318
PARTISAN REVIEW
where cleopat unmummied peachskin coloured chick
floating to harvest in her berth of hippo milk
loves antony her sallow liver of the olive groves
the widowed nipples of her breasts pout north to slavery
X/Self
is notable for impressive conceptual as well as rhetorical
power.
In
the new trilogy, the first two volumes gradually set up a
vast mythic framework, inhabited by characters who have in effect
both human and geologic (or astronomical) aspects . Thus
Mother
Poem
(1977)
focuses on women, beginning with the mother who is at
the same time the poet's native island of Barbados, set apart in the
mothering sea.
In
contrast,
Sun Poem
(1982)
elaborates upon the lin–
ear career of the father, symbolized variously as the trajectory of the
Sun from dawn to dark, the sequential colors of the rainbow , and an
African spirit (a
loa)
swept from home to be cast up on the island's
Atlantic shore.
The setting of
Mother Poem
and
Sun Poem
is Caribbean , but
X/Self
stages a kind of Hannibal/Caliban coup. Where his first tril–
ogy
(The Arrivants,
1967-69)
investigated the realities under our in–
grained myths of Africa as the "dark continent," the jungle,
X/Self
proposes that we consider Europe mythically, under the figure of the
"Alph"; that we take Mont Blanc as the center and central image of
Europe, its holy mountain. Mont Blanc's counterpart or counter-–
weight is Mount Kilimanjaro, the African hub of histories , the spirit
behind the kraal and the village compound, as the Alp stands behind
Rome.
X/ Self
is most concerned with the European element in this
scheme, with empire and responses to it; but the poem is no glib at–
tack on "the West," as is apparent in the lines that serve as a refrain
throughout :
rome burns
and our slavery begins .
In
Brathwaite's myth, Rome presents an equilibrium of sure values .
Its decline brings fragmentation and imbalance. Europe's response
to its own disequilibrium is expansion, and an ethos of depredation
replaces Rome's universal encircling organization . Behind these
changes is a mysterious force that originates midway between the
two "domes" in the bowl of the Sahara, an unpredictable dynamism
in the form of the dry harmattan wind that sweeps out over Africa
;
f
