This afternoon brings sad breaking news via Barbados Today of the passing of a legendary poet: Kamau Brathwaite, who died today just a few months short of his 90th birthday. In a 2011 Jacket2 review of Brathwaite's book Elleguas, Matthias Regan offers this succinct summation of the poet's life and work:
Those not acquainted with Brathwaite should know that he was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1930, won a scholarship to Cambridge University, served in the Ministry of Education in Ghana during the years that it won its independence from Great Britain in the late 1950s, and cofounded the Caribbean Artists Movement from London in 1966. His poetry includes two epic trilogies: The Arrivants (1973), which collects three books, Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands, about African-Caribbean rituals and their transmission through practices of daily life; and Ancestors (2001), which collects and “reinvents” three books: Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self, about the maternal, paternal, and newborn selves of island life. His histories of Caribbean culture include Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970), The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971), and History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). Together, these are among the most thoughtful and influential elements of the Afro-Caribbean Nationalism that flourished on both sides of what Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic” throughout the 1970s.
Edited by Jacob Edmond, PennSound's Kamau Brathwaite author page is home to a modest collection of recordings spanning four decades, starting with readings from Islands recorded in 1973 and an undated recording of Masks. Jumping forward to the 80s, there's a segmented reading at Philadelphia's Robin's Books on November 9, 1982, and a pair of recordings from the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh in February 1987. From the 90s, we have a recording of the poem "Angel/Engine" taken from the 1997 XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics Conference at the University of Minnesota (via Ken Sherwood), along with Chris Funkhouser's recording of a December 2000 reading at New York University that's been segmented into individual tracks. Brathwaite made two noteworthy appearances on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics radio program in 2004 and 2005, and our final recording is a forty-five minute Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club that's also been broken up into individual MP3s.
We offer our sincere condolences to Brathwaite's family and friends, along with his devoted readers throughout the world.
