the drum talk in his poems. "Word Making Man" celebrates Guillén's faith in his black roots and the spirit of resistance---as among boxers, musicians, political activists---which forges a new language bearing the force of Xango, god of thunder. "The sea between us yields its secrets" and enables the scattered islands to communicate, where "together we say wind / & understand its history of ghosts // together we say fire / & again there is a future in those sparks." Ultimately, the many islands merge into one: "we say this our land & know at last at last it is our home." In spite of history precisely, the world seems almost young, full of possibility, "'w/ the vast splendour of the sunshine & the sunflower & the // stars'."
This book occupies a special place in Brathwaite's oeuvre, being essentially a volume of selected poems but with a vision quite its own. Six of the fourteen poems in Middle Passages are taken from X/Self (1987), the last book in his second (Bajan) trilogy, whose "magical irrealism" traces the African Diaspora in all its complexity (both trilogies from Oxford University Press, although the second is nearly out of print). The new collection recasts the work in a dramatic sequence of praise and lament, protest and wonder, and finally prayer, as it shifts constantly between the Caribbean past and present, by way of Africa and Europe. "A splice of time & space," as he describes it, the book stands as a bridge toward a projected third trilogy and the "Sycorax video style" being developed in his latest work.
Here that style is most evident in the greater movement his poems show on the page, which is gained through several means: variations in font, size, and appearance (bold, italic); a streamlined punctuation where periods replace the commas of earlier versions but also fall in the middle of words, thereby interrupting their usual meaning; and the realigning of some poems to a justified right margin or centered down the middle. Even simple alterations prove effective, as in "Letter Sycorax," where the narrator speaking in nation language delights in the new possibilities of writing on a computer; Brathwaite redraws every letter x so that it will stand out in big bold type with added flair, and redesigns words to point up their embedded irony for a Caliban looking to avoid the examples of Prospero:
what is de bess way to say so/so it doan sounn
like
brigg
flatts or her. vokitz nor de
π.
san cantos nor de souf sea bible
Were it merely a video style that Brathwaite was exploring, one might say he was still at the first stage of computer love, flicking a few buttons and dazzled by the results. But calling it a "Sycorax video style," he sees the hidden potential in this new toy for subverting the staid presence of the printed word. His use of the style in Middle Passages foretells of bigger steps to come, but even the banner headlines jumping like trumpet blasts through "Duke," a tribute to Ellington and the only poem previously unpublished, barely hint at the great explosion of effects shown in his recent long poem "Trench Town Rock" (in Hambone 10). Nonetheless, the heart of his style remains deeply musical, as in the unadorned opening of "Duke":
The old man's hands are alligator
skins
and swimming easily like these
along the harp stringed keyboard
where he will make
of
Solitude
a silver thing
as if great age like his
could play that tune along
these cracks that flow
between their swing
without a scratch of thistle
sound
& whistle down the rhythm all night long
Brathwaite's poetic language, now heightened by the visual dimension, has always attained a certain richness of tensions and texture by way of his montage technique. With his thorough historical awareness he juxtaposes past and present or different points in time such that we may view their full circle, rather than as linear events in the way we usually consider history. "Colombe," the oldest poem here (Rights of Passage, 1967), plays on several ambiguities ('colombe': the dove is not Columbus here, although he has his chance), with the famous navigator poised aboard his ship, as if he might yet glimpse the ravages to come upon the pristine beauty of the island before him. As he watched "from his after- / deck," scanning the landscape:
. . . his eyes climbed towards the highest ridges
where our farms were hidden
Now he was sure
he heard soft voices mocking in the leaves
What did this journey mean. this
new world mean. dis
covery? or a return to terrors
he had sailed from. known before?
I watched him pause
Columbus has spotted a maroon settlement---the runaway African slaves who set up communities in inaccessible areas, the better to defend them---which in time did not exist until slavery. By taking "a pinch of time" (Brion Gysin's phrase), placing them both in the same space, Brathwaite emphasizes that the discovery and the resistance to slavery were part of the same gesture.
He also applies the montage to poetry through frequent interweaving between the King's English and nation language. Yet even when he seems to be writing like Prospero, it is not the tradition of English pentameter that concerns him but the Caribbean rhythms which have transformed that tongue. As for nation language---derived from an oral tradition and from native musical structures like calypso, as he explains in History of the Voice---its use by Caribbean poets was slow to take hold; early practitioners such as Louise Bennett in Jamaica (whose first book appeared in 1940) were not taken seriously by the literary establishment until the late 1960s when a new generation, Brathwaite foremost among them, revived Caribbean poetry with a native perspective. In the present collection, only "Letter Sycorax" and most of "Stone" are written in nation language, but throughout his work it remains like the other voice, streetwise and spunky, that can rear up at any moment through the measured articulations of the more literary voice. Even a single line may suffice to mark this contrast, as in the poem "How Europe underdeveloped Africa," which builds in its details of European ignorance and abuse, fueling the anger, until "these small miss/demeanours as you call them . . . be / come the boulder rising in the bleed // the shoulder nourishing the gun / the headlines screaming of the skrawl across the wall / of surbiton of trenton town of sheraton hotel // dat por cyaaan tek no moor." This last line, situated about a third of the way through the poem, stands as the sole occurrence of nation language, crying out in its rawness; its effect is further enhanced by the singular use of his video style where those several words are blown up big and bold but in completely irregular typeface, as though for once Caliban is speaking in the crude tongue Prospero expects of him, desperate to be heard.
The montage for Brathwaite is more than a poetic device; it goes back at the very least to the source of the Western tradition. In a note at the end of X/Self, he speaks of the "montage world of the Mediterranean (Norse, Byzantine, Afro/European)" which produced Aesop, Socrates, Cleopatra, Sycorax, Hannibal, Othello, and several of the Medicis. Just as moments in history are fused together in his poetry, and different registers of a language, so are some of the very words he employs---as though two or three terms crashed upon a single point in space. He bends words like one might bend a musical note, as in the title of one poem here, "Noom," which means fatal noon, of doom. The slave ships have arrived in Africa but the Europeans must be careful to ignore the natives' songs, "the sounds of their godderel / and don't try to learn their langridge." In "Soweto," he speaks of "that black bellied night of hell and helleluia," and in a passage recalling the German massacre of the herero in Namibia at the turn of the century, there are "the torn feet cracked and stacked and streggaed": this last word, in his note when the poem first appeared in X/Self, means "stripped with a sound like reggae guitar strings." But the most fluent use of montage through all its levels is to be found in "Stone," the powerful poem dedicated to Mikey Smith, the Jamaican sound-poet who was stoned to death one morning on Stony Hill in Kingston; here the voice hovers before death as consciousness runs in and out of place and time and language: "& it was like the blue of speace was filling up the heavens / wid its thunder // & it was like the wind was grow. in skin. the skin had hard hairs / harderin."
What all this comes down to for Brathwaite, as poet and historian, is the need to make order of the world---not from Prospero's viewpoint but from his own. In recomposing these Middle Passages, even the ordering of the poems bears a kind of inevitable music. So the stars glimpsed from the islands at the end of "Word Making Man" are the same stars viewed by Columbus at the beginning of the next poem, "Colombe"; where that ends he is walking ashore and early in the following poem, "Noom," another boat arrives "seeking harbour." At the close of that poem, the African noblemen/priests are to be tossed overboard from the slave ships to the sharks, but on the next page "Duke" begins with the wise old survivor.
Revisiting these poems written over a span of nearly a quarter century, Middle Passages achieves a new wholeness with them. The book offers a prismatic view of the New World's troubled birth, where again and again history is brought round in a people rising from the ashes.
* * *
Barabajan Poems
Kingston & New York: Savacou North, 1994
published in Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (New York) 51 (Fall 1995)
By its very appearance, hefty in size with a full palette of print styles, Barabajan Poems calls attention to its unique event. This is not like any other book, nor could it be, for it entails a voyage of discovery woven of many threads. The story of a life, a people, a place, it comprises the voices Brathwaite has carried with him and that have brought him home, and above all it follows the rising of his own voice. Marked by the star of return, the discovery is one of sources, the deep taproots that have always nourished his poems in the subsoil of Barbados---Little England, as it once was known, but geographically the closest Caribbean island to Africa.
Based on a lecture delivered at the Frank Collymore Auditorium of the Central Bank of Barbados in late 1987, the text might never have gathered its scope and impact had it been published by the Bank as planned. Autobiographical in nature, it merges with the history of the island as of the region, and sets the context for many of his poems from throughout his career, which are quoted at length here; the poems gain added dimension by this juxtaposition, in that he allows us to see the fruit as well as the tree, in the very details of the experience that is their basis. Brathwaite kept reworking the book, in that delay of editorial commitment, and eventually published it himself as the first title in a new series from Savacou, the journal and press he founded a quarter-century ago in Jamaica. Probably no other publisher could have gotten it right, to do justice to the density and complexity of this book as he has laid it out, particularly with respect to the "Sycorax video style" of his recent work, here given its fullest expression. Thus, in the weave of prose and poetry, invocation and reminiscence, reportage and protest and also song, all the visual elements are constantly shifting across the pages---pitch sizes, fonts, margins, spacing, bold, italic---spiced with occasional icons to underscore conceptual relationships (the train, for instance, denoting Shango, the Yoruba god of fire and thunder, but also by extension John Henry and the tradition of train songs).
From Brathwaite's first books of poetry nearly thirty years ago, as in his scholarly work as a historian, it has been his ongoing project to celebrate, and to bring light upon, the continuance of African traditions in New World cultures. The development of his video style arose from his encounters with the computer, in which he saw not just an office tool, but a new opportunity for transformation; it has enabled him to further engage in the "cosmological interfaces" that are to be found throughout our cultures. When he realized "that the computer cd write in light," he explains in a brief section at the end of the book, "I discovered a whole new way of SEEING things I was SAYING So that the video is the nearest I can get to what the athlete or the dancer or the actor says." Endless dramatic possibilities open up, therefore, by exploiting the rhythmic plasticity of the text. In the emphasis on their visual placement, the words can be heard for all their urgency or kept almost under breath or given the weight of pebbles like islands across the Caribbean itself. By naming it the Sycorax video style, he conjures the submerged mother of Caliban, she who speaks from inside the words---just as Brathwaite learned to hear the subterranean waterways beneath the riverless rock of his native land, and the culture of Africa at the heart of Caribbean practices.
Fittingly, it takes many pages to really enter the book, but this preparation is part of the event. Along the way, a quote from Miles Davis sets the tone: "Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yrself." Brathwaite opens with libations to friends, family, and dearly departed, then follows by defining his terms (poet, culture, Bajan culture), before starting at the beginning, his beginning, there in the landscape of his boyhood. The narrative yields easily to the poems, with snatches of songs and a loving litany of names, but hardly has the text commenced when we are launched into the back part of the book where fifty pages of notes, and an additional fifty of appendices (all presented in the Sycorax video style), engage in an ongoing commentary upon the lecture, expanding the dialogue of past and present, opening new connections. We soon understand that the voyage is circular by its very nature as text, sending us back and forth and ever deeper.
In seeking out the living current of African and New World traditions, Brathwaite has clearly run across many obstacles---not least of which have been Establishment attitudes sensing a threat to the colonial heritage. His discovery of jazz, as a teenager in the 1940s, opened him up "to possibilities & alter/natives within not only our developing Caribbean literatures, but within 'English' literature as a whole." The difficulty was, however, the music that excited him most, bebop, was almost prohibited by the self-appointed cultural censors, both Bajan and English, who were in a position to keep it off the radio and unavailable as imported records. What he heard as a glimpse of the future was considered improper for an educated young man. In a similar way, looking toward the past, he recounts how he had grown up hearing "Bajan had no culture," in a society that had long been trained to deny the African connection; he later found "this attitude, this platitude, this altitude" all across the Caribbean. Yet he saw that there was a native religious culture, evident from kumina in Jamaica, carnival in Trinidad, cumfa in Guyana, vodoun in Haiti, santería in Cuba, candomblé in Brazil, and so on. If these were often difficult of access, it was not just due to denial but out of an instinct for self-preservation. Herein lies the drama of survival for African culture in the New World, which Brathwaite distills into the crucial word nam:
At moments or times of crisis, man goes into implosion, disguise, defence, maroon profile, an alteration of consciousness - nam. By nam I mean grit sand pebble seed safe secret - unquestioned not necessarily visible - out of which the strength comes, where the heart of the culture resides . . . where it cannot any longer be destroyed.
By insisting, against the current, on the fundamental importance of folk cultures in the Caribbean, in the spirit of the maroons---with their renegade communities in Jamaica, Brazil, Surinam---he has celebrated that survival with impassioned eloquence, and as a poet he has unlocked those seeds and secrets at the heart of language itself.
The return, for Brathwaite, as in any great voyage, began the moment he started out. Like other young writers from the Caribbean, since there was no domestic tradition of higher learning (a matter of colonial policy), he went off to Europe for his university education. At Cambridge, it turned out, he was not the "citizen of the world" he had imagined, but a West Indian and far from home, despite making friends with British and other West Indian writers. The feeling of exile was too acute, and the prospects of his own survival in England too precarious, so after his degree he spent the next ten years in Ghana undergoing his "de/education." There he discovered a whole different way to live, where the meals were based on yam and other staples, in a "drum centred earth sounding culture." It was the arduous start of his "interior journey into the history & culture of our selves," and though he was welcomed, he was also distrusted as a "cane-sucker," a West Indian unaware of the past, searching for easy answers. But he stayed and learned, and it was there that he had a vision of home that could reconnect what was nearly destroyed in the Middle Passage. On his return to the Caribbean, where he ended up teaching in Jamaica for more than twenty years before coming to New York, he devoted his efforts to this new sense of continuity. As a poet he realized he was hearing not iambic pentameter but different rhythms in that terrain of sea and islands, and in this "rhythmic tidalectics" the entire Caribbean could be understood. Moreover, he found the connection right at home in the end, in the person of his great-uncle Bob'ob the carpenter, lame like Legba, god of the doorway and the crossroads, who on his own, hidden in the back of his shop, had all along been carving an African image; in that same spot, where the shop was converted into a Zion meeting place after his uncle's death, Brathwaite later discovered another connection, when he overheard a prayer meeting one night which soon turned into a ritual of possession, like those elsewhere in the Afro-Caribbean but never admitted to exist in Barbados. Everywhere around him, it seemed, the traces were rising to the surface, and he knew it was his task to sing of them.
For on this ground
trampled with the bull's swathe of whips
where the slave at the crossroads was a red
anthill: eaten by moonbeams
by the holy ghosts of his wounds
the Word
becomes again a god and walks
among us: look
here are his rags here is his crutch and his satchel
of dreams here is his hoe and his rude
implements
on this ground
on this broken ground