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.
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| 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.
