It seemed easy enough. Asked to provide a poem with links to Kamau, I immediately thought of one I had written around the same time I was studying his collection The Arrivants as an undergraduate at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. My poem had been heavily influenced by him, to the point where I was a little uncomfortable with it. Anyway, I hadn’t looked at it, or seen the book in which it was written, in close to ten years. That should be enough time for me to give it a really dispassionate assessment, I figured.
The problem was finding the book. After intense searches in places where it “had to be” or where “it couldn’t possibly be,” the results were the same. The book was playing hard to get, it seemed.
The focus on Kamau took me back to the first time I was exposed to his work. As a Black Power advocate while in Sixth Form at Harrison College in Barbados, I was excited that he would be paying a visit to his alma mater to do a reading. The reading took place after assembly and the extract was from his poem “Negus”:
It
it
it
it is not
it
it
it
it is not
it is not
it is not
it is not enough
it is not enough to be free
of the red white and blue
of the drag, of the dragon....
He had me right there. His wearing a dashiki put me in his corner before he spoke, and when he did, his deep hypnotic voice struck an empathetic chord that has resonated ever since. This man, I thought, could clearly understand the views I was espousing, even though we had never met. And he was a Harrison College old boy, too!
When I read his work at Cave Hill, where I took the Special English option, as it was then called, it was a joyous exercise in study. I discovered with great satisfaction that Kamau also saw the sanctity of cricket and the reality of its life metaphor. I don’t think you can be a real Caribbean man and not see just how heaven-sent the game is.
It was also during the study of his work that I had one of my most satisfying experiences on campus. Each of the students in the tutorial class had to prepare a topic for presentation; mine was the theme of exile. I figured that reams had already been written about that, as it is one of the most obvious themes of Caribbean writing. I chose instead to present a paper on “Rhythm as Meaning in The Arrivants.”
My tutor’s eyebrows rose a little when, on the appointed day, I made my entrance with drum in hand. For the hour of the tutorial, I went through the 4/4 rhythm of “Caliban,” the 6/8 rhythms that pervade “Masks,” and the Rastafari Nyabinghi heartbeat experience that was “Negus.” When my tutor said he did not know that the word Negus was part of one of the titles of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Negus Negusti, King of Kings, which gave the poem its context, of course my day was made. A fellow student, however, came out of the tutorial grumbling: “I miss my exile, though.”
I have met and reasoned with Kamau on relatively few occasions, but they have always been memorable. Most so was a magical hunt ten years ago for Guinness ice cream in Port of Spain during a Carifesta VI performance on the Brian Lara Promenade. But that’s a poem in itself, and I won’t lose this one.
Happy birthday, Kamau!
—
Adonijah is a multi-faceted communicator and editor. A calypsonian, he has also written music for three of Derek Walcott's plays and the world premiere of Austin Clarke's Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack.
