Many would agree that is fitting that Edward Kamau Brathwaite name his collection of poetry “Elleguas”- a mashup of the words “elegy” and “Elegua” (Yoruba God of crossroads). An elegy of Elegua – Brathwaite takes as a Greek artform and dedicates it to an African god. The namesake deity – whose full name is Èṣù-Ẹlẹ́gbára, is the silent protector of the house and the messenger for higher gods. It is customary to find a statue of him in the entrance in the homes of believers.
I begin with a hail to Elegua as that just happens to be one of the running inclusive crossroads that Brathwaite uses. Writing in English and intersecting with patois, Brathwaite uses references like these to channel small inward looks into the black consciousness – but not enough to let him lose agency. His references, frequent and unexplained are there for whoever can signal into them. Brathwaite’s work includes legwork – researching the minute shout-outs and details, getting closer to peeling back the layers of Brathwaite’s consciousness. In a way, that is authorative as we must educate yourselves line by line, but also speaks fathoms on how unknown and under researched the black aesthetic is. I argue Brathwaite writes within the black consciousness with the tools of the white Apollonian technology and fascinated with how blackness can build itself in a realm it isn’t invited to, Braithwaite takes the Apollonian to express an Africanist presences that is infinite and flush with information. Conjuring Bessie Smith and Harlem and an ancient African deity through the computer is just the beginning of a text flush with these references.
To fully flesh out my argument – we can see (albeit, weaker) examples of what Brathwaite is doing through the works of Frederick Douglass when he describes slave songs in Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass.

“ The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.” (Douglass 20)

Here Douglass laments that those who aren’t in the inclusive consciousness of slavery often pervert the meaning of the slave’s songs into the wrong meanings, because they do not understand the duality of the black aesthetic of inscription. This duality is the same doublespeak that Zora Neale Hurston lauds in Seven Characteristics of Negro Expression when she discusses black written and oral tradition to pair words together for more drama “Sitting chair”/ “pig hog”.
Brathwaite’s duality falls in line with the teachings of Hurston describing black inscription as double sided and deeply embedded with a black aesthetic consciousness that has been fostered through centuries of history. Ancient, silent, and yet transient, – black inscription like the god Èṣù-Ẹlẹ́gbára is a crossroad between inscribing one’s freedom and being enslaved by being inscribed upon.
One can see how Africanist diasporic inscription is embedded into Brathwaite’s doublespeak. For the poem “Duke”, it is plausible (and probably very true) that the poem is a hail to Duke Ellington. But in a very obscure argument, I would like to suggest that the poem could also reflect on Arthur “Duke” Reid, Jamaican reggae royalty in the 1950- 70s. Celebrated for perfectionism and dense musical arrangements, Duke Reid was known for The Trojan, his British sound system and transportation vessel for his music. Like Brathwaite typing on the computer, Duke Reid uses a British (colonialist) vessel for his Jamaican music. Reid was well known for creating rather long, instrumental songs for a ska artist – but with the same use of patois (“Botheration” and “Dub I Love”). Like Brathwaite’s ode to “alligator skin” – the transition between this artform is smooth and masterful. Note the other hint at double meaning – an alligator in West Indian culture is frightening but also filthy – able to move on land and in sea, they are perceived as tricksters in proverbs. Brathwaite and his “Duke” (Ellington or Reid) balance themselves between two kinds of consciousnesses and cultures in order to gain success. Brathwaite, especially, coding his black consciousness through with white capitalist apparatus. I think I like to believe that Brathwaite was also hailing Duke Reid for this reason. Both are using European, capitalist, mercantilist technology in order to pump forward a very Africanist and ancient voice.
An elegy – written in couplets – creates meaning by conjoining rhymes in a distich. So does the rhythm of Kamau Brathwaite’s (and all Caribbean) patois – creating the natural meter of the dialect. (Linguistically, patois is properly spoken in couplet beats “daDA – daDA”). The strength of coupling and double meaning is what makes this work timeless, as layer after layer can be exposed and reflected on itself – a mastering of the coupling that is key for the black aesthetic of writing.

Brathwaite writes “X/Self” with a hyper consciousness of language, medium, and genre. He plays with the Sycorax Video Style in order to reorganize constructs of the colonized and the colonizer, the teacher and the student, the Prospero and Caliban dialectical. These binaries are normally authoritative, contradictory roles which would create a limitation into the depth of which he could delve into the other. He seems to, between these two faces of the speaker in the poem, and “mamma” create a conversation that is cognizant of the fading border between computation and poetics in a tech-driven post-colonial framework. All of the binaries he tackles are based on a need appropriate poetic authorship: he needs Caliban to deconstruct the elitist sphere of technology, but he needs Prospero to have access to it; he needs Caliban in order to speak truthfully but he needs Prospero to speak the language of the computer. This is an ongoing conversation that goes on with himself throughout the poem, and in having this conversation Brathwaite shapes the text and molds the style into an Ars Poetica constructed of the Post-Colonial, Digital vernacular; it is a poem about the poetry of diasporic computation.

Contextualized as a letter to the speaker’s mamma, the diasporic element is established immediately, and the name- and placelessness of the speaker—replaced by an X in the title—highlight both a universality and rejection of oppression. “X” is referential to other inscriptive traditions: we saw in Faulkner that “X” was used to sign when one was illiterate, in the case of Malcom X it represents the rejection of colonial destruction and identification, it also evokes a mathematical equation or puzzle, or even a mark on a map (X marks the spot on a treasure hunt). As Leah pointed out, he plays with the pun of “writely” and “rightly” when he explains to his mom why he has named the poem in this way (84). This switching of words doesn’t simply emphasize the meta-commentary on poetry and inscription, but conversely complicates what “right” or “rightly” may mean. It evokes the sense that his position, writing the poem is morally right, it also evokes the sense that it is a write of a human nature have inscriptive control in this way when he sheds his identity; ironically for the letter “X” which, again, is a symbol of a lack of written literacy. All of which comes back into the context of his discussion of what it means as a diasporic subject to participate in elitist forms of art and technology whilst attempting to undermine their oppressive control over his body and inscription.

The genre of the poem as a letter also calls becomes a critique of genre and a commentary on diasporic technology and poetics. The letter as a genre within colonial and slave era writing as contraband, as one of the sole mediums of permitted writing, and as an often-disregarded medium within the literary canon due to its generally colloquial, practical, or otherwise non-literary purpose. He uses the letter as the framework for his poem and his venture into the diasporic territory of the white-male-dominated territory of the computer because it is a reminder of oppressed routes, and of the presumed illegitimacy of literary forms that are not traditionally canonized. Yet the computer and the letter, though at odds with each other—one modern, one ancient–become a unified object, and in that synthesis become poetry regardless of the words he writes to mamma. He compares this strange marriage of genres to numerous poets. First to Ovid, perhaps referencing a metamorphosis of inscriptive means, and a pinnacle of poetic accomplishment (80). Secondly, the adoption of the Prospero language, and therefore the creation of the Caliban/Prospero Dialectical references the work of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is an especially interesting subject for comparison since numerous literary voices throughout history—as early as Margaret Cavendish and as recent as Adrienne Rich—have commented on the pervasive genderlessness of Shakespeare’s writing, his balance between the feminine and masculine literary performance. The juxtaposition of the letter and the computer can be seen as a parallel feminine/masculine binary, and the colonized/colonizer (Caliban/Prospero) language that Brathwaite writes the poem in and about is mediated with similar aplomb by the speaker.

The poem then becomes much larger than a letter to his mamma or an experiment with new technology. It is equal parts a post-colonial critique and an examination of poetry itself within the no-mans land of the genre Brathwaite has created for himself as the context of the poem. His examination of poetry within the poem is unanswered; it is itself and open ended question from mamma, and no solid answers, only comparisons and mediations in language in form. Appropriately, the more existential nature of this Ars Poetica is finished with  a question in the void of Sycorax, “why is dat?” and “what it mean?” (87). The questions no poet – let alone the poets navigating every binary of their identity and space – could answer.

Brathwaite’s “X/Self” and “Elegguas” is undoubtedly a study in inscription and the body. As we discussed in class previously, there seems to be a binding between the physical, corporal form and the ability to write. We have seen this numerous times in both Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois’s work, and to see it recreated and evolved in Brathwaite’s poetry is a testament to the permanent effects of colonization and enslavement as well as the condition of black authorship. When Brathwaite speaks of his ability to write, to forge his own narrative, it is inherently tied to and reduced down to a function of the corporal body, of finally being able to possess and inhabit a physical form. He writes, “like i is a some/is a some/ is a some body/ a x pert or some thing like moses or aaron or one a dem dyaam isra lite” (87). While the breaks are certainly not as clear here in citations as they are in the poem, the physicality of writing and the autonomy of penmanship cannot be disputed.

The ability to create, to reproduce, to write upon the face of something and leave a mark is thus seemingly the definition of being “somebody.” Brathwaite’s fascinating play with re-appropriation, re-colonization, and reproduction becomes complicated and I would argue, even stronger by his inclusion of his (the narrator’s?) mother. The mother of the first person, perhaps, is her role, and yet she is not robbed of a voice. The author begins his letter by wondering at the writing technologies available to him, however, he returns to ancient writing methods, to religiosity, and gospel, before he finishes his letter to his mother. Why this return to the ancient? Is this an attempt to bridge a gap in generation, in understanding, in knowledge?

Though the character of “mam” and “mamma”is the omnipresent spectator, the reader rather than the author himself, her role in his creation (in inscribing upon him not with language of Prospero but that of Caliban perhaps). Brathwaite also makes his mother’s capacity for inscription and writing just as clear, when he describes his computer like “dat ole remmington yu have pun top de war. drobe up there ketchin duss” (81). This particular section is incredibly fascinating as the nature of the “remmington” remains obscured. Through my research, I found that not only was there a Remington typewriter, but also that a Remington is type of firearm/gun that has been around for over two centuries. Which does Brathwaite mean his mother to carry? Is the gun implied by its constant position above the “war. drobe”? How then, does Brathwaite read and imagine the role of writing, especially in relation to his mother?

The capacity for violence, for war, in writing is not only incapsulated by the previous quote, but also in Brathwaite’s return to religiosity. Brathwaite incorporates the impermanence of writing technologies, of the illusion of immortality that stems from “chipp/in dis poem onta dis tablet chiss/ellin darkness writin in light” (87). Yet, he does so by speaking to characters and figures from a religious canon that would be easily recognized by most. How then, did their writings gain permanence when Brathwaite’s writings can be lost and deleted from a computer and Ralph Ellison’s greatest work can be burned? It is the violence in the inscription that grants it its timelessness; to write on a people, to carve into flesh (and cultures and lands and resources and economies and nations and families) and bodies is to scar. Colonization walks hand-in-hand with conversion, and the return to these figures is an echo of the hidden violence in this poem, close enough to peek at but still tucked away on shelf, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

By inscribing upon a people, upon Brathwaite, and upon “mam” there creates an odd vacuum in which neither the language of Prospero nor Caliban are truly theirs. It is thus no wonder that Brahtwaite ends the poem with questions (be it from mam or the narrator himself), wondering aloud, “why is dat? what it mean?” (87). The tragic violence of it cannot be understated, and is somehow made worse by the insidious nature of its silence and dormancy.

Hey y’all! Thought this might be of interest – the excerpts themselves, as well as the overview of its (non)publication history, which touches on a lot of themes familiar to this class: dialect and transcription, the writing economy, lost archives (ala Braithwaite) and “lost” histories, etc.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Lost Interview With One of America’s Last Living Slaves

Excerpt from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston. In 1931, she sought to publish an important piece of American history – the story of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America.

The development of the personal computer and the word processor were a revolutionary step in democratizing access to technologies of inscription, but also mark the beginning of the encounter between literature and electronic mediation, a fact which itself became a generative fact of artistic work. Following a succession of personal tragedies — the death of his wife to cancer in 1986, the destruction of his archival research material on Caribbean culture by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and the attack on his Kingston home by gunmen in 1990 — poet Kamau Brathwaite developed an approach to visual poetry on his Macintosh computer’s word processor, coining it the “Sycorax video style”. In this fashion, Brathwaite produced new material but also re-worked old pieces, incorporating the total body of his output into a digital archive that could now live exclusively on his Mac SE/30.

The use of the word processor let Brathwaite take a step beyond the avenues of inscriptive power that white channels of culture-making had previously been able to police, breaking the monopoly of the pencil, pen, typewriter or printing press, all instruments of colonial English power. On a purely aesthetic note, Brathwaite’s stylized typographic choices evoke the Russian and Italian Futurist traditions of concrete poetry, which all used dynamic font and layout choices to mirror the onomatopoeic character of the poetry itself. However, I hope momentarily wearing a Eurocentric art discourse hat (and making reference to theorists like Clement Greenberg, as occurs later) doesn’t suggest that there the white and black avant-garde traditions are mutually exclusive, though critics like Fred Moten make note that there is often the dangerous appearance that the “avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American” and ” the deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avante-garde as necessarily not black” (Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, xxxi).

Though not all radical black experimentalism is Afrofuturistic, it feels reasonable to suggest that Brathwaite’s work extends the Afrofuturist tradition — that is, not in the sense that it lies within some kind of aesthetic tradition defined narrowly by any single 20th century decade’s style moments, but that its place within the Afrofuturist canon was defined is qualified by how it looks to technological developments as tools in realizing new futures within African diaspora. Though Brathwaite produced a considerable amount of work prior to his turn to his the Macinstosh SE/30 in the 1980’s, the way that he looks to the computer as a way of preserving his work and poetic voice after the literal and figurative destructions of his “archives” demonstrate how its possible to claim emotional refuge and poetic/imaginative territory even in the digital realm, and how a new technological epoch meant a new set of unclaimed affective spaces free to be cultivated for the growth of communities. The first task of in this process, what Brathwaite accomplished in the earlier portion of his career, was the crafting of the West Indian voice: “a complex of imposed “establishment” tongues (Standard English, French, Dutch, etc.) and the mainly submerged patterns of the “folk”” dialect (Brathwaite, Roots, 115).

The work of Brathwaite the poet thus became the praxical work of Brathwaite the theoretician. In his text “The African Presence in Carribean Literature,” Brathwaite suggested that a “nation language” could be reflective of not only “sound-symbols,” but also “certain tunes, tones, and rhythms which are characteristic of the folk tradition and are often essential features of its expression.” (Brathwaite, Roots, 243) That is to say, linguistic meaning does not only come in the words that we exchange between one another but also in the spectrum of all the other sounds that humans make, our extraverbal or musical communication, and also the rhythmic aspects of the ways that we vocalize. He takes this further in “History of the Voice,” developing the sense that a nation language is a form of counter-hegemonic discourse, that of “slaves and laborers” (Brathwaite, Roots, 206), and constitutes an authentic linguistic entity. Making reference to the Rastafarian rite of groundation, communal self-reflection accompanying cannabis smoking, he implicitly demonstrates the way that common discourse is a prerequisite for the formation of community, and particularly those that arise in resistance to histories of violence and disenfranchisement.

In achieving this, Brathwaite pulls a bit of a Charles Chestnutt by working as an archivist of vernacular expression in expanding a canon that had sought to exclude Black voices. His voice, however, is not in the parodic way that Chestnutt subverts plantation fiction to depict the adjacent streams of Black and white lives, and the failed or successful instances of communication between them. Instead, Brathwaite’s work seeks to outrun the reference to the histories of slavery and colonialism as necessary foundational scenes and to springboard off of inscription/transcription of speech itself as a kind of cogito. He synthesizes a voice for island life by yanking the sonic quality of island life into print. When he later reclaims it within the digital sphere, in the form Ignacio Infante calls a “digital vernacular”, he takes a step out of a context marked by nation-states and literature as a power-inflected object of printed matter, and  into the cultural fabric of the digital – where endless voices of diaspora are free to proliferate. For him, it is even more poignant that his works exist free-swimming in his computer’s random access memory, free of topology or heirarchy but all intertextually linked and at the ready.

In a sense, he demonstrates the art theorist Clement Greenberg definition of what it is like to be a modernist – “… the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (Greenberg, Avant Garde and Kitsch)  — to explain how one can take a formal aspect of one’s work, like the fact that a painting happens on canvas or that a digital text exists as multiple entangled codes (electrical currents, binary logic, and writing as we know it), and use that particular formal aspect as a point of reflection. So when Bratwaithe writes

he is still initializing the reader’s sense of the context, drawing attention to the medium he is working in and the one it has succeeded to situate himself as a subject in the larger flow of technological history (as the mention of “mercentalists” helps situate). Once he has done that, he is free to mobilize his poetic voice to performatively create the images and soundscapes of his Caribbean world. Because his work is not written on paper, we can more readily read it out loud and experience it sonorously, something of which Brathwaite seemed acutely aware of:

“Likewise, the African presence in Caribbean literature can not be fully or easily perceived until we redefine the term “literature” to include the nonscribal material of the folk-oral tradition, which on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been relevant to the majority of our people, and to have unquestionably wider provenance.”

Infante calls Brathwaite’s poetry “a vernacular performance that aims at grounding a particular accumulative history of the Caribbean (172). He contends that Brathwaite’s writing sets up up a poetic world defined simply by its own existence and constituting a representation of Caribbean history that doesn’t need to be tethered to anything to explain it. Infante suggests that his corpuses collapses the distinction between a “pedagogical temporality of history” (Infante, 174),  the way that explaining things in a historical sense necessary means referring back to a passage in logically-organized periods of time throughout which something was developed, and the the opposite “performative temporality of poetics” (Infante, 174), the way that poetic discourse creates a world which doesn’t need to be explained in reference to anything that preceded. It merely exists self-sufficiently in being uttered.

That all being said, theorist Brathwaite recognizes that, in some degree, the onus is on him to provide explanations when he makes references in the quest of his nation-making poetics. This confession uncomfortably pins him between the pursuit of his work as a community-building prerogative and his own concern with being more widely understood by audiences. We see him grappling with this sense of responsibility when he mentions that he provides footnotes to his works “with great reluctance, since the irony is that they may suggest the poetry is so obscure in itself that it has to be lighted up; is so lame, that is to have a crutch; and (most hurtful of all) that it is bookish, academic, “history.” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 113) Here, the notion of being “academic” suggests being contrived, obscurantist, or out-of-touch with an authentic reality and is marked by the presence of footnotes, rather recognition of the fact that because “Caribbean culture has been so cruelly neglected both by the Caribbean itself, and by the rest of the world” (173) that these clarifications are needed to make sense of the potent allusions in his work. Even further still, Brathwaite’s axiety about the reception of SycoraxVS seems pulled taut between its two different forms of materiality: as its self-assured digital form, or as a printed, outward facing piece of media that is expected to hold up when negotiated for its intelligibility. Brathwaite’s poems do not seem to be quite like Amiri Baraka’s, whose poems “set fire and death to Whities ass” (Baraka, Black Art) rather than allude to Descartes or Shakespeare. 

Here, I think it becomes very easy to critique Brathwaite on his potential entanglement with Ezra Poundian-type invocations of the Western canon (though the habit of namedropping many of his colleagues alleviates this charge) and, as Leah notes in her post, the way he seems to pander the white Apollonian through such invocations rather than to un-apologetically represent the Black Dionysian. But in the way that his work offers a nascent form of Black posthumanism/modernism, the SycoraxVS corpus feels like an authentically revolutionary gesture.

Richard Wright’s Native Son presents the main character, Bigger Thomas, in the most problematic manner possible. Wright portrays Bigger as an emotionally unstable, impulsive, uneducated and unremorseful character. Under some circumstances, this may not be so problematic- after all he is just a character. However, Wright played a dangerous game when crafting Bigger for his white audience. Bigger was more than just a character; he was a representation of the entire Black community for that time. It seemed that Wright pulled every negative stereotype about Black men that he could find, amplified them, and created Bigger.

Bigger possesses an unpredictable and almost uncontrollable temper. He is not educated past the eighth grade. Simply put he is both a rapist and a murderer. Even if readers were able to sympathize with Bigger after Mary’s death, his murdering Bessie was compelling enough for many to withdraw that sympathy. At what point are readers expected to draw the line between Bigger’s victimhood and his personal responsibility for his actions? Bessie’s rape and murder were unnecessary. Although I understand what Wright was trying to do, there are other ways he could have gone about doing it. For example, Bigger and Bessie could have simply had a conversation in which he informs her of what he could do to her and the fact that no one would care. While this would still seem harsh, the dialogue would not be nearly as harmful as Bessie’s actual rape and murder.

I feel as though Wright’s message could have been spread throughout the novel rather than simply being left for the end. At that point, many readers have already been affirmed that Bigger’s guilt is solely his fault. As the novel goes on, Wright makes it increasingly difficult to keep in mind that Bigger is in fact a victim of systematic racism. All Black people in America are. With Bigger’s actions, it is easy to ignore the nature of Bigger’s victimhood. In an already biased society, Wright gave his largely white audience another reason to affirm their biases. While Wright’s purpose was with good intent, Bigger’s portrayal in Native Son may have served as a detriment to the Black community, rather than an asset. Wright turned Bigger into a monster. Therefore, he inadvertently turned Black men into monsters. Perhaps he could not have foreseen the success of the book. But regardless of how successful the book was, giving the opportunity for his audience to judge Bigger was a dangerous move.

It may not be customary to “understand” why someone is murdered, but in Bigger’s case with Mary, I do understand is motivations. It is important to acknowledge that Mary’s death was in fact accidental. But had Bigger not tried to silence her, he would have been the one to end up dead. This does not excuse his behavior, but I know he did it for a reason. He feared for his life and accidentally used too much force. It is all of his actions that come after Mary’s death that make Bigger a questionable character. It is the brutality of chopping her head off and burning her body, it is him pulling a gun on Jan, it is him forcing Bessie into his plan and then raping and killing her. What is ironic is that he did not rape Mary, but he did rape Bessie, which validates his being labeled as a rapist by the white mob. However, what is sad is that in reality, no one would bat an eyelash if they knew for a fact that he did not rape Mary but did rape Bessie. He would solely be a murderer. While Bessie does not actually receive justice, Bigger is labeled for what he truly is.

In our initial class discussion of Native Son, Prof. Allred asked us to characterize Bigger. I very quickly and confidently blurted the word “smart,” that which sparked a question mark to form over everyone else’s head. I went on to ~try to explain that though Bigger may not be “smart” in the educational sense of the word, he is very aware of his surroundings and of his place in society. Thinking further about my claims, I was responding with my initial understanding/interpretation of the text rather than concrete textual evidence.

As Shemaia explained that Bigger is “very ignorant,” I thought of this moment again, and why my initial reaction was to say Bigger was “smart.” Given the fact that the story is told through the lens of a narrator, an unnamed narrator, there are few moments the reader actually gets Bigger’s personal, genuine reflection or feeling on something. At least in the first part of the novel, the reader only really has the words of the narrator and the actions of Bigger to sort out how Bigger is feeling.

Bigger’s entire existence [in the story] is driven by his fear of white people, his fear of life outside of his very small, inner circle, fear of the unknown. I think my initial response “Bigger is smart” comes from his self-awareness, and his keen observation to the outside world, thus rooting his fear. In the first part of the novel, Bigger says to Gus, “I just feel that way. Every time I get to thinking about be being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me…” Bigger’s conception of himself sparks major concerns, of course, as he is hyper aware of the power dynamics between black people and white people. Though he views life through this lens of internalized racism, the narrator shows moments of Bigger that would suggest otherwise. Bigger is so frustrated with the system, with the way white people treat black people, that his emotions become too much to handle, thus forcing him to burst and commit heinous acts of violence. While in some ways that instinct to turn to violence may be perceived as ignorant, maybe it is more willful ignorance. I believe Bigger is so aware of what he is doing, though he may not be able to identify or control what he is feeling. Rather than addressing the internalized issues, he [willingly] acts — he is in control of his actions, but chooses to be understood or seen as ignorant to the consequences. After Mary’s murder, Bigger believes he has claimed some power over white people, and in turn becomes a monster. The narrator claims in book two that the murders “were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him [Bigger].” Of course there is everything wrong with murdering for a sense of purpose… but that wasn’t Bigger’s intention when putting the pillow over Mary’s face. This passage in the novel is showing the aftermath of the murder, Bigger’s numbing. I may go as far to argue that the title “Flight” for the second part can mean a flight / loss of self, loss of emotion, loss of humanity.

I feel bad for Bigger, and that is hard for me to deal with because I am not sure I like Richard Wright. So, maybe I am just rooting for a non-Wright Bigger.

I think I have written before about my fascination with blackness and Greek Mythology introduced to me by the brilliance of Aime Césaire “Poetry and Knowledge”. In this text, Aime Césaire uses the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus to explain the white and black aesthetics. The Apollonian invokes the logical, brilliant, scientific, and male – as the namesake of Apollo, and represents whiteness/white cultural aesthetics. The Dionysian, like the namesake god of wine, passion, and madness, is feminine, emotional, irrational, and spiritual. The Dionysian is the aesthetic of black art and blackness, as Dionysus was the “othered”, foreign God of Olympus – borne of two mothers (one being a mortal) and having his physical body hated and torn into pieces.
This invocation to the gods and Aime Césaire is to set the dichotomy of blackness in art – and to support the argument that black art will never be equal in the white aesthetic. Because the white aesthetic (the Apollonian) represents everything the black aesthetic (the Dionysian) is not, they can only exist as separate and reflective. This is to dissect the language of Kamau Brathwaite and the use of Caribbean patois in his poems. By using a form of English (an Apollonian construct) warped by Caribbean culture and the African Diaspora (Dionysian), Brathwaite demonstrates how the scientific and constraining can be reflected by the “othered” madness. Like Bigger Thomas mimicking whiteness by warping its meaning (“playing white”, crudely drawing Communist symbolism on the ransom note), Kamau’s tool for reflecting white aesthetics of art are warped in his blackness.
But the topic to look at in Brathwaite’s “X/self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces” is how the claiming of white inscriptive tools is used to express blackness.
However , white inscriptive tools usually fail to do so – an embarrassing feat when the white Apollonian claims to be all powerful. Brathwaite’s use of patios leaves white inscriptive tools inadequate (not linguistically being able to create a true to form spelling of “cyaan” (can’t) or “a doan” (I don’t)). Words like “Dyaam” and “obeah” can be “translated” to the white standard of English, but not without watering down the meaning. Poetically using the computer to write this letter, Brathwaite demonstrates how new inscriptive technology falls to help the Dionysian – but finds ways to command the art form. This is no different that the works of Kehinde Wiley creating oil paintings of a black Renaissance when the medium was never intended to cater that purpose, or pop artist Rihanna confusing mainstream outlets with patois riddled “Work” (where large publications like “Vogue” called the dialect gibberish and had to redact how they wrote about race).
A work like “X Self” expresses the frustration and resistance to white art aesthetics of Bigger Thomas, and the cool dismissal of the aesthetic of Rihanna. Kamau Brathwaite isn’t consumed by the suffocation of the white aesthetic but in references to Ovid and Cicero, he seems to ask how he can stack up to those figures.
As liberating as it can be, writing to the white Apollonian from the black Dionysian is so often lost in translation it erases the inscriptive power of that being. For a contemporary example, soca artist Popcaan, frequently sampled in hip hop and rock music , seems to seldom have his name correctly reported in American media. Often referred as “Popcorn”, his name entirely loses its meaning (Popcaan is the shortening of the Jamaican joke greeting “Wah Gwan, Popcaan?”). Ethiopian-American rapper Amine often pronounces his name incorrectly for minutes during songs to tease how his name is often softened (and feminized) with European pronunciation. In the title of X Self, Brathwaite suggests that the colonized white aesthetic leaves the black Dionysian unknown and foreign. The inscription of patois (an orally strong dialect) provides proof of this, as English (which was introduced to the Caribbean through colonization), is warped into something malleable and untouchable by colonization. X Self claims an identity from nothing and much like the blanching of Popcaan and Amine, removes itself from the inscriptive canon. From X Self, Brathwaite addresses the white aesthetic in the black artistic spaces and asks “Who are you?”.
The Apollonian white art aesthetic claims to be supremely logical and brilliant but seems to have no space for the black Dionysian except to “other” it. Because it would like to be the supreme inscriptor – it looks to inscribe on this otherness. For example, how white supremacy dictates what a black person in America is called – Negro or African-American or Black, came through inscriptive practices. However, its failure is clear, as there hasn’t been a contemporary discourse standard in AAVE (black folk from Louisiana speak differently than black folk in New York) or even a decided, standardized censoring of the N-word (it is still unsure where the * goes and how to police different endings of the word). All this examples are a large, contemporary voice of Brathwaite’s artistic conversation. In a Barraka and Cesaire discourse, we must apply these ideas to larger contexts of black inscription so Brathwaite’s art has purpose and usefulness. And whereas I believe that his work is an important standard-breaking expression, I also believe that since the white Apollonian runs so deeply and corruptly in Western inscriptive practices we will not be able to undo the “othering” of the black Dionysian until the white standard recognizes it as an equal aesthetic and respectively reflects on that.

In his poem “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces”, Brathwaite makes vernacular, form, and computation indistinguishable. It is Patois, but it is also computer code, it is also internet slang, it is also poetry. Irregular line breaks can’t be told apart from bits of text, sentence fragments, typos, or stanzas.  Brathwaite’s poem inhabits a space that, based on Western notions of language hierarchies, represents a lower class of inscription and yet the inscription of the patois is in the largely white, colonized space of the computer. These intersections create an indistinguishable space, which forces us to question where language intersects with heritage and race and where both of those intersect with the universal language of computation. Brathwaite continues to evoke the robotic, creating a sense of refraction from himself and his own language from the inhuman, electronic mode of his writing. His patois contrasted with the cold robotics of the computer and robots creates an odd space of humanity and legitimacy for Patois when interacting with the artificially intelligent.

There are two direct references to robots: he name-drops R2-D2 and he verbalizes the language of the robots going “bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep into de peloponnesian war.” Robots are an object which, like Patois, embody a strange middle-space between white-creation and white-rejection. Patois is the result of a language partly forced upon them by colonizing powers, partly adopted and reimagined. Robots and AI similarly maintain a space that is created by white power, while also a threat in its embodiment of creativity. The speaking robot that arrives at the conclusion of the “peloponnesian war” exemplifies this: it has no “real” or decipherable language, and yet its reference point goes back to history of classical antiquity. The robot’s intelligence is a threat because it is grounded in history and in fact, but is dangerous because it is indecipherable and therefore impossible to wield by its creator. Similarly, Patois comes to embody a similar code; it is simultaneously a human language while it appears via the technology through which it is written like a component of computer-code. Similar to the robot, the narrator’s Patois and thought are grounded in the references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Within these references, there is a sense of adoption and translation; the inhuman beeps and Patois are both claiming intellectual knowledge of events that would, by racist and colonialist powers, be denied from them as being of too high-intellect, or historically irrelevant to colonized people. This ties into Eurocentric education, or rather the systemic denial of education in order to subjugate colonized subjects. In the poem, this tradition is undermined by the re-telling of history in a language indiscernible to colonizers. The claiming of this history and therefore cultural-capital within the poem again asks for a questioning of what language and history bears on humanity.

The comparison between Patois and the robotic is created only to be simultaneously dispelled in the poem. Robots and technology simultaneously embody the pinnacle of human achievement and the lowest level of humanity; it takes the smartest human to create artificial intelligence, but the robot created can never be human. This is the same perspective adapted by colonizing powers who claim to be on a quest to “humanize” their subjects, while creating structures and laws (both de jure and de facto) that make it impossible for subjects to be considered legitimate and human at the same rank that their colonizers consider themselves. Robots embody the inhuman: their intelligence is artificial, it is imitative, the linguistics of human-AI interaction is inherently subjugating. While Patois is indisputably human and legitimate, similar arguments are used by colonizing powers to discredit it. Much like discussions of the discrediting of black intelligence we engaged earlier this semester, a colonizer may argue that Patois is not its own language but a failure to imitate English, they may say that this indicates the artificiality of its speakers’ intelligence, and they may impose their own inability or choice not to learn it as evidence to minimize speakers’ legitimacy as intellectual humans. These dehumanizing tactics result in the same subjugation in robots and in non-white, colonized subjects who speak patois and languages like it. To go off on a tangent there has been writing done about how the very nature of our AI assistants are linguistically designed and named to embody who white structures most wish to control: the exotic and the female. The creation and colonization of the robot mirrors the purposeful creation and subjugation of speakers of Patois.

Yet the comparison to the robotic, which is embodied through explicit textual references which were mentioned earlier, as well as in Brathwaite’s method of inscription, and the visual cues suggesting the inhuman nature of typography, create an important divide between robotics and patois: those who speak Patois are human, and the robots are not. As a metaphor, the comparison works because at the end of the day—by the definition of metaphor to compare two unlike or incomparable things—we are reminded that robots and speakers of Patois, or other Creoles, are unquestionably different. An actual comparison of the two draws attention to the dangerous levels to which colonial powers have dehumanized language and monopolized technology. The placement of Brathwaite’s poetry into this robotic space simultaneously compares the struggles of colonization and otherness, while juxtaposing the fluidity and humanity of patois to the unyielding nature of technology as designed by white, owning structures. It represents another instance of white “progress” instead becoming an exclusionary limitation to the inscription of Patois.