African- Life in Brathwaite’s Poetry: A Postcolonial Perspective

Mustafa, Linda Jummai Department of English, SPS, IBB University, P.M.B. 11, Lapai – Nigeria E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +234(0)8069201220, 07033347374

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Usman, Joshua Department of English, IBB University, P.M.B. 11, Lapai – Nigeria E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +234(0)8072206991, 08134808684

Corresponding author: [email protected], Tel: +234(0)8072206991, 08034808684

Abstract The postcolonial theory is built from the colonial experiences of the people who engaged in liberation struggles around the world and particularly in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It bears constant witness to constant cultural hybridization so that the new hybrid personalities are invested with the power to dominate and reclaim their lives in the new world. According to Brathwaite, the Caribbean becomes a free man when he totally embraces his African roots; he is therefore a colonial migrant who interprets the Caribbean culture and language. He interprets his concepts through a hybrid of personae that consequently unsettle the authority of the Whiteman. This study looks at Brathwaite works as inter-textual references and counter readings of historical records to challenge historicist accounts of African- which werewritten by the White colonizers. His poetry does not only reflect the multiplicity of realities and the plurality of the subjects but the form and the shape of his writings embody the experiences of postcolonial subjects.

Keywords: Africa, Diaspora, Heritage, History, New world, Culture.

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Introduction and Literature Review

Creole: My Language, My Identity Edward was born Edward Lawson Brathwaite (1930) in as the son Hilton Brathwaite, a warehouse clerk. He attended Harrison College, an elite school, and then went with a scholarship to England, where he studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge. From 1950 he started to publish short poetry and critical essays in the West Indian magazine Bim, edited by and by 1976 after familiarizing himself with traditional verse and pre-colonial African myths of the Ghanian tradition, Brathwaite infused the African name Kamau to his names as a means of identifying with his African roots. According to Bruce King (130): …Brathwaite’s occupation as a historian, a pamphleteer and a poet have been to transcend the colonial sense of rootlessness and isolation. This sense of awareness, especially of his historical position and situation in society finds utmost expression in his brooding and slow but progressive attempt to achieve ‘wholeness’ out of the debris of the past.

Brathwaite’s Ghanaian experience opened his eyes to this possibility of attaining ‘wholeness’ in identifying with his African roots. Indeed, this experience is what led to Brathwaite’s comment below: …Slowly but surely, during the eight years that I live there, I was coming to an awareness and understanding of community, of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe, in society…I came to a sense of identification of myself with these people, my living diviners. I came to connect my history with theirs… (Brathwaite, 38)

This comment confirms his acceptance of the African culture.

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Brathwaite’s acceptance of his African roots made him a major proponent of ‘nation language’ which he describes as “the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage…” Ismail Talib (96- 97) sees Brathwaite’s acceptance of his African roots through the use of the Creole language as a form of revolution and suggests a framework within which Brathwaite’s art could be examined, in the words following: …nation language is the language from…an oral tradition. The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song…

Brathwaite could however not avoid the use of colonial language, because as an exile he has lost his indigenous language. However, Brathwaite deploys the colonial language to engineer the empathy of his readers about his identity and exilic status. He is like the writer, in Achebe words (26) whose: ‘use of English language was a means ofinfiltrating the ranks of the enemy and destroying him from within.’ In his poetry, Brathwaite protests this forced imposition of the English language and so most of his poems are written in such a way as to show his rebellion against the white man’s language. He therefore seeks to destroy the colonialist government with its own tool of power (the English language) which to him is a noble means of rebelling against colonialism. Because of his consciousness to locate an identity that is not built on humiliation and degradation of the black man, Africa becomes the progenitor to embracing a true self while an identity that is based on European supremacy is rejected. This desperate quest to be identified with African ancestors is what has influenced Brathwaite’s works so that much representation of the black world occurs more frequently in his poems. Africa: My Progenitor The poem “Ancestors” which is written in three main sections is structured in a narrative framework in which Brathwaite’s mastery of the English tradition is exhibited. The iambic pentameter however gives way to nation language or Creole in the third section as an expression of Brathwaite’s acceptance of an African identity. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is submerged in despair and confusion. He talks about his grandfather so profoundly that we notice the deep attachment between the narrator and his ancestry:

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Every Friday morning my grandfather left his farm of cornfields, chickens, cows and rattled in his trap down to the harbour town to sell his meat… He drove the trap himself: slap of the leather reins along the horse’s back and he’d be off with a trap-hearted homburg on his head: black English country gentleman. (Ancestors, P. 239)

The above lines are laced with imagery, symbols and motif that exemplify the persona’s ancestry. Brathwaite then clearly enlightens us that despite the aculturisation of his grandfather, he is nonetheless a Black gentleman in/from an English country which is a satiric reference to the Caribbean man’s identity. Just like Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a reference of a dual identity as experienced by many West Indians, so too is what is suggested in this poem. To Brathwaite, the creation of ‘Black English’ in the Caribbean is another means of obliterating the veneer of Africanism. Still deep in thought of his loss and the pains of slavery, we find that the tone of the poem is poignantly mournful and this leads to the narrator’s aim to systematically describe his loss: Now he is dead. The meat shop burned, his property divided. A doctor bought the horse. His mad alsatians killed it. The wooden trap was chipped and chopped by friends and neighbours and used to stop- gap fences and for firewood. One yellow wheel was rolled across the former cowpen gate. Only his hat is left. I ‘borrowed’ it. I used to try it on and hear the night wind… (Ancestors, P. 239)

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Edward Chamberlain in his work, Come Back to Me My Language, echoed sentiments expressed by Brathwaite: A truly West Indian literature must present the central heritage of slavery shared by black West Indians, not because everyone who matters in the West Indies is black, but because blackness as an image of slavery defines the dispossession and exploitation which to anyone looking around the West Indies was clearly not over.

It is therefore the belief of Brathwaite that in order for all Caribbeans to be truly whole, they must try to understand themselves through the acceptance of African history and culture. In the section entitled “Libation” which opens with the poem “Prelude”, Brathwaite explores and identifies with the culture of his ancestors and there seems to be a deliberate attempt by the poet to be more attuned to specific modalities of the forms of expression by his ancestors: Gong-gongs throw pebbles in the rout- ed pools of silence: news of ripples reach the awakened Zu- lus: Chaka tastes the salt blood of the bitter Congo and all Africa is one, is whole, nim- tree shaded in , in Chad, Mali, the shores of the cooling kingdoms. (Prelude, P. 90)

Brathwaite’s identification with his African heritage is further manifested in the nature of the poem. For the poem, Brathwaite adopts the incantatory rhythm in invocations. Nothing signifies his acceptance of his African heritage better than the graphic representation of African religious ceremonies which are heavily ladened with invocations.

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Converted to the esthetics of African orality, he dramatizes the performatory rites of initiation as he seeks to recover his ancestral domain: Beat heaven of the drum, beat the dark leaven of the drum, beat the dark leaven of the dungeon ground where buds are wrapped twist- ed round dancing roots. White salt crackles at root lips, bursts like a fist and beats out this prayer: Nana Firimpong once you were here… (Prelude, P. 91)

Kwabena J.H. Nketia (p.19) describes this kind of poetry as “the kind that may be heard on social and ritual occasions. It is both secular and religious.” According to Ayo Kehinde(p. 27), Brathwaite’s reconversion to African aesthetics acts as a psychotherapeutic guidance for rediscovering an identity that is truly African. Perhaps the most striking feature of “prelude” is the persona’s resolve to reconnect to the mother continent of Africa. In the following lines the narrator is conceived as one who has been reunited with both his physical and spiritual ancestry: Asase Yaa, You, Mother of earth, on whose soil I have placed my tools on whose soil I will hoe I will work The year has come round

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again; (Prelude, P. 91)

Because of this reunion, he appears to be a man more aware of his lyrical ability and this realization spurs him to use language that is keyed to the theme of reconnecting with Africa: A Voice for the Voiceless It was Young (p.1-11, 57-69) who suggested that postcoloniality allows “people emerging from socio-political and economic domination to reclaim their sovereignty (or voice) which gives them a negotiating space for equity.” This situation appears in the second section of “Ancestors”. The poet’s preoccupation with a voice for the voiceless is sustained in his questioning a subjective identity. The persona is made to remember his ancestry through soulful songs/blues, but is frightened by the history of the caricature character of Uncle Tom who does not have a voice. In fact, Uncle Tom is an epitome of ‘dog like obedience’ to his colonial lords and so defiance in any form, even in singing about his ancestry, instigates the fear of being punished. Yet he cannot help marveling at the extraordinary will to be a true African in the midst of forced adoption of the colonizers’ culture as exhibited by his father’s mother: All that I can remember of his wife, my father’s mother, is that she sang us songs (‘Great Tom Is cast’ was one), that frightened me… … telling us stories round her fat white lamp. It was her Queen Victoria lamp, she said; although the stamp read Ever Ready. And in the night, I listened to her singing in a Vicks and Vapour Rub-like voice what you would call the blues. (Ancestors, 240)

In this section Brathwaite talks about the birth of a mixed-race person; a new Caribbean human type whom Brathwaite once referred to as “...not Africanism but new Caribbeanism...” (Young, 1-11). Ironically, the voice of oral culture (“...telling stories...”) is juxtaposed against the monarchy that was instrumental to slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. So the persona uses the knowledge of slavery and colonialism as building blocks to choosing an identity and oral culture of nation language. His memory of the strict

316 enforcement of English language actually instigates a subtle resistance, hence the singing of ‘blues’ (or soulful songs) became the means of displaying his objection of a foreign culture and tradition. Invariably, the persona is compelled to deviate from the total adoption of the Whiteman’s culture. This deviance from the strident use of English language to the tongue twisting form of the Creole language which is also soothing, is the persona’s poetic device to persuade the reader into believing that the poet’s English identity is dead and his African ancestry is alive and will be a fundamental tool for reclaiming his voice: Come-a look come-a look see wha’ happen... Sookey dead Sookey dead Sookey dead-o... Him a-wuk him a-wuk till ‘e bleed-o... (Ancestors, 240-241)

Again, using the techniques as present in Jazz and Blues, Brathwaite is able to conceptualize his past with the aim of coming to terms with his exilic status. In “New World A-Comin’ ” , Brathwaite projects the image of slavery as a negative aspect of the new world. The whip of enslavement and the cruelty of forced imposition of the white man’s culture threaten to cut off all remembrance of his African ancestry. This amnesiac condition turns the West Indian into a violently fragmented person who struggles with severing all his ancestral ties and accepting a totally new culture but because he is traumatised by the unnatural alteration of his existence he takes an inward inventory into his past of genocide which gives him the strength to speak out against his oppressors and his despondency: Helpless like this leader- less like this, heroless, we met you: lover,

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warrior, hater, coming through the files of the forest soft foot to soft soil of silence: (New World A-Comin’, 9) Nation Language: Defining Identity Many West Indians labour under their collectively unaddressed layers of the colonial past as well as the falsification and demonization of ancestral indigenous African history. It is this history of falsification of economic and political exploitation, racism and European ethnocentrism that has created the downward spiral of ignorance, shame and fear, which has also become an integral part of the West Indian psyche. Given this scenario, it is then no surprise that the Caribbean dilemma has always been the construction of identities. The West Indian history has long presented a shattered consciousness in such a way that anything positive was the making of the oppressor and all that was negative was attributed to the Blackman. Writers like Brathwaite however revisited history in order to imbibe a more reckoning and self-identification posture that is holistic with a positive outlook. Brathwaite’s “Atumpan” indicates that he has been able to master traditional speech pattern and mode of praying to the gods of his ancestors. The invocatory and repetitive esthetics in the poem point to this, especially in the following lines:

Kon kon kon kon kun kun kun kun Fatumi Akore Tweneboa Akore Twenaboa kodia Kodia Tweneduru… …Funtumi Akore Spirit of the Cedar Spirit of the Cedar tree Tweneboa Kodia (Atumpan, 98)

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Moreover, in its integration of the poetics of the Atumpan drum, Brathwaite’s verse seeks to establish an interaction between the esthetics of African orality and conventional written literature. So we see a persona more concerned with performing the rites of initiation which announces and confirms his African ancestry. In performing this rite, the Atumpan drum is highly revered as the main constituency of the African culture and identity hence the invocations, the drumming and the drama are all analogues of the persona’s true identity as can be perceived in these lines: Odomankoma ’Kwayerema says Odomankoma ’Kwayerema says The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says that he has come from sleep that he has come from sleep and is arising and is arising like akoko the cock like akoko the cock who clucks who crows in the morning who crows in the morning (Atumpan, 98)

The language of this invocation, which is highly reflective of African orality, situates the poet at the dawn of consciousness of his Africanness. In reliving his distant history while also adopting the poetics of the Atumpan drum, Brathwaite has been able to express his preference for the African tradition, religion and culture over the Christian religion of his former white colonialist masters. For Brathwaite, the rejection of western values is a sure step towards his affirmation of his African identity. In The Arrivants (88) Brathwaite quoted the Akan proverb “Only the fool points at his origin with his left hand.” This proverb illuminates clearly Brathwaite’s association with and pride in his African roots. Through the distinct representation of the African tradition, norms, culture and artefacts, Brathwaite has been able to cohesively affirm his identity with Africa. His mastery of African ceremonies and the deft application of the Creole language

319 show that he is more comfortable with his African identity as against his colonial white heritage. Brathwaite’s position, in John Glenn’s words is: … [an] attempt to repossess a cultural sound identity in the Caribbean. It is of necessity that this identity subsumes the African side of West Indian existence(20).

It is for this reason that the poet under study can be said to be a representation of Afro- Caribbeans whose identities is firmly rooted in African tradition. As a result of their dual heritage, Africans in the West Indies are lost, unsure, vulnerable and disconnected from ancestral history. The apprehension of a tragic past which did not allow the West Indian to be himself is conceived in the poem, “A New World A- Comin’ ”. The fear of his ‘boss’, the new world and the place of his new language (Creole), amplify his exilic status so much that the persona is tired of an infinite journey to rediscover himself as well as his (re)admittance into the new world. Placed between a new world that is hostile to people with dual heritage, the persona seeks to define himself, his plight and a hopeless future through a language that gives him hope: How long How long O lord O devil O fire O flame have we walked have we journeyed to this place to this meeting this shock and shame in the soiled silence (New World A-Comin’, 10)

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Fragmented, Lonely and Exiled The history of the Caribbean is constituted with the crux of slavery, colonialism, diaspora, exile, hybridity and identity. Centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived in what he mistook for the East Indies, indigenous Indians-the Tainos, Arawaks and Caribs had transversed the arc of the islands that form the Caribbean. These indigenous societies were destroyed with the coming of the Europeans, and in their wake came millions of African slaves. After the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century, Chinese and East Indian indentured labourers were drafted in to support the colonial economies. This kaleidoscopic array of imported cultures has given the Caribbean its particular, unique character where Europe seems to blend with the ‘New World’. But the blending has come at some cost which is the creation of exile in the minds and physical well being of the ‘new Caribbeans’. Because of the horrors of slavery and colonialization, most Caribbeans see themselves as exiles whose historical contingency of the relationship of Blacks, Whites and Asians raises the question of their true roots. In describing the reason why his poetry talks much on the West Indian in a new world, Brathwaite interrogates his origins when he says: How did we get into the Caribbean? Our people, the black people of the Caribbean…What was the origin of their presence in the Caribbean? (Mackey, 47)

The statement made previously by the Barbadian poet, draws the attention of readers to the fact that exile is a trope that is strikingly evident in his poetry. In part two of the poem “A New World A-Comin’, is a deep attachment to and unwillingness to leave Ghana. There is a feeling of nostalgia here. Ghana has become home; the persona is in the place where he can be himself but the West Indies to him is exile. He is not content with the West Indies as home; he laments a return to Ghana; he sees himself one with Ghana: It will be a long time before we see this land again, these trees again, drifting inland with the sound of surf, smoke rising It will be a long long time before we see

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these farms again, soft wet slow green again: Aburi, Akwamu, mist rising… (New World A-Comin’, 11)

Towards the end of this section of the poem, we find that the persona has no choice than to embrace exile. Exile here is the Caribbean Islands. His futile search for new hope and a new beginning ends in the realization that his new world is really a world of uncertainties. Captivated, dislodged from his home and his ancestors, the fear of the unknown slowly moves through his body. So by the time he gets to the new world, the narrator has lost his ancestral roots and African identity only to be replaced by impersonal identity that profoundly announces a divided self and his exilic status: in indifference, in anger, will create new soils, new souls, new ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed to the star by which this ship floats to new worlds, new waters, new habours, the pride of our ancestors mixed with the wind and the water the flesh and and the flies, the whips and the fixed fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port. (New World A-Comin’,11) The poem “Postlude/Home” raises insistent questions that bring the Afro- Caribbean’s exilic status to the fore and serve as referential notes of the poet’s song of exile: Where then is the nigger’s home? In Paris Brixton Kingston Rome? Here? Or in Heaven? What crime his dark dividing

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skin is hiding? What guilt now drives him on? Will exile never end? (Postlude/Home, 77)

It is with these questions that the archetypal figure of Tom who is a father, founder and a flounderer is concerned with a constrained existence which was as a result of centuries of a harsh history of slavery and colonialism, coupled with a systematic denigration. The effect of a systematic humiliation of ‘Tom’ is an enfeebled self-apprehension: The memories are cold: the old unflamed remains of Tom we sometimes joke about… For we Who have cre- ated nothing, must exist on nothing; (Postlude/Home, 78-79)

According to Abiola Irele: It is noteworthy that Brathwaite reformulates here [Postlude/Home] Aime Cesaire’s famous lines in ‘Cahier d’un Retour au’ Pays Natal as a paradox of historical being, so as to redefine the terms of existence of a constrained humanity as one that manifests itself in the act of remembrance so essential to the vitality

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of his people’s consciousness and historical will (80).

With the buildup of the evocations of black man in exile, the narrator switches from the use of Standard English to a more personalized Creole language. The allusions, the imagery and the sorrowful manner in which he presents his loneliness produce in readers of this poem a sense of an overwhelming fragmented self and one who is not comfortable with sojourning on alien ground. He therefore whines about his loneliness, and ultimately seeks solace in armed robbery as a means of getting back at his oppressors but this notorious act makes him wonder what life would have been like assuming he had not been exiled: …lonely hearts pinin,… we, winnin’ we dinner, is pick up we tools fun the hit an’ run raid an’ you better look our for you wallet. An’ watchin’ me brother here sharpen ’e blade, I is find meself wonderin’ if Tawia Tutu Anokye or Tom could’ a ever have live such a life. (Postlude/Home, 80)

“South” commences with the image of the sea as a reminder of the Caribbean apprehension of rootlessness. Here, we find that the narrator imagines and testifies of the fear of never taking roots in a particular place. According to Said (2001:173) he (the

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Caribbean man) seems to have “left something behind” which makes his predicament to be that of despondency and exile as can be noticed here: But today I recapture the islands’ bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean rolling into the fishermen’s houses. By these shores I was born: sound of the sea came in at my window, life heaved and breathed in me then with the strength of that turbulent soil. (South, 57)

A future that is bleak because of constant travels is suggested in the second stanza. The persona passionately delineates endless journeys he had undertaken but none of these journeys has satisfied his quest for true Caribbean identity. His dreams, aspirations and desires are all thwarted as a result of drifting from place to place: Since then I have travelled: moved far from the beaches: sojourned in stoniest cities, walking the lands of the north sharp slanting sleet and the hail, crossed countless saltless savannas and come to this house in the forest where the shadows oppress me and the only water is rain and the tepid taste of the river. (South, 57)

Trying to find a solution to his wanderings, he looks into his inner self. Eventually, he is doubtful of fitting perfectly into a new world because of his earlier engagement with his native Island. This engagement makes him wonder about the possibility of living in an alien land with an alien culture without the clash of interest from his multi-cultural heritage. The wonder is expressed in the following words: We who are born of the ocean can never seek solace in rivers: their flowing runs on like our longing, reproves us our lack of endeavour and purpose, proves that our striving will founder on that. We resent them this wisdom, this freedom: passing us

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toiling, waiting and watching their cunning declension down to the sea. (South, 57)

The next two stanzas are also reflections of the pains of slavery, colonization, humiliation and degradation. Words such as ‘past pains’, ‘sorrows’, ‘hatred’, ‘washes’, ‘plains’, ‘processioned in tumult’, ‘thatch’, ‘urchins’ are reminders of the harsh predicament of the Caribbeans. This registers a more resistant imagination towards the rejection of an African-Caribbean heritage. By Brathwaite’s evocation, the narrator commands an awareness which is visionary with a view to questioning a Caribbean identity that is not anchored in African tradition. The poem therefore ends with the prospect that a Caribbean man could live with being an exile if he is not confined by exilic exigencies: The fisherman, hawking the surf on this side of the reef, stands up in his boat and halloos us: a starfish lies in its pool. And gulls, white sails slanted seaward, fly into the limitless morning before us. (South, 58)

From all the poems studied, there has been an attempt to locate exile and identity as major motifs of . Brathwaite particularly used his poems to re write the history of West Indians. According to him, the feeling of a fragmented identity as experienced by most Caribbeans is as a result of a life lived without retracing their roots back to Africa. Exile therefore becomes a situation most West Indians must live with yet Brathwaite’s view of living in exile does not mean that the Caribbean man is rootless; rather exile can be used as a medium for reclaiming lost rights. According to Serap Turkmen (6), the colonized (the Caribbean man) is forced to abandon his ‘Africanness’. Since he is de-culturated, he is left with no other alternative than to emulate the colonizer and so he is stripped of his identity. This situation makes him neither a true European nor an African. To the Whiteman, the perceived ambiguity of the Caribbean man makes him non-existent and so a life of exile is what the Caribbean man must live with. However, Brathwaite is of the view that no Caribbean should live a life of servitude. They are instead to turn the disadvantage of a dislocated history into that which

326 gives them the power to live as men with identities, men who despite the pains of slavery can raise their heads high and say they are not without a culture, heritage and language.

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Works Cited Brathwaite, Edward, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. New York: , 1967

______History of the Voice. : , 1984, p. 10. ______“Imehri”. .2, Sept. 1970, p. 38. _____ The Arrivants. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 88. _____ “Caribbean Man in Time and Space.” In Carifesta Forum Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1976, p. 202. _____ Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974. ______Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 260. ______The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford, 1973. ______The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Bodunde, Charles. “The Black Writer in the Multicultural Caribbean: The Vision of Africa in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants.” In Glaser Marlies and Marion Pausch. (eds.). Caribbean Writers: Between Orality and Writing. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1994, p. 18. Chamberlin, J. Edward. Come Back to Me, My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Urbana: University of Illionois Press, 1993. _____ Come Back to Me, My Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 188-194. Collymore, Frank. (ed.). West Indian Magazine, Bim. 1976. Dash, Michael. “Edward Brathwaite.” In Bruce King. (ed.) West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1970, p. 219. Egudu, Romanus. N. Modern African Poetry and African Predicament. London: Macmillan, 1978, p. 8. Frantz, Fanon. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986, pp. 17-18.

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Gallagher, S.V. “Linguistic Power: Encounter with ”. The Christian Century. 12 March, 1997. Vol. 26. Glenn, John. “Kamau Brathwaite and the Poetics of (re)Possession”. Journal of Caribbean Literatures. 2009, June 22. Griffths, Glyne. A. “Kamau Brathwaite as Cultural Critic.” In Stewart, Brown. (ed.). The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren, 1995, pp. 75-85. Irele, Abiola. “The Return of the Native: Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s “Masks”.” World Literature Today. Vol. 68, 1994. _____ “The Poetry of Edward Brathwaite.” Third Ife Festival of the Arts, 4th-18th December. 1970, p. 22. Kehinde, Ayo. “ Edward Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and the trope of Cultural searching.” The Journal of Pan African Studies. Vol. 1, No. 9, August 2007. P. 184. King, Bruce. The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing world. London: macmillan, 1980, p. 130. Mackey, Nathaniel. “An Interview with Edward Kamau Brathwaite”. Hambone, 9 (Winter 1991), p. 47. Nketia, J.H. Kwabena. Funeral Dirges of the Akan People. New York: negro University Press, 1969. Said, Edward W. Introduction to Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978, pp. 1-28. ____ “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile.” Harper’s 269, 1984, pp. 49-55. _____ Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon, 1994, pp. 47-64. _____ Reflections on Exile. London: Granta Books, 2001, p. 173. Turkmen, Serap. “Identity in the Colonial Lands: A Critical Overview of the Postcolonial Studies”. Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations. Fall and Winter 2003, Vol. 2, N0 3 & 4. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 1-11, 57-69.

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