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Two mainstream Caribbean poets

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Caribbean Literature is a distinct body of narratives from the Caribbean islands, written by people who have descended from slaves and slave traditions.
Caribbean literature, like African-American literature, is a literature that reflects on the former slaves or their descendants as they seek to find a place in a territory where they first arrived as slaves from Africa.
Caribbean and African-American literature are important to serious readers of African literature, especially those who seek a broad understanding of the condition of black people in Africa and those outside Africa.

The Caribbean islands were first called the East Indies by Christopher Columbus, erroneously thinking that by sailing westwards, he had arrived in the famed Spice Islands in the Far East. In due course, these islands were rightfully renamed the West Indies.
As historian Eric Williams outlines in his seminal works, the Caribbean, like the mainland USA, were part of a territory where slaves from Africa were shipped and made to slave on plantations for generations. Because of the hot and wet conditions and very rich soils, banana and sugar plantations were opened up. This is why the islands are often called the plantation islands.

The Caribbean islands are also called “the archipelago,” a geographical term referring to a portion of the sea studded by islands. The more popular of these islands are Trinidad, Martinique, Tobago, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas.
They are in the vast blue Atlantic Ocean, only miles away from the USA coast and South American countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Hondurus and others.

The Caribbean region is also called the melting pot because people of many origins have co-existed there for centuries. They have intermarried and this has threatened the existence of clear-cut identities.
There are Caribbeans who are the indigenous people of the whole American continent sometimes called the Red Indians. They were the first to be enslaved. We have the African descendants in the Caribbean. They made the bulk of slave labour and still remain the majority in the Caribbean. Then we have some Europeans descending from the notorious slave masters, the settlers and colonial plantation owners. There are Indians and Chinese who came from the Far East as indentured labour, especially at the demise of slavery.

The Caribbean territory has gone through numerous experiences including slavery, settlerism, colonialism, and neo colonialism. In this territory, a proper sense of nationhood is weak. Each island tends to be too small to stand alone. They speak different languages like English, French, Spanish and others. They look to Europe or America for leadership. Sometimes they look to Africa for identity and cultural inspiration.
No wonder the major themes in Caribbean literature tend to be slavery, belonging, maroon, alienation, moving to Africa or to America or to Europe.
The Caribbean territory has produced poets of note, amongst them Aime Cesaire, Claude Mackay and George Campbell. The most prominent Caribbean writers have become classical and amongst them are the two poets Edward Brathwaite and Dereck Walcott. Their poetry is a window into Caribbean society and its complex nature.

Edward Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930. He was well travelled, in the process, developing a deep passion for the Caribbean and Africa. He is outstanding for openly demonstrating through his poetry and thought that Africa is the home of the black Caribbean. He even adopted a middle name, Kamau, which is Kenyan.
Brathwaite is also outstanding for realising that while Africa is the original home, the Caribbean must realise that the islands are their Africa and the smallness of the islands should not be a problem. In his poetry, he generally seeks to develop deep roots in the islands which he finds as spiritually satisfying as Africa. He is therefore concerned with group culture and history and not individual perspectives.

In his poem called “Islands,” Brathwaite suggests that if one is in a hurry, one could think that the Caribbean islands are insignificant remnants of slavery and a place of doom. However, if one were serious, the islands are actually jewels of hope that is aided by the shimmering corals of the beaches on the vast Atlantic. The islands and the people capture the vast slave territory. There is need for the Caribbean to act and think positively so that the rigours of slavery could be put behind. The persona is not escaping but engaging positively with history, the land, rocks and the sea around him:

“…but my people
know
that the hot
day will be over
soon
that the star
that dies
the flamboyant car
cass that rots
in the road
in the gutter
will rise
rise
rise in the butter
flies of a new
and another
morning…”

The poem called “Pebbles” is probably the most compact and idiomatic of all the poems of Brathwaite. It talks about Barbados being a pebble, seemingly useless and small but very resilient and enduring. Barbados is also as unconquerable as the back of a duck that is famed in folklore to be the duck’s most important part.

In the poem called “Prelude” which is a result of Brathwaite’s travel to Ghana and how he felt overwhelmed by his own blackness. The persona gives credit to the greatness of black people through the great empires of old Africa. The persona performs the ritual of libation which involves talking to ancestors through sacrifice of the blood of a fowl. It dramatises the African belief in imploring the ancestors for rain, good harvest and good fortunes:

“Nana frimpong
take the blood of the fowl
drink take the eto,
mashed plantain,
that my women have cooked
eat
and be happy
drink may you rest
for the year has come
around again…”

Brathwaite believes that for the black Caribbean, the question of identity has been answered in that they have readymade traditions in Africa and are not a lost people. The poet believes that Africa is mother to the islands and is part of the folklore that says if a slave dies, he goes back across the water to Africa where his place is already prepared by the fireside.

‘The cabin,’ is a poem that takes you back to the dilapidated slave cabin in the former slave quarters where Tom, the archetypal slave lived. There is acceptance that slavery is over. Brathwaite suggests the idea that the former slaves must hug their history and use it as a vehicle for solace in moving ahead as a people. Unlike Naipaul and Walcott, Brathwaite thinks that the Caribbean have a historical identity and must not be confused:
In his poetry the central issue is the collectivity of the Caribbean people.

On the other hand, Derek Walcott was born on the tiny French and English speaking Caribbean island of St Lucia in 1930. He is of mixed African, English and Dutch blood. His poetry is characterised by lavish metaphor, luxurious sound and rhythm. There are also influences from Homer, Dante, Dylan Thomas, Auden and others.

There is also the sophistication of language and density of meaning. The Walcott persona tends to be aware of himself as an individual. Walcott’s poetry is usually meditative and is imagined from the point of view of a loner taking a strawl. For Walcott poetry the sea, the beach and the sky are paramount. His poetry has the heavy presence of sea-side imagery.
In a 1976 article called “The muse of history” that got republished in 1998 as

“what the twilight says,” Walcott gives what is considered as his answer to the Caribbean question. He writes: “I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper “history,” for if I try to forgive you both I am into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expatiates and explains…”

Walcott believes that the Caribbean should just let go in order to start on a fresh page. He declared hostility to the culture of African Caribbean literature of dwelling on suffering. He accused Brathwaite of being absorbed in self pity, rage and masochistic recollections. He blasts the Caribbean poets in general for nurturing “the scars of rusted chains” and for revering “the festering roses from their fathers’ menacles.”

For Walcott, the Caribbean poet is liberated from history and becomes poet par excellence. Walcott calls for a celebration of the Adamic potential of the Caribbean region which he calls “the new world.”
In his poetry, especially in the piece called “Crusoe’s islands” and “Crusoe’s journal,” Adam is used as a figure of the poet, naming his world as Adam named paradise. He portrays the islands as Eden:

“Upon this rock the bearded hermit built
His Eden:
Goats, corn-crop, fort, parasol, garden,
Bible for Sabbath, all the joys
But one
Which sent him howling for a human voice.
Exiled by a flaming sun…”

Walcott is also fascinated by thoughts of the first men to visit the islands. These are explorers like Walter Raleigh, Christopher Columbus and James Cook and also rebellious slaves like Toussaint and Henry Christophe who liberated their islands.

Finally there is the image of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ from a 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe. Crusoe is an archetype, the man marooned on a desert island after a shipwreck. Crusoe is a castaway who must learn to know the island upon which chance and history have thrown him upon. It is Crusoe’s loneliness, his exclusion which forces discovery upon him.

This is well explored in the poem called, “Crusoe’s journal”, where Crusoe the hermit makes new tools, teaches Christianity to Friday the savage cannibal. A new culture and technology have been fashioned out. There should not be exile on such new territory:
“For the hermitic skill…

we learn to shape from them where nothing was
the language of race,
And since the intellect demands its mask
that sun cracked, bearded face
provides us with a wish to dramatise
ourselves at nature’s cost…
God’s loneliness moves in His smallest creatures…”

In the poem called “Crusoe’s New island,” the Caribbean needs not escape the loneliness. It is through a new language, not physical departure, as in Naipaul’s ‘Miguel Street,’ that the Caribbean should use to reach out to humanity. The poet in that poem derives his inspiration, like all historic hermits, from his loneliness which he calls the paradiscal calm. He is both a craftsman and a castaway.

In some of these poems, the Walcott persona reflects directly on the issue of the identity of the Caribbean people. In the poem called “The schooner Flight,” Shabime, a Walcott persona says he is just a simple nigger who loves the sea, who received colonial education, who has Dutch, nigger and English blood and that makes him either a nobody or a whole nation. He suffers from cultural schizophrenia:
“I’m just a red nigger who loves the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”

In the poem called “Verandah,” Walcott comes closest to his thoughts about his mixed identity. His persona thinks loudly about his mixed heritage. He thinks that he sees his great traveller and colonialist English ancestors float to him ghost like on the verandah. He entertains them by remembering their exploits. He does not regret the white man’s rape of poor black women and that people like him (Walcott) could have wallowed in slavery.
Walcott is liberal and non-committal where Brathwaite is anxious to find roots that go deep. Both of them represent two different classical ways of how the Caribbean feels about their place in the world.

Memory Chirere

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Insight

Shining Like Stars: Part One

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Last week, in a piece titled “Hope Springs Eternal”, I wrote about the relative values of (leftist) political commitment and Christian faith in a world that is beset with violence, poverty and oppression. Now I’m offering a review of a book by Lindsay Brown titled Shining Like Stars: The power of the gospel in the world’s universities, which explores the work of evangelical students in propagating the Christian faith in some of the world’s most dangerous countries, such as Columbia, China, Russia, Sudan and the DRC. Countries where despair seems to be a pretty rational response to the lives that huge numbers of people are forced to lead. I shall concentrate on cases where that effort to spread the Christian faith is allied to a commitment to agitate for better political and social conditions.

As an aside, I begin by quoting Will Shoki, editor of the invaluable online opinion journal Africa is a Country. I know I’ve mentioned him at least once in previous weeks, but that is because they are so good. In a piece Shoki wrote for the edition of March 4th this year, he records the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s reference to “the courage of hopelessness”, whereby “it is only when we despair and don’t know anymore what to do that change can be enacted.” Shoki adds: “I have never been quite sure what this means — in fact, I have never been quite sure what Zizek means about anything.” Which is to say, Zizek is a pretty difficult read, but his work is a nut it’s well worth cracking.

Be that as it may. Let us turn again to the question how, in a harsh world largely run by greedy, selfish, murderous brutes, a dedication to the message of the gospels and a commitment to political and social transformation can be a joint life-saver.

Lindsay Brown, the author of the book I’m reviewing, was for many years General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). Towards the end of his book there is an Appendix in which he lists around 150 student organisations worldwide that are affiliated to IFES. Many countries where IFES-allied groups have a strong presence are only nominally Christian, many others (for example, China and the Gulf States) are hostile to the gospel. In Lesotho — where neither of these impediments holds — the relevant body is called the Scripture Union of Lesotho, Tertiary Ministry (SULTM); as Brown’s book doesn’t touch on Lesotho, I’d be very interested to hear from my readers about the activities of SULTM.

The first chapter of Shining Like Stars is titled “Never Underestimate What Students Can Do.” This begins by recounting the story of Daniel and his three fellow captives in Babylon under the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, the story that ends with three of the young Jews being saved by their faith when they are cast into the burning fiery furnace. Then there are reminders of the long history of evangelism in western Europe, followed by the observation: “world mission is less and less about westerners going elsewhere to serve Christ, but about believers from everywhere going everywhere . . . for example, during the twenty years of civil war in Chad its displaced students, sent by the government to study in other countries, founded IFES movements in Niger, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Burkina Faso.”

One of the first of many testimonies the book contains is, however, from a female British student of Russian, identified simply as Elizabeth, who travelled as an evangelist to one of the -stan countries, former Soviet republics of Central Asia (which of the former -stans this was isn’t specified). It was a perilous but highly successful mission. Elizabeth records: “My birthday was fun. I had five cakes and three parties. They really know how to make cakes here!” Not much peril involved in that, you might say. But then Lindsay Brown notes that many sensitive words in Elizabeth’s testimony have the letter “x” inserted in them and explains that this was to escape electronic surveillance.

And so it seems being an IFES evangelist can be a bit like being James Bond, except more graceful. The second chapter in Brown’s book is titled “Our Sovereign God and Human Courage” and that’s where I’ll pick up the story next week, as well as detailing the activities IFES evangelists organize to attract students to the gospel. And then — after all, the chief focus of this piece — how they strategise evangelical work in relation to the advocacy of political and social transformation.

To be concluded

Chris Dunton

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Insight

Hope springs eternal

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Given the abysmal state of the world today, what is it that keeps one going? I mean, just look at the mess we’re in. The cowardice of world leaders faced with the challenge of climate change —world leaders most of whom are, of course, in thrall to capitalism (for when it comes to our mismanagement, that’s what really rules the roost). The appalling violence in Ukraine and the Middle East. The apparently endless misgovernance of countries as diverse as Lesotho and Nigeria. How does one not give into despair?

Me, I have an interim resource and a vastly more profound one. The former is my commitment to left-wing socialism, a conviction that life on earth can be vastly improved by following the principles of Marxist-Leninism (not — an important qualification — the corrupt form of those principles that moulded dictatorships such as the Soviet Union). The second resource is faith in the message of the Gospels, the embracing of our Lord Jesus Christ. For with this, the ills of the world pale into insignificance. Which is not — I absolutely insist — to refuse the responsibility of political commitment to ease the suffering of millions on earth, a duty we have while we’re still stuck on the bloody place.

Of those two resources, one allows a limited, constrained kind of hope, the other a hope that is boundless.

To expand on the notion of hope, recently in these pages Bishop David Ramela quoted the great Czech author and political leader Vaclav Havel, who became President of his country after resisting Soviet oppression in acts of dissidence for which he was imprisoned. Havel, as quoted by Bishop Ramela, wrote: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart . . . I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.”

Hope as distinct from optimism? Well, a couple of references here. First, the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (like Havel, imprisoned for his beliefs, in his case by Mussolini’s Fascists) wrote of the need to maintain “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, any reasonably intelligent person knows that things are going to screw up, but must act as if this were not the case. And another Marxist, the British critical theorist Terry Eagleton (the mentor of your columnist, incidentally, when he was an undergraduate — and ever since) has written a fine book, Hope Without Optimism. I shan’t go into that here, but shall review it in this column in a few weeks’ time.

Turning to the relationship between political commitment and the Christian faith, the evangelist preacher Robert Sheehan once commented: “Many Christians put more weight on political programmes and economic packages than on the power of the gospel in the nation. Do you?” The answer, I would hope, is “no”, but “quite a lot of weight all the same.” And I’m going to sign off this week with a lengthy quotation from the New Testament—namely, Ephesians 2: 14-22—which has to do with the relationship, in the time of Paul’s evangelism, between Jews and Gentiles. It is a passage — to refer to my piece some weeks ago on the Gaza crisis — that one would like to read to the Hamas leaders in Palestine and to Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu before banging their heads together.

“For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordnances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace. And that he might reconcile them both to God in one body, through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place in God in the Spirit.”

Joining, harmony, hope.

Chris Dunton

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Insight

Reading and emotion

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What does a good piece of writing do? How does a piece of writing evoke emotions in you? Well, reading is a good art that can stimulate and sharpen our sensibilities. In this instalment we focus on the emotional journey triggered and enabled by good literature. While other books may educate us and sharpen our cognitive abilities, that is the abilities to think and solve problems, reading literature of fiction does more; it stirs our emotions and sharpens our affective capacities.

By affective capabilities, we refer to the abilities to feel and tune in to our emotions and sensibilities. Life, after all, is not only about heart facts and reason. Life is about feeling and experiencing and the ability to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. Reading literature is so liberating and humanistic! Reading art in all its many genres grounds us in the varieties of human experiences and engenders in us tolerance, understanding and empathy.


Stories have a way of taking us on journeys real and imagined which stories transform us from the inside. These stories allow us to visit far-flung places and meet new people and feel their environment. Art has a way of mending bridges because through stories we come to understand people who may seem different from us. And at times we may have felt hatred and dislike for them and their way of doing things. But through reading about them, we hear their stories. We experience that which they are experiencing. We begin to see them from the inside out, and we get to know what lies underneath their skin, so to speak. That’s why they say that we can only begin to make sense of the world once we have reduced the whole world to stories. Let’s write a small story together and ascertain how it would move us. Let’s go.


“He trudged on thinking how he would approach Mwandionesa. Her warm and coy smile flashed before his eye.


Slowly mustering up a morsel of self-belief, Themba trudged along the battered, winding road in the heart of a thicket of musasa trees in the Musirizwi enclaves in Chipinge, south-eastern Zimbabwe. Like a heavy burden, a gnawing sense of failure nibbled at his conscience and a sense of uselessness clung on the air with unrelenting defiance. The stain of failure, the feeling that his people and he were inconsequential had taken lodging in his entire being. That is why he found a sense of solace only from isolating himself in his flimsy cocoon of loneliness like the proverbial ostrich which buried its head in the sand. He would have an occasional home-brewed beer called chikeke and thereafter lock himself within the labyrinth and sordid visceral being.


A gaunt bird flew overhead and he heard its flapping feathers amidst the thickening doom and darkness. “Bird”, he retorted to its presence, “what would you do if you were ever crushed by the label of failure.” A soft, warm tear tricked down the rugged terrain of his face. “Makauyo went to Egoli and returned without a name to himself, Khuyumani, too, lies buried in the bowels of the soil with nothing to show” he said as if he were speaking to the bird.


As he touched the cold handle of the door to his heart clutching a small, whimpering puppy in a cardboard box, he could hear the breathing of Mwandionesa and her stabbing, moist eyes asking him without a word where he has been for the last three days. He stood for a moment which seemed like an eternity. With false bravado, he mustered a not-so-convincing, frail knock. Mwandionesa, heavy with child, slowly made for the door and slid it open. Themba did not know what to do. He loved her but he did not know how to express it, like a person bereft of a language. Mwandionesa rummaged her pots on the dying embers of a hearth and gave him respectfully a plate with sadza and a small portion of chicken. A tear escaped-one, two, and another! She broke down, a downpour of tears streaming down her lips. “Themba, ngendaa yei weidaro mwamuna wangu? Indaa yei ndiripe Dube? Indaa yei weiita mukuba wekunzerereka kungaitei imbudzi irikumakaba isina unousha?” (Themba, why do you treat me in a manner? Why do you behave as if you are a stray goat without a shepherd? If I have wronged you I am prepared to appease you”).


“Look at me, Themba,” she demanded as a visibly pregnant and swollen stomach bulged through her threadbare blouse. The puppy whimpered plaintively. With hesitation Themba went to where Mwandionesa stood. With his furrowed labour-weary hands he touched her waist and led her to their mat of reeds made of “umhlanga” as she was fond of referring to reeds. She did not protest. A glow, a faint glow burnt in her eyes as she eased comfortably on his lanky chest. She fumbled for his hand and shepherded it to the lower regions of her belly and said, “He was kicking all these days you were away.” Themba was engulfed in a flurry of emotions; guilt as well as pride. With deliberateness, Mwandionesa said, “this boy will be called Thando. Yes Thando. He will build this homestead and more should you feel that you don’t have a home.” Themba nodded in agreement.
Themba began to feel the warmth of her presence as her succulent breasts pressed against his lanky chest and slowly closed his eyes…”

What a gripping tapestry which evokes a lot of emotions! It’s a story that stirs a lot of emotions; from empathy, sadness and an inner glow in the heart at the end. As the story begins, we feel Temba’s struggles, fear and hopelessness. He seems to be carrying a huge emotional burden and a crushing sense of defeat. I hope you have also seen Temba’s bid to reassert his sense of being and purpose through his desire of caring for a puppy – we could actually feel it whimpering. And the new hope ignited at the end of the story and affirmations of hope and new beginnings! The birth of a child always brings with it new beginnings – hope springs eternal!
So here we are! Stories are so humanising. Learning to read art in all its genres evokes emotions in us. It sharpens our affective side and warms our hearts.

Vuso Mhlanga teaches at the University of Zimbabwe. For almost a decade and half he taught English language and Literature in English at high school. Send your comments and questions to: mhlangavuso85@gmail.com

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