Kamau Brathwaite

Ancestors

New Directions

2001

___________________________________________________________________

Recovered by Joyelle McSweeney

“What?” you say, “How can a book published in 2001 qualify for inclusion in the Recovery Project?” Kamau Brathwaite’s outrageous and outrageously brilliant 473-pager is a ‘Reinvention,’ as the cover page has it, of the earlier volumes Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987), landmarks of Caribbean literature in their own right. But Ancestors is not merely a repackaging of this trilogy in book-form; it is a rewriting of the earlier books in an array of pumped-up lo-fi typefaces which the author dubs ‘Sycorax Video Style.’

Those of you holding onto your Dover Editions of The Tempest will recall that Sycorax is the witch-mother of Caliban and the previous occupant of the island over which Prospero reigns (and also the author of its magic). The conflict between Caliban and Prospero over language, power, and the island has long been a flexible and helpful trope for the relationship of colonial and post-colonial subjects to the Queen’s English. But Brathwaite, already responsible for ratifying vernacular under the term ‘nation language,’ has pushed this chain of associations further by identifying the mother-tongue of Sycorax with what he dubs ‘video style.’ This style revels in the freedom from canonical deportment viz. typeface, font size and stanza shape made available by writing on a word processor.

So what does Sycorax Video Style look like? It’s rarely left justified, it’s anti-elegant in shape, it features the abrupt appearance of symbols and icons(for example, a picture of a mermaid), and it allows surprising breaks and redirections in the flow of the verse. What makes the style so thrilling in Ancestors is that it allows the poems of the original volumes to lose their Eliotic smoothness and occur gesturally, in a sort of animist real time. Reconceiving the poems in Sycorax Video Style also allows Brathwaite to louden up the “dub riddims and nation language and calibanisms” in which the original works were written (X/Self, 113). In the opening poem to X/Self, a poet-speaker puts on the robes of empire in preparation for a radical renovation of Western history and power structures. The original Oxford Paperback conclusion to this poem reads:

the conqueror my father’s wife would hang her head confused

if she were here to see her son so fopped

and peacock’d for a circumstance

for which he was incompetent

and all the squelchy women

of the palace

know it.

The same passage in Sycorax Video Style reads:

the conqueror my fathers wife x/wife will hang her head con

fuse if she was here to see her son

so fopped & peacock’d for a circumstance for which he is incom

-potent

& and all the squelchy women of the palace

knows it.

Brathwaite’s rhythms are consummate in either case but the right justification and breaking down of syntax in the new version force the reader to progress syllable by syllable, working out history by single footsteps forward out of white space and into black type. The fitful progress of the enjambed lines enacts the bad fit of the poet in his emperor clothes. The humor of the punchline is improved, to my mind, by the vernacular ‘knows it,’ and the combination of intimacy and historical scope is amplified by the non-negotiable presence of the thick type and the nation language. In the Ancestors version, the poem is signed with a louche, freehand star.

‘Freehand’ is a good way to think about the energy that Sycorax Video Style has brought to these decades-old texts. The subversion of imperialist models already written into the content and diction of the pieces now races all over the page. The first book in the trilogy, Mother Poem, is a choral, loving evocation of the women of the island, women we might associate with Sycorax herself. These mothers, sisters, shopkeepers, and lost girls are inseparable from the island’s geography, as the opening passage suggests:

The ancient watercourses of my island

echo of river. trickle. worn stone.

the sunken voice of glitter inching its pattern to the sea.

memory of foam. fossil. erased beaches high above the eaten.

boulders of st philip . my mother is a pool.

But like Anna Livia Plurabelle, this mother is not just mythic, not just the water or the weather. As the style of Mother Poem pivots between lush, continuous descriptiveness and a more vernacular, anecdotal mode, so does the mother figure shift attributes. During a face-off with the Eurocentric teacher, Chalkstick (‘dreamer of desk/-coteque and dais’), we get this portrait of her:

she love the sound of schoolbells. squares

triangles. hookey hockey matches

desks. gas chambers. froward march

[…]

xodus from the house of bond

-age into james bond in-bond shops & rats & cats & garbridge

so chalkstick smiles. accepting another black hostage

of verbs

Mother Poem, which in Ancestors appears with a lengthy new section transcribed from tabloids and a radio program called ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ gives a monumental portrait of life on the island through portraits of its women. As one poem concludes.

how can we tell

these dancers from they dance?

@

With Sun Poem, the trilogy’s second volume, Brathwaite turns his attention to men, particularly a boy, Adam, who seems to represent Brathwaite himself, his father, and possibly his future son or future children of Barbados—as well, of course, as Adam, the first man. The poem begins with a rooting, unlocalized voice (perhaps existence itself? perhaps that of the island?) trying to find the root of itself:

So that for centuries now have i fought against

these opposites

how i am sucked from water into air

how the air surrounds me blue all the way

Eventually, description of the island begins to coalesce around the figure of the young Adam. Passage after passage begins ‘when adam open his eyes’ and includes tides of perception, like:

dips & hills he pass

that were smooth or cov-

ered w/moss & like lances of light

& the sand was rib like water in wind

& all is silent as a fish eye look

This Adam lacks not only a myth of his origins but also, unlike the Biblical Adam, names for the things around him; in the space of the poem, however, the world comes into being as it reaches his senses and is folded into the text. In the same way, the multiplication of fathers and sons throughout the book works up a lineage. There is pathos in the gap between the poem’s ambition for its male characters (“Hannibal heavily crossing the alps/was his father my farther/setting out in his mental canoe”) and the disabling poverty they experience. When the father-figure speaks in Sun Poem¸ frustration overtakes languid description:

yu thinkin I owns it?

dat parff dat dere now. runnin away from yu. goin up de hill rounn de benn by miss brevitor tree . yu

tinkin I owns it?

Ironically, in the penultimate poem of the book a description of the intricacy of the heavens rhymes with earlier descriptions of the bottom of the sea and provides a way to envision the eventual apotheosis of the son/sun: “but suns don’t know when they die/they never give up/hope heart or articule”. The book ends with a long withheld, and pointedly partial, creation myth.

This brings us back to X/Self, the rollicking, trans-global, anachronistic series of poems implicating countless historical figures and claiming them all in the nation language which, unlike them, is still living. The leaping associations and linguistic virtuosity of X/Self is unabrogated, though the version of X/Self in Ancestors is considerably slimmer than the original. It also lacks the quirky yet fascinating glossary that accompanies the Oxford text, which spells out directly associations that can be culled from the text anyhow. Mt. Blanc haunts this book, and the poems seem determined to outwrite the shadow it casts across Africa:

& all the while kilimanjaro widens deepens darkens

wound whole absence

before yr glass. before your glacier

smoke dreams mist whiteness un. glitter

of sunlight. the gutter

i bleed in now

as rome burns

& our slavery begins

herod Herodotus the tablets of moses

are broken

the soft spoken

whips are uncoiled on the rhine on the rhone on the tiber

X/Self is also the book in which Caliban finally writes a letter to his mother--

guess what! pun a computer O

kay?

--an ars poetica for Sycorax Video Style.

The variety and divergent energies of Brathwaite’s visual style do not undermine the heft of Ancestors. In a deeply humanist manner, Brathwaite has reconceived a deep history for Caribbean peoples whose culture has been erased, effaced, belittled, or underdeveloped due to the vicissitudes and viciousness of imperialism. The project of writing the culture of the Caribbean was begun before and has continued after the writing of the books collected in Ancestors, both by Brathwaite and others. Yet this single volume represents an amplification and remounting of the effort, a reconsideration of the tropes of post-colonial discourse and a launching of the project into a new century, the ‘Sycorax video’ age.

Works Cited:

Brathwaite, Kamau. X/Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.