Middle Passages

The Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite reversed the Middle Passage of slavery when he ex/iled himself to Ghana, where he re-discovered his ancestral African roots. Returning home, he charted a second discovery, that of Africa in the Caribbean through six interconnected books, three published in the 1960s which turned into The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), and a second (Bajan) trilogy comprising Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1987), all published by Oxford...
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The Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite reversed the Middle Passage of slavery when he ex/iled himself to Ghana, where he re-discovered his ancestral African roots. Returning home, he charted a second discovery, that of Africa in the Caribbean through six interconnected books, three published in the 1960s which turned into The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), and a second (Bajan) trilogy comprising Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1987), all published by Oxford University Press.MiddlePassages is an offshoot of the second trilogy, 'a splice of time & space', as he puts it, between his/father's world of Sun Poem and 'the magical irrealism' of X/Self. With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, MiddlePassages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations.And so MiddlePassages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.