SOURCE: Rohlehr, Gordon, and E. A. Markham. “Rohlehr on Brathwaite.” In Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies & Britain, edited by E. A. Markham, pp. 109-16. Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1995.

[In the following interview, Rohlehr, an authority on Brathwaite's poetry, expresses admiration for Brathwaite's growth as an artist and reflects on the critical reaction to Brathwaite's work, especially among Caribbean writers.]

There are a number of possible ways I might have gone about it. I could have selected a number of concerns in the Trilogy [The Arrivants], for example, spoken about imagery. I felt that as a first exploratory work on the Trilogy. I should retrace in my criticism the journey which the [The Arrivants.] was about. The Trilogy is about a journey, or several journeys, which are all tributaries of a single journey. And it's interesting when you take that line, how many things come together. For example, I used that word tributaries, right away you've got the river, and the image of several branches coming in to form a stream, and you've got the idea of the trail. Then you've got that central image in the Trilogy of Anancy, the spider's web. You can see the spider's web, the trail, the river, the strands, the themes, all come together in such an intricate way that what you have is a network or a web; several tissues or strands joining together.

There is a remarkable coherence in what Eddy was doing in the Trilogy. One exciting way of approaching Eddy would be to jump in anywhere, or you might take a single word or a single image and see what has happened to this throughout the thing, and you find yourself moving in all kinds of directions. I decided that I'd take the chronological approach poem by poem, right through to the end. On the other hand I decided that I must also capture something of the sense of growth and the dimension that you gain as you move through the Trilogy.

You ask me about the criticism of Eddy's work. One of the things I have found is that for all the acclaim that his work has got, there isn't really much authoritative statement on the work. You've had this mixture of admiration and reservation, a grudging kind of admiration, particularly among Caribbean critics. There are some who have been in many ways overtly or covertly really quite hostile. Now you find that there is much less written about Masks even though there is Maureen Warner-Lewis's special work on Masks. She digs into all the sources on what he has done, in fact I deliberately said in my study that I am not going to do that in Masks because it has already been done by Maureen.

The general reaction in the Caribbean is one of not really wanting to open themselves up to the African experience. The African experience has been censored out of us, and we have learned to censor ourselves. You say Africa, you say black, and the minute you say those words, there is a sense of, why am I going on about this? Or, why am I preoccupied with the past? These notions immediately arise, and you feel that you shouldn't talk about it. Not much was said about Masks. Almost nothing was said about Islands; you can pick up ten articles but they don't say anything. So here I was feeling that the poetry is gaining in dimension, growing with every book. The words, the images and that the very ‘superficiality’ of which Eddy was overtly or covertly accused in Rights of Passage, had disappeared by the time we got to Islands. By that time the same people who might have criticised superficiality were not prepared to go through the effort of discovery and self discovery which was necessary if you were to come to grips with the new dimensions in Islands.

It struck me that this was very typical of us, that there are levels at which we are very superficial people. We talk about writers without knowing the writers. I mean there is very little autobiography in the West Indies. We literally talk about people we don't know. It is something which we need to contemplate, when we are contemplating this whole business about a biography or autobiography in the Caribbean: the concealed self, the layers and layers of Masks, or whatever that we create to protect us. Is this the result of some strategy which we as a people designed because our real selves were so frequently under attack? I mean parents don't tell us about the past, they don't tell us about the immediate family. You have no sense of the last generation. Our writers have been preoccupied by history; they have been preoccupied by autobiography, maybe for that very reason, that this was already an allusive thing. We grew up in the present moment, without having been given this dimension, this sense of a linkage with the past. I went into sketching the pattern of his ideas as he had expressed them in his various non-poetic statements: in his essays, in his reviews, in his articles, seeing how that mind was developing before Rights of Passage had begun.

Nobody in the Caribbean wants to reassess the African presence, even those who talk about it. I mean if you go into the libraries of our colleges, you'll see that the books on Africa are largely unread. They don't know anything about it. The books on India are also largely unread. The point about this is that where knowing that past and knowing that self becomes hard work you're pretty certain that nobody wants to do it.

Islands has that dimension because having gone into Africa, Brathwaite gets a way out, he gets another eye. The eye was always there, but he didn't know. So another eye is opened. He can now, for example, approach an image from two cultural angles. So the cross becomes not only the Christian cross but the crossroad and an icon. If you look at my book Pathfinder you'll see that the cover is black, that black on the cover represents the black ground. The names are largely in white, that white represents the white language, which is an image taken from the book too, you see.

The ground is black, the ground of being is black. The language which has been imposed on you is white. You use that language but you are using it on a black ground, which is actually a total reversal of the European image of making black marks in the white snow.

Then you will see on the cover a circle cut by a cross. Now that represents the beginning, that is the central icon. Then there is the God, the crippled God, the old man who stands at the gate at the point of intersection of the crossroads. And he has to be invoked to open the barrier, to open the gate before you can begin anything. The circle is the central image in the sense of moving in four different directions, the sense of moving away from an origin or moving back to an origin if you like—everything there is icon.

Now if Masks projected us into the past, Islands is projecting us towards the future. Now the question of refashioning the future is fascinating because it suggests that the future has already been mapped out; we are already headed for something that needs to be changed, that needs to be refashioned. So, it's a concept again of the poets, the artists, a rule of constant redefinition, remaking. He's saying that unless we have an energy of consciousness which we inject into the present, we remain with a future which is already pre-determined for us. It's pre-determined for us by the people who have made us what we have been from the past. It is pre-determined for us by the moles, by the categories and prisons that they have created.

Before we look at the second Trilogy [comprised of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self] let's look at what came in between. You had Other Exiles (1975), which is going back to some of his earlier work between 1948 or 1950, when he was at Cambridge. He has some interesting portraits of Europe and Europeans.

The poems which came out in Black and Blues (1975) were written between 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1972. Now if you talk about a silence about Islands, there has been an almost total silence about Black and Blues. Poems like ‘Starvation’, are severely focussed on the Kingston of the early 1970s. We are dealing with a phenomenon of terrifying violence. They are a response to the nakedness of now, the terror of now, with what we have become through the constant corrosion of being urban people in a ghetto, unemployed, and being in a sense trapped in that post-emancipation arrangement, by which we were not to be accommodated, by which we were never to possess the world into which we have supposedly been set free.

The dry season in the Caribbean is when the bushes burn. It's also when the hibiscus blooms. There are times when the place has been so dry, that the silver birch drops all of its leaves and you have this white skeleton of stems with a flower at the end of it. There's just not sufficient moisture to sustain the tree. That is the ambiguity running through Black and Blues. The ambiguity of drought and a life which was there. The ambiguity of the bareness and bleakness.

Brathwaite spent his first extended stay in Barbados for nearly 20 years, in early 1975/76. What I think it did was to free him from the kind of mental oppression that is part of the Jamaican experience. Now I'm not saying this against Jamaica, but you live there in a society which is under pressure, under stress. The mid-70s was period of a lot of raping. The poem ‘Spring Blades’ is about raping, at least part of it is about that. It's a place that set fire to an old ladies home, a place which gunmen made children go back into. So that there is grimness there, which obviously is lifted off when you get to Barbados.

On the other hand, of course, I remember George Lamming saying that Barbados was stable—the stability of the cemetery. So that you can get the other sense in Barbados of the place being stable as well as static. I think though that what Barbados did was to give his mind an ease, and he began now to explore the Barbadian landscape.

Now, Mother Poem is autobiography. So is Sun Poem, and so to a certain extent is X/Self. The question is how do we see these three very different poems as part of a trilogy. If they are part of a trilogy, what kind of trilogy? They're certainly not the same kind of trilogy as Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands. It is possible to see Mother and Sun poems as being two sides, two ways of looking at the Barbadian experience, Mother Poem being essentially the experience of the women, obviously as seen through the eyes of a man. Though the voices in Mother Poem, apart from the narrator's voice, are all those of women. Sun Poem is about the male experience. And, the images or central symbols are different. In Mother Poem you're dealing with the land, the women, and not so much the sea, you know, the sea becomes your existence towards the end, and I think there is a really marvellous poem about the sea towards the end of Mother Poem. Some of the best writing about the sea I know anywhere; where the actual pulse and rhythm of the poem is the long heave of the sea. Now we get hints of this early in the poem, like you know when you're in Barbados in the night and there is less traffic, and if you're close to the coast, you sometimes just hear the sea. And there is that poem about the land talking about what has happened to the consciousness of the ordinary Barbadian, who has been told to accommodate himself to tourism. And so he becomes maybe a beach-boy, or a bus-boy.

Although Mother Poem is autobiography, it is not autobiography in any simple way. There is a kind of process by which Brathwaite distances himself, but it is not autobiography for example in quite the same way as, say, Walcott's Another Life; even there there is distancing. The people who appear in Mother Poem are all voices for something much larger than themselves. They are voices for the landscape; they are voices for the whole historical process; they are voices of the psyche or consciousness, protesting at what is happening to it. And they are voices of the women coming into a consciousness of themselves, and into a kind of visibility which is quite similar to the apocalyptic movement in their arrivance. In other words in Mother Poem the women are moving from accepting their position in the room, you know, the domesticity to that voice in ‘Cherries’ which rebels.

These women are also located in history, because Brathwaite is very much aware that there was and is women's oppression. So that passage at the centre of Mother Poem is historical; it deals with the confrontation of the plantation between the slave girl and the mistress. In other words it's not just simply that men oppress women, which is the formula we sometimes get. Oppression has got to be seen as part of a system, which includes women oppressing each other. So it includes a class dimension, a race dimension, as well as a gender dimension. Mother Poem I think is a very important poem.

Sun Poem is dealing with boyhood. It's more closely autobiographical. But the rituals are different. The rituals of the men are rituals of male confrontation, fighting on the beach, winning your spurs, and this kind of thing. That autobiographical strain is interrupted somewhere in the middle too, by a movement back to the past. Because Brathwaite is really interested in what has happened to the male archetype. Why is it that we don't have any heroes that look like ourselves? What was done to the male? What was destroyed when we destroyed the male archetypes in this society? He does this in the poem called ‘Noon’, in which he looks at the movement of the sun-god across the East Coast of Barbados. That East Coast is rugged; it's quite different from the other part of Barbados. He creates a myth, the dying of the god, but the dying of that god is also equated with the dying of Christ; the three hours of darkness, so that it is a dying of a male archetype.

The mother is not only a woman but the land, looking at the destruction of spirit and consciousness in her children, particularly in her sons. It is done in terms of the sea surging, that surge of the sea becomes more insistent. And then there is also the sense of trying to get the shape of the landscape in the movement of the verse, which is remarkable towards the end of Mother Poem. Barbados exists in terraces, the whole country can be seen as a series of steps, you move from one plateau right up to the other and then at the core of it there is this fairly hard rock, the rest of it is like stone.

There are all these caves because of the limestone, with water seeping through. Barbados is literally an island which has as its centre a womb of water. Mother Poem makes fantastic use of this geological fact. So the caves become wombs, become consciousness. The water is the fertility, the life, which is always springing there; but it's under the surface; you've got to get below these layers, you've got to get down into the caves before you discover Barbados. And that is seen as an almost archetypal female presence in the island. Mind you the real mother lives under a system of oppression, oppression on the job. Not only that, they are on the tail end of a system of oppression because when their man is oppressed they are oppressed too. And so at the beginning of Mother Poem you've got the monologue, there's a long monologue in which she is looking at her husband and what has happened to him. He has worked in a warehouse and it just mashes him up. But what is fascinating about that monologue is that it turns, it changes halfway through and she begins to contemplate that this is what my work has become. She's talking about what his work has done to him, and she's saying that that is all they give him, they didn't even give him a little gratuity, a little sense for all the work he had to do, in the morning. So that she is a rebel voice in the poem.

And of course there is the other archetypal thing of placing the poem in the framework of the sun, or of mythology. So that is the Sun Poem, but it ends, like Mother Poem, with a promise of rebirth: the sun goes down, the sun comes back up. So that cycle of death is also a movement towards rebirth. Mother Poem ends with the sea surging and the land is pulsating so that we get the sense that she isn't dead at all; she's become part of the process. So we get these two Mother and Sun poems becoming two ways of looking at Barbados. And there's a precision. Brathwaite tends to be geologically precise when he talks about the terraces and the steps and the movement up, they're there. So the thing is precise on a visual level, on a geographical level, as well as on a level of image and archetype.

In X/Self, what Brathwaite is doing and what links it with Mother Poem and Sun Poem is that it is his intellectual autobiography. In other words it is telling us that to understand where I am coming from you have to understand all of those things. So it is going to pose a lot of problems partly because the range and the scope of what it brings together is so wide. It has a lot to do with redefining the way in which we see. It is using the other eye to look at European history up to the point where Europe became involved with Africa creating the world we know today. So in a sense it is an autobiography of the mind, and of the development of the mind. But it is not done in an easy way. The eye for example is a Roman, an Emperor, or a Tribune. The eye is sometimes, just a black presence. And there is this sense of contrasts for example between Europe and Africa. X/Self is an attempt to explain why it is that Europe has been able to create the society it has created, and Africa has had a great deal of problems with the same thing. And what he is really saying is that Europe has done it because Europe has drained the resources of Africa. So that I think the central statement there is ‘Rome burns and our slavery begins’, because it begins to see the disintegration of the Roman Empire, particularly through the movement of Islam into the Iberian peninsula and into North Africa. He seems to see that as something which drove Europe back on itself which destroyed feudal Europe and created the Europe of the Compass, the Europe of Columbus, the Europe which moved out of Europe again in a sort of new wave of imperialism, which now included the ‘dark continent’.

Now, saying that is one thing, but trying to look at how he worked that vision out in the poetry is another. I find a lot of the earlier European poetry that he wrote, some of which you get in Other Exiles, I find some of the style of that is there. A very relaxed style. At the same time I find this has added a kind of witty, almost comic style. I mean he's doing all sorts of things with words. He's laughing all the time. But it's a fun which tends to reduce the grandeur. A punning which reduces, which cuts down, which tries to see this thing in a new way.

The “X” is the unknown quantity, suggesting what you cannot contain in any single image or metaphor. The central vision is that of the confrontation between Europe and Africa, but not only Africa, it brings in a lot more of the new world, the American Indians; so it is really dealing with the frontier situation; with the question of conquest, and in its latter pages with apocalypse.