Born to Slow Horses

Review: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Born to Slow Horses, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 2005, pp. 143, $ 22.95 The 2nd June 2006 Kamau Brathwaite was awarded with the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize, a Canadian prize which joined into a long list of international recognitions to him as a Caribbean poet. With this twenty-second collection, Born to Slow Horses, Brathwaite like Derek Walcott, the other Telamon in the temple of Caribbean contemporary poetry, uses his poems to place the peculiarities of the region before international readers. Brathwaite, who was born in 1930 in Barbados, moved from Bridgetown to study in England, first at Cambridge, then at Sussex. He had worked for seven years in Ghana at the Ministry of Education and then returned to the Caribbean in 1962, first to St. Lucia, then to Jamaica. He is now Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. His output as an essayist and poet reflects the geography of his movements, as much as the cultures from which he feels like he was born to: the African and the Caribbean. Brathwaite has never felt bound to exclusively European literary forms, instead he searched for new ways to communicate - at a formal level mostly - for those voices which he thought had been silenced by history. That is why his poetry becomes giocai, because it fingers the open wound of 9/1 1 and at the same time it ranges between the sea and the urban landscapes which he knows well, unifying worlds so much different one from the other: Barbados is menaced by the expanding concrete, while New York has been envisioned as the pearl of an island crown since he moved there in 1990. Colonial history and contacts with Europeans are in the background of his poetry, embedding the image of the horses in a historic and biological frame of rearrangement. The horses, proceeding from North America but extinct, were reintroduced by the Europeans and used as a means to defeat the natives. The contacts between such different civilizations which Brathwaite's style weaves together matches the syncopated gait of a galloping wild horse. Where his Sycorax Video Style assembles various fonts of different sizes, leaving the track of a restless race, on the page at times slow and repetitive - like the monotonous chant of an African story - at other times tough and marked - swift in the successive lines, disrespectful of prosodie norms. It is not by chance that a contribution to the original layout of the book is in one of the last pages, in which Brathwaite introduces an autobiographic panel and an explanation of his poetic production, putting Born to Slow Horses into a fourth phase of his poetry, after the Time of Salt in his life. This period, between 1986 and 1990, was marked by the lasting blows like his wife Doris's (whom he used to call Zea Mexican remembering her Amerindian origins) death due to cancer in 1986, the hurricane which destroyed his house and his library in Kingston in 1988 and being threatened with a gun during a robbery in his own house in 1990. These experiences are told in The Zea Mexican Diary (1993), Shar/Hurricane Poem (1990) and Trench Town Rock (1999), a trilogy which further developed his Sycorax Video Style. In Born to Slow Horses Brathwaite's voice is the vernacular one of the post-Salt period of Words Need Love Too (2000) or Ark (2004), the nation language that he raises as a real bulwark of national identity. Both for the African dialect frame and for a new use of punctuation and orthography, and also for the neological creativity of the poet, this language may appear obscure to European readers, forcing to a re-reading of his lines. Each of the seven parts which compose the book contains three medium-length poems, or just a longer one. From the index or from the contents page the local contextualization of titles sticks out: the indigenous name Guanahani, which was given by the natives to the first island discovered by Columbus, the African one of Kumina, the Jamaican syncretic religion and the African- like one of Namsetoura. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.