SOURCE: McWatt, Mark A. “Looking Back at The Arrivants.” In For the Geography of the Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Timothy J. Reiss, pp. 59-65. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2001.

In the following essay, the author looks back at The Arrivants, in which one can detect “subtle displacements and perturbations caused by the gravitational tug of the author's academic discipline.”

My first publication after arriving at Cave Hill as a very green Assistant Lecturer in the mid-70s was a review of Kamau Brathwaite's Mother Poem in Bim magazine. The first paragraph of that review was not lacking in effrontery:

As a whole the poem sustains the reader's interest and there is much in it that is effective, but by some reverse alchemical process the golden poetic voice of the earlier poems has been transformed into that of a baser metal. …

(137)

At that time...