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.
The questions are answered later in a very subdued way, a characteristic of lost memory or of those memories that have grown cold:
What we
can’t touch
will never
be enough
for us to shout
about, who live
with God-
less rock
the shock
of dis
possession.
For we
who have crea-
ted nothing,
must exist
On nothing….
Brathwaite’s poetry resounds with polytonal sounds and rhythms which create particular moods or physical states, and which reinforce the various thematic strands in his poetry. Patricia Ismond, a profound critic of Brathwaite and Walcott, informs us that Brathwaite uses language and various rhythms to create something new:
The rhythms are accordingly chosen to convey
the qualities of suffering and the type of sensibility
that unites the Black race. To mention a few at
random: the plaintive blues of the Southern negro;
the frenzied jazz of his urban brother; the powerful
pulsation of limbo therapy; the resonances of the
dark mystery of African religious ritual.
The second book of his trilogy The Arrivants, Masks, corroborates Ismond’s analysis here. This book utilizes Akan mythology, art and religious ritual. It examines the poet’s journey to Africa, his encounter with the ancestral past, and his psychogenesis there, which begins with a religio-mythical transformation, in the form of a sacrifice-ritual, in the poem “Prelude”:
Take the blood of the fowl
drink
take the eto, mashed plantain,
that many women have cooked
eat
and be happy
drink
May you rest
for the year has come round
again.
Ismond sees this form of ritual as one of initiation and is intended to merge the internal and external realities of the persona. The ritual begins the communion with the ancestors and introduces the traditions and customs:
The African Imagination in search of a more precipitate
contact with evil… In the Western imagination the thrust
is upwards; in the African downwards.
I would argue, however, that both good and evil for the African move downward. In African cosmology, good and evil are vital forces within nature and do affect man. That is why in this undifferentiated world any aberrations that upset the tenuous balance must be dealt with through purification rituals, atonement rituals, appeasement rituals, or through sacrifices to the appropriate gods or ancestors.
—
Horace I. Goddard was born in Barbados and currently lives in Canada. He is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and critic. His most recent novel is Child of the Jaguar Spirit (2009). His most recent poetry collection is One People: Two Worlds Apart (2014). This essay in its entirety was first published in Kola 27.1.
