Kamau Brathwaite (right) and Marguerite Laurent, attorney and performance artist. The Haitian-American legal activist met Kamau at the St Martin Book Fair in 2006. In background are St Martin poets/authors Drisana Deborah Jack (left) and Changa Hickinson. (Photo © 2015 House of Nehesi Publishers)
Kamau Brathwaite's Words Need Love Too (House of Nehesi Publishers, 2000) was called "a felicitous example of the publication of a major Caribbean writer at home" by Elaine Savory in the Harvard University journal Transition (2008).
THE STATE OF exile is another theme that predominates West Indian writing, and it certainly permeates Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry. In the poem “Postlude/Home,” the poet poses a series of questions about the Black man’s place in the African Diaspora. These questions link the theme of exile to those of dispossession and deracination:
What guilt
now drives him on?
Will exile never
end?
The memories
are cold.
MAY THERE BE many more fruitful years, for Kamau Brathwaite has never stopped writing as the years have passed. May there be joy in a life well lived and realization that the profound ways he has changed poetics will live vibrantly after him. Generous and gentle, Kamau Brathwaite has helped younger poets over the decades, as teacher, mentor and friend. He has shown his students how to imagine more fully and how to find a form to best express that imagining.
PALM TREE SYNDROME: Colonial Installation: Plant Me, Please (Mixed-media drawing, May 2010, Private collection)
The piece has many layers, and it is inspired by my knowledge of the literary work of the great cultural icon Kamau Brathwaite. The puzzle pieces and sections are a reflection of his many articles, and the concept explored is an abstracted linkage to his renditions.
I MET KAMAU (I was once chided for respectfully saying, “Mr Braithwaite”) in 1978. We were invited to participate in the fifth anniversary of the New Artist Movement in St Vincent/Grenadines. I remember the trepidation of delivering a talk, “Caribbean Theatre Today,” with him in the audience. He spoke afterwards, and for this milestone celebration I quote a passage from his address that has stayed with me over the years and has helped put imagery to my understanding of culture and now reparations:
A REVIEW OF KAMAU BRATHWAITE’S THE ZEA MEXICAN DIARY: 7 SEPTEMBER 1926-7 SEPTEMBER 1986 (THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS, 1993)
real/dreeem/innnbeeetweeen, yOr ridddimmms, rituals
an riiites continew to creeeAte =beee-tru-to-yOr-self=
sculptures innn deee lannnscape of our hed-space.
yOu, carrr-eee deee salt an liiite widinnn yOr soul-case!
…an from deee tiiime wen yOu put sum of her, onnn yOr
tung, an yOu, swallowed her…yOr heart-strings strummm an
drummm an strummm an drummm an striiike into liiite
ev-reee-wear yOu walk goOod…
It seemed easy enough. Asked to provide a poem with links to Kamau, I immediately thought of one I had written around the same time I was studying his collection The Arrivants as an undergraduate at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. My poem had been heavily influenced by him, to the point where I was a little uncomfortable with it. Anyway, I hadn’t looked at it, or seen the book in which it was written, in close to ten years. That should be enough time for me to give it a really dispassionate assessment, I figured.
