The poetic work of the Barbadian historian and cultural theorist Kamau Brathwaite (Bridgetown, 1930) has constituted from its inception the fundamental part of an intellectual project aiming at the articulation of an original Caribbean aesthetic. From his first published poetic work, Rights of Passage (1967), Brathwaite’s poetry has documented his own intellectual search for a Caribbean form of expression that could embody the complex history of the folk culture of the West Indies in general and of Barbados in particular. Brathwaite’s attempt to establish a Caribbean aesthetic originally took shape as a radical response to a seminal question Brathwaite himself posed in his early critical essay “Sir Galahad and the Islands” (1957): “The question therefore is: will the folk society on which the Islander is based be able to nurture and sustain him ‘home,’ or will he, too, turn away from his sources?” (Brathwaite, Roots, 18). In its original context, Brathwaite’s rhetorical question succinctly summarized the main cultural dichotomy that structured the work of key Caribbean writers working during the 1950s—such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Eric Roach. The contradiction seen by Brathwaite between his notion of the Caribbean as “home” and the tendency of some Caribbean writers to move away from their “sources” primarily implied for him a tension between a return to the folk culture of the Caribbean and a shift toward a position closer to the culture of the metropolis, which, as Brathwaite argued, partly ignored the historical roots of the Caribbean.
By asking this crucial question early in his career as a historian and poet, Brathwaite was not only documenting the two main aesthetic and historical paths taken by Anglophone Caribbean writers during the 1950s, but he was also ultimately aiming to transcend the conflicting and problematic nature of this crucial dichotomy within Caribbean history and culture. Brathwaite crafts his own response to this foundational question as a paradoxically utopian “return” of the postcolonial emigrant writer to the Caribbean as follows:
The future development of West Indian writing depends upon the state of health of society in the West Indies. If society is in good health, our “central” writers (those based on the folk) will continue to find nourishment from their soil. To this not impossible utopia the emigrant would, no doubt, gladly return, bringing with him those metropolitan standards of taste and judgment that might help keep our Muses innocent of parochialism. (Brathwaite, Roots, 27)
Brathwaite’s attempt to conceive an aesthetic that could articulate an essentially utopic return to Caribbean sources is partly determined by his own position as a migrant writer for whom a return to the Caribbean meant a necessary recuperation of his own cultural “sources” and “roots.” As Brathwaite himself acknowledges, it was precisely owing to the particularities of his own historical condition as a “roofless man of the world” that, after his education in England, he ended up taking a position in Ghana in 1955—a job with the Ghanaian Ministry of Education, which he held for the next seven years of his life and which would completely mark the rest of his career: “Accepting my rootlessness, I applied for work in London, Cambridge, Ceylon, New Delhi, Cairo, Kano, Khartoum, Sierra Leone, Carcassone, a monastery in Jerusalem. I was a West Indian, roofless man of the world. I could go, belong everywhere on the worldwide globe. I ended up in a village in Ghana. It was my beginning” (Brathwaite, “Timehri,” 38). Brathwaite’s proposed recommitment to the land and people of the Caribbean archipelago is intrinsically related to his conception of “rootlessness” as the essential West Indian condition. His view of the Caribbean artist as “emigrant” is thus solidly grounded on what he defines as an ancestral “spiritual inheritance of slavery” (30), primarily associated with the Middle Passage as the foundational event for Caribbean culture. This historical and “spiritual” heritage—which Brathwaite describes as “the migrant African moving from the lower Nile across the desert to the Western Ocean” (30)—operates as a powerful cultural matrix for the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, ultimately rendering the folk culture of the West Indies the direct result of the “adaptation and transference” of African folk culture into Caribbean plantations.
Overall, this historical transatlantic cultural transfer from Africa into the Caribbean implies for Brathwaite a rearticulation of African forms primarily determined by the unique geopolitical context provided by the Caribbean archipelago. As Brathwaite suggests, “African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment. Caribbean culture was therefore not ‘pure African,’ but an adaptation carried out mainly in terms of African tradition” (Brathwaite, Roots, 193). In this sense, Brathwaite’s proposed “return” to the Caribbean as the foundation for a Caribbean aesthetic hinges on his groundbreaking critical reconceptualization of the notion of the “Creole” as a model of cultural hybridity—perhaps one of the most influential and relevant theoretical contributions of Brathwaite to the fields of Caribbean history and cultural studies.1 In his doctoral dissertation on the formation of Creole society in Jamaica (published as The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820) Brathwaite defines his use of the term Creole in the following terms:
The word itself appears to have originated from a combination of the two Spanish words criar (to create, to imagine, to establish, to found, to settle) and colono (a colonist, a founder, a settler) into criollo: a committed settler, one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestrally indigenous to it. . . . In Jamaica, during the period of this study, the word was used in its original Spanish sense of criollo: born in, native to, committed to the area of living, and it was used in relation to both whites and slaves. It is in this sense that the word is applied in this book, with the overtone as may be heard, say, in present-day Puerto Rico, of “authentic,” “culturally autonomous.” (xiv)
Based on Brathwaite’s etymological definition of the Creole within the context of Jamaican society, the relation of the artist as migrant with the folk tradition that sustains Brathwaite’s project implies a foundational recommitment to the West Indian land or settlement in search of a distinctly “Creole” aesthetic expression, positively defined by Brathwaite as “authentic” and “culturally autonomous.” Thus, for Brathwaite it is only through a commitment to the local “sources” of “nourishment” that the Caribbean artist can eventually develop a genuinely Creole Caribbean aesthetic. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin argue in The Empire Writes Back, Brathwaite’s theoretical articulation of the notion of the Creole as a process of adaptation and transference able to alter previous cultural configurations is ultimately grounded on the spatial and environmental specificity of the Caribbean archipelago:
For Brathwaite, Creolization is a cultural action based upon the “stimulus response” of individuals to their environment and, within culturally discrete white-black groups, to each other. . . . Thus Brahwaite’s concept of a distinctive “Sun aesthetic” includes place as a dynamic factor in the contemporary Caribbean reality. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 146)
While Brathwaite’s work as a historian has documented in detail the multifaceted nature of this Creole transformation of African folk culture in the Caribbean (primarily in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica [1971] and in Contradictory Omens [1974]), his attempt to articulate an original West Indian aesthetic is grounded on a migrant “need” that goes beyond the empirically based form of knowledge generally provided by modern historiography. In this sense, Brathwaite emphasizes the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of this characteristically West Indian “need”: “I want to submit that the desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of West Indian sensibility—whether the migration is in fact or by metaphor” (Brathwaite, Roots, 7). Therefore, perhaps the most crucial aspect of Brathwaite’s conception of migration as the foundational West Indian event is that it needs not only to be traced, located, and documented in historical terms, but, more important, as a constitutive “desire” it must also be conveyed in an originally Creole aesthetic form. Peter Hitchcock characterizes Brathwaite’s intellectual project as powerfully affirming the cultural particularity of the Caribbean as a “voicing of history”: “Brathwaite’s sense of Caribbean cultural specificity argues for a historically embedded internal distancing of colonial lore at the level of language, music, and memory. Brathwaite attends to the elaboration of that connection/disjunction by voicing a history, polemically and poetically” (Hitchcock, 65).
Brathwaite’s own “voicing of history” has articulated his work as a poet, historian, and cultural theorist of the Caribbean for more than fifty years. His ongoing aesthetic project has essentially constituted from the beginning a witness to his own search for a model to transcend the Caribbean impasse embodied in the seminal question in “Sir Galahad and the Islands” and that is conveyed in the following section from Brathwaite’s first collection of poetry, Rights of Passage:
Where then is the nigger’s
home?
In Paris Brixton Kingston
Rome?
Here?
Or in Heaven?
What crime
His dark
Dividing
Skin is hiding?
What guilt
now drives him
on?
Will exile never
end?
(Brathwaite, Arrivants, 77)
Brathwaite’s poetic “voicing” of the Caribbean experience departs from the premise that the progressive synthesis of the key historical dichotomy of home/metropolis that structured Caribbean culture during the 1950s was ultimately doomed to a standstill. The problematic nature of this potential cultural stasis is emphasized by Brathwaite in Contradictory Omens: “The optimistic expectation of dialectical ‘progressive’ synthesis/solution, therefore, leads to impasse; it is an aspect of Caribbean reality our model-makers will have to take account of” (63). As Simon Gikandi argues, one of the critical mechanisms initially conceived by Brathwaite in his attempt to overcome the stasis inherent in this dialectical opposition was to confront the historical roots of Caribbean identity: “Brathwaite begins with the assumption that black or Caribbean identity cannot be found in a reconciliation between the alienated self and its Euro-American figures of desire; rather than to seek to overcome this gap the self must come to terms with the history of its repression” (Gikandi, “E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of the Voice,” 23). Brathwaite’s consideration of the potential synthesis of contradictory historical forces as ultimately leading to an alienating “impasse” for the West Indian writer is because the notion of synthesis itself is the result of an imposed Western dialectical logic of history that he has determinedly tried to challenge throughout his work. In order to counter this historically grounded “impasse” within the realm of West Indian culture, Brathwaite has gradually developed the foundations for his Caribbean aesthetic based on an alternative logic to Western Hegelian dialectical thinking that he has called “tidalectics,” or “a tidal dialectic” (Third World Poems, 42). As a cultural logic not determined by the insular environment of the Caribbean, Western dialectics entails for Brathwaite a logic that is essentially alien to the Caribbean condition. The notion of “tidalectics” primarily aims at countering the teleological or progressive linearity of Western culture. Thus, in an interview with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite says that the notion of “tidalectics” implies “the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear” (Mackey, “An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14). Regarding Brathwaite’s conception of tidalectics as “a dialectics with my difference” (“Interview,” 14), Peter Hitchcock has suggested that its cyclical cultural logic manages to open a spatiotemporal dimension for Caribbean cultural identification conceptually parallel to Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic, with the following implications:
The challenge of tidalectics, like dialectics, is to think simultaneously its time/space coordinates without sacrificing the specific nuance of either. This, of course, is something of Paul Gilroy’s approach to the Black Atlantic, which is a heuristic device in the “inner dialectics of diaspora identification.” Indeed one could argue that Brathwaite’s tidalectics is a poetic elaboration of the main tenets of the Black Atlantic, a conceptual space of identification that links blacks across the Atlantic by culture, politics, and history (although one of the reasons Brathwaite uses tidalectics is to separate his spatial imagination from the colonizing and racist consciousness of European dialectics, particularly, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). (Hitchcock, Imaginary States, 69)
As discussed by Hitchcock, Brathwaite’s “tidalectical” model aims at providing an aesthetic realm or “conceptual space” that could articulate a reconnection with the African presence in Creole society. However, while Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic constitutes in his own words “the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4), Brathwaite’s tidalectics is an exclusively Caribbean formation grounded on the specific environmental particularity of the Creole roots of West Indian culture.2 Although Brathwaite’s proposed tidalectics can be seen to entail a rhizomatic “literature of reconnection” (as he has argued, “a recognition of the African presence in our society not as a static quality, but as a root living, creative, and still part of the main” [Roots, 256]), Hitchcock’s conflation of Brathwaite’s tidalectics with Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic clearly ignores the Caribbean and Creole specificity of Brathwaite’s overall intellectual project, that is, that the “our” of “our society” refers exclusively to Caribbean society.3 In this sense, Brathwaite is rather clear in his emphasis of the importance of the local versus the international in his drive toward a Creole aesthetic, as he argues here:
It is my contention that before it is too late we must try to find the high ground from which we ourselves will see the world, and toward which the world will look to find us. An “international” tradition by all means for those that wish it. But a Creole culture as well. And a Creole way of seeing, first. It is from this stone that we must begin. (Brathwaite, Roots, 79)
Paradoxically, Brathwaite’s attempt to counter the internationalist and cosmopolitan impulse of Caribbean culture during the 1950s and ‘60s through his proposed West Indian aesthetic—which as suggested here aims at relocating the “need” of migration back to its “authentic” Creole sources through a “tidalectical” cultural logic—can be expressed only in nonparochial terms, as he declares, “bringing with him those metropolitan standards of taste and judgment.” Thus, at the very core of Brathwaite’s conception of a West Indian aesthetic lies a problematic relation between the local source of “nourishment” (62) needed by the West Indian artist—conceptualized by Brathwaite as a “New World Negro cultural expression, based on an African inheritance” (62)—and an equally necessary cosmopolitan aesthetic influence that constitutes for him “a superstructure of Euro-American language, attitudes and techniques” (Roots, 62).
Ultimately, if Brathwaite’s Caribbean aesthetic configures “a conceptual space of identification” for Caribbean culture, it can do so only as a conceptual space that explicitly resists being cosmopolitan by being at the same time radically local. Although Brathwaite’s primary cultural “stone” for his Caribbean aesthetic is grounded on a “Creole way of seeing,” it ultimately represents a vernacular mode of cultural perception and expression that not only responds originally to the cosmopolitan tendencies of other Caribbean artists (Naipaul and Walcott are two key Caribbean authors generally mentioned by Brahtwaite in this context) but also requires an “international” superstructure of “languages, attitudes, techniques” for its articulation. In this sense, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular within Brathwaite’s proposed West Indian aesthetic are not opposite cultural forces in tension, but rather, as Sheldon Pollock argues in his analysis of the dialectic between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan in the cultural context of Southeast Asia, they are “mutually constitutive” cultural forms: “These cultural forms are not just historically constituted but mutually constitutive, for if the vernacular localizes the cosmopolitan as part of its own self-constitution, it is often unwittingly relocalizing what the cosmopolitan borrowed from it in the first place (Pollock, 39).
Following Pollock’s succinct analysis of this mutually constitutive dynamic, the form of vernacular expression that Brathwaite is trying to establish implies the relocalization of a cosmopolitan impulse that precisely mirrors the relocalization of African culture at work in Brathwaite’s conception of the Creole. As in the case of the transference and adaptation of African culture into the Creole cultural forms historically developed in the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s Caribbean aesthetic implies a creolization of constitutive cosmopolitan poetic techniques based on the local particularism of the cultural logic he defines as “tidalectics.” In this sense, Brathwaite’s utopic configuration of a Caribbean aesthetic not only emphasizes the importance of the notion of the Creole as a foundational concept for Caribbean culture but also ultimately highlights the “mutually constitutive” interaction of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, in Pollock’s configuration of this relation. This mutual interaction also unveils a larger cultural implication as a “critique of the oppression of tradition,” which is here described by Pollock:
Affective attachment to old structures of belonging offered by vernacular particulars must precede any effective transformation through new cosmopolitan universals; care must be in evidence, a desire to preserve, even as the structure is to be changed. . . . It consists of a response to a specific history of domination and enforced change, along with a critique of the oppression of tradition itself, tempered by a strategic desire to locate resources for a cosmopolitan future in vernacular ways of being themselves. (Pollock, 47)
Applying Pollock’s magisterial work on the relation between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular to Brathwaite’s project, we can analyze his vernacular poetics as constituting both a reaction to an “enforced” cultural superstructure, as well as a new cultural form that could in itself function in a “cosmopolitan future.” Brathwaite’s project toward a Caribbean aesthetic can thus be read as primarily emphasizing the relevance of the “old structures of belonging” he traces through his work as a Caribbean historian in order for those “vernacular ways of being in themselves” to provide the “stone” or foundation for a true transformation of the cultural logic of Caribbean experience.
Grounding the “West Indian Voice”: Brathwaite’s Vernacular Poetics
One of the key features of Brathwaite’s overall intellectual project toward the development of “a new species of original art” (Roots, 235) constitutes what I will describe here as its incommensurability, that is, the fact that it ultimately aims at a total manifestation of Caribbean culture. As perhaps the most essential constituent element of Brathwaite’s aesthetic project, Caribbean literature had to incorporate not only the complex series of historical and cultural dichotomies that structure Caribbean history but, more important, do so in a way that could embody in itself the Caribbean as its total expression. This holistic aspect of Caribbean literature for Brathwaite is conveyed in some detail in his interview with the Caribbean poet and scholar Kwame Dawes:
When I talk about Caribbean literature I’m talking about literature which addresses and informs and comes out of what I call Caribbean Cosmology. The nature/natural of the Caribbean. Our sense of our space/time. . . . The relationship of landscape to time, the movement of landscape and manscape in time and to time’s riddims; our sense of our history out of this and the details of that history, iconographically expressed. The paradoxes, violences, and futures of society; people’s relationships, integuments, physical, social and spiritual; the language we speak among each other and how this relates to Nature. (Dawes, 31)
As Brathwaite suggests, Caribbean literature must become a total expression as a worldview or “cosmology,” as well as establish a relationship of the Caribbean self to the realms of nature and history. Despite Brathwaite’s own recognition of the fragmentation and tension among the different historical forces that have shaped Caribbean culture into an essentially Creole form, it is evident that his project toward a Caribbean aesthetic ultimately emerges as an attempt to arrive at a unified and coherent expression of its totality. Brathwaite thus endows the literary or poetic event with the seminal power of articulating this aesthetic project as a whole, that is, of providing a coherent and authentic form of expression for the Caribbean as an individuated culture of “local authenticity.” J. Michael Dash highlights the troublesome conceptual contradiction between the fragmentary nature of the Creole logic that pervades Brathwaite’s project and the idea of “wholeness and reintegration” toward which he is ultimately aiming:
The strength of Brathwaite’s ideas in the Seventies is tied to a seminal vision that privileges the creative confluence of contradictory forces and a poetics that requires a new sign system be invented to represent this vision of repressed tensions and unvoiced interactions. . . . The logic of this model would seem to push Brathwaite not towards an integrating text or a reestablishment of lost continuities, but towards an anti-essentialist concept of radical incompleteness. However, there is a tension between such a radically transgressive idea and another impulse that haunts his poetic imagination, that of wholeness and reintegration. (Dash, 193)
Paradoxically, both the nature and the form of this coherence and unity sought by Brathwaite emerges as an indeterminate and ultimately incommensurable force, an aspect largely missed by Dash in his critical view that Brathwaite’s work implies a somewhat essentialist idea of Caribbean completeness. In fact, Brathwaite’s project is characterized by a radical uncertainty as to the actual form of that coherence. As Brathwaite would candidly suggest later in his career, “I don’t know the nature of that coherence but one hopes that the coherence will be observable” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 18). Although there is no doubt that Brathwaite’s project aims at the very sense of “wholeness and reintegration” that Dash mentions, it constitutes a form of wholeness that does not have a determined unity or configuration, and in which, as Brathwaite would put in “tidalectical” terms, “The unity is submarine” (Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 64). Owing in part to this “submarine” incommensurability of the impulse toward cultural cohesion, Brathwaite carries out through his Creole aesthetic a radical intellectual critique of the West Indian condition. Brathwaite’s critique essentially implies a reexamination and redefinition of the very terms that could lead to the conceptualization of Caribbean culture as an original historical event independent of its European sources. It is only through a critical reevaluation of the defining concepts of West Indian culture that the path for the revision of the Caribbean folk tradition as the source for a “literature of local authenticity” can be established, as he argues here:
Until, therefore, our definition of “culture” is re-examined in terms of its totality, not simply its Europeanity, we will fail to discover a literature of negritude and, with it, a literature of local authenticity. Likewise, the African presence in Caribbean literature cannot be fully or easily perceived until we redefine the term “literature” to include the nonscribal material of the folk-oral tradition, which on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been relevant to the majority of our people, and to have had unquestionably wider provenance. (Brathwaite, Roots, 204)
Perhaps the fundamental element of Brathwaite’s critique of Caribbean culture intrinsically related to Dash’s idea of “wholeness and reintegration” is the rediscovery of the power of the “folk-oral tradition” as historically preceding the “scribal tradition”—which Brathwaite clearly identifies with European culture. As with his conception of Caribbean history, Brathwaite uses the notion of a Creole “local authenticity” as the foundation for a genuine Caribbean literature. It is precisely within the Creole linguistic framework intrinsic to the Caribbean that Brathwaite’s notion of the “West Indian voice” becomes the absolute key to his tidalectical Caribbean aesthetic. Brathwaite conceives this “voice” both as a hybrid of European tongues creolized by the “folk-oral tradition” and as a foundational rebellious force potentially able to provide the basis for an authentic Creole aesthetic for Caribbean culture:
The West Indian voice is a complex of imposed “establishment” tongues (Standard English, French, Dutch, etc.) and the mainly submerged patterns of the “folk”—the peasants and illiterates who carry within themselves a transformed but still very real and essentially non-European tradition of Africa, Asia and the Amerindians. (Brathwaite, Roots, 115)
This “complex” of standard European tongues and “submerged patterns” of folk culture can be further analyzed in terms of its intrinsic syncretism resulting from the fused or amalgamated set of historical and linguistic forces suggested in Brathwaite’s notion of the “West Indian voice.” Moreover, based on the “tidalectical” logic at the very core of his project toward a Caribbean aesthetic, Brathwaite’s notion of a “West Indian voice” does not constitute the kind of synthetic dialect that Henry Louis Gates defines within the context of African American culture:
Afro-American dialect exists between two poles, one English and one lost in some mythical linguistic kingdom now irrecoverable. Dialect is our only key to that unknown tongue, and in its obvious relation and reaction to English it contains, as does the Yoruban mask, a verbal dialectic, a dialectic between some form of an African antithesis all the while obviating the English thesis. (Gates, Figures in Black, 172).
As opposed to Gates’s dialectical approach—in the Hegelian sense of the term—to the Afro-American dialect, Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” essentially entails a transformative and transferential conception of vernacularity in which specific verbal patterns of local sounds and rhythms reenact and embody the experience of the Caribbean. In Brathwaite’s linguistic model, both of the “poles” Gates describes in his definition of the Afro-American dialect are not synthetically but syncretically incorporated into the “West Indian voice” as a signifying totality. Thus, contrary to the conception of the “source” language as an “unknown” and “irrecoverable” tongue, Brathwaite conceives this linguistic “source” as a local form of West Indian expression that can—and, more important, should—be recuperated for the purposes of a truly original Caribbean aesthetic. The notion of syncretism appears in this context as an extremely productive concept to describe the Creole logic that, as suggested by Brathwaite, is inherent in the development of the “West Indian voice.” Based on the groundbreaking work on the cultural conditions of the Caribbean by the Cuban critic Antonio Benítez Rojo, it becomes clear that Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” constitutes a characteristically Caribbean “syncretic artifact,” with the following theoretical implications:
A syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier made of differences. What happens is that, in the melting pot of societies that the world provides, syncretic processes realize themselves through an economy in whose modality of exchange the signifier of there—of the Other—is consumed (“read”) according to local codes that are already in existence; that is, codes from here. (Benítez Rojo, Repeating Island, 21)
In the light of Benitez Rojo’s conception of the Caribbean syncretic signifying artifact, Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” becomes a powerful signifier able to provide the Creole “stone” to ground his intellectual project toward a Creole Caribbean aesthetic. From this perspective, the “West Indian voice” as a “signifier made of differences” is the product of the kind of syncretism proposed by Benítez Rojo resulting from a transferential “modality of exchange” which reads “the signifier of there” based on local “codes from here,” since, as Brathwaite argues, it constitutes a local form of language which is “constantly transforming itself into new forms,” as well as “adapting to the new environment” (Brathwaite, Roots, 262). From this syncretic lens of constant transformation, transference, and adaptation, the foreign condition that Brathwaite ascribes to the European “establishment” tongues amalgamated into the “West Indian voice” is always read and incorporated through the local folk codes that Brathwaite considers to be original to—albeit “submerged” in—the West Indian experience. The transferential tension between a local ground (here/folk) and global influences (there/Europe) at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” constitutes a syncretic and translatable force that facilitates the articulation of a vernacular system as the basis for his Caribbean aesthetic. It is precisely because of the syncretism characteristic of the modality of exchange at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of the West Indian voice that the mutually constitutive relationship between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan described by Pollock emerges within Brathwaite’s project. Moreover, Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” articulates a signifier that constantly translates the local word into a form of cultural and spiritual power able to articulate in itself an original (Creole in this case) system of signification that can universally embody the experience of the Caribbean. For Brathwaite, this universality of the local word—to which he refers throughout his work as either “nam,” “nommo,” “the Word” or “name”—endows it with a primal and constitutive “secret power” able to articulate a new system of signification for the Caribbean: “We are dealing here with a local concrete force, a flow of power, and impetus that carries with it word, image and consciousness” (Brathwaite, Roots, 70). Ultimately, Brathwaite asserts the power of the “West Indian voice” as a syncretic artifact in which the local signifier can ultimately channel and express the totality of Caribbean experience and beyond in the following terms:
“Nam” means so many things for me. “Nam” is “man” spelt backwards, man in disguise, man who has to reverse his consciousness . . . in order to enter the new world in a disguised or altered state of consciousness. “Nam” also suggests “root,” or beginning, because of “yam,” the African yam, “nyam,” to eat, and the whole culture contained in it. It is then able to expand itself back from “nam” to “name” which is another form of “nam”: the name that you once had has lost its “e,” that fragile part of itself, eaten by Prospero, eaten by the conquistadors, but preserving its essentialness, its alpha, its “a” protected by those two intransigent consonants, “n” and “m.” The vibrations “nmnmnm” are what you get at the before the beginning of the world. (Brathwaite, “History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self,” 33)
Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” as a local signifier that embodies “word, image and consciousness” ultimately enacts a “groundation” of his work as a Caribbean cultural theorist and historian. Brathwaite’s peculiar use of the notion of “groundation” or “groundings”—a key term of Rastafarian culture—appears in the context of his development of the notion of “nation language” in his article “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” (1973):
In addition to sound-symbols, nation language sets up certain tunes, tones and rhythms which are characteristic of the folk tradition, and are often essential features of its expression. The overall space/patterns of this language, we might say, are controlled by a groundation tendency in which image/spirit is electrically conducted to earth like lightning or the loa (the gods, spirits, powers, or divine horsemen of vodum). (Brathwaite, Roots, 243)
As Brathwaite suggests, nation language as a vernacular linguistic system constitutes a “total expression” (273) that provides a “groundation” of the “image/spirit” signified or channeled “to earth” by the very sounds and rhythms of the “West Indian voice.” In “History of the Voice,” the seminal essay in which Brathwaite develops his theory of a Caribbean vernacular, Brathwaite conceives “nation language” as a “submerged” linguistic form parallel to the notion of the “West Indian voice.” He particularly defines “nation language” as “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and laborers” (Roots, 260). Brathwaite’s use of the Rastafarian concept of groundation to describe his own theory of nation language deserves further analysis. Within Rastafarian culture, groundation, or grounding, constitutes an important religious ritual as one of the main cultural forms for the everyday transmission of Rastafarian experience, described here by the sociologist of religion Ennis Barrington Edmonds:
Grounding, in the context of the yards, takes place when a few Rastas gather to smoke ganja spliffs, or “to draw the chalice,” and to reflect on their faith or on any current or historical event that affects their lives. This is the more informal level of grounding, and it can take place anywhere and anytime without any prearrangement. However, for many, grounding is a daily activity, which takes place in the yards of leading brethren and elders. . . . These gatherings are somehow more formal, and in addition to ritual smoking and reasoning, drumming, chanting, and sometimes “speechifying” and feasting are often elements of the grounding. (Edmonds, 74)
Based on Edmonds’s detailed description, groundation can be regarded as the performative and material manifestation of Rastafarian ideology, specifically in Althusser’s material conception of ideology (i.e., “Ideology has a material existence”) developed in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” According to Althusser, the ideas of the subject are ultimately constituted by “his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (243). If according to Brathwaite, the “space/patterns” of nation language imply a form of groundation, it can do so only as a medium which can perform in itself the historical and spiritual tensions at the core of Caribbean history, in much the same way that Rastafarian groundation materially performs some of the key tenets of Rastafarian ideology. In this sense, Brathwaite’s conception of vernacular language as a performative “grounding” of Caribbean experience lies at the very core of his overall aesthetic project. The radically performative nature of Brathwaite’s poetic voicing of Caribbean experience inherent in his use of the concept of groundation is vividly emphasized here:
as the poem write, first the song arrive, its tune, its mourn, its riddim, and as it take its shape upon the page, so does its meaning—the limbo stick and the slave ship and the dance—its splay & sprawl, agony of contortion of body— becoming a memorial—a kind of Rosetta Stone for all these centuries of apparently forgetting—of the way this voyage is. (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 301)
Brathwaite’s work as a West Indian poet claims to perform in itself the very same process of groundation of the historical and spiritual experience of the Caribbean that he claims for his theory of nation language. As such, Brathwaite’s poetry emerges as the aesthetic expansion of the same “West Indian voice” he previously documented historically, but that urgently requires its poetic practice—as a spiritual groundation—in fact, “becoming a memorial” of the past, present and future of the Caribbean experience. Therefore, Brathwaite’s role as a Caribbean poet precisely becomes the complex process of unveiling different manifestations of the “West Indian voice” as the syncretic signifier that could effectively lead to the establishment of a nation language for the Caribbean and which could provide a tidalectical sense of “coherence” and “unity” to Caribbean culture as whole.
Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video Style: A Virtual Caribbean Voice
Since the publication of his first collection by Oxford University Press in 1967, Brathwaite’s poetry has undergone a progressive textual, visual, and material transfiguration in his attempt to articulate the history of the “West Indian voice.” In his ongoing poetic search for the very sounds that could provide an original expression of Caribbean experience—ultimately conceived by Brathwaite as “a rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience” (Roots, 265)—Brathwaite carries out a gradual process of decomposition of the traditional rhythm and meter patterns of English verse, as well as standard English syntax and grammar. This radical linguistic transformation has been described by the poet Nathaniel Mackey as a process of rupture that essentially aims at destabilizing the semantic and structural coherence of words. For Mackey, the end result of this poetic reconfiguration of the English language is an extremely particular form of linguistic minimalism that ultimately opens up the path for the emergence of the essential Caribbean form of signification associated with Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice,” that is, his notion of “naam,” “name” or “the Word,” as Mackey argues here:
Returning to the smallest particles of language, syllables and letters, he assaults the apparent solidity and integrity of words, destabilizing them (showing them to be intrinsically unstable) by emphasizing the points at which they break, disassembling them and reassembling them in alternate spellings and neologistic coinages. . . . Words are reopened, broken open, their semantic integrity unsealed by “shadows of meaning” that are played upon and thereby shown to permeate “the Word.” (Mackey, “Wringing the Word,” 45, 48)
Overall, Brathwaite’s process of destabilizing the structural and conceptual consistency of words, as described by Mackey, represents the textual embodiment of his notion of tidalectics and his attempt to disrupt the linear logic of European dialectical thinking he has been trying to counter throughout his work. Thus, Brathwaite’s textual tidalectics entails a syncretic amalgamation of the kind of linguistic ruptures that Mackey refers to, aiming at fragmenting and dissipating the conceptual and formal coherence of the English and European cultural traditions through a performative strategy that keeps repeating and reiterating itself throughout his poetry. At the same time, this linguistic tidalectical process keeps recovering a series of cultural sources that resurface and recur in his poems, ultimately leading to a process of rewriting in which poetic tropes, images, and full sections of poems are constantly revised, reincorporated, and rewritten into new poetic compositions. This tidalectical progression of Brathwaite’s poetry is, at the same time, parallel to the oscillation from the historical to the autobiographical taking place in his poetic work. Whereas Brathwaite’s first trilogy (Arrivants) deals primarily with the Middle Passage as the fundamental historical and spiritual event for the Caribbean—as Brathwaite comments to Mackey, “It is history, it has happened” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 18)—his second trilogy (Ancestors) places Brathwaite himself at the very center of his poetic project, in fact as a personal “groundation” of Caribbean experience. As Brathwaite argues, while the first trilogy—composed of Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)—deals “with the communities that give rise to Caribbean peoples and their problems,” the second trilogy—configured by Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987)—treats “the grounding of that whole thing into person. It’s about my mother, it’s about Barbados, it’s about myself within the family context” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14).
Figure 5. Kamau Brahwaite’s Sycorax Video Style, section from “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” included in Ancestors. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
However, Brathwaite himself and, consequently, his aesthetic project experienced a series of tragic blows that led to a standstill and ultimately a temporary silencing of his poetic voice. During a span of four years (1986–90), generally referred to by Brathwaite as his “Time of Salt,” he suffered the tragic loss of his wife, Doris Monica Brathwaite, in 1986 due to a virulent cancer, the destruction of all of his personal archive of Caribbean culture by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and finally a brutal assault at his Irish Town home by three Kingston gunmen in 1990. As he describes it, these series of tragic events marked the rest of his poetic production by ultimately leading to the “dreamlike” emergence of the Sycorax video style (SycoraxVS) he would develop with his Apple computer—a now obsolete Mac SE/30:
I come to Sycorax during my Time of Salt: death of Zea Mexican 1986, loss of Irish Town Library of Alexandria 1988, murder by Kingston gunmen 1990 . . . just look at the dread frequencies of these catastrophes. My writing hand becomes a dumb stump in my head. . . . I mean I can’t write or utter a sound or metaphor. But Sycorax comes to me in a dream and she dreams me a Macintosh computer with its winking io hiding in its margins which, as you know, are not really margins, but electronic accesses to Random Memory and the Cosmos and the Iwa. (Dawes, 37)
As Brathwaite confesses in this interview with Kwame Dawes, his “Time of Salt” undoubtedly constituted a painful period of poetic silence and crisis caused by a series of tragic events. Indeed, it is as if the realm of history, or Caribbean history to be more precise, managed in a rather brutal way to silence temporarily Brathwaite’s attempt to articulate a history of the “West Indian Voice” through his poetry as a form of groundation. It is precisely in the face of these new painful conditions, however, that the rhetorical force of Brathwaite’s seminal question originally voiced in 1957 (“Will the folk society on which the Islander is based be able to nurture and sustain him ‘home.’ or will he, too, turn away from his sources?”) regains the full uncertainty of its rhetorical undecidability and transforms itself into the following key question that will mark the rest of Brathwaite’s intellectual production:
How does my self now go forward into that wider community again, seeing it now from the point of view of a new personal baptism into unexpected areas of loss and hopeful reconstitution of all this once more into the psycho-natural elements of wind, water, metal fire, green history? (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14)
Although Brathwaite’s personal crisis during those four years can be interpreted as an inability of the Caribbean to adequately “nurture and sustain him ‘home,’” Brathwaite overtly refused to turn away from his sources after the traumatic series of events. Instead, the sudden appearance of SycoraxVS as a new medium for his work provided Brathwaite the tool to transfigure radically the mode of groundation of the very same “psycho-natural” sources of inspiration lying at the very core of his project. As I argue in the rest of this chapter, SycoraxVS offered Brathwaite a new medium to recast the two main components of his Caribbean aesthetic, that is, the vernacular linguistic form he refers to as “nation language” and the form of archival memory ultimately required for the production of historical knowledge. It is only through the material transfiguration of Brathwaite’s own poetic practice—literally of “his writing hand”—into the digital medium embodied by his SycoraxVS that Brathwaite’s own history of “the West Indian voice” was able to continue to exist as a virtual reconfiguration of itself.
As the name of Brathwaite’s visual style indicates, the main creative source recovered through his Mac SE/30 after his “Time of Salt” was the figure of Sycorax—perhaps Brathwaite’s key tidalectical source for his Caribbean aesthetic. Sycorax, the figure of Caliban’s mother from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first surfaced in Brathwaite’s Mother Poem as a powerful syncretic signifier within Brathwaite’s dense poetic iconography—which gradually took on the maternal roles of womb, Barbados as homeland, and the Caribbean as mother nature, among many other significations. The actual moment of creative reconstitution that led to the symbiotic union between the figure of Sycorax and the digital medium of the computer as SycoraxVS is originally described in the section of X/Self (1987) titled “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” through which the characteristic tidalectical progression and variations of his work later became “Letter SycoraX” published both in Middle Passages (1993), and in Ancestors (2001), in the section reprinted here.
As X/Self relates Sycorax in this version of the passage, the computer articulated a new form of writing that can be instantly accessed, altered, and rewritten (“yu na ave to benn dung over to out out / de mistake dem wid white liqrid paper”), since it is not restrained by the material conditions traditionally associated with print. The digital textuality offered by the computer medium is also seen by X/Self as a liberating force for the purposes of Caribbean culture that could provide an alternative response to Caliban’s antagonistic stance toward Prospero: (& learn-in / prospero ling/age & ting / not fe dem / not fe dem / de way caliban / done but fe we / fe a-we / for nat one a we shd response if prospero get curse / wid im own / curser” (Ancestors, 449). In this sense, the cursor of the computer as “prospero’s curser” offers a new creative positionality for Caribbean culture that transforms Caliban’s oppositional stance into a new potential force able to carry out a productive rearticulation “for a we” of that same “curser”—now as the basis for a new “ling/age,” constituting at the same time a language, a linguistic age, and even a nation language for the Caribbean.
One of the most productive cultural rearticulations provided by “prospero’s curser” is the fact that it allowed Brathwaite to turn virtually the figure of Sycorax into the computer system itself. As Brathwaite relates in an interview by Emily Allen Williams, “Sycorax by the way is my SE/30 Macintosh computer and ‘lives’ in the computer” (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 299). At the same time, as Brathwaite describes to Dawes, a key characteristic of SycoraxVS is its visual potential, “allowing me to write in light and to make sound visible as if I am in video” (Dawes, 37). It is precisely through SycoraxVS that Brathwaite’s seminal statement regarding nation language—“What we see is in fact the speaking seeking voice” (Brathwaite, Roots, 244)—finally becomes a literal visual force that fully pervades all of his work since the appearance of his “video style.” Hence, in Brathwaite’s conception, SycoraxVS operates as a complex syncretic signifier that combines the oral and the visual in the new medium offered by the digital computer, in his words, a “weld of computer and visual orality—scrollature—videolect—a kind of improvisationary hieroglyphic enactment—an expression of multiple representation” (Williams, Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite, 298). It is as if the complex process of generation to which Brathwaite subjects his own poetic voice (and, ultimately, his conception of nation language) through the inception of SycoraxVS manages to produce a virtual aura that illuminates its own spatiotemporal presence, or its own moment of groundation. Mirroring Brathwaite’s own conceptualization of SycoraxVS as a new medium for the groundation of Caribbean experience, most critics have emphasized the role of the computer precisely as the seminal syncretic signifier Brathwaite imagines it to be, instead of analyzing the way the digital technology of the computer allows Brathwaite to imagine Sycorax as such a syncretic artifact. A relevant example of such a critical response to Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS is offered by Elaine Savory here:
But by imagining the computer now as a medium which can help Caliban turn back towards his mother, Sycorax, by liberating him from some of the strictures of the written conventions of the English language text, Brathwaite has stepped into a space in which orality, the book and the screen combine to project an immediate sense of cultural identity and linguistic freedom. (Savory, 217)
If Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS can “project an immediate sense of cultural identity” associated with the way “orality, the book, and the screen” are intermedially combined, as suggested by Savory above, I would argue that this is exclusively due to the digital nature of the new medium Brathwaite has been using since the late 1980s for his Caribbean aesthetic. As Graeme Rigby points out, this new syncretic form adopted by Brathwaite’s “welding” voice is solely facilitated by his use of computing technology: “The Apple Mac has enabled Kamau to hold the very tool which shapes the image, to shape it himself in its minute particularities, to emphasize and sing the shapes as he creates them” (Rigby, 252). Although as a medium SycoraxVS clearly emphasizes the visual or sculptural dimension of his writing as if it were video, the fact remains that SycoraxVS is not the result of the recording visual technology referred to as “video”—whether analog or digital—but rather of the digital computing phenomenon generally known as word processing. In other words, although it has always been published in print format by a wide variety of publishers who have adapted or reproduced with some alterations the digital form of Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS (usually as typecast or photo-offset versions), the format itself as produced by Brathwaite through his Mac SE/30 essentially constitutes a form of digital poetry. Although this important fact regarding Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS may seem self-evident, Chris Funkhouser’s succinct definition of the field of digital poetics is extremely useful for my analysis of Brathwaite’s use of digital technology in his work: “A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or processes (software) are distinctively used in the composition, generation or presentation of the text (or combinations of texts)” (Funkhouser, 22).
Therefore, since it originally constitutes a form of digital poetry, the power of SycoraxVS as a “writing in light” able “to make sound visible” and to rearticulate Brathwaite’s poetic practice as a groundation of the “sources” of Caribbean experience is fully dependent on a crucial form of language that has been generally ignored regarding Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS, that is, the computer language of programming code. In order for Brathwaite’s poetic performance to become effectively a “writin in lite” (Ancestors, 455) which can ultimately provide a conceptual topos of reconnection with the cultural sources of the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s poetic voice must necessarily be translated into a new medium through the language of code. This form of translation of Brathwaite’s “voice,” or rather of his keyboard-typed words by computer coding, is required in order for it to be processed by the computer processor and thus to appear visibly as SycoraxVS in the monitor of the Mac SE/30. As N. Katherine Hayles argues in her effort to bring the language of code to the foreground of literary studies, programming code constitutes a language that must necessarily perform itself before any human can interact with the computer:
Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language. When language is said to be performative, the kinds of actions it “performs” happen in the minds of humans . . . . By contrast, code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behavior and, through networked ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code. Although code originates with human writers and readers, once entered into the machine it has as its primary reader the machine itself. Before any screen display accessible to humans can be generated, the machine must first read the code and use its instructions to write messages humans can read. (Hayles, 50)
As Hayles’s analysis of the performativity of programming code makes clear, Brathwaite’s poetry as a groundation of the sources of Caribbean experience can perform itself only after the language of programming code has literally run its own digital performance. In fact, Brathwaite’s poetry can only exist as SycoraxVS once the poetic voice has been subjected to the performativity of the computer code that enables the mechanical processing of the poem’s words to be translated into the visual images that appear in the monitor of Brathwaite’s own Mac SE/30. One of the key theoretical implications of such a process of digitization is that Brathwaite’s vernacular articulation of the “West Indian voice” is ultimately constituted as a virtual voice. The virtuality of Brathwaite’s poetic “voicing” through his SycoraxVS is extremely relevant in two different ways. First, the process of digitization that converts Brathwaite’s poetry into bits of digital information carries out a literal de-vernacularization of his notion of the “West Indian voice” since code constitutes, as the new media philosopher Pierre Lévy describes it, a nonactualized linguistic form essentially “inaccessible to humans”: “Digital information (0s and 1s) can also be qualified as virtual to the extent that it is inaccessible to humans. We can only directly interact with its actualization, through some sort of display” (Lévy, 30). In this sense, the local and material dimension of Brathwaite’s nation language is radically delocalized, rather literally losing its material and signifying ground as a formalized linguistic medium into the virtual domain of the mathematical language of programming code. Second, the process of virtualization of Brathwaite’s voice into computer code can at the same time be interpreted as a process of deterritorialization, since as Lévy also highlights, digitization implies a de facto rootlessness of the information processed because it is practically independent of “any spatiotemporal coordinates,” as he argues here:
Any entity is virtual if it is “deterritorialized,” capable of engendering several concrete manifestations at different times and places, without being attached to any particular place or time. . . . The computer codes written on diskettes or computer hard drives—invisible, easily copied or transferred from one node of the network to another—are quasi-virtual, since they are nearly independent of any spatiotemporal coordinates. Within digital networks, information is obviously physically present somewhere, on a given medium, but it is also virtually present at each point of the network when it is requested. (Lévy, 30)
The inherent deterritorialization of any virtual entity described by Lévy is, at the same time, extremely relevant for the transfiguration of Brathwaite’s conception of history and historiography through SycoraxVS. In this sense, the digitization of his poetic voice in SycoraxVS also provides Brathwaite a virtual form of archival memory and, consequently, a rootless repository for his own writing that mirrors what Brathwaite conceived as the essential rootlessness of the Caribbean condition. A key practical consequence of this material transfiguration of Brathwaite’s poetic practice into a virtual form was, in fact, to save those same Creole sources lying at the core of his Caribbean poetics from what Brathwaite considered to be the reactionary cultural conditions of Caribbean culture. As Brathwaite mentions in the introduction to his “Time of Salt” long poem Shar, the unreadiness and inability to protect the cultural production of the Caribbean constitutes one of his major concerns after his “personal baptism into unexpected areas of loss:”
You have to be concerned with the sources of a poet’s life a people’s inspiration and try to protect care for as best you can, those sources. . . . We have to be concerned with the poet’s health well being comfort. yes; but above all there are archives—that written memorialized recorded record of his / her life / hope / history / art. . . . As far as I can see our Caribb culture is too much a reaction—if not a reactionary plantation culture. We are not prepared to foresee to foresay to forestall to help in that real way. Instead we prefer/we proffer help—if help at all—after the accident after the death after the hurricane. (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.)
After the historical trauma of Brathwaite’s “Time of Salt,” his MacSE/30 provided a form of archival memory that, owing to its intrinsic virtuality and deterritorialized form, facilitated a brand-new—and safe—repository for his “archives,” as well as a new textual medium for his own “written memorialized recorded record.” As channeled through his Mac SE/30, Sycorax offered Brathwaite “electronic accesses to Random Memory” not only in a symbolic or metaphoric way, as he mentioned previously, but, more important, in a strictly literal sense. In fact, the specific form of “Random Access Memory” through which he has been able to reconstruct his poetry is the rootless, random, and virtual memory provided by the 32 KB of RAM of the Mac SE/30.4 The tremendous impact of SycoraxVS as a new archival medium for the virtual recording and storage of Brathwaite’s sources rests on the fact that he decided to rewrite, save, and publish in his Mac SE/30 a considerable part of his previous work, as well as almost all his work produced after the inception of his video style. Among other works composed in his newly minted SycoraxVS, Brathwaite recast the set of historical experiences that determined his “time of Salt” in the highly autobiographical poetic works Shar—Hurricane Poem, Zea Mexican Diary, and Trench Town Rock. At the same time, during the 1990s, Brathwaite also re-created in SycoraxVS his Casas de las Américas award-winning collection Black and Blues (1976)—published by New Directions in 1995—and his aforementioned second poetic trilogy Ancestors, also published by New Directions in 2001.
Apart from the practical consequences just described, one of the most important implications of the virtual transformation of Brathwaite’s Caribbean project through SycoraxVS is that the “deterritorialized” memory provided by the RAM card of his Apple computer was incorporated as a new paradigm for his own tidalectical conception of his work. As Brathwaite explains to Emily Allen Williams, RAM becomes in fact the archival form of random memory that articulates his overall oeuvre:
EAW: Are you suggesting that the reader’s view toward your work must first be chronological? Historical? It’s not simple—is it? Toward understanding?
KB: Not, it’s not that simple, but you’ve got to—
EAW: Go back to go forward?
KB: Yes . . . but more like random access memory really . . . the way that works . . . And you have to know what you have read before, and then read it in sequence . . . and in historical context. And still be able to make connections from any one part of the work to another. And not to confine it to poetry either. I mean, the history, the prose, the dreamstories, even the photography are all connected. (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 305)
As Brathwaite suggests, the form of memory provided by his Mac SE/30 has offered him a virtual temporality in which any point in time can be retraced and accessed instantaneously, allowing for the emergence of the tidalectical sources that implicate for Brathwaite the totality of Caribbean experience. At the same time, this virtual form of memory is able to save his creative sources from the historical conditions of Caribbean culture before the foundational “sounds” for a nation language can be materially lost or forgotten. Therefore, the digital medium that constitutes Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS provides a virtual reconstitution of his writing as a radically new form of groundation of the Creole sources of Caribbean experience. Moreover, it is finally in SycoraxVS that Brathwaite finds a digital language able to transfer his voice into the kind of rootless syncretic signifier that can coherently match the rootlessness and homelessness that Brathwaite sees as the essence of the West Indian condition.
Brathwaite’s Nation Language and the Temporality of Translation
As shown in this chapter, Brathwaite has effectively adopted throughout his career a double role as poet and theorist of nation language who both documented the rhythms and tones of the West Indian voice as its premier historian and archivist,5 and at the same time performed and articulated that Caribbean voice in his own poetry—both in analog and digital media. Silvio Torres-Saillant describes this dual aspect of Brathwaite’s intellectual project toward a Caribbean aesthetic as follows:
In his search for an authentic Antillean expression, Brathwaite has sought to piece together the history of the voice for his people, but he has also invested much energy and imagination in the task of inventing that voice. The repetition, recurrence, and recasting of ideas and verbal performances in many of his works suggest the urgency with which he has assumed the task of unearthing and creating. (Torres-Saillant, 154)
The key aspect of this double position of cultural urgency that is adopted by Brathwaite, as Torres-Saillant suggests—and which the critic largely ignores in his analysis—is that “piecing together the history of the voice for his people” constitutes a radically different heuristic action from the “task of inventing that voice.” Thus, in order to understand the tidalectical logic of Brathwaite’s attempt to establish an “authentic Antillean expression” it is important to analyze the oscillation between history and poetics that structures his oeuvre—a movement characterized by its repetitive, recurring, and circular form throughout Brathwaite’s work. In this sense, the location of Brathwaite’s overall project at the juncture between the archaeological “unearthing” of history and the poietic “creating” of poetics aims to bridge the ambivalent split of two differing temporalities (one diachronic or historical, the other synchronic or performative), which Homi Bhabha defines as “the site of writing the nation” with the following implications:
In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation. . . . The tensions between the pedagogical and the performative that I have identified in the narrative address of the nation, turns the reference to a “people”—from whatever political and social position it is made—into a problem of knowledge that haunts the symbolic formation of social authority. (Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297)
The importance of the fact that Brathwaite’s overall work is situated precisely at the juncture of the two splitting temporalities that, according to Bhabha, lie at the site where the narration of nation is produced cannot be critically overlooked in the context of this analysis. As previously mentioned, in his attempt to establish a nation language for Caribbean culture Brathwaite drew upon the Rastafarian concept of groundation as a model for welding the “piecing together” of history and the “creating” of poetics, and consequently the splitting temporalities of nation production each heuristic action entails. In this sense, groundation articulates an ambivalent mode of temporality somewhat in between the merely “pedagogical” and the merely “performative,” using Bhabha’s terms, since it produces its own local form of history in the repetitive ritual through which it is enacted. Similarly, Brathwaite’s poetic take on groundation represents an alternative temporality for the Creole articulation of the local sources of Caribbean culture through which they are constituted historically. As a vernacular performance that aims at grounding a particular accumulative history of the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s poetry literally becomes a “memorial . . . for all these centuries of apparently forgetting.” Bhabha describes this ambivalent temporality at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of groundation as the “temporality of translation or negotiation” (Location of Culture, 26) in the following terms:
When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History. . . . In such a discursive temporality, the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonist instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle and destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason. (Bhabha, Location of Culture, 25)
Brathwaite’s tidalectical Caribbean aesthetic constitutes precisely the kind of “dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History” that Bhabha refers to regarding the “temporality of translation.” As Bhabha argues, the temporality of translation opens a space of transferential exchange as a negotiation of differing historical, epistemological, cultural, and linguistic forces that ends up producing a hybrid topos, which, in the case of Brathwaite’s poetics, becomes the basis for the constitution of a new vernacular culture. Referring again to Bhabha’s seminal work on the task of nation writing, it becomes clear that Brathwaite’s development of a nation language for the Caribbean represents a “contentious” acknowledgment and “inscription” of Caribbean culture as a national culture, ultimately constituting a form of what Bhabha defines here in terms of the concept of “minority discourse”:
Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national culture—and the people—as a contentious performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of time. Now, there is no reason to believe that such marks of difference—the incommensurable time of the subject of culture—cannot inscribe a “history” of the people. . . . They will not, however, celebrate the monumentality of historicist memory, the sociological solidity or totality of society, of the homogeneity of cultural experience. The discourse of the minority reveals the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal moment of historical time. (Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 308)
In the light of Bhabha’s argument, the power of Brathwaite’s poetic groundation lies precisely in the way it manages to inscribe a nonteleological “history” as translated by the “marks of difference” he ascribes to the Creole specificity of the “West Indian voice.” Hence, Brathwaite’s work reveals “the insurmountable ambivalence” that governs the temporality of translation articulated through his own poetic voicing of the differential particularity of nation language as the vernacular foundation for Caribbean culture. Thus, one of the most powerful characteristics of Brathwaite’s work is his own struggle with the problematic tension inherent in the temporality of translation owing to its location between the accumulative temporality of history, on one hand, and the performative temporality of poetics, on the other. A key consequence of the temporal tension inherent in his poetics is that it ultimately leads to the intrinsically modern “hurtful” anxiety expressed in the following explanatory note heading the footnotes to Brathwaite’s X/Self:
The poetry of X/Self is based on a culture that is personal—i-man/Caribbean—and multifarious, with the learning and education that this implies. Because Caribbean culture has been so cruelly neglected both by the Caribbean itself, and by the rest of the world (except for the spot/check and catch-ups via cricket and reggae), my references (my nommos and icons) may appear as mysterious, meaningless even, to both Caribbean and non-Caribbean readers. So the notes . . . which I hope are helpful, but which I provide with great reluctance, since the irony is that they may suggest the poetry is so obscure in itself that it has to be lighted up; is so lame, that is to have a crutch; and (most hurtful of all) that it is bookish, academic, “history.” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 113)
Brathwaite’s poetic voicing of the history of the West Indian voice tends to move toward the archival knowledge of historiography—requiring footnotes and historical contextualization as suggested in the excerpt just quoted—while, as an “inscription of the history of the people,” it is based on the “multifarious” and incommensurable realm of the “personal.” Therefore, the “hurtful” result of the temporality of translation at the core of Brathwaite’s overall project lies in the fact that the heuristic difference between history and poetics for the articulation of a nation language is ultimately lost within his work. As Bhabha claims, the hybrid space opened by the temporality of translation constitutes a negotiating discourse that ultimately manages to “destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects.” Although Brathwaite’s conception of his poetic practice as a groundation does produce its own history, its ambivalent temporality gradually collapses the epistemological difference—and thus the split—between the pedagogical temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. The end result of Brathwaite’s conception of nation language as a groundation of the sources of Caribbean experience is that as history of the West Indian voice it can continue to exist historically and poetically as a temporality solely grounded by Brathwaite himself.
The emergence of SycoraxVS in Brathwaite’s work after the sudden silencing of his voice during his “Time of Salt” implies a renewed attempt to rearticulate an ambivalent temporality between history and poetics for the development of a nation language for the Caribbean. The medium that channels—electronically now—the sources or the essential “image/spirit” of the Caribbean experience as SycoraxVS is not so much the “space/patterns” of nation language as voiced by Brathwaite himself, but rather as digitally translated by the language of computer code. Through SycoraxVS, Brathwaite’s voice ceases to be the medium that articulates the process of groundation, ultimately shifting the translating agency to the new medium articulated by programming code, which rather literally “illuminates” his voice. In this sense, SycoraxVS provides a new virtual temporality of translation that manages to avoid the kind of historical forgetting feared by the destruction of his “archives”—“after the accident after the death after the hurricane” (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.)—providing a digital form of memory in which, as suggested by Lévy, “information is virtually present at each point of the network when it is requested.”
However, Brathwaite’s insistence both in using SycoraxVS as exclusively channeled through his Mac SE/30 and in choosing the medium of traditional print as the only format for its publication denotes a particularly distinctive attempt to subject the virtual temporality of translation inherent in SycoraxVS to Brathwaite’s own historical positionality. Althouh the generation of Apple computers to which the Mac SE/30 belongs was cutting-edge technology in the late 1980s, by the late 1990s it had already become outdated and technologically obsolete, even requiring, as Chris Funkhouser notes, “emulation programs to be viewed—if it is even possible to load the media (usually a diskette) onto the machine” (Funkhouser, 21). Therefore, being able to view and experience SycoraxVS as originally produced by Brathwaite himself is not only a challenge for his publishers and readers, but a nearly impossible deed unless one has access to Brathwaite’s very own Mac SE/30.
Ultimately, the traditional print format in which Brathwaite has chosen to publish his digital poetry reinforces his authorial control over SycoraxVS as a syncretic signifier for Caribbean culture. At the same time, it emphasizes the potential of groundation of its original digital format as a form of visible writing through which Brathwaite has struggled intellectually as well as creatively to ground through his poetry the constantly splitting temporalities of history and poetics within the context of Caribbean culture. However, by radically subjecting SycoraxVS to his own authorial, editorial, and interpretive position, Brathwaite ends up historicizing the digital syncretic signifier that has transfigured and regenerated his work so effectively since the 1990s. As experienced by readers of Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS, the medium itself, in its available printed form, constitutes a mere visual record of its original digital form, in fact losing its intrinsic virtual temporality and deterritorialized mode of archival memory, something that could be avoided if published in various modes of digital media, such as the World Wide Web. More important, Brathwaite’s decision to de-digitize SycoraxVS by exclusively publishing his work in traditional print format has not only done away with the intrinsic virtuality and rootlessness of the digital medium but has also eliminated the productive positionality symbolically embodied in the computer’s cursor. It is precisely Brathwaite’s original recognition of this creative potential of the computer’s digital cursor as “prospero’s curser” (Ancestors, 449) for the vernacular rearticulation of Caribbean culture that is virtually lost in the published version of SycoraxVS. Through this loss, SycoraxVS essentially becomes Brathwaite’s particular version of the “distinctive kind of written discourse” that, as the literary theorist and historian Hayden White describes referring to history, mediates “a certain kind of relation to the past” (White, Figural Realism, 1).