Review
Kamau Braithwaite Middle Passages
KAMAU BRATHWAITE:
Middle Passages;
Bloodaxe, £6.95
The date of this book's publication was significant - 1992 being the 500th anniversary of Columbus's entry into the/his New World. Kamau Brathwaite (his other books were published by Edward, then Edward Kamau) is an academic historian if whose work has focussed on the ramifications and distortions engendered by that 'discovery'. His work in various genres, for his historical research has always informed his poetry, indeed the two great trilogies for which he is best known in the literary world -The Arrivants and Mother Poem, Sun Poem and X/Self - represent his engagement with the human effects and issues of that brutal history. His historical imagination, as mediated through his poetry, is informed by his experience of living for many years in Africa, and, on his return to the Caribbean, by his recognition of the submerged presence of Africa in the cultures of the region. Much of his work has been a kind of reclamation of that African inheritance, a reclamation that has inevitably involved a process of challenge and confrontation with the elements of the mercantilist/ colonial culture which overlaid and often literally oppressed the African 'survivals'.
Just as he insisted in his scrupulous – but also controversial - The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 that the slaves most important act of resistance to the slavers' attempts at domination was through their refusal, adaptation and appropriation of the slaver's language, so Brathwaite's most fundamental challenge to the cultural status quo has been to the language of cultural domination itself, and to its most privileged form, as book-bound, grammar-bound script. Brathwaite has consistently championed the use of non-standard vocabularies, refusing the pejoratives of 'dialect' or even 'creole' as terms to describe the languages that Caribbean peoples actually speak, instead coining and asserting the appropriateness of the term 'nation language' to reflect both the status of that spoken tongue and the fact of the differences between the languages of the various nations of the West Indies.
Alongside that concern to break and break away from the cultural constraints of English has been an ever-present concern in his poetry with the orthography of that language as if the very technology of print were loaded against the enunciation of the new/ old/ evolving oral/ literary language. From his earliest collections Brathwaite has experimented with layouts, with syntactical “calibanisms” as he calls them – spelling, breaking, spacing, shaping words in ways that dislocate them from their familial associations and meanings, but more importantly allowing nuances, echoes, puns rhymes and particular kinds of music 'out' of the language that history has given him to express his experience and vision. There is a modernist/ formalist dimension to this experimentation but much more significant is his sense of the language's complicity in the making of that history, which so dominate his imagination and his poetry.
Middle Passages reflects both that concern with history -- as past and present- into future -- and marks a new stage in hid development of those challenges to grammatical/ orthographic orthodoxy. A note among the publication and copyright details announces that the “text is based on the 'Sycorax video style' being developed by Kamau Brathwaite” and the book employs a variety of fonts, calligraphies and symbols varying in scale from the minuscule to the massive, both within and between poems. The 'Sycorax video style' is a product of the word processor and in a recent interview (see Planet 75) Brathwaite spoke of the liberatior of the word processor for someone whose language is essentially, fluidly oral rather than fixedly formal and scribal. Composing in/ on the screen of the word-processor rather than 'through' the pen or 'via' the typewriter he called “writin in light”...
Even that phrase carries echoes of the middle passage; one 'justification' the slavers made for the continuing trade in human beings over four centuries was that it delivered savage Africans from darkness into the benign light of Christian civilization... Such distortions are the stuff of colonial histories and Brathwaite's history-as-poetry is in part a re-writing -- in a different light -- of the experience behind the distortion. For the most part the poems in Middle Passages are either lamentation for or celebration of (and sometimes both) figures - public and/ or personal to the poet - who together construct a counter-history .So the collection opens with tributes to the Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen and the jazz pianist Duke Ellington - both exemplars of black New World culture - sandwiching two much bleaker poems. 'Columbe' is a restrained, measured and generous-spirited portrait of Columbus, recognising him as a man of visions as well as a figure whose coming unlocked the gates of the middle passage. Narrated through the voice of an Amerindian who yet has knowledge of the events to come, the poem is suffused with a sense of inevitable doom. That fate is spelt out in 'Noom', in part a callous and matter-of-fact account of the atrocities of the middle passage and its aftermath told in the voice of a European sympathetic to the trade. The words coming out of his own mouth are enough to damn him and - still - to shock 'us', however many times we've read the statistics:
and there are certain noblemen. their priests you
might call
them. who talk too much & mutter & make zodiac
signs & have. you will find. a great deal of influence
among the warriors and older womenstick knives through their tongues
and when the ship sails for the fair winds of the azores
strangle them drunk & dunk them overboard
the dolphins will weep while the sharks rip their
watery groves
That juxtaposition of praise and lament runs through the book. Several – indeed most - of the poems in Middle Passages have been included in previous collections of Brathwaite's work, albeit in slightly different forms. He has always written in sequences, or at least he has always wanted his readers to thread narratives between sections of the books and he has spoken before of rearranging his work for different occasions or purposes, to focus in on a particular theme. That is clearly what Middle Passages sets out to do, forcing its readers - whether coming new to the poems or recognising the rearrangements and mutations - to consider those issues of history, language and culture that resonate between the collection's title and the various celebrations of the Columbus quincentennial. Brathwaite has always been -in every sense -a challenging poet and Middle Passages is not an 'easy' book, but it is, without question, an important one.
Page(s) 56-58
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