SOURCE: Gikandi, Simon. “E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of the Voice: The Allegory of History in ‘Rights of Passage.’” Callaloo 14, no. 3 (summer 1991): 727-36.

In the following essay, the author examines “Rights of Passage” as an example of a poem “in which oral languages take revenge against institutionalized poetic forms.”

At the beginning was the shout—the beginning is, for us, the time when Creole was created as a means of communication between the master and his slaves. It was then that the peculiar syntax of the shout took hold. To the Antillean the word is first and foremost a sound. Noise is a speech. Din is a discourse.

Edouard Glissant, “Free and Forced Poetics”

Like many other poets in the Caribbean, Edward K. Brathwaite began his writing career under the anxiety of cultural identity and a crisis of writing. He was brought up in a colonial tradition...