SOURCE: Gowda, H. H. Anniah. “Creation in the Poetic Development of Kamau Brathwaite.” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 691-96.

In the following essay, Gowda praises Brathwaite for creating a national language and for moving “from the margins of language and history, from the peripheral realm of ‘the other exiles,’ to the center of civilization, effecting a renaissance of oral poetry and remaking the poetic world.”

dry stony world-maker, word-breaker, creator … 

Edward Brathwaite, “Ananse”¹

There are not many historians who have distinguished themselves as poets and prose writers, who can recite poetry with rhythm and melody, not many who have endeavored to create “nation language” and make poetry truly native. Kamau Brathwaite, who has now become the Neustadt Prize laureate for 1994, has all these attributes and accomplishments, as well as the great honor of freeing poetry in English from the tyranny of dying of ossified main tradition. In his...