Sunday 9 February 2020

HOMAGE TO A ‘FEARLESSY INNOVATIVE’ CARIBBEAN POET

The passing of Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite will leave a profound void in the Caribbean, but the region is commemorating his literary legacy even as it mourns.

“He was a fearlessly innovative poet and certainly one of the earliest to be recognised internationally,” said Jamaican writer and educator Dr. Velma Pollard, following the announcement that Brathwaite had died in his homeland Feb. 4, aged 89.

Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite.
“He was constantly trying new things, new forms of expression,” Pollard told SWAN. “Perhaps his biggest legacy is his successful experimentation with poetic form. No other Caribbean poet has been so daring.”

That legacy will be highlighted in the coming weeks and during this year’s NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago, taking place May 1-3 in the capital Port of Spain.

It was revealed Feb. 5 that a few days before his death, Brathwaite had agreed to accept the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters, a prize presented annually by Bocas.

“Although the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award is not usually given posthumously, as it was offered and accepted by Professor Brathwaite shortly before he died, we will present the award as already planned at a ceremony in Barbados in March,” stated Bocas Lit Fest founder and director Marina Salandy-Brown.

“It now seems even more significant to honour him, and in this time of mourning it is a small consolation to know that news of the award brought Professor Brathwaite pleasure in his final days,” she added.

Like Nobel laureate Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, Brathwaite saw his influence spread globally as he explored Caribbean history, culture and the effects of colonialism.

From his youth in the Barbadian capital Bridgetown, his career took him to other islands, and to Africa and the United States. He worked as an education officer in Ghana and later taught in the history department at the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus in Jamaica, eventually becoming a professor of comparative literature at New York University.

His remarkable first collection of poems, Rights of Passage, was published in 1967 and formed the first volume of The Arrivants trilogy.

“In The Arrivants, he speaks of men ‘making / with their / rhythms some- / thing torn / and new’, and those words could be applied to him as a poet as well,” Pollard said.

“He was passionate about the links between Black people in Africa and the New World, and he uses sound to link them. Music is a strong component of, a sort of background to, much of his poetry,” she continued.

Other noted works include Third World Poems, Middle Passages, and Born to Slow Horses, among his prolific output.

As an activist-writer and scholar, Brathwaite co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement, bringing together an array of arts practitioners from across the region and elsewhere. He also launched the journal Savacou and published numerous essays on history, literature and other subjects.

He received many academic and literary honours during his lifetime, and merited even more accolades, according to his friends.

After gaining a scholarship to study history and English at Cambridge University, he later earned his Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in the 1960s and won Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in the 1980s as well as the Order of Barbados - a national honour.

In 1994, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, known as the “American Nobel”, and in 2006 he won both the Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada’s richest poetry award) and the Gold Musgrave Medal for Literature from the Institute of Jamaica. He went on to receive Cuba’s Casa de las Americas Premio in 2011, and the 2018 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in the United States.

Beyond the Caribbean, Brathwaite is esteemed for the way he used his art to address “the largest problem of the postcolonial historical experience: the problem of rehabilitating the colonized mind and restoring it to its equilibrium,” as poetry editor Vijay Seshadri has written in the Paris Review, an international literary magazine.

“His solutions were radical and stunning, in both theory and practice,” Seshadri wrote. “Those of us who share that history, whether East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, American, are enormously indebted to him for the clear and steady way he confronted and clarified our understanding of ourselves.”

For others, Brathwaite’s personality will be missed as much as his work. According to writer and scholar Opal Palmer Adisa, a long-time friend of the poet, Braithwaite was “gentle, thoughtful and powerful” - a man who “loved words” and believed strongly in hope.