Abstract
Brathwaite’s invocation and experimental appropriation of ‘nation language’ is a significant mediation that destabilises and de-authorises coloniality, inscribing a new ‘in-betweenness’ that highlights how the subaltern can speak. I argue here that the poet-persona’s minted vocabulary and his re-appropriation of canonical texts such as the Bible and Shakespeare’s The Tempest inaugurates a meta-discursive enunciation of epistemic possibilities. In embracing the fragmented contours of Barbados and radically privileging the political complicity of Africa in the matrix of slavery, Brathwaite embosses languaging as the primus for problematising identity, belonging and becoming. Polysemy therefore emerges as a complex interplay of enunciation and emergence, agency, subjectivity and restlessness that recuperates the anguish of contact, marginality and resistance while at the same time celebrating the plurality of the interstitial self.
Highlights
Born Edward Brathwaite in 1930 in Barbados, he read History at Cambridge and subsequently taught History in Ghana (1955–1962), making his ‘relocation’ to Africa and the first intimate encounter with the ‘paradoxical ancestral continent’ (Brathwaite 1973)
The latest begins with Mother Poem (Brathwaite 1977) whose sequel is Sun Poem (Brathwaite 1992), and this culminates in X/Self (Brathwaite 1987)
In X/Self, he moves further to reclaim a fourth tributary to his identity, and the four landscapes (African, European, American and AmerindianMaroon) cross-fertilise each other to create a poetically complex, experimental, questing, restless and assertive Caribbean voice
Summary
Africa in Brathwaite: The matrix of cultural quest, identity and history as poetic vision. ‘X’ suggests, concurrently, power and namelessness, a collocation of the ‘in-between’ and the outside, that strange phenomenon Homi Bhabha (1990) aptly describes as ‘almost-but-not-quite’ Brathwaite is both rational and emotional in the (trans)fusion of verbal and musical forms into poetic ones. The long poem etched in The Arrivants, Mother Poem, Sun Poem and X/Self destabilises power and linguistic configurations that results in several semantic challenges and possibilities. Through the tensions of folk rhythm, historical flashbacks and poetic-cum-imaginative excursions to Europe, New York and Africa, Brathwaite garners new perspectives and expresses a portentous vision. He locates Barbados and the West Indies in the context of global power dialectics and the http://www.literator.org.za
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