emerging image: the poetry of edward brathwaite

Emerging Image : The Poetry of Edward Brathwaite

DAMIAN GRANT On the appearance of the first volume, Rights of Passage, in 1967, Edward Brathwaite’s intended three-part sequence of poems was recognised as an ambitious undertaking for poetry. With Masks (1968) and latterly Islands (1969) the undertaking is complete,l and one can safely and gratefully say that the ambition has been fully realized. So often large intentions are inadequately fulfilled, come unsupported by any real poetic strength: one might mention the example of Alan Bold, who appears alongside Brathwaite in Penguin Modern Poets 15, and whose ‘massive global embrace’ amounts to a clumsy lunge, a self-righteous verbal gesturing that has provided three volumes in Chatto’s Phoenix Living Poets series depressing in their verbal and imaginative inertia in the same space of time that it has taken Brathwaite to produce his challenging work.

A long poem, or series of poems, may be written either in one modulated voice (like Paradise Lost, The Prelude) or composed (like Tennyson’s Maud, ‘A Medley’, Berryman’s variously lyrical and dramatic Dream Songs, or his earlier, infinitely complex Sonnets) in sharply contrasting styles and voices. Brathwaite adopts the latter pattern; and the first thing one is compelled to admire is the con- fident versatility of a talent that can make such a choice. Brathwaite possesses the obvious abilities of several different poets, the descriptive, the personal, the political, the prophetic : he displays the intelligence and irony of Enright, the technical virtuosity and dramatic ability of Berryman, and that linguistic sixth sense one associates with Hughes or Heaney. It is his complete competence that compels us to pay attention to him; his superb poetic equip- ment that allows the success of his large-scale work-which deserves the popularity, as it certainly has the impact, of a substantial novel.

Rather than break open the design to demonstrate his qualities- which will, in any case, make themselves sufficiently obvious-I will defer to this and explore Brathwaite’s work in terms of certain key ideas, ideas which create a definite coherence under the variegated surface of the poem (and which permit one to refer to the whole as ‘a poem’ in this way). The theme, over the three books, might be summarized as the rediscovery of Africa; a rediscovery that has to be made by the twentieth-century Negro, a condition of his own proper freedom, selfhood, and political independence. Brathwaite ‘Rights ofpassage, O.U.P., 20s. Masks, O.U.P., 12s. 6d. (paper). Islands. O.U.P., 22s.

Emerging Image: The Poetry of Edward Brathwaite 187

offers in fact to define and articulate the modern Negro consciousness, seen as a complication of past experience, present problems, and future possibilities.

The most important themes in the poem are those of retained memory and rediscovered voice. If his colour is his physical identity, his memory is the Negro’s spiritual identity: the short memory that takes him back into slavery (‘his-/tory bleeds/behind my hollowed eyes’ (II,65) ) and the long memory that takes him back beyond this:

You who have come back a stranger after three hundred years welcome Here is a stool for you; sit; do you remember? (11, 37)

back to the tribal wars (‘El Hassan dead in his tent’ (11, 15) aims at a similar resonance to that created by Yeats’s ‘And Agamemnon dead’), back to drums and dancing, back to the reassurance of forests and rivers. Animals retain their knowledge as part of their instinct: the eagle or the vulture ‘still knowslthe beat of the root blood/ up through the rocks’ (III,4), but man has to ‘dare to remember’ (I, 12), his memory is an active thing that ‘bends, curves, nods/ head and crouches’ (11, 72).

The slave experience, then, is only a part of the compounded past, part of the ground from which full consciousness in the present must be fed, and from which must start the symbolic butterfly of the future; but it is of course a crucially important part, and that which of all historical elements appears here in sharpest relief and in cruellest detail. The flintlock of the slaver comes as a terrible irruption in the forest, the master’s whip coils and uncoils as a recurrent motif, the shackle grapples at ankles, a ‘clanking bulldog’ (111, 18); sweat moistens, flies confuse, and rats infest the inherited experience of captivity. But such pain is necessary for regeneration: ‘A yellow mote of sand dreams in the polyp’s eye;/the coral needs this pain’- these are the opening lines of ‘Coral’, a fine poem on this theme in the latest volume. Regeneration is from the slave; the same pain that creates the coral ‘stirs the resurrection/out of Tacky’s bones’. Brathwaite provides later in this poem (‘Vhv?) an image of terrible beauty to focus the sacrifice:

For on this ground trampled with the bull’s swathe of whips where the slave at the crossroads was a red anthill eaten by moonbeams, by the holy ghosts of his wounds the Word becomes again a god and walks among us . . . (111, 108-9)

188 Critical Quarterly

That, it seems to me, is poetry of a high order; containing the pain without hysteria, it controls and articulates an intense feeling by the equally intense exercise of poetic concentration.

At a slightly lower pitch, but no less imaginative, there is an excellent example of Brathwaite’s treatment of memory in the way the young Caribbean boy, seeing three nuns appear on his ‘horizon of fear’, translates them into ‘Santa Marias with black silk sails’ that walk towards him on the water (III,23). But for all this sustained evocation, the slave past is seen ultimately in what must be called a generous perspective. There is no superficial animus, no a-historical recrimination (it may be appropriate to mention here that Brath- waite teaches the history of these times at the University of the West Indies). The poet apportions a certain amount of the blame on the tribes themselves; their pride, and unpreparedness : ‘too soft,/too blandished, too ready for peace and for terror’ (11, 17). This theme is taken up again later in a poem which uses the West Indians’ mixed success at cricket as an image for a defect, or at least a dis- advantage, of temperament: ‘let murder start an’ you cahn fine a man to hole up de side’ (111, 44).

One of the things Brathwaite does to achieve perspective is to relate the Negro captivity to the Jewish captivity in Egypt (the desert becomes the characteristic landscape of dispossession) and the present racial persecution to the ‘Jewish experience’ in Germany; for the narrator on a visit to New York, ‘an elevator sighs/like Jews in Europe’s gasses’ (I, 53). And on a literary level, the poem is certainly informed by persistent reference to Eliot’s Waste Land. The Tiresias-like ‘I’ of the poem has similarly foresuffered all; the images of dust and drought and ‘pages/damp from dirty lots’ com- bine with the oppressiveness of modern cities: ‘So to New York London/I finally came’ (I, 21) to provide an atmosphere of sterility. But Eliot’s poem is also implicitly criticized as Brathwaite takes us beyond this sterile vision. ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ is Eliot’s promise, but-and I suspect his ‘but’ is adversative to this-Brathwaite offers us something more positive :

. . . But I can show you what it means to eat your god, drink his explosions of power

and from the slow sinking mud of your plunder, grow.

The physical world provides another imaginative index to the Negro experience. The forest and the river are not always friendly: ‘with new warm arms the forest holds us’, ‘Here green’s net sticks/ wet’ (11,29,3 l), but it is the leaves that conceal the slaver’s ambush. The river, ‘blue finger of water,/heat’s solace’, cannot protect him from the sea (sea and river provide another symbolic contrast), from ‘the wind’s salt/scorching my eye’ (11, 51). Fire also is recognized as


equivocal in its favours: ‘Flame is our God, our last defence, our peril’ (I, 7), and the elements similarly can join to torment the slave : ‘the wind‘s anger’ (11, 51), the ‘cutlass edge of rain’ (111, 53), and- with the identification made even more explicit-‘master sun’s/ cutting edge of/heat’ (I, 3). The slave is ‘chained/to the sun’ (I, 80) as to his tool. The earth itself is dust and desert rather than fertile soil: and the slave endures ‘the rot of dust.’ But the face of nature changes for the freed man. The dull dust becomes mud, ‘a milk of darkness’; ‘rain unhooks flowers’ (111, 75, 76); and ‘the sun’s gold weight/lightens’ (111, 61).

Memory is the condition of consciousness-memory which in- cludes these physical realities; but this consciousness which has dared to remember must be articulated. Brathwaite deals with this need, the Negro’s need for the Word, in his second main theme, that of silence and speech.

Captivity is repeatedly identified with, characterized by, silence : the silence imposed by the slave’s condition of capture, transit, and work. Ambush in the forest is the ‘leaves’ sudden betrayal of silence’ (11, 51); capture is signalized by immediate loss of voice: ‘this shock/ and shame/in the soiled/silence’; the captured are ‘linked in a new/ clinked silence of iron’ (I, 9-10). The Negro is stripped of his identity, ‘denuded into silence’ (I, 62), taken on board ship, below decks, ‘where the si-/lence lies’: ‘long dark night is the silence in front of me’ (111, 36-7). The whole sound of Africa is made mute: Christian bells silence the gong-gong, the cock wakes no-one, drums go quiet, volcanoes are voiceless, ‘the shorn rain’, in a magnificent image of dispossession, is ‘cut from its thunder’. This situation obtains through the period of captivity:

‘The years remain silent: the dust learns nothing with listening . . . . . . My sisters sip silence’ (11, 67).

Freedom comes as a detonation of sound ‘explo/ding dimensions/ of song’ (11, 30)

‘Gong-gongs throw pebbles in the rout- ed pools of silence . . .’ (11, 3).

The third volume opens with the heroic lines, ‘Nairobi’s male elephants uncurl/their trumpets to heaven’ : now at last, there will again be ‘bridges of sound’ (111, 3). The fisherman sits on the beach, ‘He is blind . . . but he has his voices’ (111, 11); the woman speaks from her sensual centre, communicates with the wisdom of the river

‘She’s dark and her voice sings of the dark river . . . . . . she walks in a world where the river whispers of certainties’ (111, 12).


There is comfort to be taken even in the fact that ‘the dog barks at the stranger’ (111, 8).

This effective metaphor of silence-more vital, more rooted than Eliot’s in Four Quartets-is the main subject in one poem (‘The Making of the Drum’) in Masks

‘Here in this silence we hear the wounds of the forest; we hear the sounds of the rivers;

vowels or reed- lips, pebbles of consonants, underground dark fo the continent’ (11, 8)

and in five important poems in Islands. In ‘Ananse’ the Creator God, seen as a spider, ‘squats on the tips/of our language’ and ‘spins drum-/beats, silver webs of sound’ (111, 6). ‘Shepherd’ starts off with dumbness, but then ‘a crack ascends the silence’: ‘now the drum speaks . . . lips curl into old shapes’; the road to the harbour is ‘cobbled with voices’; the drum praises the gods, ‘and the rope that loosens the tongue of the steeple’; the gods in their turn ‘speak to us with the voices of crickets, with the shatter of leaves’ (111, 28-33). ‘Wake’ offers a welcome to the Word-whilst acknowledging the difficulties and possible distortions

‘For the Word has been destroyed and cannot live among us . . . . . . When I was hungry, you fed me books, Daniel’s dungeons now I am thirsty, you would stone me with syllables.’

(111, 55)

‘Naming’ is straightforward-a symbolic naming of moon and trees : but then ‘Negus’ concentrates this idea much more powerfully

‘I must be given words so that the bees in my blood’s buzzing brain of memory

will make flowers, will make flocks of birds, will make sky, will make heaven, the heaven open to the thunder-stone and the volcano

and the un-folding land.’ (111, 67)

And so the cock crows. But the cock can crow at a false dawn: Brathwaite gets no more hysterical about the future than about the past, and restrains any premature satisfaction. ‘And so the black eye travels to the brink of vision/but not yet’ (111, 106). The poems show a full, even a bitter cognizance of the problems facing the


Negro race at the present time. Freedom itself can appear a source of confusion, a disorientation after the years directed to obtaining i t

‘. . . freedom surrounds us

like the wave round rock; enchants, encircles, isolates us from that fear, that hope, that protest, that was our common ground’ (111, 59).

Haiti, we have already been warned, is ‘ruined by greed and the slow/growing green of its freedom’ (I, 35). The problem is the re- establishment of values-values which are not provided by the simple fact of freedom itself (‘it is not enough to be free/of the red white and blue/of the drag, of the dragon . . .’). Freedom is trivialized if it expresses itself only in a crude and selfish materialism adopted from the slavers themselves: ‘Just give us/what we earn/in bright bold/ cashlbefore we/smash/and grab/it. To helllwith Af-/rica/to hell/ with Eu-/rope too,/just call my blue/black bloody spade/a spade and kiss/my ass . . .’ (I, 27-8) : freedom is forfeited if the Caribbean world offers itself up-victim for a second time-as a moral and economic colony, a ‘semicolony’, of Europe, America, or Japan.

There is no satisfaction for the Negro in a world where his girls wear girdles, where

‘. . . the city-sick electorate

can brawl and stew their buttocks in thick saucy tunes and latest juke- box choices . . .’ (111, 57)

where ‘the red rain of urine falls slowly on the islands; the dump/ heaps sprout pain again and again’ (111, 80). This only represents a new submission to old masters :

‘Now slave no more now harbour-

less no more, he forges from his progress’ flames, new iron masters;

brilliant concrete crosses- look-he bears-to crucify his freedom.’ (I, 76).

The weapon of war is now ‘cutlass profit’ (I, 47), and the result is that ‘the stars/rernain my master’s/property’ (111, 19); there is still the threat-despite fertilizers and transistor radios-of dust and silence.

The real defeat for the Negro would be the acceptance of this debased, vulgarized version of himself, ironically proclaimed in the


poem ‘Folkways’ (I, 29). But although Brathwaite faces this possi- bility, he does not surrender to it, and the shoots of new life puncture the waste land surface of the poem, the ‘black and bitter/ashes in the ground’ (111, 12). It would not do justice to the complexity of the poem to call this ‘optimism’: Brathwaite leaves us at the end with the qualified promise of ‘some-/thing torn/and new’. (111, 113).

It is in deliberate deference to the workings of the poem that I have tried to give a descriptive account of the leading themes rather than attempt to summarize its poetic quality in my own words (a regular temptation for the critic of poetry, who wants to get in on the act). I don’t think it will be summarized; paraphrase always does violence, and it would do particular-and general-violence here. But it can be seen concentrated, concentrated in poems that will stand beside the very best that is being written in English at the present time. Such a poem is ‘Ogun’, a brilliant evocation of, and meditation on, the poet’s uncle at his carpenter’s craft; which, since it offers a pertinent summary, also, of the themes I have been tracing, I can leave to speak for itself.

. . . And yet he had a block of wood that would have baffled them. With knife and gimlet care he worked away at this on Sundays, explored its knotted hurts, cutting his way along its yellow whorls until his hands could feel how it had swelled and shivered, breathing air, its weathered green burning to rings of time, its contoured grain still tuned to roots and water. And as he cut, he heard the creak of forests: green lizard faces gulped, grey memories with moth eyes watched him from their shadows, soft liquid tendrils leaked among the flowers and a black rigid thunder he had never heard within his hammer came stomping up the trunks. And as he worked within his shuttered Sunday shop, the wood took shape: dry shattered eyes, slack anciently everted lips, flat ruined face, eaten by pox, ravaged by rat and woodworm, dry cistern mouth, cracked gullet crying for the desert, the heavy black enduring jaw; lost pain, lost iron; emerging woodwork image of his anger.

emerging image: the poetry of edward brathwaite

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