X/Self by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

First published: 1987

Type of poem: Poetic sequence

The Poem

X/Self is a book-length work divided into five parts, which are further divided into individual, closely connected poems. The thematic and stylistic connection among these shorter poems is so strong that the work is best thought of as a single, unified poem. As such, it is also the final third of a larger sequence that Edward Brathwaite began with the publication of Mother Poem (1977), continued in Sun Poem (1982), and concluded in X/Self.

The title of the poem has a complex meaning. The figure of an “X” within the poem implies the crossing of cultures, such as the crossing of an imperialist European culture with African and Native American cultures, which is the collective legacy of the Caribbean peoples with whom Brathwaite, a native of Barbados, identifies. Because of the confusion that such a legacy can cause within an individual, the “X” also has a second meaning as the “X” in a mathematical formula, the unknown element that the mathematician—or in this case, the poet—is trying to identify. As a whole, the title X/Self implies that the self of the person born into a colonized state is, to an extent, an unknown element. Further, it becomes clear throughout the poem that Brathwaite is writing not only about Caribbean people but also about people from colonized and Third World nations throughout the world.

Two lines repeated throughout the poem are “Rome burns/ and our slavery begins.” By this, Brathwaite implies a connection between the fall of the Roman Empire and the enslavement of various peoples around the world. In his many references to such things as slave revolts against Rome, the re-enslavement of a Brazilian republic of ex-slaves by the Portuguese in 1696, and the slaughter of children by South African forces during the Soweto uprising of 1976, it becomes apparent that Brathwaite views the fall of the Roman Empire as an event that made future empires feel justified in resorting to slavery to suppress “others” whose independence might threaten the might of the empire. That is, the devaluation of women that Brathwaite writes about, as well as the enslavement of African and Native American peoples, have been politically justified throughout the ages as a means of maintaining political order.

Brathwaite conveys this idea through an astounding array of poetic techniques, among them, a facility with words that seems to decompose language even as it composes with it. Thus, many visual and verbal puns are apparent in his writing: “Cincinnati” becomes “sin/cinnati,” “hallelujah” becomes “hellelluia,” and in a pun that has to be read aloud to be appreciated, Christopher Columbus’s first name becomes a question when written as “Christ/opher who?”

Similarly, just as he tries to re-envision language by looking at it differently, so he tries to reimagine history and culture by looking at familiar figures in a new light. Christopher Columbus, for example, appears many times throughout the poem, not as the brave explorer of legend, but as the man who began the process of enslaving and destroying the people of the new world. Prospero, from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), also appears, but envisioned as a plantation owner rather than a benevolent magician, while Caliban, from the same play, appears as a native who has been enslaved and forced to speak his master’s tongue. Similarly, Richard Nixon appears as Augustus Caesar, while a character in a 1960’s television situation comedy, Julia, is compared with a daughter of Caesar, also named Julia.

These elaborate references and jokes are part of what Brathwaite himself, in notes that follow the poem, refers to as “magical montage.” Taken together, such images have a jazzy feel to them in that, much like jazz, they provide what seems to be a freshly improvised version of old tunes. More than simply a spirit of play, however, is being conveyed. Brathwaite is also deliberately trying to subvert traditional views of culture and history by improvising his own views from his own perspective. That is, the rapid, freewheeling associations that are made in his poetry are a way of saying that European culture and history belong to him, as a member of a society that has been shaped by European imperialism, as much as it does to the Europeans. He has a right to provide his own interpretations.

Because his references are so wide ranging—from the Greek philosopher Socrates to the black actress Diahann Carroll, and from T. S. Eliot to the Martinican poet of negritude Aimé Césaire—many readers will find his poetry quite dense and difficult. As an aid to readers, the poet includes eighteen pages of notes at the end of the poem, explaining and commenting on many of his references. In a brief introductory comment to these notes, Brathwaite admits that he provides these notes with “great reluctance,” afraid that some readers will be misled by them into reading his poem as an academic exercise built around these notes. Perhaps because of this reluctance, the notes have an idiosyncratic flavor all their own. They do not read as dry, academic notes, nor as mere comments, but often as an integral part of the poem, which not only clarifies but extends the type of interpretation of history that is going on in the main poem.

Forms and Devices

Without a doubt, the most important poetic device employed by Brathwaite in this poem is his use of historical and cultural allusion. Brathwaite, however, relies on allusion so heavily that this allusion becomes cultural and historical revision.

Although the poem does not adhere to a strict outline, the reader will notice a general progression throughout the poem. The earlier sections, sections 1 and 2 especially, focus on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. His view of the Empire, though, is not of a unifying force throughout the world but of one that spreads death and destruction. Not only does he call attention to many revolts against the Empire, but he also associates these with later revolts against other empires, such as (in the section entitled “Salt”) a Haitian rebel, Toussaint Louverture who, near the turn of the eighteenth century, led a successful revolt against France. Similarly, later wars and battles, such as (in the section entitled “Nix”) the 1961 United States-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, are compared to battles waged by the leaders of Rome to maintain the Roman Empire.

As the poem develops, however, it becomes clear that at least as much as the poem is interested in reinterpreting the grand sweep of history, it is interested in the human cost of individual battles and revolutions and other such mayhem.

In the section entitled “Edge of the Desert,” for example, he writes:

rome burnsthe desert multiplies its drought into this childwhose only drying water is his pools of singing eyes there…chad sinksand forest trees crash down.

The relation between the destruction of these empires and of the land is not purely a metaphorical one. Empire building and empire destruction has a very real ecological cost.

Among the most important allusions the reader of X/Self encounters are the allusions to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, particularly to the characters of Prospero and Caliban. In the section entitled “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” a character writes (in a dialect characteristic of Barbados) to his mother on a computer. In the references to Prospero in this letter, he is recast as a plantation owner, while Caliban, his unwilling servant, is seen as an enslaved native of the island whose attempt at rebellion failed. Readers who recall that Shakespeare’s Caliban appreciates language only because it allows him to curse will appreciate the pun Brathwaite makes when he says “for not one a we should responsible if prospero get curse/ wid im own/ curser”; even others will appreciate the wordplay in the footnote that describes a “curser” as the “tongue of the computer.” The wit, however, should not overshadow the meaning: Use a man as a machine, and the “machine” that is created will rebel, if only in language.

Not the least important echo within this poem is that of T. S. Eliot. Not only might a long, footnoted poem remind one of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), but the title of the last section, named “Xango” after an African god of thunder, recalls the final section of Eliot’s poem, entitled “What the Thunder Said”; more important, Brathwaite’s poem comments on The Waste Land by re-envisioning it. That is, Brathwaite’s poem (like Eliot’s) traces the descent of Western civilization. It does so, however, not through tracing its devaluation of art—a common reading of Eliot’s poem—but by tracing the destruction this Western tradition has caused by looking at its sometimes devastating effects on peoples’ lives.

Source for Further Study

The Times Literary Supplement. September 4-11, 1987, p. 946.