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Tidalectic Lectures: Kamau Brathwaite's Prose/Poetry as Sound-Spaceby Anna Reckin |
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Anna Reckin is a Ph.D. student in the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in the U.S.A. and in England. |
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| 1 | This paper looks at the ways in which Kamau Brathwaite draws on spatial paradigms in his work, in particular, paradigms that call attention to dynamic, sonic, and performative aspects of spatiality. I am interested in bringing together and overlaying some ideas about the key words in my title: Kamau Brathwaite's use of the term "tidalectic" and the notion of a sound-space. Three works, "History of the Voice," Barabajan Poems, and ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, are discussed here as examples of a particular kind of sound-space, the transcribed lecture: an all-too familiar cultural space in the academy and the literary world that Brathwaite transforms into a venue for a dazzling performance on the page that encompasses drama, bibliography, autobiography, poetry, polemic, geography, literary theory, history, and much else besides. |
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| 2 | Key to an understanding of this kind of space are its dynamic qualities. Brathwaite proposes “tidalectic” as “the rejection of the notion of dialectic, which is three–the resolution in the third. Now I go for a concept I call 'tide-alectic' which is the ripple and the two tide movement” (Naylor 145). Even the word-play between these terms, with its unsettling near-anagramming of "tida-" and "dia-," seems to perform a tidalectic movement in microcosm. On a larger scale, Brathwaite has suggested that it describes the structure of trilogies such as Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self, and the reprise of these three in Ancestors shows the “tidalectic” as a creative process; a process that I would argue also shows up very clearly in his radical reworking of the lecture form in the three texts I discuss here. |
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| 3 | The tidalectic also describes a nexus of historical process and landscape, as in the following passage in ConVERSations which provides a defining image of the Caribbean and its origins, an "on-going answer" in Brathwaite's words (29): the image of an old woman sweeping the sand from her yard early every morning, who is
“Like our grandmother’s – our nanna’s – action,” Brathwaite says a little later, “like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future” (34). |
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| 4 | This trans-oceanic movement-in-stasis, a to-and-fro and back again that is idealized and mythologized as well as highly particularized ("North Coast Jamaica") and historicized (the reference to the "middlepass") can be thought of as one aspect of something that can be termed a space--I would argue, a sound-space--with the following defining characteristics:
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| 5 | A detailed discussion of the video style would warrant a separate
paper; here I'd like to emphasize what it shares with other aspects
of Brathwaite's treatment of sound-space: its textual dynamics and
its function as a site for other-wordly presencing. For example,
ConVERSations describes the Sycorax typeface in terms of
a recuperation of Caliban's mother as "the lwa who, in fact,
allows me the space and longitude – groundation and inspiration
. . . that I'm at the moment permitted" (189). In other words,
through her foregrounding of one important aspect of textual materiality,
typography (in this case the remarkable innovation of a type that
has been made by the writer himself), she produces the conditions
for poeisis–which the reader sees in process, performed
on the page and in the book through the application of the video
style. The loa doesn't merely inspire the poem, nor does she speak
through the poet; her first task is to make space and ground from
which to speak, from which the poem can be heard. |
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| 6 | Examination of the spatial aspects of literature can sometimes
be used as a way to identify what may be seen as conservatism, essentialism,
or regression to a static pastoral ideal in a text–Afrocentrism
seen purely in its regressive aspects, for example. Implicit in
such critique is the idea that spatial constructs necessarily work
prescriptively. Here I would like to argue for Brathwaite's work
as an example of the way that attention to the spatial can offer
the reverse–possibility, subversion, transformation, multi-directional
openness. Whether the soundspace configures itself as lecture (as
delivered, as written, as recorded), or ocean, as shore or radio
broadcast or hounfort, one of its primary functions is as a channel
of communication. But sound-space as described here is more than
simply an exuberant and joyful place where diverse sounds meet and
jam together. What is being described is also, of course, a metaphor
for the complex operations of creolization. Brathwaite's video style
is evidenced in O'Grady's tyrannical trickery, enforcing mimicry,
refusing "nam, the precious deep vibrations of the
mmmmmm. . . . [and] against Kinta Kunte. . . . against
woodsmoke & breadfruit cookin / down in de gully . . . against
Damballa dancing in the D'Ogou belly" (Barabajan Poems
248). And all three texts here are sited at Legba's cross-roads:
"on this ground / on this broken ground" (The Arrivants
266, Barabajan Poems 266). |
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| 7 | This discussion focuses primarily on the more innovative features
of Brathwaite's treatment of textual, historical, and geographical
space. Also important, but not discussed in detail here, are conventional
uses of spatial reference; for example, the lyrical descriptions
of Barbadian landscape which inform the poet's discovery of his
voice through his connection with specific places, a theme that
is particularly powerful in the early sections of Barabajan Poems.
Or, the use in that same text of a series of landscapes to structure
biography and the development of consciousness / mythology, and
thence the shape of the book itself–as shown in the sequence,
Brown's Beach: "Genesis;" Mile & Quarter: "Revelation/Possession;"
and Bathsheba: "Re/Creation of the Gods/Cosmos/" (96). |
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| 8 | The three lectures that are the subject of this paper provide arenas for the performance of the kind of sound-space I have been describing and also discuss it thematically. The earliest, "History of the Voice," exists in at least three published versions. One of its appearances in print was in English Literature: Opening up the Canon, a collection of papers from the English Institute meeting in Harvard of 1979, edited by Leslie Fiedler and Houston Baker, where it was given the title of “English in the Caribbean: Notes on Nation Language and Poetry, an Electronic Lecture.”[3] Baker gives an interesting frame for that lecture in a note: Professor Brathwaite says of nation language that, “When it is written, you lose the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning.” Surely this written representation of Professor Brathwaite’s unscripted remarks, which I have edited, loses some of the magnificent force and meaning that his live performance conveyed in Cambridge. The reader, for example, will not only miss the sound of Professor Brathwaite’s voice but also the sound of the taped recordings and accompanying music that added much to his presentation. Nonetheless, the following remarks are in themselves quite remarkable in what they convey of a new sense of sound, and noise, emerging from the present-day Caribbean. (15) I should also mention a second (anonymous) note (the first one
was signed H.A.B.), which tells us that “Professor Baker’s
sensitive version has been further revised by the speaker, who has
added footnotes and some texts.” Here, in the revisions and
revisitings of the text and in its early title as an "Electronic
Lecture" can be seen practices that carry on into the production
of the other lecture-poems. Barabajan Poems, published in
1994, developed out of a lecture given in 1987 at the Central Bank
of Barbados. What was originally a speech given at a formal occasion
and attended by such dignitaries as the Prime Minister of Barbados
(who introduced Brathwaite's talk), is transformed into poem, autobiography,
vodoun performance (at key points we are explicitly invited into
the tonnelle), and protest against the mistreatment and neglect
of Barbadian history, culture, and landscape. Lastly, ConVERSations
with Nathaniel Mackey, published in 1999, started out as the
transcript of a particular kind of literary occasion, a public discussion
between the two poets in 1993, and builds on their on-going poetic
conversation, including an earlier published interview in Mackey’s
magazine Hambone in 1991. Similar to Barabajan Poems,
it expands into autobiography, bibliography, history, and polemic. |
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| 9 | These lectures can also be seen as manifestations of sound-space and the tidalectic process in some of the details of their production. The "taped recordings and accompanying music" that Houston Baker referred to in the note quoted above included some items that worked as illustrations and examples alongside others that seem to produce acoustically one kind of creolized heteroglossic sound-space I am arguing for in Brathwaite's work. For example, a recording of a reading of one of McKay's poems by the poet himself is followed by the Agnus Dei from Fauré’s Requiem (276); while a recording of George Campbell's work read by “our Milton of the Caribbean” (the words that Brathwaite uses to describe George Lamming), is followed by the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth (278). It helps that Campbell’s poem mentions “destiny” and “knocking at the door ”! Playfulness apart, the point is to make an argument about the ways in which rhythm communicates–an argument that is extended by bringing West Indian nation language and its precursors into the sound-space of the Cambridge Massachusetts academic lecture: the words and music of the Mighty Sparrow singing calypso mocking English nursery rhymes, Miss Lou's "folk poetry," as well as John Figueroa, Miss Queenie, Michael Smith, Bongo Jerry, and Derek Walcott, to list but a few, along with references to sounds that would be closer to home for the North American audience, for example, Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Miles Davis (296). |
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| 10 | The complexity of the sound relationships that Brathwaite traces can be seen clearly in the reasons he gives in "History of the Voice" as to why Eliot’s poetry had been influential for Caribbean poets of the 1960s. One of these reasons has to do with voice: “What T.S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone. That is what really attracted us to Eliot” (286-87).[4] This aspect of Eliot can be seen, for example, in the opening of Brathwaite's “The Dust:” Evenin’ Miss how you? How “The Dust” echoes on theme and tone various passages of The Waste Land, for example, the pub scene: I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, But for Brathwaite, it is the sound of Eliot’s
voice that made the difference. In an important footnote to “The
History of the Voice,” he says, “For those of us who
really made the breakthrough, it was Eliot’s actual voice,
or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council (Barbados)–reading
'Preludes,' 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' The Waste
Land, and later the Four Quartets–not the texts–which
turned us on" (286). I want to point to the nesting that's
going on here, and the complexities of the mediations: young Caribbean
poets find inspiration, courtesy of an official body sponsored by
the colonial government, in the recorded voice of an exiled and
Anglophile American. The connections continue beyond the metropole
as Brathwaite's gives a second reason for emphasizing Eliot: "In
that dry, deadpan delivery, the 'riddims' of St. Louis (though we
did not know the source then) were stark and clear for those of
us who at the same time were listening to the dislocations of Bird,
Dizzy, and Klook” (286). So what is finally (and of course,
this isn’t by any means to exhaust the layers) tuned into
is jazz. Eliot provides not only evidence but a model of subversion
through the agency of the British Council. |
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| 11 | The other example Brathwaite gives of a subversive voice, this time one heard over the airwaves, is that of John Arlott, the British cricket commentator; and again, what is valued is the sound and rhythm of his voice, and the way it provides a model for difference from some "official" version of English, through that other very important official organ, the BBC. According to Brathwaite, Arlott stunned, amazed, and transported us with his natural, 'riddimic' and image-laden tropes in his revolutionary Hampshire burr, at a time when BBC meant Empire and Loyal Models and Our Master’s Voice, and cricket, especially against England, was the national sport . . . Not only was Arlott 'good' (all our mimics tried to imitate him), but he subverted the establishment with the way he spoke and where: like Eliot, like jazz . . . (“History of the Voice” 286). Brathwaite’s “the way he spoke and where” is
important here: sound and its subversion are heard through place.
The BBC broadcasts and the British Council library make a place
where Eliot and Arlott, (even the sound-echo of their names is interesting),
and beyond them, the voices of exile and the metropolis, rural England
("Hampshire burr" as set against the language of cultured
London) and St. Louis are encapsulated and transmitted. |
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| 12 | The relationship between original sound-space (the discussion at Poet's House, New York) and published transcription in ConVERSations is more straightforward than in "History of the Voice," uncomplicated by external sound recordings. The overall outline of the book follows the typical shape of this kind of occasion, from the conversation between Mackey and Brathwaite, presented in Q&A format, to questions from the audience. From the beginning, however, the book presents itself as a performance before a group of people. Sections I and II are deferrals of the event, and frame it. The first is a dialogue between four voices, two of them children on their way to the performance still befuddled by "trying to remember the dream that makes us possible” (8). But "if we don't reach this lecture in Time," the voice goes on, "we'll never be real" (8). The second is a confession of the "dread" (in very large capitals) with which Brathwaite says he approaches interviews and their "threshold precariousness of improvisation," some notes on "the mechanics of this document," and a series of acknowledgements, including a long one expressing thanks to the audience–not so much for their attention, as for their movements within the room. He thus thanks the audience at Poets House that night, for creating this ebb & flow of the tides from time to time – esp at the beginning, a few people still coming in, getting suttle etc – when I think - even tho these movements are ever so 'slight' and unintentional etc – that I might lose the very momentum of the genesis – the no longer THRESHOLD – but the intrant ideas & how best how ACCURATE to wrestle them upon the threshold floor. (14) Just as Sycorax's loa, in the form of a potential in a machine and a typeface on screen and page, makes location an occasion for enunciation so that the tidalectic movements of human listeners settling into a physical space create the conditions both for the "momentum" of the "improvisation" of the conversation, and for the attention to detail that the reader of the published version will recognize in the precise movements of the book's intertextual layerings. |
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| 13 | Another example from the three lectures, Barabajan Poems, has to do with transmission of a different kind, the operations of sound in the hounfort. The text makes explicit reference to places where lecture may overlap with religious performance. The formalities with which the book/lecture begin include not only thanks for the invitation to speak, and a reminder of current events (the death of James Baldwin, the 21st anniversary of Barbadian Independence, and the overthrow of the newly elected president of Haiti), but "a libation to three great peaceful powerful beautiful spirits" both present and not present at this occasion: Brathwaite's mother, his wife, and the writer Frank Collymore (19). The first words of the first page of the lecture, picked out in large gothic script are "first of all;” the last words to appear on that page, on the last line, can be read with them: "welcome you into the tonnelle"(19). |
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| 14 | This invitation is reiterated at the end of Section V of the book, when the narrator makes a pause after a series of reminiscences about his early life as a writer in Barbados, Cambridge, and Africa, and with it a strategic turn to the presence of Africa in the Caribbean as personified by great-uncle Bob'ob, who is also a manifestation of Legba and Ogoun (152). The drama of the pause at this point, which opens a section of memories of Mile & Quarter where Bob'ob's carpenter's workshop is located, and which will lead to a video re-styling of the poem "Ogoun" from The Arrivants, is heightened by its typographical treatment; it is started on a new page in a fairly large type. The typeface itself, however, is highly informal; its different-sized letters jiggle up and down to give a jaunty, offhand effect, reinforcing the text's message as it coaxes the audience about "gettin too lull too sleepy too relax . . . doan leff me nyet try hole on a bit longer" (147). The passage ends with a pun that is part-joke, part-ritual, part-serious train-journey-styled transition: "But you are, I hope, beginning to see the light an we comin in comin in comin in comin in commin in inna the tonnelle" (148). |
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| 15 | It is not until Section VII of the poem, however, that the audience is taken fully into the hounfort, and the "Gods of the Middle Passage" make their entrance. The narrator revisits the building that had housed Bob'ob's carpentry shop, now used as a Zion meeting place. It's a Wednesday night, and the prayer meeting is about to begin. A prelude to what will unfold is given in a passage that moves out from the beaches and coves of Barbados into a great slow glowing listening of The way into the space of listening is through the remembered presence of Bob'ob, who has now become Legba, preparing the way for Ogoun, Shango, and Damballa. Shango's presence is brought into the text by the evocation of trainsongs, represented first by means of a textbook-like list, an accumulation of facts and commentary interlined with additional commentary in smaller type, through which sing out the names of musicians, forms,[6] the titles of songs (a parallel perhaps to a lengthy list of African place-names a few pages earlier), and then by a quotation in very large type from the most onomatopoeic section of "Folkways" from Rights of Passage (The Arrivants 33): "so come / quick cattle / train, lick / the long / rails . . ." (174). All this precedes the entrance of Damballa, which is announced with a hissing "which was like an 'opposite' or rather / / cattacorner // sound & rhythm to what the rest of the room/ sound (womb/ song) was doing" (177). The speaker finally enters the building and puts together what's happening there as a "choreography of sound" (180) that takes in the various loa, the church worshippers, and the panting sound of a woman who is possessed. These combine towards a climax that is also a tidalectic movement: By now the people in the shop are no longer singing in English or Bajan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . they are into the pull of an alteration of consciousness as if the tides of their lives have paused on the brin(k) of falling onto our beaches & instead have slowly lifted themselves up up so that the cries that should have been breaking from their crests do not move anymore but glisten in the deep silence of their throats until they begin to sweep slowly backwards like away from our shore from our trees from our hills away from Barbados . sweeping away into a new dark wail that sweeps us all up . . . Lecture hall (named after Collymore), workshop, church, hounfort, Barbados, seashore, ocean, and Africa; family, academe, government, nation, loa, and geography have all come together at this point in the book: it takes me back & drags me tidalectic into this tangled urgent meaning to & fro . like foam . saltless as from the bottom of the sea . dragging our meaning our moaning/ song from Calabar along the sea-fl-oor sea-floor with pebble sound & conch & sea-sound moon This is also a crucial turning point in the book, the occasion for a deep examination of "how we cope with the persistent legacies of the plantation” (184)--loneliness, disappointment, dispossession, poverty, and fear–through narrative, memory, drama, possession, reclamation of Bajan/African spiritualities and their complex intermeshings. |
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| 16 | The focus shifts to the story of the woman, a regular attender of the Wednesday night service at the Zion church, who is possessed. This is a version of a poem first published as "Angel / Engine" in Mother Poem (Ancestors 131) collaged with commentary by an observer.[7] It's this observer who locates the woman's experience, sees the image of Brathwaite's cosmological missile and capsule in the room, and who emphasizes the terrible struggle and break between a stuttered "G" that will not spell God and the fiery thunder and hiss of Shango. This much fuller account of the woman's possession is far more jagged than the one in "Angel/Engine," but like that poem it shows the transformation as being brought about by trainsongs–literal lines of connection/communication that are also layers of sound: the hiss and thump and rumble of the train and its rhythms (the sounds that signal Shango in the description of the early stages of the ceremony). In a characteristic appendix to Barabajan Poems, Brathwaite identifies the words of the songs as coming out of West Africa and spreading through Brazil, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, "early New Orleans," and the USA (369). |
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| 17 | Section VII ends with the declaration, in some of the largest type to be used in the book, and spread over two pages, that After this it This opens the way for a series of evocations of specific Barbadian landscapes, a kind of interlude before the return to a discussion of history and politics in Section XII, but of course it is far more than an introduction to these. If poet (and text) are to extend themselves beyond nostalgic pastoral memoir, beyond even a Wordsworthian recollection of the growth of a poet's mind in a specific landscape, it is essential that they enter the sound-space of the Bajan hounfort, hear its cries and rhythms, witness what Brathwaite calls "the kinesis of ‘possession'" in his discussion of Shango trainsongs in Appendix VII of the book (370). |
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| 18 | I would like to conclude by revisiting the discussion of the way that Brathwaite manipulates the formal structures of the lecture in Barabajan Poems. In a fascinating edit from lecture to book, the formula "first of all" (in the same gothic script as on the first page of the book) is repeated in the closing pages of the book, beginning a second set of thanks and grateful formalities that originally appeared at the start of the lecture: "before I launch into this. . . not lecture. . . but a sharing with you" (268).[8] The thanks start with an expression of gratitude for the recognition received that includes a joking reference to "The Artist's Dressing Room with NAME . . . on the legba door (remember?) and large photos all over the palace" (268). The casualness and geniality of this is followed by a long and increasingly lyrical riff on ancestors and ancestral landscapes, and ends with wording that echoes the "first of all" (268): "and look now, Mr Chairman, Yr Xcellencies, ladies & gentlemen . . . look how far . . . we are be/come" (269, ellipses as in original). |
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| 19 | This tidalectic move brings the performance of book, lecture, ritual, and history together, making what has happened since the first description of the lecture's formalities seem like an exploratory insertion--but it does not in fact close the book. The rest of page 269 is blank, with the symbol for Shango placed like a seal or a publisher's colophon in the center. Then the text shifts voice again, to show a series of Bajan folk proverbs in very large type, one or two per page, another tribute, Brathwaite writes, this time to the collector of the proverbs, Margot Blackman, and to "our NYU Bajan Fola."[9] The final reaching out and drawing in happens on the last two pages of the main text (it's worth noting that the book is supplied with particularly rich critical apparatus: notes and references, seven appendices, and an index), with yet another movement of reversal: from the final proverb, "sea / doan have no / BACKDOOR" (282) to the declaration "X- / cept that our house on Brown's Beach was just / that – the sea's / BACKDOOR" (283). The word "backdoor" is written in very heavy, almost impenetrable gothic capitals, and looks like a fence. Underneath it, the final typographical element of the main text, are three squared dots, centered; do they mark the end of a section, or are they ellipses? Either way, the implication is of more to follow. The very last movements in the book's main text are thus from ocean back to island/origin, and between seeming closure and opening: Legba's pivot. |
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| 20 | But this is also one part of one of the book's large-scale tidalectic gestures. If one turns back to the first mention of Brown's Beach, in an anecdote about a discussion between the critic Gordon Rohlehr and Brathwaite's mother" that provides the opposite book-end to this passage, we read that "when she was growing up on Brown's Beach, the sea was much further out . . . and her mother told her that even before that, that out there. . . there were farms. . ." (24, last two ellipses as in the original).[10] This description, which takes the sea back and away, is immediately followed by a backwards/forwards movement that takes the reader into the first childhood memory of that beach, "First as it is now, / or almost now" (24). Text and physical landscape alike are subject to the sway of the ocean, the ultimate tidalectic sound-space. |
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[1]My emphasis on acoustic technologies here derives partly from Adalaide Morris's very useful discussion in "Sound Technologies and the Modernist Epic: H.D. on the Air." Morris includes the telephone in her list of sonic devices, and as Aldon Nielson points out in reviewing Brathwaite's Words Need Love Too, the telephone call, which he describes as a "neo-space" (203) can provide a complex metaphor through which to explore diaspora, community, memory, and the transmission of "vowels of glistance." The poem Nielson is discussing here, "JerryWard & the fragmented spaceship dreamstorie," is yet another reassemblage of lecture, an attempt to retrieve via a telephone conversation what had been "staining in" the mind of a listener since hearing a lecture of Brathwaite's some years earlier (203). [2]Brathwaite's on-going revisions of older work now routinely involve a process of transcription into the video style; the most significant example to date is the "reinvention" (as Brathwaite describes it on the title page) of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self as Ancestors. The video-style reinventions can be considered to be another aspect of the recursive tidalectic process, this time at the level of typography. [3]Other versions of the talk appeared as a book-length publication of 1984; and as an essay in the collection Roots, (originally published by Casa de las Américas in Cuba in 1986 – the essay itself is dated 1979 / 1981 in that volume). [4]Brathwaite is quite explicit about Eliot’s subversive influence: “it is interesting that on the whole, the establishment could not stand Eliot’s voice – and far less jazz” (286). [5]This poem is also excerpted in Barabajan Poems (142-144). [6]For example, "worksong fieldhollers . howlinwolf blues gospel & boogie-woogie . R&B. some rock. and all that soul" (173). [7]As described earlier for the operations of the Sycorax typeface, the presence of the loa and its enunciations are important particularly insofar as they open up a sound-space, something that "allows . . . the space and longitude – groundation and inspiration." The expansion out from the single consciousness of the possessed woman in "Angel/Engine" – which is like a single point traversed by the sounds of the railroad line and the oncoming trajectory of the train – into the two- and three-dimensional "choreography of sound" in the Barabajan Poems version is interesting in two respects: first as a recognition of the increasing importance of multi-dimensional sound-space, and secondly perhaps as a move away from describing possession primarily in a way that invites direct bardic identification (the loa riding the woman is also the loa riding the poet) to a more complex representation that acknowledges place and ground as the antecedents of enunciation. As the space is opened up, so are numerous other perspectives that add to and do not dilute the still highly accessible and extremely powerful voice of the woman / loa. Rhonda Cobham's vivid description of the use of typography in this passage calls attention to the way that positioning (literal and figurative) includes emotions like embarrassment on the part of the "scholarly" observer, whom she sees as "cower[ing] on the periphery of the ritual he is describing" (303). [8]In fact, the main statements of thanks (to the Central Bank of Barbados "for bringing me here at this time" and the statement about launching and sharing are repeated verbatim. The rest of the text at these two points branch in different directions; one of the significant differences between them is that the first one acknowledges friends and family, while the second emphasizes landscape and "the long journey," in effect supplying a geographical summary of the book. [9]Fola is identified as a " Plantation" Personality Type in the index to Barabajan Poems, alongside such "icons, ancestors and loa" Bob'ob, Caliban, and Anancy (395, see also 316); she a character from Lamming's Season of Adventure who typifies a woman who finds herself through possession. Here the reference is to her manifestation in the person of a Barbadian student of Brathwaite's at NYU, who finds a way to engage positively with her "submerged" Caribbean heritage through the study of its literature, and in particular, the proverbs that Blackman collected (328). [10]This anecdote is itself a playful twist on the theme of reworked lectures, describing an occasion when Brathwaite's mother was in the audience for a lecture by Rohlehr at the University of Sussex, and set out to correct some biographical details "so that in the end it was she giving the lecture and it was he (he also tells the story) who was happy to listen & learn " (24) |
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Works Cited |
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Baker, Houston and Leslie Fiedler (eds.) English
Literature: Opening Up the Canon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1981. |
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