KAMAU BRATHWAITE'S CORPUS has been concerned with articulating a Caribbean cultural theory whose root conceptualization lies in history. His remapping of colonial history in his literary and scholarly work reveals a concern with redressing history’s tyrannies, and with refuting the assumption that New World Africans were irrevocably dissevered from their roots of African spirituality as a result of colonial slavery. His famous assertion, “the unity is submarine” (Contradictory 64), references the “watery graves” of the Middle Passage, affirming the connection between African ancestral spirits and their Afro-Caribbean descendants. Africa has thus been a point of origin in Brathwaite’s creative work. This connection has not only enlarged his own awareness, but also shaped his literary aesthetics and Afrodiasporic consciousness.
My reading of Tom in Brathwaite’s The Arrivants evinces a poetic reclamation of this Afrodiasporic figure and reassesses the notion of racial betrayal with which this character has been traditionally associated. Brathwaite rescues Tom from the legacy of servility and derision that Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s character has come, historically, to represent. Tom is re-humanized, reinterpreted, and rendered the first New World African, the dubious figure of racial betrayal transformed into the symbol of collective self-recognition, existing in a space of inclusion that transcends national boundaries.
Tom journeys across the Atlantic through the Middle Passage to a cotton plantation in the American South, where he is haunted by memories of the Golden Age of the Ashanti Empire. His memory of the ancestral home is submerged as a strategy of adaptation and survival in his new and brutal environment, and he seeks to “drown the screams, shore/ cool the lashed sore,/ keep the dream pure” (Arrivants13). From behind the mask of self-deprecation, Tom seemingly plays the part of acquiescence. He is assigned the derisive label “Uncle Tom” synonymous with spinelessness; yet Brathwaite suggests the subversive and latent revolutionary potential beneath Tom’s passive, benign exterior, a potential actualized in valiant figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner. While Tom pays his debt to human guile (Complete Poems 112) and seethes in subterranean treachery, he is the embodiment of stoicism, bearing the whip on behalf of the enslaved. He is the repository of ancestral memory, challenged to preserve tribal history for posterity in the fields of labour where “cartwheels turn over heart” and “destroy the roots of love” (Arrivants18).
In Brathwaite’s allegorical representation, Tom is not merely survivor, but the purveyor of African history and culture so integral to Afrodiasporic consciousness. The African American figure of derision emerges as the Trickster of West African folklore, the Haitian Vodun deity Legba, the Caribbean Caliban; he is thus the quintessential pan-African/Afrodiasporic embodiment of our creolized selves, in whom resides the potential for a more equitable and humanist future within our globalized world.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Edward. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Kingston: Savacou, 1974.
Brathwaite, Edward. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear the Mask.” In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 112-113. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970.
