Brathwaite explains his attempt to create a Genesis for the Caribbean islands, one for his own people.  All children who live near water take pebbles from the beach or shore and skip it along the water’s surface, a universal act common to all of human experience within that environment (?).  If God had created the Caribbean islands, that same chain of islands, that same curve, he would have done it by skitting a pebble along the water, and wherever the stone had skidded on the water, there an island would have sprung from the depths of the ocean. This was his conception, the narrative kernel at the center of his Genesis.  But as he points out, Keats and Wordsworth had not composed this work yet. So how to enflesh or incarnate this idea into a poem that would not buy into the European models of poetry relying on the tha-tum rhythm of the iambic pentameter, but something springing from the very soil and sky and blood of the Caribbean.  The most authentic and ancient resource lie in the folks songs of his people, that is the Calypso has the syncopation, the sound, the song that God’s skidding stone would have used to create those Caribbean islands.

Scribal culture’s equivalent on the page is read and said- sterile and lethargically:

The stone had skidded arced in to bloom into islands

Cuba and San Domingo

Jamaica and Puerto Rico

Grenada and Guadalupe – Bon Air

But inventing his own origin myth and singing it in Calypso, liberate Brathwaite to attain what “he is become” and frees him to become authentic to the total Caribbean experience, what Glissant calls free or natural poetics.

The word choice of become connotes a process or ongoing flux like the eternally moving waves of the Caribbean sea as it washes ashore, ever new, ever moving, ever becoming, something quite different from the static frozen conceptualized fragmented Parmenides’ being of the the European or British literary tradition.  Brathwaite’s effort here to establish a literary tradition true to the nature and culture of his geography and people is reminiscent of Emerson’s call in the 1830s for American poets to develop their own artistic identity independent of emulations of the European traditions.  Both poets characterize the English language as infinite in potential but imprisoning in practice, what Glissant refers to as forced or coerced poetics.

Language then is by its very nature political, even in the “useless”  realm of art or poetry, as it either participates in or breaks free from the use of force.  The poems in Middle Passage (besides the very title of the collection, that is) that most easily illustrate the political to me are “Letter Sycorax” and “The Stone”.  These (as do all good poems) require context: the first playing off the colonialism lurking within Shakespeare’s Tempest and the latter involving the stoning murder of fellow Caribbean poet Mikey Smith from Jamaica by rival political party members.