BOOKS
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produced several other volumes of poetry, as well as a prodigious
series of articles in criticism and literary history, quite apart from his
career as a professional historian.
To an American observer, the two poets diverge from a com–
mon point of origin: one sets out from T. S. Eliot's taste, the other
from his practice. Walcott's early work emerges from the density of
Jacobean drama and the metaphysical poets. Brathwaite begins with
suites of poems and grows toward trilogies that pursue Eliot's in–
terest in complex rhythms of structure, in the
architectural
possibilities
(and problems) involved in making large poems of freestanding
lyrics. Even more importantly, he draws inspiration from an Eliot
almost forgotten here: the jazz poet, explorer of the whole gamut of
American voices and their rhythms, whose recordings inspired Ca–
ribbean poets to shape their own speech into poetry.
X/Self
explores what Brathwaite calls "Calibanisms"-Joycean
wordplay forged under the pressure of exile and colonialism, the
blue-notes of language, the black-and-blue notes of battered people.
It is a poem of things misheard, misspoken, twisted to advantage.
Elsewhere Brathwaite has said of his colonized creole figure, "He's
not supposed to get it right." But x/Self is no fool: there's Latin,
Chinese, Xhosa in this poem, along with several distinguishable
forms of English. His insight is (third-) worldly and his sharp creole
tongue can show "doom" in "dome," "fornicalia" in "california," and
more:
how will i know that that click of camera camel humped mo–
hammed
will not convert you from island to islam
tourist to perfect terrorist
This book is eclectic in more than its language. Here, for the
first time, Brathwaite explicitly associates his work with the "Magical
Realism" of Latin America. Medieval poems, pop tunes, and televi–
sion shows appear along with myths of Mesoamerica, Africa, and
even Asia. There are moments of impudent creole bricolage in the
manner of Ishmael Reed, as when in one poem Admirals Perry and
Columbus are conflated with Alfred Nobel (who gave us both dyna–
mite and the Prize) and a persistent videotape salesman. Yet the
same magic often achieves a phastasmagoric sweep:
there is a crack within the utter stone of ethiopia
watch where the mediterranean sea comes seeking through
