News

THE TIME WAS the summer of 1991.  Kamau said to me, “Where are those Guanahani poems?” The place was the English Department of the University of Miami.  Kamau was the Poetry Director for the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute.  

I was one of several persons attending the Institute and definitely one of the beginner writers in a workshop of established and published writers such as Zee Edgell, Velma Pollard, Michael Anthony, Robert Antoni, to name a few.  I was extraordinarily nervous and lacking in confidence in this setting.

It is as if there is a shadow 
of something whole

interrupting the relentless clouds
of snow swirling about us,

and suddenly, the dark body 
of steel, wood, and canvas,

sailing through with the warm laughter 
of a singing troupe drunk

with careless delight,
becomes everything in the world.

This is how the news 
that Kamau Brathwaite had won

the medal named after that tricky, 
tricky New Hampshire poet,

who sardonically goaded
his earnest best friend to war,

Kamau Brathwaite's Words Need Love Too (House of Nehesi Publishers, 2000) was called "a felicitous example of the publication of a major Caribbean writer at home" by Elaine Savory in the Harvard University journal Transition (2008).

THE STATE OF exile is another theme that predominates West Indian writing, and it certainly permeates Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry. In the poem “Postlude/Home,” the poet poses a series of questions about the Black man’s place in the African Diaspora. These questions link the theme of exile to those of dispossession and deracination:

        What guilt
        now drives him on?

        Will exile never
        end?

        The memories
        are cold.