Her Stem Singing: Kamau Brathwaite's Zea Mexican Diary: 7 Sept 1926-7 Sept 1986

Abstract

from Ghana, and Doris Monica Welcome had recently returned home to Guyana from Britain, training in home economics complete. Days after their first meeting at a party in Bridgetown he followed to Trinidad, then to Guyana. After their wedding, he took back to his home and family in Barbados, when everyone . . . comes to me as if in shock and yes, yes, yes . . . She is the one: (122-23). Their miracle of meeting, of recognition, resulted in a partnership of extraordinary richness and creativity. They worked together in Ghana, St. Lucia, Jamaica, London, at individual projects and joint enterprises. then, in May 1986, when they were both nearing sixty, when new pathways of work were opening, their home at Irish Town becoming more and more of a haven, Kamau Brathwaite was told that Doris had advanced, inoperable cancer. She died six months later, on sixtieth birthday. Mexican Diary: 7 Sept 1926-7 Sept 19861 records the poet's experience of living through those six months, and beyond: in extracts from the diary which he kept at the time; in letters and excerpts from letters written immediately after his wife's death to Zea his name for Doris in honor of part-Amerindian ancestry (Rights of Passage [1967] is dedicated to Mex and Jah Music [1986] to Mexican, my wife),2 from Ayama, the poet's alter ego, to his sister Mary Morgan in an epigraph written by Brathwaite before his wife's Thanksgiving service; and in a short epilogue, The Awakening. At one level, the experience recorded is universal: the loss of a loved one, a beloved partner. Brathwaite tells fully and honestly his human response to impending loss: the swings between irrational hope and bleak reality; the agony of not knowing whether a refusal to accept the medical facts, a strong enough belief in a miracle, may prevent his wife's death, or whether this stands in the way of death, hampering their preparation for it; of how, without meaning to, he blurted out what the doctor had told him; the endless question of why (41, 78). He tells of his responses to the moment of loss: the realization, as the hearse moved away, of nothing nothing I cd do cd do cd ever do again w/ for for for for her (102); the concern to know, And you, my love? Can you see me? Hear me? Are you close by? Angry? . . . Indifferent? Different? same? Changing? if so how? Do I affect you? Do you affect me? Are you okay? (114); disbelief that the cremated ashes are indeed she whom he loves.