SOURCE: Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean Word.” In Caribbean Poetics: Towards an Aesthetic of West Indian Culture, pp. 93-122. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, examples of the Caribbean language, religion, and culture are teased out of Brathwaite's poems, leading to the conclusion that “Brathwaite insists on a theory of language, culture, and on a philosophy of history that have strong political implications insofar as they aim to liberate the Caribbean mind from the throes of a colonial heritage.”

… isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?

Jamaica Kincaid (1989: 31)

Few oeuvres stress Caribbean literature's deep concern with language as sharply as that of the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite. A poet, historian, fiction writer, and critic, Brathwaite became known in the archipelago starting in the early 1950s...