Edward Kamau Brathwaite Remembered at The Guardian

Lyn Innes writes a heartfelt obituary for Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who died this week at the age of 89, noting the author's "best-known work," The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, which "he began composing and performing [...] while teaching and studying history in Jamaica and Britain in the 1960s." More: 

This epic trilogy traces the migrations of African peoples in and from the African continent, through the sufferings of the Middle Passage and slavery, and dramatises 20th-century journeys to the UK, France and the US in search of economic and psychic survival.

The Arrivants exemplified Brathwaite’s ambition to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry, which would celebrate Caribbean voices and language, as well as African and Caribbean rhythms evoking Ghanaian talking drums, calypso, reggae, jazz and blues. Brathwaite argued that the iambic pentameter embodied the British language and environment; it was not a meter that could carry the experience of hurricanes, slavery and a submerged African culture.

In his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984), Brathwaite contended that the English language spoken by the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean carried a suppressed African identity that surfaces in the way words are voiced and also in particular words, idioms and syntactical formations, such as “nam” for “to eat”, “i and i” for “we”, and “What it mean?” for “What does it mean?”.

Read on at The Guardian.