Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy Ancestors (2001) consists of three poems: Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987). Brathwaite began Mother Poem while back in Barbados for the first time in almost 20 years. He recounts the realization that in looking back on his first trilogy, The Arrivants, “there is an absence of my family . . . I made the link between Barbados and my mother” (Dawes 35).
The structure of Ancestors thus roughly corresponds to the fertile landscape / the poet’s mother (Mother Poem), life-giving power / his father (Sun Poem), and finally the poet’s self (X/Self). Brathwaite has suggested that the Ancestors trilogy also connects with his previous trilogy, The Arrivants, to which pair he plans to add a final trilogy, thus creating from the three long poems a larger composition with a macro “tidealectic” structure, in “rejection of the notion of dialectic” (Naylor 145; Mackey 13–14).
Kamau Brathwaite
X/Self takes a long historical view of the European history that leads to the conditions that gave rise to the poet’s existence. The poetic refrain “Rome burns / & our slavery begins” suggests the first link in a causal chain by which cultural erosion and the displacement of power among European powers competing for domination leads inexorably to colonial contests and the economics of slavery that drove expansion (393).
Ancestors employs Brathwaite’s “Sycorax Video Style” (derived from “Sycorax,” Caliban’s mother, banished for practicing witchcraft)—in which experimentation with layered fragments and physical layout, such as typeface and spacing, works to create the poem’s aural feel (Dawes 37). If the figure of Sycorax represents for Brathwaite the mystical maternal core of Caribbean sensibility, this technique enlists technology to generate an organic form through which, Brathwaite explains, “the fonts take me across Mexico to Sisqueiros and the Aztec murals and all the way back to ancient Nilotic Egypt to hieroglyphics—allowing me to write in light and make sound visible as if I am in video” (Dawes 37).
Bibliography
Brathwaite, Kamau. Ancestors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Dawes, Kwame, and Neville Senu, eds. Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001, 22–37.
Mackey, Nathaniel. “An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite.” In The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown, 13–32. Mid Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press, 1995.
Naylor, Paul. Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Rohlehr, Gordon. “The Rehumanization of History: Regeneration of Spirit: Apocalypse and Revolution in Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and X/Self.” In The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown, 163–207. Mid Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press, 1995.
Williams, Emily. The Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.