MiddlePassages: Poetry

by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Eve Adamson (Introduction)

Middle Passages is an offshoot of the author's second trilogy, 'a splice of time & space', as he puts it, between his/father's world of Sun Poem and 'the magical irrealism' of X/Self. With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, Middle Passages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. And so Middle Passages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Edward Kamau Brathwaite is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

Brathwaite held a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and was a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum.

Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770 - 1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.

Reviews

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a real mixed bag of poetry. Some of it quite good, some of it beyond my ability too appreciate. Most of it is about the murderous treatment that black people have been subjected to over history and is delivered with anger and hatred. But some of the poem are tributes to black peoples contribution to music. The poems were fairly long and drifted into abstraction at times. I've taken parts of a couple of the poems that I liked as examples:

This first one is about Columbus titled Colombe.

"Columbus from his after-
deck watched heights he hoped for
rocks he dreamed. rise solid from my simple water

Parrots screamed. Soon he would touch
our land. his charted mind's desire
The blue sky blessed the morning with its fire

But did his vision
fashion as he watched the shore
the slaughter that his soldiers

furthered here? Pike
point & musket butt
hot splintered courage. bones

cracked with bullet shot
tipped black boot in my belly. the
whips uncurled desire?"

The next example is titled Duke.

"The old man's hands are alligator
skins
and swimming easily like these
along the harp stringed keyboard
where he will make
of
Solitude
a silver thing
as if great age like his
could play that tune along
these cracks that flow
between their swing
without a scratch of thistle
sound
& whistle down the rhythm all night long"

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some all-timers in here. Brathwaite masters sound, bringing rhythm beyond the bounds of meter, music within the bounds of language. Playful, empathetic, historically and politically conscious, unafraid to venture into the abstract, fearful of complacency, morphing verse line by line, his work just sings off the page. It's poetry as a physical, tangible force.

Some excerpts to sample:

From "Stone":

When the stone fall that morning out of the johncrow sky

i couldn't cry out because my mouth was full of beast & plunder
as if I was gnashing badwords among tombstones
as if that road up stony hill. round the bend by the church
yard . on the way to the post office . was a bad bad dream

& the dream was like a snarl of broken copper wire zig zagg.
ing its electric flashes up the hill & splitt. ing spark & flow
ers high. er up the hill . past the white houses & the ogogs bark.
ing all teeth & fur. nace & my mother like she up . like she up.

like she up. side down up a tree like she was scream.
like she was scream. like she was scream. in no & no.
body i could hear could hear a word i say. in .even though
there were so many poems left & the tape was switched on &

runn. in & runn. in &
the green light was red & they was stannin up there &
evva. where in london & amsterdam & at unesco in paris &
in west berlin & clapp. in & clapp. in & clapp. in &

not a soul on stony hill to even say amen

From "Colombe":

But did his vision
fashion as he watched the shore
the slaughter that his soldiers
furthered here? Pike
point & musket butt
hot splintered courage. bones

cracked with bullet shot
tipped black boot in my belly. the
whips uncurled desire?

[Christian Gurdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of poems, especially the poetic tributes to Rodney and Mikey Smith. Brathwaite adopts his sycorax style in the poems, which playfully upend the conventions of Western poetry, and find a new + distinctly Caribbean sound. It would be 5/5 but certain poems fell slightly flatter than others.

[J.A.]

A rhythmic, entrancing, inciting set of poems. Meaty and meaningful and come out with their fists swinging.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and pleasent. I was particularly intrigued by the way the narraror talked.

[Matthew DeCostanza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as Allen Ginsberg is the child of Whitman and Blake, so Brathewaite is the child of Cummings and Achebe.

I appreciate the Cummings-like grammatical liberties, and Brathewaite has written some rather genius lines ("You're nothing. You came from nobody. Third class servant class got-no-class underclass"), but I, having read so much American poetry, can only read about the jazz greats and civil rights and Mother Africa so many times before I get bored. Sorry.

[Gwyneth Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of poetry shows the author's thoughts on social matters in the West Indies from the 1960s to 1980s. The material is sometimes personal, but many times it is an overview of the prevailing conditions in the countries, especially in Jamaica.

[Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

father of dub poetry

[katieㅤ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredible

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ick. Not simply tedious, but actually an active irritant.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars