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.
The confluence of influences from Western modernists such as Eliot and the oral tradition in Ghana, where Brathwaite met the ethnomusicologist Kwabena Nketia, fed Brathwaite’s poetry. So did his groundbreaking work as a historian (creolization in Jamaica). But from his early mature work, the first trilogy now known as The Arrivants, through his second trilogy, revised and published as Ancestors, to the full development of his scribal/oral “video style” in works such as Barabajan Poems, he has never ceased to search for new paradigms by which to explore and represent the Caribbean and its diasporas.
The Arrivants demonstrated a sure mastery of poetic form and the rich nature of African diaspora speech as well as paid homage to Akan culture. Many poets find a voice and stay with it, but Kamau Brathwaite has found many voices on his poetic journey. Strongly influenced by music, especially jazz, he has made us acutely aware of the kinetic nature of Caribbean and African- American language. Included in his prize-winning collection Born to Slow Horses is a poem about a dramatic encounter with the spirit of a slave woman, angry at having been buried with no ceremony, as well as a powerful and poetically achieved elegy for 9/11, into which is woven the music of Coleman Hawkins.
But Brathwaite’s journey has not been an easy one. From 1986 to the early 1990s, he experienced what he calls his “time of salt.” First his beloved wife Doris died, then his house in Jamaica, with his considerable library, suffered serious damage from Hurricane Gilbert; and when he found temporary accommodation in Kingston, he was brutally attacked by thugs in his own apartment. The result, not surprisingly, was that the desire to write left him. But in his remarkable short fiction collection, Dreamstories, he tells of coming across a computer on which he was able to experiment. The result was several important books that appeared in 1994, and the affirmation that henceforth a computer (and an old Mac printer) would be the means to develop a new phase of his work.
That constant development and courage in the face of great adversity, and his unfailing affection and care for those who practice the literary arts, show him to be an extraordinary person, just as much as his work clearly demonstrates an outstanding poetic achievement. He is still writing, still thinking about new directions for the work, and no doubt on this special birthday will be at work on something new.
Happy Birthday, Kamau Brathwaite, and thank you for all you have shown us and shared with us.
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Elaine Savory has published a good deal on Brathwaite as well as on Caribbean and African poetry, drama and women's writing. Recently, she published essays on postcolonial ecocriticism. She teaches at The New School, a progressive university in Manhattan.
