Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020)

Brathwaite's trilogy The Arrivants was something of a breakthrough work for him and for Caribbean poetry in English when it appeared in the late sixties. Unlike Walcott's long poem Omeros, this is a sequence of linked poems, rather than a single continuous narrative. Brathwaite makes extensive use of the poet's freedom to be in more than one place or time at once, and there is only very limited use of named characters. The first part Rights of Passage deals with the slave trade and the show more modern African diaspora, Masks takes the poet - physically and spiritually - back to Africa, whilst Islands looks at life and landscape in the Caribbean.

Book-length poems often seem rather intimidating, and it doesn't necessarily help when you know that Brathwaite cites the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance, Miles Davis and Aimé Césaire as major influences. You come to this book expecting rant, sprawl, and unintelligible Africanisms, but what you actually find is a remarkably well-disciplined bit of poetic engineering. There are apostrophes to African gods, to James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre, there are episodes of calypso, limbo and cricket, there's even the occasional bit of good-old-fashioned Pastoral, but it's always there for a good reason and as you read, you can see the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place around you and building up a complicated multidimensional picture of the world that slavery has made.

This is very oral poetry, which you should probably try to imagine being performed in a pub in Brixton or a basement in Greenwich Village. Brathwaite makes use of a very wide range of language registers, from formal academic English right through to patois, creole, black American English, and fragments of African languages. He provides a short glossary of the most important African terms, but most of the time you're on your own (but with enough clues in the context not to lose track completely). Masks is the most difficult part from this point of view, as you need to have at least a general idea about African religious beliefs and the way they are reflected in Caribbean traditions to make sense of what Brathwaite is trying to say. The endnote is quite helpful for this. Rights of Passage and Islands are both much more accessible.

One thing in particular you need to come to terms with is Brathwaite's habit of writing long passages in very short (one or two stress) lines. This might look like sixties affectation on the cold page, but it makes complete sense when you realise how it's meant to be read with a strong drumbeat rhythm behind it. It's really useful to listen to a recording of Brathwaite reading it (there are some on Poetry Archive).

Rant? You want rant? Well, there is a bit, but it's very cool, organised rant:

So went the black
hatted zoot-
suited watch-
chained dream
of the Panama boys
and the hoods
from Chicago.

Yeah man!
the real ne-
gro, man, real
cool.

Broad back
big you know what
black sperm spews
negritude.

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Profound and disturbing, Trench Town Rock captures frames of the endemic violence in Kingstown Jamaica during the early 1990s, and Brathwaite's own brush with that violence. The text deftly spans genres, melding poetry, reportage, and memoir into a riveting whole. Brathwaite makes effective use of his excellent ear for language and compelling use of typesetting in Trench Town Rock. He crafts a commentary not only on Kingstown, but on government, violence, and human nature.

Musical, fast-moving, and powerful, this collection is worth exploring when you have time to sit and simply read it straight through. While the poems can, for the most part, stand alone, the collection is clearly meant to be read straight through. The narrative strands and voices here are carefully woven and expertly tempered by musical rhythms. Well worth the time for poetry fans.

I'm not a big poetry person, and reading poems fast (as I did these) is typically a recipe for disaster. But even so, this didn't do much for me-- I was rarely struck by imagery or a turn of phrase in this volume of postcolonial poetry, aside from "his- / tory bleeds / behind my hollowed eyes". Yes, you read that right: that sentence fragment has two line breaks in it, one in the middle of a word. He does this consistently; I'm convinced it's an attempt to pad out his page count.