Edward "Kamau" Brathwaite
Edward "Kamau" Brathwaite was a renowned Caribbean poet, born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Barbados. He developed a passion for literature and jazz during his education at Harrison College and published his first significant work, "Shadow Suite," in 1950. Brathwaite earned a scholarship to study history at Cambridge University, obtaining his degree in 1953. His early works reflect influences from T.S. Eliot and explore themes of identity, cultural roots, and the African diaspora. Notably, he lived in Ghana during the late 1950s, where he engaged in educational work and contributed to literary anthologies.
Brathwaite's most significant poetic contributions include "The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy," which delves into the experiences of the African diaspora, and later works that incorporate innovative word sculpting techniques. His writing often reflects personal experiences, including the loss of his wife, and he has received numerous accolades for his literary achievements, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Through his poetry, Brathwaite offers a complex exploration of Caribbean culture, history, and identity, continuing to influence readers and writers well into the twenty-first century.
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Edward "Kamau" Brathwaite
- Born: May 11, 1930
- Birthplace: Bridgetown, Barbados
- Died: February 5, 2020
- Place of death: Bridgetown, Barbados
West Indian poet
Identity: African descent
Biography
The prolific and acclaimed Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite to Hilton and Beryl Gill Brathwaite. Raised in Bridgetown, Barbados, Brathwaite pursued an interest in both literature and jazz during his years at Harrison College in the late 1940s. Brathwaite’s first significant publication, “Shadow Suite,” appeared in Bim, a Barbadian literary journal, in 1950. His early poetry shows the influence of T. S. Eliot. Awarded the Barbados Island Scholarship to Cambridge University in 1949, Brathwaite continued his education at Pembroke College, where he received a history degree in 1953. During the mid-1950s, he often read his poetry on the BBC program Caribbean Voices.
Brathwaite’s search for cultural roots led him to Ghana, where he worked for the Ministry of Education between 1955 and 1962. His poetry from this period was aired on the Ghana Broadcasting System, and in 1958 many of these pieces were published in the anthology Voices of Ghana: Literary Contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System, 1955–57, edited by Henry Swanzy. While in Ghana, Brathwaite also wrote and directed plays intended primarily for children’s theater. During the 1950s and 1960s, he published literary criticism in Bim. He married Doris Welcome in 1960.
Brathwaite returned to the West Indies in 1962 and a year later joined the faculty of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He journeyed to England for graduate work in 1965, shortly thereafter becoming editor of Bim and secretary of the Caribbean Artists Movement. He received his doctoral degree in history in 1968 from the University of Sussex for a thesis entitled The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, which he later developed into a book of the same title, published in 1971.
Brathwaite’s work of the late 1960s explores the African diaspora. His themed collection Rights of Passage (1967) uses the journey motif to reveal the African American experience, ancient African civilization, and the African encounter with Europe. The work contains emblems of resistance and traces through “memory” the middle passage, slavery, and colonization. In 1967, Brathwaite published Odale’s Choice, a play based on Sophocles’s Antigone (441 BCE) and set in Africa.
African language and ritual are evident in Masks (1968), his next collection, which presents traditional Ghanaian culture and the Akan worldview. Spiritual quest is an element of this collection, and the drum a central symbol. Islands (1969) ultimately suggests a reawakening of consciousness in its treatment of themes found in Rights of Passage and Masks. Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands form The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, perhaps Brathwaite’s most important poetic achievement, published as a single volume in 1973. He also recorded oral presentations of these pieces and documented Caribbean life in prose works such as Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (1974), which espouses “nation language,” and Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970). He explores exile, the African homeland, and jazz in Other Exiles (1975).
In 1972, Brathwaite visited Kenya, where he was given the name Kamau. During the 1970s, he continued to investigate island sources in Mother Poem (1977), an extended work that relies on the Barbadian experience, Caribbean vernacular, and the mother trope. Black + Blues (1976) evokes such jazz figures as John Coltrane.
In the 1980s, Brathwaite edited the anthology New Poets from Jamaica (1979) and furthered his development of Caribbean and diasporan themes in Sun Poem (1982) and Third World Poems (1983). In 1986, he suffered the loss of his wife, Doris, a tragedy he documents in later writing. Themes of slavery are contained in X/Self (1987), which uses an epistolary motif and historical references to Europe, the Americas, and Africa. X/Self, Mother Poem, and Sun Poem make up a second trilogy, published together in 2001 as Ancestors. In X/Self, word sculpting—creative arrangements of text—represents a departure from conventional formats. In the innovative Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations (1989), derived from the Koforidua manuscripts of the 1950s, Brathwaite presents a series of folk sayings.
In 1990, Brathwaite published Shar, a poetic retelling of his response to the destruction of his library during Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. In 1991, Brathwaite began teaching at New York University in the Department of Comparative Literature. He also republished a number of earlier writings. Middle Passages (1992) deconstructs the Christopher Columbus myth and contains tributes to Nelson Mandela and Duke Ellington. Roots (1986) collects essays from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Another document of personal tragedy is The Zea Mexican Diary, 7 Sept. 1926–7 Sept. 1986 (1993), a mixture of journalistic entries and epistolary structures chronicling the painful loss of Brathwaite’s wife. This is a complex work that uses word sculpting, a technique Brathwaite also uses in Barabajan Poems (1994). Also in 1994, Brathwaite published Dreamstories, a fictional collection featuring word sculpting, personal experience, and journey motifs. In all of his works, Brathwaite uses nation language, the ancestral past, and personal experience to present in verse a complex history of the African diaspora. In 1994 he was the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Brathwaite continued to publish into the twenty-first century, starting with Words Need Love Too (2000), a collection of yet more “dreamstories.” Subsequent books include Golokwati 2000 (2002); the two-volume MR (2002), an “exploration of magical realism,” according to Elaine Savory; and Born to Slow Horses (2005), for which he won the 2006 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Elegguas (2010), the title of which recalls both the word “elegy” and Eleggua, the Yoruba orisha (deity or divine spirit) of roads and thresholds, is a collection of poems for the dead, including several “Letter[s] to Zea Mexican” that were originally published in The Zea Mexican Diary. Strange Fruit (2016)—titled after the song written by Abel Meeropol and most famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, in which “strange fruit” is a metaphor for the bodies of African Americans murdered by lynching—“charts a movement from the pain of poems ‘written along the v/edge & coast of death and carrefour,’ the despair of sensed erasure and abandonment, of dwindled voice, to a moment of revelation of a living ancestral presence,” according to the publisher's description.
Brathwaite has won numerous awards throughout his career. In addition to the Neustadt Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, his honors and awards have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship, the 2006 Gold Musgrave Medal, the 2010 W. E. B. Du Bois Award, and the 2015 Robert Frost Medal, among others. In 1987 he was made a Companion of Honour of Barbados.
Bibliography
Anniah Gowda, H. H. “Creation in the Poetic Development of Kamau Brathwaite.” World Literature Today, vol. 68, no. 4, 1994, pp. 691–96. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9501184553&site=ehost-live. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017.
Brathwaite, Kamau. Strange Fruit. Peepal Tree Press, 2016.
Brown, Stewart, editor. The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. Seren, 1995.
Kamau Brathwaite: 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. World Literature Today, vol. 68, no. 4, 1994, pp. 653–903.
McWatt, Mark A. “Edward Kamau Brathwaite.” Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 58–70.
Povey, John. “The Search for Identity in Edward Brathwaite’s The Arrivants.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 27, no. 2, 1987, pp. 275–89.
Rohlehr, Gordon. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Author, 1981.
Savory, Elaine. “Kamau Brathwaite: Grounded in the Past, Revisioning the Present.” The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, Routledge, 2011, pp. 11–19.
Ten Kortenaar, Neil. “Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and T. S. Elliot’s The Waste Land.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 4, 1996, pp. 15-27. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=84348342&site=ehost-live. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017.
Thomas, Sue. “Sexual Politics in Edward Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and Sun Poem.” Kunapipi, vol. 9, no. 1, 1987, pp. 33–43, ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol9/iss1/1/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017.
Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge UP, 1997.
Williams, Emily Allen. “Whose Words Are These? Lost Heritage and Search for Self in Edward Brathwaite’s Poetry.” CLA Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 1996, pp. 104–8.