[In the following essay, a poet praises The Arrivants as “a major document of African reconnection” that “draws attention to Caribbean continuities out of Africa.”]

Of the many useful and interesting discussions of The Arrivants¹ or of individual books in the trilogy, there are two I am anxious to recommend. Maureen Warner-Lewis' Masks: Essays & Annotations² and Gordon Rohlehr's Pathfinder³ are of value not only for their critical judgements but also for the wealth of information they provide about the contexts of the poetry. Inter alia, Warner-Lewis guides us through West African detail, and Rohlehr elucidates many allusions to jazz and other manifestations of Africa-related New World culture. Anyone studying The Arrivants should make early contact with these two items, and will no doubt wish to explore the rest of the bibliography.

The present essay is introductory, offering a very brief outline of the trilogy, its origins, its shape, its main concerns, and a glance at some of its techniques.

In an autobiographical essay called ‘Timehri’⁴ Brathwaite describes himself as a Barbadian “from an urban village background, of parents with a “‘middle-class’ orientation” who made friends “with boys of stubbornly non-middle class origin”. From Harrison College, “originally founded for children of the plantocracy and colonial civil servants and white professionals”, Brathwaite won one of the prestigious Barbados scholarships “that traditionally took the explanters' sons ‘home’ to Oxbridge or London”. It took him, “a potential Afro-Saxon”, to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read History. He wrote poems, most of them rejected by the Cambridge magazines. He felt neglected and misunderstood.⁵

Then in 1953, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin appeared and everything was transformed. Here breathing to me from every pore of line and page, was the Barbados I had lived. The words, the rhythms, the cadences, the scenes, the people, their predicament. They all came back. They all were possible. All the more beautiful for having been published and praised by London, mother of metropolises.⁶

After graduation, he applied for jobs all over the place. “I was a West Indian, roofless⁷ man of the world. I could go, belong, everywhere on the world-wide globe. I ended up in a village in Ghana. It was my beginning”. He began to feel connected to Africa.

Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly; obscurely, slowly but surely, during the eight years that I lived there, I was coming to an awareness and understanding of community, of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe, in society. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, I came to a sense of identification of myself with these people, my living diviners. I came to connect my history with theirs, the bridge of my mind now linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland. When I turned to leave, I was no longer a lonely individual talent; there was something wider, more subtle, more tentative: the self without ego, without I, without arrogance. And I came home to find that I had not really left. That it was still Africa; Africa in the Caribbean.⁸

Brathwaite returned to the Caribbean in 1962. “I had, at that moment of return,” he writes, “completed the triangular trade of my historical origins. West Africa had given me a sense of place, of belonging; and that place and belonging, I knew, was the West Indies”.⁹

Like many other publications by Brathwaite, The Arrivants draws attention to Caribbean continuities out of Africa, which a European overlay may sometimes obscure, and argues that the psychic wholeness of Caribbean black people requires fuller recognition of our African heritage. As Damian Grant wrote in an early review article:

The theme, over the three books, might be summarized as the rediscovery of Africa; a rediscovery that has to be made by the twentieth-century Negro, a condition of his own proper freedom, selfhood and political independence. Brathwaite offers in fact to define and articulate the modern Negro consciousness, seen as a complication of past experience, present problems, and future possibilities.¹⁰

In response perhaps to talk about the trilogy's public mission, Brathwaite was emphatic in an interview: “This trilogy as a whole, is concerned first of all with my own experiences. I am trying to come to terms with being a West Indian who has travelled to Africa”.¹¹ But he is trying also to present “the self without ego” and to express “an awareness and understanding of community, of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe”. In The Arrivants he speaks through a series of personas or masks or, to put it differently, through a shifting persona who represents black experience in various manifestations. As Brathwaite notes, in Rights of Passage the persona, Tom, “undergoes a series of transformations—from ancestor to slave to prophet to Uncle Tom, and is finally translated into an image of the past out of which the future springs”.¹² With reference to Masks, Warner-Lewis writes:

The poet found that he could not get to the heart of his questionings unless he became other people and felt as they did at the crucial points of their existence: the slave, the ancestor, the king, the villager, the pioneer and clan-founder, and he himself, Brathwaite, the descendant and inheritor of all these. But the poet needs at times the detached mask of an onlooker, an outsider, the scholar with history at his fingertips.¹³

The Arrivants brings together “three long poems that … deal, in their different ways, with journeys”.¹⁴ “Time's walking river is long” (The Arrivants, 120). The order in which the books appeared is part of the point: the African book is the centre of the trilogy; and though the journeys never end, the poem leaves us in the Caribbean. The final book signs off with a series of present participles, whose suggestion of a continuing process is reinforced by the absence of punctuation after the final word:

now waking
making
making
with their
rhythms some-
thing torn
and new(15)

(The Arrivants, 269-270)

In Rights of Passage we meet personas of the New World Negro, the dislocated African, forever on the move and with little memory of ancestral Africa. “Where then is the nigger's / home?” “Will exile never // end?” (The Arrivants, 77). According to the author, “Rights of Passage … is about the black diaspora: the shattering journey out of Africa into New World plantation slavery, the song and dance of illusory emancipation, and the first recognition of identity. Masks is the necessary and countervailing journey: ingathering of the multitudes: return of scattered psyches to the ancestral homeland: a movement from hurt to heart”¹⁶ The epigraph to Masks is an Akan proverb: “Only the fool points at his origins with his left hand” [i.e. disrespectfully]. In the first half of the book, we travel through sections of African history and culture; in the second half, an African returns from the New World, in unavailing search of his buried navel string. Though the attempt at reconnection has been fraught with disappointment, contact with Africa has strengthened the persona. He will rise and stand on his feet. In Islands we are in the Caribbean, mostly, exploring Africa forgotten and retained; and, through a series of Afro-Caribbean figures, considering “the certainties/uncertainties of the Caribbean, taking up the theme of ‘the gains and the losses’, implicit in Masks”.¹⁷ As understanding deepens, there is movement towards correcting the cultural imbalance of the colonial heritage which has tended to privilege Europe. Near the end of the trilogy, in ‘Vèvè’, when the Word is invoked (The Arrivants, 266), Legba—“the Dahomean / Haitian god of the gateway”¹⁸—emerges from St John chapter one. “Christ will pray / to Odomankoma // Nyame God / and Nyankopon” (The Arrivants, 267). As Rohlehr puts it, “Christ and Odomankoma are recognized as different names for the same concept of God as communicable immanent force in the universe and incarnate Word.”¹⁹

Rights of Passage, Masks and Islands were republished together as The Arrivants in 1973. Reprints from 1978 at least have included a new and closely relevant epigraph.

Well, muh ol' arrivance(20) … is from
Africa … That's muh ol' arrivants family. Muh
gran'muddah an' muh gran' fadda. Well, they came
out here as slavely … you unnerstan'?
Well, when them came now, I doan belongs to
Africa, I belongs to Jamaica. I born here.
Well, muh gran'parents, she teach me some of the
African languages an' the rest I get it at the
cotton-tree root … I take twenty-one days to get
all the balance …
So I just travel right up to hey, an' gradually
come up, an' gradually come up, until I experience
all about … the African set-up …
                                                  Kumina Queen, Jamaica

The epigraph foregrounds African ancestry; and slavery as the reason African ancestors came to the Caribbean. It makes a point which is extensively explored in Masks: the speaker, a leader in an Africa-derived religious ritual, says plainly that she does not belong to Africa, she belongs to Jamaica, she was born here; and that she has been taught some African lore by her ancestors and has received some of it by intuition or by supernatural means (“at the cotton-tree root”). There is a direct connection with various concerns in the trilogy. The trauma of slavery is evoked in all three books. In Masks the African returning from the New World is forced to recognize that he no longer belongs in Africa. Islands examines manifestations of Africa in the New World, finding ancestral memory retained to some degree in religious ceremony (‘Shepherd’, ‘Wake’, ‘Eating the Dead’, ‘Negus’, ‘Vèvè’, for example) and the intuitive gropings of art (as in ‘Jouvert’ and ‘Ogun’).

Each book is divided into parts, each part into sections, some sections into numbered subsections. The transitions are often introduced by connectives (such as “and now”, “but”, “so”, “for”) which strengthen the appearance of continuity. Many sections seem to be poems complete in themselves, and some have indeed been published separately. But meaning in the trilogy is partly a function of placement, as passages extend or modify ideas introduced earlier and as their music plays against the movement of other passages. Acknowledging the influence of T. S. Eliot, Brathwaite has said: “The tone, the cadence and above all the organization of my long poems (and all three poems of my trilogy are long poems, not collections of poems) owe a great deal to him”.²¹

Brathwaite also shares with Eliot a recurrent concern with memory and time. “And the wheel turns / and the future returns / wreathed in disguises” (The Arrivants, 168).²² History repeats itself. As Mark McWatt has observed, “the reality one confronts in the poems, however clear or ‘raw’, is always coloured, as it were, by a sense of historical time, an overlay of reverberations from past events and personalities which cause in the reader a kind of mental or imaginative shift toward a historical perspective”.²³

For example, there is a sense in which the West Indian emigrants travelling to Europe in the 1950s replicate Columbus in the fifteenth century travelling in the other direction.

What do they hope for
what find there
these New World mariners
Columbus coursing kaffirs
What Cathay shores
for them are gleaming golden
what magic keys they carry to unlock
what gold endragoned doors?

2

Columbus from his after-
deck watched stars, absorbed in water,
melt in liquid amber drafting
through my summer air.

(The Arrivants, 52)

So too in Masks “the omowale/ex-african reverses the movement of the poem (ship to heartland rather than heartland to ship) and undertakes a journey of re/discovery of origins”²⁴ In the third part of Masks, at a moment centuries ago, the Africans captured for slavery reach the sea, where “voyages ended; / time stopped where its movement began;” (122) and at the beginning of Part IV (which follows) the persona recently arriving in West Africa is welcomed as a stranger: “you who have come / back a stranger / after three hundred years // welcome” (124).

Images merge cinematically, as again in ‘Littoral’ (170-173), near the beginning of Islands. In section one the blind fisherman (whose head is like a mask) is weaving a net, “his fingers knit as the dark rejoices / but he has his voices …”. Section two presents one of those voices, a woman singer who “travels far back, explores / ruins”. When the poem was published in 1960 the singer was Billie Holiday;²⁵ but in the immediate context of Islands she is an African ancestral memory, becomes Yaa Asantewa, “warrior and queen and keeper of the tribe”. Between sections two and three we make another leap through time: from the blind fisherman on a Caribbean beach more or less now, into the hold of a slave-ship long ago.

                                                                                                                                  He hopes
that light will break in the clearing
before her song ends …

3

But no light breaks under the decks
where the sails sing

The trilogy is held together partly by patterns of recurrent imagery. Journey, movement, time, river, sea; dust, sand, dryness, pebble, stone, rock, earth, soil, water, tendril, pistil, green, tree, hurricane; sun, moon, night, fire, sleep, awakening, dawn, morning, day, light, dark, womb, birth, blindness, sight; speech, shout, whisper, silence; drum, mask, dance, circle, music, song; gold, silver, black, red, whip, lash, iron, shackle, clink, clank, Uncle Tom; spider, fisherman—these are some of the images and some of the ways they cluster. They are of multiple significance, they inter-relate variously, they develop and change. So the spider, for example—Ananse, “the spider-hero of the Akans; earthly trickster, but once with the powers of the creator-gods”²⁶—is both positive and negative, is used to suggest diminished memory of Africa (“Creation has burned to a spider”, 164), is an agent of rebellion (heard by Tacky and L'Ouverture), is both untrustworthy and supremely creative (“stony world-maker, word-breaker, / creator”, 167), and connects with the blind fisherman weaving “nets, embroideries” (170), the fisherman whose “fine webs fell softly” (263). The fisherman in turn shades into a mask: “his eyes stare out like an empty shell” (170): which reminds us of “his- / tory bleeds / behind my hollowed eyes” (148) and connects with many other references to masks, masking, role-playing, disguise.

Or take, for example, pebble, stone. “It will slay / giants // but never bear children” (196). Its potential in battle is acknowledged, but the emphasis here is on sterility. When “my island is a pebble” (196), when lightning strikes a “world of stone” (268) the main implications are negative. In ‘Negus’, on the other hand, “stone” is more positive, the instrument of existential rebellion: “fling me the stone / that will confound the void” (224).

There are references throughout to the drum, a central symbol of African culture. “God is dumb / until the drum / speaks” (97). “Drum” is the very first word of The Arrivants, and it is there at the end in ‘Jouvert’. Wrenched from Africa, the New World blacks still remember the talking drum, “Atumpan talking and the harvest branch- / es” (13). The angry man in ‘Folkways’ feels “like a drum with a hole / in its belly” (31), an image later associated with Tom, in whose cabin there is “A rusted / bucket, hole kicked into its / bottom” (70, 248). The Rastafarian in ‘Wings of a Dove’ summons us to “beat dem drums / dem” (44). The poet-persona in the ‘Prelude’ of Masks invokes creative power: “Beat heaven / of the drum, beat” (91). Near the beginning of Masks we share in a ritual of creative preparation, ‘The Making of the Drum’ (94-97). The “quick drummer” (162) is part of the jazz scene in ‘Jah’. Drums are crucial in ‘Shepherd’, helping towards possession: “the room rumbles / clouded with drums” (185), “the drum trembles” (186), “the drum speaks” (187); and when the Shepherd senses an ancestor, “can smell / his sweat / his musk of damp and slave // ships”, the Shepherd himself becomes metaphorically a drum with which the ancestor communicates: “his heat hurts / me, my belly is tight / his hands hit // me into sound” and “Slowly / slowly / slowly / the dumb speaks” (188), the form of words suggesting—since “God is dumb / until the drum / speaks” (97)—that the drum and the Shepherd are divine instruments. Drums are important also in the voodoo ritual, “Att / Att / Attibon // Attibon Legba / Attibon Legba / Ouvri bayi pou' moi / Ouvri bayi pou' moi …” (224), open the gate for me. In ‘Vèvè’ the gods will arrive “welcomed by drumbeats” (265). There are also the drums of steel band music, the booming bass drum and the ping pong tenor pan as in “flowers bloom / their tom tom sun // heads raising / little steel pan // petals to the music's / doom // as the ping pong / dawn comes // riding / over shattered homes” (269).

Rhythmic patterns recur in various contexts. For example, the “It / it / it / it is not” (222) and “Att / Att / Attibon // Attibon Legba …” of ‘Negus’ (224) recall the beginning of ‘Tano’ (151), “dam / dam / damirifa / damirifa due …”, each clearly suggesting drumbeats. But damirifa due is “an Akan cry of pity and sorrow meaning ‘condolences’”;²⁷ the soul of the returning African is gathered back into the ancestral fold. “Attibon Legba” moves in the opposite direction: it is an invocation to the gateway god, Legba, who facilitates access to other gods. The drumbeats return in ‘Shepherd’ (“Dumb / dumb / dumb”, 185-187) but, through possession, there is reconnection with ancestors, and “Slowly / slowly / slowly / the dumb speaks” (188). Here “Slowly / slowly / slowly”—also recalled in ‘Timehri’—reminds us of Osai Tutu, royal founder of the Ashanti Confederation, rising in ceremonial dignity (141).

The Arrivants is richly allusive, connecting a range of detail in the history and culture of various communities. Each volume has its prevailing tone, created partly by the diction, the rhythms of speech, and partly by allusions to music. We hear in Rights of Passage a New World soundtrack—worksong, Negro spiritual, various styles of jazz, calypso, ska; in Masks, Akan drum rhythms, and jazz; in Islands—centred in the Caribbean—jazz again, and aural motifs of steel band, limbo dancing, Jamaican folksong, Haitian drums. Some of the music allusions²⁸ are to the words of songs—“just call my blue / black bloody spade / a spade” (29), for example, echoes “What did I do / to be so black an' blue”. Some are to the titles of tunes, such as ‘New World A-Comin’ (9) which alludes with irony to a Duke Ellington composition. There are musicians mentioned by name or nickname (such as Charlie Parker's, ‘Bird’). Some of the allusions assume an intimate knowledge of the music.²⁹ Here, for example, is Brathwaite in response to an enquiry about the final pages (82-85) of Rights of Passage.

I'd never be able to write “bird calls” … without having Parker in mind: especially since there is an LP of that name. So when I wrote it I heard that saxophone in addition to what I was really talking about: Noah's dove after the rain: which is again connected with Coltrane's greatest lyric ‘After the Rain’: which derives its beauty not only from itself, but also from its juxtaposition to his greatest storm, ‘Impressions’.³⁰

The music allusions are not just cultural background. They are often an important element of the meaning, as again, for example, in section two of ‘Folkways’ (33) which ends:

rat tat tat
on the flat-
out whispering rails
on the quick
click
boogie woogie
hooeeee
boogie woogie
long long
boogie woogie
long long
hooey long
journey to town.

Pointing out “the connection between this passage and traditional railroad blues”, Gordon Rohlehr has argued that Brathwaite is here “establishing the connection between Jazz and Journey; seeing jazz as yet another gift of the archetypal tribal experience in Africa, and its counterpart in the New World”.³¹

Sometimes Brathwaite will more or less mimic the music or imitate rhythms as in that brilliant passage, or in “Kon kon kon kon / Kun kun kun kun” (98), or “Come-a look / come-a look / see wha' happen” (240), patterned on a Jamaican folksong. More often, however, there is a subtle tension between the speaking voice and the music reference, as in these lines which parody Caliban's drunken song (The Tempest, Act II, Scene ii) and also suggest the syncopation of road march music in Trinidad carnival:

Ban
Ban
Cal-
iban
like to play
pan
at the car-
nival;
pranc-
cing up to the lim-
bo silence
down
down
down
so the god won't drown
him
down
down
to the is-
land town

(The Arrivants, 192)

But Brathwaite does not insist that the speaking voice always be equal or dominant. He sometimes gives absolute priority to the music rhythm. In ‘Wings of a Dove’, for example, the emphatic rhythm is sometimes expressed in normal creole syntax, but at other moments normal syntax is ignored. “So beat dem drums / dem, spread // dem wings dem, / watch dem fly // dem” is normal speech; “soar dem / high dem” (44) is not.

This seems to be a choice he makes from time to time: to let the music rhythms take charge. When he prefers to, he convincingly represents speech. Indeed a major area of Brathwaite's achievement in The Arrivants is his flexible command of speech rhythms. His ear allows him to register various accents, including American and African:

See them zoot suits, man? Them black
Texan hats?

(The Arrivants, 23)

Akwaaba they smiled
meaning welcome
akwaaba they called
aye kooo
well have you walked
have you journeyed
welcome

(The Arrivants, 124)

He captures many West Indian voices, from standard English as in ‘Mammon’ (73-76) to Barbadian creole (he says “nation language”)³² in ‘Cane’ (225-229) and ‘Tizzic’ (260-261), Jamaican Revival preaching in ‘The Stone Sermon’ (254-256), Rastafarian speech in ‘Wings of a Dove’ (42-43). In section two of ‘Francina’ (215) standard English modulates into creole. In ‘The Dust’ (62-69), one of our finest poems in creole, he presents Barbadian women talking about their world and its worries, moving without strain into ultimate questions about the meaning of life.

An' then suddenly so
widdout rhyme
widdout reason
you crops start to die
you can't even see the sun in the sky;
an' suddenly so, without rhyme,
without reason, all you hope gone
ev'rything look like it comin' out wrong.
Why is that? What it mean?

(68-69)

‘Rites’ (197-203; a prose version had been published earlier³³) is a West Indian classic, our quintessential cricket poem. It is clear from the cricket-loving tailor's lively monologue that the test match is, as Orlando Patterson has argued, “not so much a game as a collective ritual”.³⁴ When things are going well for their side, spectators feel empowered. “All over de groun' fellers shakin' hands wid each other // as if was they wheelin' de willow / as if was them had the power” (200). When the batsman is doing well, a spectator brings a votive offering, as to a god—“a red fowl cock // goin quawk quawk quawk in 'e han'”. A man who for twenty-five years has been “lickin' gloy / pun de Gover'ment stamps” (200-201) is transformed, noisily calling for blood. But when the game begins to favour the invading English, there is silent consternation—“could'a hear de empire fart” (202)—then a babel of advice. The moral is drawn explicitly:

when things goin' good, you cahn touch
we, but leh murder start
an' ol man, you cahn fine a man to hole up de side …

(The Arrivants, 203)

The umpire/empire pun is characteristic of The Arrivants. Wordplay abounds. “Miss- / issippi painfields” (51) is typical. The pun is arguably an aspect of the jazz technique, the literary analogue of the blue note (the flattened third or fifth or seventh), a note that makes you hear an adjacent semitone. In “Boss man lacks pride: / I am his hide // of darkness” (19) the Hyde is emphasized by the line break: I am his Hyde, his other self, the self of darkness. In “to hell / with Eu- / rope too” (29) we get: to hell with you, and with the rope as well. Sometimes the lineation visually reinforces meaning as in:

the wise
are di-
vided

(The Arrivants, 130)

or:

O who now will help
us, help-
less, horse-
less, leader-
less, no
hope, no
Hawkins, no
Cortez to come.

(The Arrivants, 10)

Some early readers of Rights of Passage were disconcerted by the frequent division of words, by passages such as

E-
gypt
in Af-
rica
Mesopo-
tamia
Mero-
e

(The Arrivants, 35)

especially as the division was often not aurally detectable in Brathwaite's own reading of the verse. Lineation is far less obtrusive in Masks and Islands. But Rights of Passage, Brathwaite has explained, was “a tale of deprivation, paradoxically balanced upon a sense of hope, of continuity and of unity: fragments that still held secrets of the whole. And this paradox came to be expressed in the poem in the counterpoint between the broken lines of the verse, and the shifting but basic rhythms of its impetus”.³⁵

The Arrivants is a major document of African reconnection. Brilliantly, it charts a set of overlapping psychic journeys to, from and within the New World and Africa, acknowledging achievement and some painful realities, examining self and community, past and present. The final lines of the trilogy celebrate awakening consciousness and the creative growth of the artist-persona and other Caribbean black people:

hurts for-
gotten, hearts
no longer bound
to black and bitter
ashes in the ground
now waking
making
making
with their
rhythms some-
thing torn
and new

(The Arrivants, 269-270)

Notes

1. Pronounced ar-RIVE-ants. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), comprised of Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969). For other works by Brathwaite and a selection of Brathwaite criticism, see the bibliography at the back of this book.

2. Maureen Warner-Lewis, E. Kamau Brathwaite's Masks: Essays & Annotations (Kingston: Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1992): a reissue of Notes to Masks (Benin City: Ethiope Publishing Corporation, 1977) with a revised version of ‘Odomankoma 'Kyerema Se’, an essay published in Caribbean Quarterly 19: 2, June 1973.

3. Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Trinidad: private publication, 1981).

4. Edward Brathwaite, ‘Timehri’, Savacou 2, September 1970, 35-44. For a slightly different version see Orde Coombs ed., Is Massa Day Dead? (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Press, 1974), 29-44.

5. ‘Timehri’, Savacou 2, 36-37.

6. Ibid.

7. In Is Massa Day Dead? “rootless”, 33. The word as in Savacou is much richer, playing against “rootlessness” earlier in the paragraph, and suggesting “unaccommodated man” and a Barbadian pronunciation of “ruthless”.

8. Ibid., 38.

9. Rosalie Murphy & James Vinson eds., Contemporary Poets of the English Language (London: St James Press, 1970), 129.

10. Damian Grant, ‘Emerging Image: the poetry of Edward Brathwaite’, Critical Quarterly 12:2, Summer 1970, 186-187.

11. The Poet Speaks Record Ten, ed. Peter Orr (London: Argo, 1968).

12. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Record Notes to Rights of Passage Record One (London: Argo, 1968).

13. Maureen Warner-Lewis, Masks: Essays and Annotations, 15.

14. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Record Notes to Islands (London: Argo Records, 1973).

15. The concluding lines of Rights of Passage and Masks also emphasize process—each marks a stage in the psychic journey—but with a full stop at the end of the one, an ellipsis at the end of the other. Images of journey, dawn and music figure in the final pages of each book.

16. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite. Recorded Notes to Islands.

17. Ibid.

18. The Arrivants, 273 (Glossary).

19. Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 314.

20. “Ol' arrivance” would be the same sound as “whole arrivants”, meaning all my ancestors here (as well as my old ancestors or ancestry).

21. Rosalie Murphy & James Vinson eds., Contemporary Poets of the English Language, 129.

22. Cf. the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps in time future, / And time future contained in time past.”

23. Mark McWatt, in Daryl C. Dance ed., Fifty Caribbean Writers (Newport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 60.

24. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Record Notes to Masks (London: Argo, 1972). The omowale is one who returns.

25. Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 192.

26. The Arrivants, 272 (Glossary).

27. Maureen Warner-Lewis, Masks: Essays and Annotations, 93-94.

28. See Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 333-340, Appendix One, ‘Black/Ground Music to Rights of Passage’.

29. “Knowing precisely what music is being alluded to, one can fruitfully explore the hidden network of allusions beneath the taut or casual surface of things”, Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 333. In a passage at the beginning of Masks (90-91, “Gong-gongs / throw pebbles in the rout- / ed pools of silence …” etc), Jimmy Carnegie hears a John Coltrane solo. “Brathwaite,” he writes, “has accomplished an almost impossible feat of ‘transcription’.” (J. A. Carnegie, ‘The Face's Soul’, review of Masks, Public Opinion (Kingston, Jamaica), August 2, 1968.

30. Pathfinder, 55.

31. Gordon Rohlehr, review article on Islands, Caribbean Studies 10:4, 178.

32. See Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984).

33. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, ‘Cricket’, in Andrew Salkey ed., Caribbean Prose (London: Evans Brothers, 1967), 61-67.

34. Orlando Patterson, ‘The Ritual of Cricket’, Jamaica Journal 3:1, March 1969.

35. Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Record Notes to Rights of Passage (London: Argo, 1968).