Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy, The Arrivants (1988), consists of three previously published long poems: Rights of Passage (1967), Islands (1968), and Masks (1969), each comprised of many constituent parts. Critic Pamela Mordecai labels the trilogy’s structural elements in descending order as “books,” further divided into “sequences,” “statements,” and “sections.”

Structurally, the three books suggest the transatlantic flow of bodies, ideas, and images that Brathwaite has called “tidealectic.” Reversing the direction of New World settlement, the poem begins in the Caribbean, moves to Africa, then returns to the Caribbean, synthesizing preserved African myths and practices into a vision aware of the African elements embedded in Caribbean culture.

Brathwaite’s use of “nation language” draws on the cadence, vocabulary, and diction of Caribbean speech, creating layers of internal rhymes, puns, and subtle cultural references. For example, in a characteristically deft play on the commonplace of the Black Caribbean diaspora—that the islands’ chief exports are Caribbeans—he observes, “so the boy now nigratin’ overseas” (50). A recurrent motif is the image of Caribbean islands as pebbles sprinkled across the sea: “The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands” (48). Brathwaite’s rocks are a complex symbol, alternately fertile “Jewels” in the sea and at other moments barren stones from which no water can be wrung (205).

Brathwaite sardonically observes the economic realities of life under plantation economics: “The rat / in the warehouse is as much king / as the sugar he plunders,” and he harshly criticizes the rise of tourism as a key industry in continuity with more candid forms of past colonial power: “Unrighteousness of Mammon / hotels for tourists rise on sites / of the old empire’s promenades of cannon” (204, 216).

In exploring African elements in the history and culture of Caribbean life, the poem represents a kind of answer, Brathwaite has remarked, to basic questions of self-scrutiny necessary for self-determination: “Where were we coming from, and why are we not going where we should!” (Dawes 34).

Works Cited

Mordecai, Pamela. “Images for Creativity and the Art of Writing in The Arrivants.” For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Timothy J. Reiss, Africa World Press, 2001, pp. 21–42.

Morris, Mervyn. “Overlapping Journeys: The Arrivants.” The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown, Poetry Wales Press, 1995, pp. 117–131.

Rohlehr, Gordon. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Gordon Rohlehr, 1981.

Williams, Emily. The Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite. Greenwood Press, 2004.

Categories: British Literature, Caribbean Literature, Literature

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