words by Mónica Fernández Jiménez
In postcolonial lands, there is a strange and delicate balance between literary theory and literary production, a battlefield as fraught as the relationship between nationalism and literature. Before Postmodernism, one might have claimed that literature comes first, and that the literary historian simply recorded what they saw. Today, we are not so naive as to believe intellectual production does not influence the words of authors. Is the nationalist agenda, especially in once-colonised countries, a prescriptivist hindrance to authentic production or a mobilising creative force?
Writing at the intersection between theory and literature, Barbadian bard par excellence Edward Kamau Brathwaite seemed to have all the answers. Throughout his lifetime, he sought the so-called ‘Nation Language’, a form of Caribbean literature free from the conventions of colonisers and accurately reflective of the rhythms and psyche of the creolised Caribbean. Its essence is captured in Brathwaite’s famous description of a woman sweeping her yard: the ground on which the house stands is sand, making the act of sweeping redundant; thus, her action is “like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another”¹.
Brathwaite’s sweeping woman exemplifies a common notion among Caribbean scholars, that Antilleans do things ‘in a certain kind of way’². To understand where their thinking comes from, some context about creolisation is relevant. This is an anthropological concept that explains the cultural features that emerged from colonisation and slavery in the Caribbean and the South of the United States. It is specific to the violence of slavery and the Middle Passage, which erased the cultures of enslaved people while imposing another worldview in which, paradoxically, they were never allowed to integrate. Unlike previous theories of hybridity (and mestizaje in Mexico and the Borderlands), creolisation does not believe in the blending of two cultures into one, with equal features composing it. Instead, it implies that all those cultures that were eroded and destroyed through violence kept reappearing in the form of 'explosions' through elements such as dance, music, the rhythm of poetry, and small actions such as a woman sweeping her front entry.
But coming back to the search for a Nation Language, Brathwaite pursued this quest using diverse—and perhaps opposing—forms of expression, ranging from rhythmic lyric poetry to theory on literary history. His most famous text on this culturally nationalist mission, History of the Voice, criticises the poetry of early twentieth-century Jamaican author and Harlem Renaissance writer, Claude McKay, for his use of the sonnet. Brathwaite argues that, though McKay’s poems are good, they do not reflect his voice, contending that the iambic pentameter is not an appropriate rhythm to portray the dialect of Jamaica and, more broadly, the Caribbean, McKay showing trouble to recite his own poem during a recording. Significantly, the alternative that Brathwaite provides as an example of a piece that accurately captures the Nation Language is a calypso poem of his own writing.
I am aware that this remark might sound like mockery, but nothing could be further from the truth. Brathwaite’s intention to both theorise and write is not uncommon in cultures struggling for political legitimacy. Art and literature are an essential element in fights for independence. In a compelling study on literature and nationalism, scholar Leah Rosenberg explains that Caribbean literature only came to be distinct from the conventions of the colonisers once it was pushed by movements for political rights³. This grandiloquent statement, however, can become a Trojan Horse if interpreted as a way of saying that postcolonial cultures are incomplete, so devoid of personal forms of expression that they had to be commissioned for a bigger cause. While this statement can easily be debunked by remembering that one of the landmarks of World Literature, the Aeneid, was commissioned by Emperor Augustus to legitimise his divine lineage, one must be wary of the idea of incompleteness in the Caribbean, as it goes way back. In the nineteenth century, one of those infamous colonial texts seeking to justify inhumane atrocities portrayed Caribbeans as “no people [...] in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own”⁴.
But, of course, Brathwaite does not claim to have invented the calypso; that is his whole point. He claims that calypso music has always existed in the Caribbean and refers to it as “an ancient form”⁵. Furthermore, the poet and critic is not prescribing the use of the calypso as a template for Caribbean poetry; he claims that the movement towards it is natural because it allows a certain movement of the tongue adept at Caribbean dialects and ways of speaking. And while referring to the calypso, in its current form, as ‘ancient’ is a bit of an overstatement, the point here are those explosions mentioned above; not the roots but what lies beyond them. Emerging from the plantation and originally sung in French Creole, the calypso (the term deriving from the West African word kaiso) is a volcano expelling from its core fragments of the African cultures to which the Caribbean is heir, as well as the European and Asian elements incorporated by creolisation, into a new but ancient worldview.
Although calypso originated in Trinidad and Tobago, not in Brathwaite's native Barbados, out of all musical forms, the poet chooses it as the Nation Language. The reason lies, perhaps, in its central position in the carnival festivities. Carnivals are one of the clearest manifestations of creolisation in the Caribbean, a sign, if you will, that creolisation exists. Though introduced by Europeans in the eighteenth century, this street festival, conceived to subvert the status quo for a day, quickly incorporated elements from all the cultures that once appeared on the islands, to the extent that today no one questions the hegemonic presence of a Chinese horn in the Cuban carnival. Cultural critic Antonio Benítez-Rojo refers to the festival as containing “all the sign systems”⁶, including language but not limited to it: dance, music, and body movements… And so, all that was buried in the bloody history of the Caribbean emerges effortlessly, leaving a trace of all that was thought forgotten, and reminding us that history is not linear but archipelagic: centuries old elements can explosively reappear in a song.
Brathwaite’s whole text is not really a prescription on how to write if you are Caribbean; it is a celebration of the different references and the rich culture that exists within these islands. His focus on the calypso highlights that violence was once a written word; that while languages can be forbidden and manuscripts burnt, the rhythm existing within one’s soul cannot be erased. Brathwaite is far from a prescriptivist: listen within, he seems to indicate, rather than follow written indications. That is a nation, not its borders.
