[In the following essay, Reiss links the structure of Brathwaite's poetry to seventeenth-century England by positing that the poet's work often has an underlying structure derived from iambic pentameter, a meter that Brathwaite has tweaked to reflect the historical changes that have led to the postcolonial culture of Barbados.]

Through Kamau Brathwaite's work run three favorite metaphors. The earliest uses the iambic pentameter that had become a norm in English poetry from roughly the seventeenth century. The second represents the Caribbean Islands as the result of a child's (or god's) skipping stones in a great curve across the ocean from the coast of Guyana to the tip of Florida. The third transforms the waters buried deep in the porous rock that is Barbados into the welling of a buried culture whose very concealment has made it the more vital to the life above. The first concerns the constitution, practice, and differentiation of a poetic voice; the second holds an individual's sense of a home place; the third captures something like a collectivity's living cultural and political consciousness.

At the same time, each one works and plays with the other two. More than tropes in language, the finest metaphors are alive and capture vital actualities. Such are these. Barbados is rock of the sort Brathwaite takes for his image. Beneath and in it is the fresh water making life on the island possible. As the poet/historian has also been able to show, Barbados does have a hidden culture, living remnant of Igbo consciousness. Then too, Barbados is geologically unique among the islands, and the more-than-metaphor grasps that singularity as it simultaneously situates it among its companion islands geographically, historically, and culturally. Lastly, the skipping stones, as well, offer not just an image of place but a rhythm and the curving shape of an imagination.

They ground a different poetry and a consciousness not best rendered by that pentameter whose exemplar Brathwaite finds in the English eighteenth century: “The Cúrfew tólls the knéll of párting dáy.” He observes that before Chaucer no such dominant meter was to be found, but that since then poetic effort in the anglophone world has had to be expended in its terms. (Whitman sought to overcome it by noise, “a large movement of sound,” Cummings by fragmenting it, Moore “with syllabics.”) Yet it stays. And that rhythmic inertia is a dilemma, for “it carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. A hurricane does not roar in pentameters. And that's the problem: how do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience?”¹ That rhythm, of course, is grounded and trammeled in the skipping stones and rock-concealed water, both bearing spirit of place. But that is not the only problem. With experience of place bound in form goes a bond of culture.

In the essay just quoted, Brathwaite did not dwell on Thomas Gray's celebrated poem, and for good reason: he wanted to get on to the forms of a new voice. Here, though, we may grant it a bit more attention, and I would like to quote its beginning at a little more length:

The Cúrfew tólls the knéll of párting dáy,
The lówing hérd winds slówly ó'er the léa,
The plówman hómeward plóds his wéary wáy,
And léaves the wórld to dárkness ánd to mé.
Now fádes the glímmering lándscape ón the síght
And áll the áir a stíllness hólds,
Save whére the béetle whéels his dróning flíght,
And drówsy tínklings lúll the dístant fólds.

If you look at where the accents fall in the first stanza, you see how the long vowels echo tolling bell and “lowing herd.” Fading landscape at dusk, evening quiet of late summer, wheeling beetles, tinkling sheep bells, the later “ivy-mantled tow'r,” “mopeing owl,” “rugged elms,” “yew-tree's shade,” and “swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed” are stereotypes meant to summon the image of an age-old country England to frame the elegy on humble folk that is the principal weight of the poem: “the short and simple annals of the poor” (l. 32). They frame a nostalgic musing on those who might have been great churchmen, rulers, or musicians, except only that “Knowledge to their eyes her ample pages / Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll” (ll. 49-50). So these remain a gem unknown in ocean cave (53-54), a flower “to blush unseen” and “waste its sweetness on the desert air” (55-56), “a village-Hampden,” a “Cromwell guiltless,” or “some mute inglorious Milton” (57-60).

The marching, endlessly expansive pentameter, then, contains a very particular history and cultural experience. “The madding crowd's … strife” may be called “ignoble” (73), but the nostalgia grounding the poem's theme depends entirely on the achievements of those who supposedly formed and sprang from that crowd. Indeed, the Hampdens, Miltons, and Cromwells, who, lost in poverty, misery, and illiteracy, never did share the expansive culture, would have done so if only they had had the wealth and learning to give them the necessary competitive edge. Gray glories in a “loss” that proves the depth of English culture, with its myriad putative conquerors, preachers, and poets scattered about the countryside. The Hampdens, Cromwells, and Miltons raise before us the image of those great churchmen, rulers, and artists who were not silent or “wasted” in the desert or under the seas; those who did “wade through slaughter for a throne” and “shut the gates of mercy on mankind” (67-68), whether at home on those of a different class, abroad on those of a different race, or everywhere on those of a different sex.

We may also perhaps be permitted to see how the marching linear pentameter (or its equally normative counterpart in the alternating masculine and feminine rhymes of the French alexandrine, with its more or less clearly set caesura) corresponds to a broader cultural reality, one anchored both in political theory and in historical actuality. I mean the argument that what makes a “healthy” state, society, and culture is expansion. The notion dates at least from Machiavelli's suggestion that the reason a society needed to think constantly of outward expansion was clear in its image as a place composed of endlessly active animals that would turn destructively against one another if not directed elsewhere. Bacon thus thought of war as the health-giving exercise of nations; so did Hobbes, Locke, and many other successors. The individuals whose threatened warring necessitated the founding covenant of civil society provided the very image and model of the states that those individual societies were to become. Reason, knowledge, will, and power to act became their organizing axioms. The order of reason matched that of the world, the accumulation of material knowledge allowed such reason instrumentally to adjust the world to its own benefit, will urged one to it, and power gave the tools to make intervention sure.

What came to be termed “literature” participated in these changes, adopting what I have elsewhere called “epistemological,” “ethical,” “aesthetic,” and “political” roles—the last being initially the most important. It confirmed a (sometimes complicated) politics of singular authority, however embodied; it claimed to be ordered by a syntax that was both that of right language and that of universal reason; it portrayed and asserted an ethics of individual interest whose virtue lay in simultaneously benefitting the community; and it placed beauty in a personal “taste” that echoed general reason.² Literature's “guarantee” of political claim and historical practice ultimately helped “universalize” these developments, so that the assertion of a right to intervene in others' histories and cultures became grounded in Europe's claim to being the vanguard of human progress, with no less than an obligation (God- or History-given) to put others in the way of such progress.

We do this, of course, only with the deepest regrets and the most profound awareness that something has been lost. Gray's mid-eighteenth-century nostalgia was quite typical of that of many others: Oliver Goldsmith's, for example, in poems like The Deserted Village or The Traveller. And that such as Samuel Johnson made fun of the linguistic archaisms used by Gray changes not a whit the significance of the nostalgia. Alexander Pope had put it perfectly in his Essay on Man not so long before (1730-34) of the “lurking principle of death” that dwells within the body: “The young disease, that must subdue at length, / Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength / … cast and mingled with his very frame” (1.134-37). This death lurking in the heart of expansive Enlightened Reason finds its modern currency among such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács, and many others, who have argued that within such Reason lies a virus destructive not just of the European—Western—world and its culture, but of all civilizations. Some think it means the need to find something quite new; others to complete an unfinished, unperfected Enlightenment; yet others a rediscovery of what came before, of some supposed wholeness with the universe.

Whatever the solution, golden age or Eldorado lost meant golden age or Eldorado had to be found. With or without regret, expansive Europe would have to march out in file and find it. Death could not be allowed its victory. And whatever they might be, right reason and knowledge would first be Europe's. Others, Asian, African, or American, untutored like those inglorious Miltons and guiltless Cromwells, poor like Gray's “rustic moralist” (84) or “hoary-headed Swain” (97), without power and the knowledge of right reason, would justly be put in order by the vanguard. For after all, as James Thomson put it in the artful pentameters of his rewritten Summer of 1744:

Ill-fated race! the softening arts of peace,
Whate'er the humanizing Muses teach,
The godlike wisdom of the tempered breast,
Progressive truth, the patient force of thought,
Investigation calm whose silent powers
Command the world, the light that leads to Heaven,
Kind equal rule, the government of laws,
And all-protecting freedom which alone
Sustains the name and dignity of man—
These are not theirs.(3)

One can but admire these “softening arts of peace” that, by teaching us that we alone rightfully possess “the name and dignity of man,” so readily justify the manipulation of those who therefore do not.

I am not—need I say?—suggesting that pentameters create (or in themselves are) a tool of oppression, a title of hegemony. Nor, of course, was Brathwaite. Language and style alone no more make hegemony than revolution. Yet they confirm and guarantee them. They are nonetheless the form of a particular pattern of thought, bearer of certain structures of feeling, and expression of specific kinds of practice. Those, too, are crucial to this experience that never had to learn to roar with the notes of a hurricane, to curve with stones skipping across the ocean, to limp with the life of Legba or dance with the rhythm of Shango. In his 1992 “Columbus poem” Brathwaite aims Colón westward into the future as a linear missile whose sure systems become less assured when he looks out upon the changed history and geography for which he has been willy-nilly responsible. Not for him the view of Keats's Cortez in Darien. Both the rhythm and the typography of the poem are aimed to undermine the patterns, structures, and practices which Columbus was to come historically and culturally to embody and exemplify.

The move is essential. Voice, language, forms of expression, we know, capture and colonize the mind no less surely than more overt ways of seizure. As James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus put it in a famous passage: “His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”⁴ Brathwaite has inevitably put the matter rather differently: “It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled. Within the folk tradition, language was (and is) a creative act in itself.”⁵ Again, language is not and cannot be separated from a whole culture, and the West Indian case was graver still than such a one as the Irish to which Dedalus referred. The modern peoples of the islands never had a tongue alive in and imbued with the place where they dwell, for they were forcibly brought to lands whose own peoples had been destroyed. Further, the languages whence they came were both robbed of their source and shattered to fragments. The language Dedalus holds at bay is their only possibility: a language bent first to a victimizer's will, desires, and interests.

Brathwaite argued the consequences in 1963, characterizing anglophone Caribbean prose writers as producing, at home or abroad, “the same story, expressed in the same rhythms and a similar technique: frustration, bewilderment, lack of a centre, lack of faith in the society into which they were born or in which they find themselves.”⁶ It was a story of endless emigration, no matter the direction in which it went. In this regard, one reads now, with the surprise that even a mere twenty years of changed awareness can bring, the pride with which Kenneth Ramchand viewed such emigration in 1971: “Since 1950 … every well-known West Indian novelist has established himself while living [in the English capital]. London is indisputably the West Indian literary capital.”⁷ One recognizes economic and cultural pressures that still drive a Caryl Phillips to “establish himself” in London and indeed to tell the same story of exiled “frustration, bewilderment, lack of a centre, [and] lack of faith in [their] society,” as that to which Brathwaite earlier addressed himself.⁸ The point, though, was the pride Ramchand could then take in such emigration.

In a very real way, one may characterize Brathwaite's own work as historian, storyteller, cultural archivist, educator, essayist, and poet as a lifelong effort to take up the gauntlet he threw down in his criticism. The effort to find a poetic form that would not just pick at or disrupt the dominant pentameter but use a quite different rhythm, one from another place, another environment, another experience, was just the earliest of the shapes that work took. It has also led him from the rock of Barbados and the curving stones of its habitat, through Europe to Africa, and eventually back to the Caribbean. Its aim has been to discover, to invent (in that word's double sense of finding and making: invenire) that Caribbean—especially his own Barbados—as a home, not as a displacement or a surrogate for something else, be it “little England” or robbed Africa.

The first part, and understanding, of that geographic and historical story was told in the Arrivants trilogy. There, Rights of Passage “tells the story” of the passage from Africa to the Caribbean as a displacement that remains a displacement, simply the obverse, in a sense, of the coin that had Europe as center and exile on its other face. Indeed, that particular passage was quite evidently part of the same story. Masks then tells the further tale of a modern poet's return to Africa, less as a search for “roots” than as a way to compose cultural remnants into something more “whole,” whose masks become successive distancings from a self that will ultimately be thereby able to become part of a collectivity. Can this itself be shipped back, as it were, to the poet's home in the “islands” whence he came? Islands, the third book of the trilogy, seems to answer this question with another one: the remnants that Africa may “put together” can surely only remain remnants in those displaced islands? But it is as remnants, pieces fit for recovery, creation, building, that they can be fitted into a cultural space that is, precisely, Caribbean—a home space.

Brathwaite's poetry has never sought any easy answers. There was certainly no hope here for one. This last “conclusion,” if it was not to remain only a pious wish, demanded considerable and wide cultural work. Already in the late 1950s, Brathwaite had started writing criticism of Caribbean literary work, and it has always accompanied his poetry and, equally importantly, his work as a historian. That latter work was clearly essential: to understand the place that was and is Barbados and its island companions, and the European, African, and American history in which it and they participated. This is not the place to examine the details of that work. What is important here is how it informs the poetry and criticism, infusing it with that very sense of an “environment,” a place, of particular historical experience, which is and is not that of Europeans—or Africans, or other Americans (although it may be worth noting that the effort to make anew a culture's voice is seconded by an educative one, where he has made his scholarly work the basis of textbooks for schoolchildren of the Caribbean).

Suffice it to say, as the three metaphors with which I began suggest, that this work has always explored issues similar to that found in the poetry and criticism. One way to get at this, perhaps, is to suggest that the ten years Brathwaite spent in Africa (mainly Ghana) enabled him to make a passage akin to that expressed by George Lamming's Trumper, who comes back from the United States having discovered his group identity as a black. Memory, a sense of place, and above all a culture-consciousness are embodied for Trumper in this recognition, so that the old “big bad feeling in the pit of the stomach,” the dizziness and emptiness are forgotten: “A man who knows his people won't ever feel like that.”⁹ Brathwaite came close to paraphrasing these sentences in the characterization we saw of the anglophone Caribbean novel. In West Africa he found both the possibility of such group belonging and a place which grounded many of the fragments he had found and was to find in the Caribbean. But that was assuredly not to say, as some critics have, that he set aside Europe. “West Indian literature” had to be seen, he wrote in 1967, in its “proper context of an expression both European and African at the same time.” It is to say, however, that fragments of the one had to be set against, recovered from, built into the “imposure” of the other.¹⁰

Brathwaite was now prepared to go beyond both those he had once criticized and his own criticism. He would seek the home from a discovery of Caribbean geography and its meaning in history (the skipped stones and their fall; the rock hiding vital waters; windstorms of Africa, the Saharan harmattan, that are now—after him—understood to affect the December-February droughts that strike the islands and the aforementioned hurricanes) by reconstructing the shards of fragmented cultural memory, by historical recovery, folk recall, and exploration in a poetry that would set out to find not only a Caribbean “content,” but its own form of expression, its own rhythms and music. This last he would eventually draw from his work on jazz forms, his sensitivity to local sounds and images, and his deep awareness of the cultural importance of drumming rhythms. But he would also explore the wider and more general possibility of “nation language”: a language that would itself echo “the environmental experience.”

For one—disastrous—way for the colonized mind to face down its colonizer is to do what some did to the normative pentameter: fragment it, take it apart, break it up—even though, as Brathwaite argues, to do so still leaves it as the only hegemonic form. And what the fragmenter risks getting, and indeed gets in the end, is “a frantic impoverished dialect.” This is to quote Wilson Harris describing the speech of one of his protagonists, Hassan, in The Far Journey of Oudin. He is matched by Kaiser, who had but “a few words of formal English.” Neither of them can possibly come close to grasping the “unearthly delicate writing on the sky.” And to Hassan's imagined wish to go back to India, Kaiser responds by protesting: “What language had he save the darkest and frailest outline of an ancient style and tongue? Not a blasted thing more.” “You have no language,” says another; “you have no custom.” That is why the Hindus' Indian father feels so distanced from them: “we got to forgive he,” says one of them, “for the strict unfathomable way he got of looking at we like if he grieving for a language. In ancient scorn and habit at the hard careless words we does use. But is who fault if the only language we got is a breaking-up or a making-up language?”¹¹

One cannot just “create a language” or “rescue … the word” from its possessors, as Eduardo Galeano writes. No doubt a writer's feel for “his or her people—their roots, their vicissitudes, their destiny—and the ability to perceive the heartbeat, the sound and rhythm of the authentic counterculture” must be intense.¹² But what and where is such “another culture”? How can one recognize its “authenticity”? To say so much leaves yet unsaid the matter of how one might create or rescue language and word. One does neither ex nihilo: one uses, combines, fuses, and recombines myriad elements from the varied sources that forge everyone's homes or home. These elements already always exist, doing so in cultural experiences and environments whose ramifications may often escape notice. Whatever impoverishment is theirs, they remain remnants of a particular culture, and will do so until we know enough of that experience and ours to be able to use them otherwise. “Collective identity is born out of the past and is nourished by it.”¹³ We must know the working of the elements composing that past and the identities which arise from it. To think one can adopt them without preparation, as if they were neutral, is almost surely to fall back into the patterns customary to the words one supposed one was rescuing: not—perhaps—impoverished, but still colonized.

Brathwaite traced those difficulties—with anger—in Black and Blues.¹⁴ There the angry breaking away from the consequences of colonization and oppression, of cultural “imposure,” made use of his gradual uncovering of jazz forms, local sounds and images, the rhythm of the drum—the fragmented shards, as I said, of cultural memory—to recombine them into something potentially new. Anger, while it is surely the only appropriate response to the theft of a language and a culture, clearly risks rejecting altogether the very elements it must of necessity use: “like a rat / like a rat / like a rat-a-tap tappin // like a rat / like a rat / like a rat-a-tap tappin // an we burnin babylone” (“Conqueror,” pp. 19, 23). These lines were to be repeated in Sun Poem (1982), where they signal even more emphatically Caliban's revolt. Black and Blues then takes the reader through a triple sequence of understanding.

The opening anger emphasizes the dismay and disgust of the poet who has been forced to pick through the “fragments” marking the loss of his own culture and the sinister “gift” of the pieces permitted by another only to serve its own interests. Then comes the outrage of “Drought,” facing the consequences of oppression: Caliban as “victim of the cities' victory” (30), Madrid or Paris, Amsterdam or London; Caliban, too, confronting visions of a place that “is no white man lan' / an' yet we have ghetto here” (32). This yields to the further outrage of being forced to violence to avenge what has been taken (a violence that usually destroys its own), and at the adulteration of African memories: “a forgotten kingdom” (43), a yearning still borne in pain. Yet, at the last, we find the hopefulness of “Flowers”: the rediscovery of fragments, African and Caribbean, based in firm geography of place: “the seas drummers // softly softly on sound … / it is a beginning” (“Harbour,” 83); in the symbol and existence of “Crab,” who holds memory and geography together; and in the final hope of “Koker,” with its “coastline” lying beneath “the sounds of stretched light … the don drumming light, against / sky that is their living monument” (90).

Black and Blues captured the dismay, frustration, bewilderment, decentering, and grief of Harris's characters in their linguistic and cultural deprivation, but found a way to tap new rhythms, a confident history, and a solid sense of place(s) to start making something otherwise. In a way, it repeated in concentrated little the movement of The Arrivants. We seem to be shifting here from what we may once more call, again after Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a decolonizing of the mind, toward something that may be considerably harder, something that requires remapping the terrain, reclaiming the soul. Brathwaite's second trilogy, consisting of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self, furthered these themes. The first was, so to speak, a discovery of the place of Barbados. The poet's quest to know and remember his mother became a rediscovery of Barbadian geography, imbued with the Atlantic call of Africa and Europe, but essentially now itself, its own, with its own no longer buried culture as well. Out of the submerged coral of the island come its waters of life as out of various cultural practices, now seen for the first time, come submerged but ever less fragmented cultural forms, completing the hope expressed at the end of Black and Blues. The poet himself gets a grounded (new, but also culturally old) name.

Sun Poem next pursued the poet's paternal “genealogy,” confirming his place in the land less “mythically,” through the family grounding of grandfather, father, son, and memories of the boy's childhood. The son's name of Adam symbolized this rooting, discovery, and, no doubt above all, the poet's invention of the new. X/Self finally explored the poet's now affirmed grounding in past and present, in Europe and Africa, in violence and oppression as well as in tact, grace, and renewal. The islands have become, too, a place of and for their own people: “not fe dem / not fe dem / de way caliban / done // but fe we / fe a-we.”¹⁵ This poem was to be reworked, rewritten, and lengthened as “Letter Sycorax” in Middle Passages, where the poet himself became and superseded the old Caliban of a past that still depended on fragments tied to a particular hegemonic memory.¹⁶ Answering (for example) Galeano's dilemma, this shift may prove as important a one for the Caribbean imagination as was Roberto Fernández Retamar's replacement of José Enrique Rodó's Ariel by Caliban himself. The negation, aggression, and denial with which Rodó's “Uncle Tom” was finally rejected yield here to new cultural creation.

Not for nothing did Brathwaite finish the second trilogy by rewriting “Shango,” a poem that came toward the end of Black and Blues. There the poem had started: “huh / there is a new breath here // hah / there is a sound of sparrows” (75). “Xango” begins: “Hail // there is new breath here // huh // there is a victory of sparrows” (X [X/Self], 107). The more European-like “hail” (befitting conquering Rome of the beginning of X/Self) was now combined with the thunder god's “huh”; noncommittal “sound” became the more optimistic “victory”—still, perhaps, not altogether freed of indecent hegemonies, for those “sparrows,” after all, are the New Testament birds whose fall God would heed as much as a human's. Their victory risks being understood as a version of a central tenet of a text crucial to the European imagination: “And the meek shall inherit the earth.”

Yet at this end, even if only momentarily, the poet of the second trilogy seemed to have found a moment of that “tact and selfless grace” he found necessary for such peace and balance in the much earlier Contradictory Omens (61). It is in light of this that we should read the humorously expressed sense of hope maintained in Middle Passages (even after the most catastrophic losses, personal and intellectual): “is a matter of hope of keep hope alive of the right to continue the dream / about our rightful place at the table,” he wrote in “Duke: Playing Piano at 70” (MP [Middle Passages], 24). Of this collection, Fenella Copplestone observed: “Its menace is real, its compassion touches the deepest springs of sadness, and its mythology is potent and frightening. People die in his world.”¹⁷

But people also live there, and if the world has menace, it is to those whose control is overthrown by it. For here death is not the lurking disease, at least momentarily endemic to Enlightened Reason, recorded, as we saw, in unthreatening (?) expansive linear pentameter. Death plays its accepted and unfearful part in the ineluctable rhythm of life, the balanced experience of tact and grace. The “menace” of this poetry (poor, but revealing, word) is of a site composed from fragments no longer just remnants of things lost, but living crystals recombined and fused into consciousness of a place that does now capture fully “the natural experience, the environmental experience” of which Brathwaite was writing ten years and more ago.

It touches the deepest springs of sadness because the people who die there are vital, crucial to the remaking; their loss—one loss, anyway—is incomprehensible disaster: “without reason,” he wrote in the dedication of X/Self, “all you hope gone / ev'rything look like it comin' out wrong. / Why is that? What it mean?” But these lines come from the last part (“The Return”) of Rights of Passage, first book of a trilogy whose last word was of hope—“making / with their // rhythms some- / thing torn // and new”¹⁸—so that the loss itself was now tied to the sense of place. Geography, poetry, self, history come together. The “missile” that was Columbus, that was the whole mighty power of an expansive culture imposed on Africa and the Americas, has yielded to a changed rhythm, a changed voice, the networked circle of Shango hidden in the watered rock beneath the still ongoing destructions of multinational capital.¹⁹ Another major impingement of Europe on the Caribbean was of a different missile: a German torpedo sinking the Cornwallis in Bridgetown Harbour—but that was fifty years ago. Here too, marks of European aggression were quickly swallowed by Barbadian waters, becoming a plaything for local boys (BP, [Barabajan Poems], 153-54, 347-61). This swallowing may also be a harbinger of creation and hope.

Now, the poet returns to his uncle's workshop of his youth, to his limping Bob'ob. In the ruins of the old workshop he discovers that Bob'ob had carved a forbidden African image; as surprising and mysterious as the carving itself is its survival over the years in the ruins of Bob'ob's home (BP, 155). Limping Bob'ob, holding a lost past of Africa but also opening it unbeknownst to the poet, can be recognized as Legba, “the limping / crippled African god of the crossroads of beginnings & opening doors—as Bob'ob as Toussaint Louverture—the Liberator or ‘Opener’ of S Domingue into Haiti—himself a cripple—fatras baton they once called him … and whose French sobriquet—‘Louverture’—was surely a direct translation of the Dahomey Legba (Open/Doorway) & why not?” (172). And what of the poet himself? New “Adam” of Sun Poem, inventor of new names, opener of culture, finder of lost presences, sewer of remnants—may he not fill the same role? And why not? He discovers too that Bob'ob's ruined workshop has become a Zion meeting hall, a place of worship for a fundamentalist “Christian” group not happily accepted by authorities (166).

Listening outside, the poet hears the rhythm of their worship, their singing/chanting, and their movement/dancing slowly change, “the sound of their voices has gradually gone through an alteration of orbit & pitch. they are into the pull of an alteration of consciousness as if the tides of their lives have paused on the brin(k) of falling onto our beaches & instead have slowly lifted themselves up up up so that the cries that should have been breaking from their crests do not move anymore but glisten in the deep silence of their throats until they begin to sweep slowly backwards like away from our shore from our trees from our hills away from Barbados” (181-82). The rhythm changes, the motion changes, the dance becomes the hoarse rhythmic deep breathing of Shango's visitation. The Christian hymnal pentameters give way to a different syncopated drumbeat, that is also the echoed blues and jazz rhythms of the old trains, “sulphur and fire into a sibilant & quiet acceptance of her trans-formation like Aretha coming home in Pullin*” (196-97).²⁰ “Until there is at last what there always was / Shango / as she struggles to name almost names him the train comin in / comin in / comin in wid de rain” (200-1; see also Mother Poem, 98-103).

Barabajan Poems is, for the moment, the culmination of the movement I have been seeking to trace. Bringing together the three metaphors with which we started, it transforms them into the vital essence of a culture. Legba, Shango, the rhythms, voice, and history that together make a whole have come together with other shards of other cultures: steam trains and blues, Christian hymns and jazz, the “rattle and pain” of loss and deprivation (BP, 201) with the vivid hope of new names and endless depth of proverbial orality (268-83). Brathwaite is here far indeed from Pope, Thomson, and Gray—not to mention the falling snow of his Cambridge youth. He is also very distant from those bewildered tales of emigration typical of the Caribbean writers of his youth—and still perfectly usual, we saw: both are, we have of course been suggesting, aspects of the same, very partial and interested, history—and place (which is not—not just, and not first—Caribbean). Barabajan Poems confirms the hopefulness of the lighted living coastline that ended Black and Blues and affirms the embedded collective “self” of X/Self into what seems a quite new cultural, natural, environmental surety.

Galeano wrote that “a literature born in the process of crisis and change, and deeply immersed in the risks and events of its time, can indeed help to create the symbols of the new reality, and perhaps … throw light on the signs along the road.”²¹ Brathwaite, poet, historian, and critic, has brought us—and himself—somewhere else, into a “web,” it may be, as Wilson Harris puts it, “born of the music of the elements.”²² The poet offers a reply of grace and tact to inertias of a European literature whose forms still by and large correspond to needs fixed four centuries ago and query them, sap them, only with a great tentativeness of difficulty, striving against political, economic, and cultural forces whose interests lie in pursuing and retaining a familiar and customary history into the present (pretending its conflicts over).²³ He has found/created experience natural to the place that is his, itself made (into a) whole from what had been the blighted fragments he recorded in earlier poetry. This is, we suggested, to go beyond decolonizing the mind, becoming aware of the forms and content of colonization, so as to remove—or at least see past and between—the accretions of alien “imposure.” It is to remap an environment, a history, a geography, a culture, and an experience. It is to reclaim the soul.

Notes

1. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, London/Port of Spain, New Beacon, 1984, pp. 9-10. I thank Patricia J. Penn Hilden for her attention to this essay.

2. Timothy J. Reiss, The Meaning of Literature, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1992. Others of these matters are in Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1982, 1985.

3. James Thomson, The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence, James Sambrook, ed. [1972], Oxford (Eng.), Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 61-62 (ll. 874-84).

4. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], New York, Viking, 1960, p. 189.

5. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, Oxford (Eng.), Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 237.

6. Kamau Brathwaite, Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature, Havana, Casa de las Américas, 1986, p. 36.

7. “Introduction” to C. L. R. James, Minty Alley, London/Port of Spain, New Beacon, 1971, p. 5. The novel itself first appeared in 1936.

8. See e.g. Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage, Harmondsworth (Eng.), Penguin, 1985.

9. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin [1953], New York, Schocken, 1983, pp. 300-1.

10. Kamau Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” in Roots, pp. 62-63. The term imposure comes from Brathwaite's Contradictory Omens, Mona (Jamaica), Savacou, 1974, p. 61 and passim.

11. Wilson Harris, The Far Journey of Oudin [1961], in The Guyana Quartet, London/Boston, Faber & Faber, 1985, pp. 179-82, 155.

12. Eduardo Galeano, “In Defense of the Word,” in We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991, tr. Mark Fried et al., & New York, Norton, 1992, pp. 141-42, 138.

13. Ibid., p. 138.

14. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Black and Blues, Havana, Casa de las Américas, 1976. References to this work in this paragraph and the next are indicated directly in my text.

15. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, X/Self, Oxford (Eng.), Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 84-85. Subsequent references use the abbreviation X.

16. Kamau Brathwaite, Middle Passages, Newcastle (Eng.), Bloodaxe, 1992, pp. 76-88; New York, New Directions, 1993, pp. 93-116. Subsequent references use the abbreviation MP.

17. Fenella Coppleston, review in P.N. Review 89, 19:3 (January-February 1993), p. 61.

18. Edward Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, Oxford (Eng.), Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 69, 270.

19. Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems 1942-1992, Mona (Jamaica)/New York, Savacou/Savacou North, 1994, p. 187. References to this work are henceforth indicated directly in my text and use the abbreviation BP where needed for clarity.

20. I cannot, needless to say, hope here to capture completely Brathwaite's typographical play, echoing visually the changing sounds of voice and rhythm of dance.

21. Galeano, p. 139.

22. Harris, The Guyana Quartet, p. 7.

23. I refer here to the “Epilogue” of my Meaning of Literature, pp. 338-47, and to work in progress.