In a television interview in 1991 the West Indian author George Lamming
examined the question of what it means to be a person, Indian or African,
in the West Indies. It required, he said, a measure of “curiosity” about
places outside the region, ancestral places.
At pivotal points in their career, writers of Lamming’s generation pursued
their “curiosity”. Walter Rodney, best known for “How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa”, steered his doctoral interest toward Africa after
studying in England. He lived and worked in Tanzania before returning to
the region in the late 1960s. After student and writing spells in England,
V.S. Naipaul turned his attention to India (this led first to “India: A
Wounded Civilization”, 1977)
Kamau Brathwaite lived and worked in Ghana and was apparently
“transformed” by what he saw and felt there.
He returned to the West Indies with “news” of observances, and with
definitions for repairing fragmented West Indian lives. That repair process,
he noted, was already on the way through the fevered assemblies of
Rastafari in Kingston, Jamaica, a community viewed with contempt in
those days simply for singing and thinking aloud about Africa.
Walter Rodney’s activity in Jamaica was cut short. Less confrontational,
Kamau Brathwaite stayed on and flourished, at least for awhile.
In that1991 interview George Lamming spoke of efforts by West Indian
writers of his generation to make those ancestral places part of an island-
empire, cost-effect discourse.
Europe (Britain, France) was not ready, he said, for revised history
lessons about the slave source of their immense fortunes (documented by
Walter Rodney); or the Windrush migrant experience in London (captured
in Samuel Selvon’s stories).
More recently, it has been noted, England still seems reluctant to consider
arguments for colonial labour reparations, advanced from regional Admin
centres (UWI, Hilary Beckles).
Back home in the 70s these graduate men were not just “news breakers”.
They set about “raising consciousness”. Fragmented West Indian nations
could be unified by attempts at ideological realignment (Rodney), or trans
Atlantic kinship recognitions (Brathwaite).
There were reminders, however, that like reservoir water levels, regional
“consciousness” could rise and fall; periods of optimism and intense
creativity, if not sustained, could flatten into stretches of mind shelling
chatter, like in Guyana, masking stagnant cultures.
Brathwaite’s work falls within a continuum of great Caribbean innovators –
Rex Nettleford (dance), Bob Marley (music), Walter Rodney (education) –
exceptional men whose interventions vitalized generations in their life time.
From deep research areas graduates were returning, but few with such zeal
to address directly the historical deformations in the region.
The publication, for instance, of Brathwaite’s “The Arrivants” (1973)
sparked disquiet and debate in the region. Jamaica seemed a “kin” perfect
testing ground for its ‘look back then forward’ thinking.
In UWI Humanities Depts. at the time there was a mood of cautious
accommodation. And occasional mockery, like this from one not impressed
member of the English Dept. about Brathwaite’s page line structures:
“Anyone can write stuff like this. Anyone can go, Shit /shit / shit is not /
shit is not enough.”
Still, Brathwaite’s poetry rallied classes of believers, hanging on to every
drum beat and reference; placing his ground raking lines in contest with
the elegiac stanzas of acceptance from Derek Walcott’s divided veins, his
formal command of European aesthetics. Here was poetry with the power
to change the life of anyone stuck in tropic shade.
*
These days, as tinder and gossip blow about on news sites, islanders no
longer need wait for traveled authors to return with world reports.
Messages and links pop in on devices a hand reach away (along with
platforms for doctored profiles, tribe followers piling on.)
Back in the wireless 70s, Brathwaite’s poetry introduced new word rhythms,
the new “perspective” he considered essential for island nation building. It
is easy to forget how intensely that need was felt back then.
Readers installed his words rhythms like reinforcing steel rods – in strict
Brathwaite terms, reinforcing “spirit” rods, recovered from submerged
sources of self-belief – essential for island restoration, for changing how
islanders managed their lives.
Some will argue his “work” on the islands, undermentioned in recent
decades, was done; that it’s time for future mining appraisals, new
actors clearing and building on old village frontiers. Building – not just
waiting for things to grow.
As memories of that productive period fade, as surface issues draw clicks
away from Brathwaite’s subterranean tremors, he leaves behind these
saved images: his Rasta tam, his Elder shepherd beard; the reading voice
swollen with compassion; the nation language format he created like a
toolbox for ever sure imaginations to search forward with.
– Wyck Williams
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FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 