EXPLORING HISTORY, MIGRATION AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE IN SELECTED POEMS OF EDWARD KAMAU BRATHWAITE (2) (original) (raw)
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African-Caribbean Life in Brathwaite’s Poetry: A Postcolonial Perspective
Ansu Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2017
The postcolonial theory is built from the colonial experiences of the people who engaged in liberation struggles around the world and particularly in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It bears constant witness to constant cultural hybridization so that the new hybrid personalities are invested with the power to dominate and reclaim their lives in the new world. According to Brathwaite, the Caribbean becomes a free man when he totally embraces his African roots; he is therefore a colonial migrant who interprets the Caribbean culture and language. He interprets his concepts through a hybrid of personae that consequently unsettle the authority of the Whiteman. This study looks at Brathwaite works as inter-textual references and counter readings of historical records to challenge historicist accounts of African-Caribbeans which werewritten by the White colonizers. His poetry does not only reflect the multiplicity of realities and the plurality of the subjects but the form and the shape of his writings embody the experiences of postcolonial subjects.
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Amerindian presences play a continuous and significant role in Brathwaite’s poetic oeuvre, marking a tension between his literary recovery of the past and his desire to create a new alter-native image in the place of these figures. Far from a tension to be resolved (Brathwaite does not articulate fixed ‘either-or’ expressions), the poet uses a range of textual devices to ensure that Afro-Caribbean Amerindian entanglements constitute his alter-native project, manifesting in the possession of Amerindian presences in poetic forms, whether the pre-colonial Arawaks, his wife Doris, or the native Caliban of Shakespeare’s imagination. While not specifically expressed in these terms, these entanglements inform what Edwards describes as the “anxieties of sovereignty” that haunt Brathwaite’s work (17), and the need to create “a legitimizing Genesis,” to quote the late Michael J. Dash (197). In the most explicit reading of this dynamic, Shona Jackson calls this nexus an “epistemic condition” of “becoming native” that is “predicated on its own and on New World aboriginal displacement, and on the nation-state and the creation of an identity within it that will ultimately govern this new native status” (82). Jodi Byrd gives a similar finding when she traces representations of Amerindian absence in the work of Wilson Harris, who frames “Amerindian presences […] as ‘alien,’ ‘lost,’ and ‘vanished,’” in order to establish a “center from which these experiences have been ‘lost’ or ‘vanished’” (Byrd 157). By reading for the recurrence of Amerindian-Creole entanglements across Brathwaite’s work, I complicate the ‘rupture’ separating the poet’s early and late work, a split precipitated by a series of crises he describes as ‘the time of Salt’. On this basis, I take a non-chronological reading of Brathwaite’s work that traces an unresolved tension between his sense of native genesis and his recovery of Amerindian paradigms. After doing so, I take a wider view of Brathwaite’s engagements with Indigenous communities beyond the Caribbean based on the poet’s comments in ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey that each of the world’s continents “has a culture paradigm which can be ‘read’ from the totems of their landscape: Americas (cenote), Europe (missile), Af (circle), Asia (pagoda), Australasia (wave/boomerang)” (115), as well as Brathwaite’s engagement with writers and scholar working across Indigenous studies.
Identity, History and Caribbean Experience in Select Poems of Derek Walcott
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This study examines how history has shaped social identity and the impacts of both on Caribbean experience in Derek Walcott's poetry. Using New Historicism as theoretical framework, it critiques some Caribbean historical realities highlighted in the selected poems and their impacts on society at individual and societal levels with particular emphasis on identity. Four poems from different collections of Walcott are analyzed in this paper, which are "Codicil", "The River", "Love after Love" and "The Sea is History". The conclusions of this critical engagement show clearly that identity in Caribbean reality is inescapably tied to the traumatic history of displacement, enslavement, migration and alienation of the Caribbean peoples.
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