A REVIEW OF KAMAU BRATHWAITE’S THE ZEA MEXICAN DIARY: 7 SEPTEMBER 1926-7 SEPTEMBER 1986 (THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS, 1993)
This is a departure from the usual Kamau Brathwaite fare: the vigour and pulse-beat of his unrelenting poetry dramatizing the unfortunate spoils of history and its impact on the African psyche in the so-called New World, and the reassertion of a people's memory and vital presence. Here, in The Zea Mexican Diary, a sense of pathos, tenderness, is what pervades; we become witnesses to what is immensely personal, the passing of Brathwaite's wife, Doris, "this iriedahta of Guyana," as we are brought along in the journey over a sixty-year period of creation in Brathwaite's depiction of the dimension of familial self (husband and lover): to share in the agony of loss of the woman the author fondly calls "Zea Mexican" or simply “Mexican,” because of her Guyanese-Amerindian heritage. This memoir-diary is not without distinctive elements of stream of consciousness and verbal pastiche, though not as deliberate or conventional technique. Here, as we observe the unique nature of organic form at work, we become aware of the intensely private and personal as Brathwaite recounts his late wife's illness and final departure without the explosiveness of language we are sometimes accustomed to in his work.
While I have met EKB (as Brathwaite is fondly known to those most familiar to him) on a few occasions in the Caribbean and elsewhere, I have never met Zea—and wished I did—a woman who had been with her husband since the early days: through Brathwaite's years as a student in Britain and his travels and work in Africa before returning to the Caribbean (Brathwaite now teaches in New York). One gets the sense and unmistakable impression that Zea was integral to his writing: perhaps a shaping, moulding force, the way one's spouse or partner always is in a harmonious, supportive relationship; symbiotic even, until now fully acknowledged as Brathwaite gives testimony to his feelings and experience; and, perhaps: the creative act is never singular—we are told—but always dual, especially in the kind of poetry Brathwaite has written over the years—hardly self-reflexive, but representative of the community, often as Afrocentric as is his overriding metaphor in the context of the colonized-imperialistic experience and the struggle or wrestle to salvage the self from the sense of the community's loss or permanent void.
Zea, in this memoir of her "dying," also brings out the fundamental image of Brathwaite as "BLACK ICON": as she becomes a reason "for such a conscious honest woman to guard him and his seed." An element of self-consciousness, seen perhaps of passing on the black race, is more than alluded to; but this is not always sustained. And overriding the feeling of loss is the sense that "words are not enough": as if the book itself is speaking to the reader, echoing the words, with the memoir also speaking back to the author seen through shifting voices, spliced phrases, references to other writers' and friends' commentaries, phone messages, letters—all integrated: including words of solace from AJS (A.J. Seymour, the late Guyanese poet) who sends support in describing the loss he felt over his own wife's death: all the "widowered images" that form and reform in the mind and imagination. This latter comprise the crux of Brathwaite's style and presence, the unique way the words are printed on the page, with the author's indelible imprint and signature of X, other self-indulgences of technique, which to the average reader may become too intrusive, take away from the pathos, though it is distinctively—invariably and unequivocally—Brathwaite's.
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Cyril Dabydeen teaches at the University of Ottawa. A former poet laureate of Ottawa, his work has appeared in Oxford, Penguin and Heinemann books of Caribbean verse. His novel Drums of My Flesh won the Guyana Prize for best book of fiction. He is the editor of Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today. This review previously appeared in World Literature Today (University of Oklahoma).
