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Kamau Brathwaite: Trench Town Rock

Biography

'tidelectics' (tide + dialectics)

sycoraX Video Style: Jamaica, 1990

“The stones & steppes in the heart of the poet who sings from the dirt that he ate in the yard from the dream that he drinks from his mother’s milk.”

Robbery and near death experience in 1990 as described in Trench Town Rock cause another "alteration of consciousness"

sycoraX, 1990 - present

“one of the few African-centered cultural thinkers to co-opt the computer in a thoroughly anticolonial and thoroughly creative way” (Savory)

Develops "sycoraX video style," named after Caliban's mother in Shakespeare's The Tempest, begins writing again

“Insofar as Braithwaite in these texts gives vent to paranoias, phobias, and desires, instigated by the immediacy of his major losses and personal dramas since the loss of his wife in 1986, [his work since] shows his new emphasis on private pain as firewood to fuel the literary imagination.” (Silvio Torres-Saillant)

“i see sycoraX as the underground, submerged, force that influences Carribean culture. The sub/south gravitation force that bends the rigid axis of the Euro-space And what we are trying to do – what I starat to do as I come back to life after The Time of Salt – is lissen to SycoraX. try to hear (unlike Caliban) and decipher < her vegetable & spiritual language of darkness & sound. So that Sycorax video style is an alternative to Prospero books; a way of xpressing the seeing of sound.”

in contrast to “the activist poet, who sought to embody, in his life and work, the diasporan quest for wholeness,” and instead “projects an aesthetic sensibility shattered by [tragic] circumstances,” privileging “private expression of grief in a public forum” (Sandra Paquet)

University: Cambridge, UK, 1949 - 1953

“The pre 1986 protagonist remains a symbolic and collective, even when closely associated with the poet’s personal quest or ordeal but in the most recent work…[including Trench Town Rock], Brathwaite has walked the path of sharing the most devastating passages of his recent life, bound, as Rohlher rightly says, by the necessity to offer the spirit guides absolute honesty and sincerity” (Elaine Savory)

Salt Period: Jamaica, 1986 - 1990

sycoraX, 1990 - present

Wife Doris dies of cancer in 1986

won scholarship to study history at Pembroke College,

Cambridge Univeristy in England

In 1991 moved to New York to teach comparative literature at NYU

Her extensive bibliography of Brathwaite posthumously published

Brathwaite stops writing

Brathwaite has rewritten pre Salt Period works in sycoraX, not as revision, “but to go on working…[with a] sense of seamlessness of organon, or the organic, and therefore all of my work fits into a constant pattern which keeps on growing”

Ghana, 1955 - 1962

In 1988 Hurricane Gilbert destroys his house, including his library and archives

After receiving bachelor's, moved to West Africa (a part that would become Ghana in 1957)

“Brathwaite the historian has drawn substantially from the formal and linguistic innovations he has developed as a poet. The transgression of disciplines and the fusion of genres have the weight of a necessity”(Silvio Torres-Saillant)

worked for the ministry of education writing children's plays

Moves to Marley Manor Apartments in Kingston, where the events of Trench Town Rock take place in 1990

“graduated from Colonial Britishness,”

“de/education” of colonial “ass/umption(s),” “undergroan[ing] a strange alteration of consciousness.”

“I say you have to be everything to bring those fragments together because fragments by their very nature are everything, little seeds growing throughout the scattered diaspora, throughout the Carribean”

“the students there did not seem to know about black people, although the great tide of Carribean migration in to Britain had already started,”

“my uncle, my brothers, my sisters, evvabody << from home and country and confident in the street. <<”

Jamaica, 1967 - 1985

1967 publishes first poetry collection, Rights of Passage

“facing down…the intellectual origin of theories which buttressed colonialism and racism” - Elaine Savory

Western Critics: “makes very flat reading”

“sociology and journal entries in a generalized, contemporary, sometimes jazzy free verse, and that is not enough.”

In 1971 changes his name from Edward to Kamau in a Kenyan baptism ceremony

Ghana, 1955 - 1962

Continues to publish poetry, first three books collected in 1973's The Arrivants

began publishing poetry in the Barbados literary magizine BIM

Also publishing works of history exploring Carribean Creole culture and the legacy of slavery

“buil[ding] the vivid image in his mind of the close relation between the African and the Caribbean experiences... not by means of an ethereal or genetic connection, but through an active transformation of the social norms that took place over more than three centuries of slavery, which, nevertheless, has remained undocumented precisely because it did not conform to the stipulations of the white elite that was dominant throughout this period.” (Montague Kobbe)

Barbados, 1966

Barbados gains independence

“When Brathwaite returned to the region, about the time colonialism was beginning to wane on the political level, he brought the tremendous gift of deep thought and extensive knowledge about both England and West Africa, the two major sources of Barbados’s historical identity.” (Elaine Savory).

Jamaica, 1963

joined history faculty at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica

“I had, at that moment of return, completed the triangular trade of my historical origins. West Africa had given me a sense of place, of belonging; and that place. . . was the West Indies. My absence and travels, at the same time, had given me a sense of movement and restlessness—rootlessness. It was, I recognized, particularly the condition of the Negro of the West Indies and the New World.”

“We in the West Indies—must insist on the importance to us, as West Indians, of the University of the West Indies…it is only in the West Indies that the individual can learn about the West Indies.”

“for all its positives, an aspect of the plantation.”

Birth: Barbados, 1930

born Lawson Edward Brathwaite

father a warehouse office worker

raised middle class

Education: Barbados, 1930 - 1948

height of British imperial power,

"little England"

colonial British "received education"

“If I didn’t write poetry I wouldn’t have learned anything about the Caribbean. I knew more about Leeds and Sheffield than I knew anything about Grenada or Guadalupe or even my own island.”

“i wanted to write even at the age of twelve. i wanted to say ‘how was the genesis of the Caribbean.’ i wanted to do what was done in the bible….But it had to be done as a Caribbean.”

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