Stone
When the stone fall that morning out of the johncrow sky it was not dark at first . that opening on to the red sea humming but something in my mouth like feathers . blue like bubbles carrying signals & planets & the sliding curve of the world like a water pic. ture in a raindrop when the pressure.
drop then the stone fall that morning out of the johncrow sky I couldn't cry out because my mouth was full of beast & plunder as if I was gnashing badwords among tombstones as if the road up stony hill . round the bend by the church yard . on the way to the post office . was a bad bad dream & the dream was like a snarl of broken copper wire zig zagging its electric flashes up the hill & splitt. ing spark & flow. ers high. er up the hill. past the white houses & the ogogs bark. ing all teeth & fur. nace & my mother like she up. like she up
like she up. side down up a tree like she was scream. like she was scream. like she was scream. ing no & no. body i could hear could hear a word i say. ing . even though there were so many poems left & the tape was switched on & runn. ing & runn. ing & the green light was red & they was stannin up there & evva. where in london & amsterdam & at unesco in paris & in west berlin & clapp. ing & clapp. ing & clapp. ing & not a soul on stony hill to even say amen
& yet it was happening happening happening . the fences begin to crack in i skull. & there was a loud booodoooooooooooooooogs like guns goin off . them ole time magnums . or like a fireworks a dreadlocks was on fire . & the gaps where the river comin down inna the drei gully where my teeth use to be smilin . & i tuff gong tongue that use to press against them & parade pronunciation . now unannounce & like a black wick in i head & dead . & it was like a heavy heavy riddim low down in i belly . bleedin dub . & there was like this heavy heavy black dog thump. in in i chest & pump.
in murdererrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr & i throat like dem tie. like dem tie. like dem tie a tight tie a. round it. twist. ing my name quick crick. quick crick . & a nevva wear neck. tie yet . & a hear when de big boot kick down i door . stump in it foot pun a knot in de floor. board . a window slam shat at de back a mi heart . de itch & ooze & damp a de yaaad in mi sil. ver tam. bourines closer & closer . st joseph marching bands crash. ing & closer . bom si. cai si. ca boom ship bell . bom si. cai si. ca boom ship bell & a laughin more blood & spittin out lawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwd
Kamau Brathwaite
from Stone for Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill, Kingston 1954-1983 from Middle Passages 1992 (50-52)
source - http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG-snh/Caribbean/Barbados/Poetry/Brathwaite9.htm
One the most important figures in Caribbean literature, Kamau Brathwaite, will visit the University of Ulster next week to present a poetry reading at the Belfast campus.
Poet, playwright, critic, and historian Brathwaite is one of the leading producers of intellectual discourse on Caribbean literature and culture. His work examines the complex Caribbean heritage and its African roots, tracing historical links and events that have contributed to the development of the black population in the Caribbean.
Born in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1930, Brathwaite won a scholarship to study history in Cambridge. After graduating he entered the British colonial service and was stationed to the Gold Coast (now Ghana). During this period he immersed himself in the region’s traditional verse and pre-colonial African myths. He returned to the West Indies in 1960’s and began a long career teaching History at the University of the West Indies.
Drawing on his extensive travels, Brathwaite’s poetry infuses European and African influences. He combines spoken word with modernist techniques and uses rhythms from jazz and folk music. At the core of his work is the search for Caribbean identity and racial wholeness.
One of his most important publications is The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770 – 1820, an in depth study of colonial ‘plantation’ and slavery in the Caribbean. In recognition of his literary achievements, his many awards include the ‘Neustadt International Prize for Literature’, the ‘Casa de las Américas Premio’, the ‘Guggenheim Fellowship’, and the ‘Fulbright Fellowship’.
Professor Brathwaite will read a selection of his poetry at 6.30pm on Thursday 6 October. The event will take place in Studio 5, Level F of the Belfast campus on York Street. Admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
On Friday 7 October Brathwaite will also be the keynote speaker at ‘Prepossession’, a colloquium at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. The event, which ties in with an exhibition of photo-and video-based work at the Gallery, brings together international speakers to debate issues relating to the influence of politics and trauma on contemporary art.
source - http://www.ulster.ac.uk/news/releases/2005/1848.html
When the author dies
IN A LETTER that has now found its way onto the Internet, poet and New York University lecturer Kamau Brathwaite writing of his homeland Barbados laments: "I cannot even die here now. No strength to even burn myself upon this pasture as I want to do."
The emotionally charged letter is a response to the way he is being treated by authorities in the matter concerning the construction of a road in the vicinity of his property. It so alarmed the poet's many friends and well-wishers around the world that a campaign of support has got under way through a website called Save CowPastor set up on the initiative of Tom Raworth, a poet residing in Cambridge.
Brathwaite conscientiously objects to the negative ecological, social and cultural consequences of the road; for in building the road, the authorities have unleashed the moral equivalent of Sauron's menacing army of orcs in the Tolkien trilogy – disrupting a simpler way of life, uprooting trees, ravaging some of the last grazing lands for livestock (many of which have perished), preventing the 75-year-old poet from establishing a sanctuary for the arts at the location, possibly even desecrating an African burial ground.
This affair brings to mind that once fashionable phrase "the death of the author" Рthe title of Roland Barthes' landmark essay Рperhaps not in the nuanced way intended by its now quite dead author. I was thinking more of the stark difference between the way the state treats a living author and a dead one; that is, the way the state can antagonise, or even persecute, an independent-minded intellectual, only to exploit his memory as a national figure in death. It seems that dying is sometimes the only thing you can do to advance your career as a poet. This may account for the disproportionate number of suicides among poets compared with every other type of artist. So I ask: what is the likely scenario when the author in question dies? At that time, I imagine, the authorities who have done everything to thwart the establishment of Brathwaite's cultural institute will, with every clich̩ they can think of, ceremonially and tearfully laud his long and productive literary life. Finally, he will be officially acknowledged, his life's work symbolically claimed as a national treasure, and his name used for all kinds of purposes. In time, he might have a school, an auditorium, a roundabout, or better yet a new airport road named after him. Even then, his books might hardly be read in his native land and his archive neglected or forever lost, a thing of dreams as mythical as Shangri-la or Kubla's pleasure-dome. Poets are well accustomed to dealing with ambiguities in their work, but the contradiction between what is being done now and what will inevitably be said when Kamau Brathwaite goes on his further journey will hardly qualify as paradox, but be revealing of a far more uncomplicated dishonesty.
In his writings, Brathwaite has shown himself to be a loyal foot soldier in the cause of the underprivileged denizens of the Third World. He has been, moreover, a tireless cultural ambassador abroad, personalising the thematics of economic disparity, social displacement and cultural diaspora through his sustained and inventive use of highly musical Barbadian and Caribbean vernaculars.
Like Basho and many other poets of world renown, Brathwaite is an indefatigable traveller and most emphatically a poet of place, a landscape artist whose painterly eye illuminates the specific sites of his journey: Brown's Beach, Cattlewash, Cambridge, Ghana, Kingston, New York and now CowPastor.Lee Jenkins and Alex Davis of University College Cork, wrote recently on the Save CowPastor website: "We know Barbados because of and through his poetry, using his words as our map to the island." Brathwaite's aesthetic, however, clashes with the official touristic image of the island, which has been sold abroad for generations. Some years ago, one of the New York dailies headlined an interview with Brathwaite with his words "hotels squatting on my metaphors". That official image of the island is not only based on largely false assumptions about the expectations of tourists, but it is a continuation of the myth of exotic places that was one of the most potent hallucinations of colonial psychosis.At the very least, Brathwaite is owed a public apology for being pushed so far to the edge of thinking and doing the unthinkable.
Adorno famously wrote that "after Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry". But poetry, if it serves any profound purpose, is a way of dealing with such devastation. Apparently robust and still enormously productive, Brathwaite remains a missed opportunity for Barbados. In the active years that he has left, the poet seems determined to make his final contribution. There is probably no more credible resource person in matters of culture; and his extensive archive could still be used as a significant point in a powerful matrix for the development of the diverse Caribbean arts communities – that is, if the authorities were interested in anything other than cynical patronage of the arts.
Alex CUMBERBATCH
