Gabrielle Bellot on Brathwaite's Conception of 'Nation-Language'

In the wake of Kamau Brathwaite's death, Gabrielle Bellot looks at a 1974 essay, "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature," in which the poet "reflected on the sometimes striking ways in which Caribbean cultures contained traditions and rhythmic patterns resembling those in West Africa." In a piece at NYR Daily, Bellot thinks back to graduate school:

I was in graduate school in Florida, in a small, largely white class that was discussing Brathwaite’s distinctive use of language, particularly in relation to his famous comment that he had been deeply influenced by T.S. Eliot—less by Eliot’s poetry than by the idiosyncratic rhythm Eliot used when reading his poetry aloud. We were examining “The Dust,” my favorite of Brathwaite’s poems, which is rendered entirely in vernacular dialogue. I decided to offer to read it aloud, since I was the only student from the Caribbean in the classroom. Because of the anxiety I had carried around with me for most of my life, I rarely volunteered to read anything out loud. But I had enjoyed “The Dust” so much that I decided to push past my trepidation.

The poem, which is presented as a series of unmarked conversations between people talking about the darkening state of affairs in their life—“de pestilence” ruining crops, the seemingly biblical omen in a volcano’s smoke—is a simple yet captivating evocation of what Brathwaite called “nation language.” Brathwaite developed the term as an expansive alternative to the more commonly used “dialect,” which, he noted, carried a “pejorative” connotation. In a 1976 lecture, which was later revised as a 1984 essay in The History of the Voice, Brathwaite famously defined nation language in contrast to the Eurocentric imagery that colonization had imposed upon our nations in the Caribbean. Many of us, he noted, had been raised so wholly on European history, languages, and art that we knew more about English kings than about our own islands’ heroes—like Nanny of the Maroons, who led an army of escaped slaves and free-born blacks against the British in Jamaica. We learned to write of snow and that distant Mother Country’s kingdoms, but lacked the language for our own world, for the hurricanes with their blind cyclopean rage and the dinghies rotting away in their sleep on our beaches and the beautiful madness of rum shops.

To capture those—the things we actually lived with—we needed to use nation language... 

Continue reading at NYR Daily.