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Bocas Lit Fest to honour literary icon

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20200205215423
20200205
Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite

Bar­ba­di­an writer, schol­ar, and ed­i­tor Ka­mau Brath­waite, who passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 89, was a tow­er­ing fig­ure in Caribbean let­ters and cul­ture for half a cen­tu­ry. Dozens of con­tem­po­rary Caribbean writ­ers — of both po­et­ry and prose — ac­knowl­edge him as an in­flu­ence and a men­tor.

Just days be­fore he died, Brath­waite agreed to ac­cept the 2020 Bo­cas Hen­ry Swanzy Award for Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice to Caribbean Let­ters, pre­sent­ed an­nu­al­ly by T&T’s Bo­cas Lit Fest. The award pays trib­ute to Brath­waite’s land­mark work as a crit­ic — the au­thor of many sem­i­nal es­says on Caribbean lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture — lit­er­ary ac­tivist, and ed­i­tor, and was al­so in­tend­ed to ho­n­our him in the year of what would have been his nineti­eth birth­day.

“Al­though the Bo­cas Hen­ry Swanzy Award is not usu­al­ly giv­en posthu­mous­ly,” says Bo­cas Lit Fest founder and di­rec­tor Ma­ri­na Sa­landy-Brown, “as it was of­fered and ac­cept­ed by Pro­fes­sor Brath­waite short­ly be­fore he died, we will present the award as al­ready planned at a cer­e­mo­ny in Bar­ba­dos in March. It now seems even more sig­nif­i­cant to ho­n­our him, and in this time of mourn­ing it is a small con­so­la­tion to know that news of the award brought Pro­fes­sor Brath­waite plea­sure in his fi­nal days.”

Born on 11 May, 1930, Brath­waite stud­ied at Har­ri­son Col­lege in Bar­ba­dos be­fore win­ning a schol­ar­ship to read his­to­ry at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. Af­ter work­ing in Ghana and St. Lu­cia, he joined the his­to­ry de­part­ment at UWI Mona in 1963. Four years lat­er, he pub­lished his ground­break­ing book of po­ems Rights of Pas­sage (1967), which be­came the first vol­ume in the tril­o­gy lat­er col­lect­ed as The Ar­rivants: a for­mal­ly in­ven­tive and in­tel­lec­tu­al­ly provoca­tive ex­plo­ration of Caribbean his­to­ry and cul­ture and its an­ces­tral roots in Africa, rang­ing from po­et­ic lita­nies to ex­tend­ed pas­sages of “na­tion lan­guage,” from the com­ic to the trag­ic, in­flu­enced by folk mu­sic and jazz — “mak­ing with their rhythms some­thing torn and new,” as the tril­o­gy’s clos­ing lines pro­claim.

A pro­lif­ic po­et over the decades, Brath­waite de­vel­oped in the 1990s what he called his “Syco­rax video style” — “a use of com­put­er fontage to vi­su­alise his sense of dream and morph and rid­dim dra­ma,” as he de­scribed it. A re­bel­lion against the con­ven­tion of or­der­ly vers­es and stan­zas march­ing down the page, this aes­thet­ic fol­lowed Brath­waite’s con­vic­tion that “the hur­ri­cane does not roar in pen­tame­ters.”

Par­al­lel to his ca­reer as a po­et, Brath­waite al­so pub­lished a broad-rang­ing cor­pus of es­says on top­ics in Caribbean his­to­ry, cul­tur­al stud­ies, and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism. In the 1960s, he was one of the founders of the Caribbean Artists Move­ment, which brought to­geth­er dozens of Caribbean and Black British writ­ers, artists, crit­ics, mu­si­cians, and oth­ers. In 1970, he co-found­ed the ground­break­ing in­tel­lec­tu­al jour­nal Sava­cou, which fu­elled in­tense de­bates about the na­ture and pur­pose of Caribbean lit­er­a­ture.

The Bo­cas Hen­ry Swanzy Award will be pre­sent­ed to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Brath­waite fam­i­ly at the an­nu­al Ka­mau Brath­waite Lec­ture on March 5, host­ed by the Cul­tur­al Stud­ies Pro­gramme at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Cave Hill Cam­pus. Brath­waite and his lega­cy will al­so be cel­e­brat­ed at the tenth NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest, run­ning from May 1 to 3 in Port-of-Spain.


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