RIGHTS OF PASSAGE

Edward Brathwaite

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Record One

RIGHTS OF PASSAGE by Edward Brathwaite Issued in association with the British Council and the Poetry Room in the Lamont Library of Harvard University. Edited by Peter Orr.

Part One: Work Song and Blues

READ BY EDWARD BRATHWAITE

Part Two: The Spades

I Prelude & -

II New World A-Comin’^;^ ,

III Tom L\[

IV All God’s Chillun tj' £ 0 '

V Didn’t He Ramble ^

I Prelude ;

II Folkways fs0

III The Journeys £>0

IV The Twist - >0

V Wings of a Dove ^ G&

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Recorded 15th December 1967

Peter Laslett tells the story of how one day during the war he went up the stairway of the Library of Congress and there at the top, with fixed bayonets and generally heavily armoured, were two splendid United States Marines in front of illuminated cases containing the Declaration of Independence and a copy of Magna Carta. They were, he said amidst laughter, ‘guarding our mythology’. There was, he added, a profound irony in the situation. For me, a West Indian, ascending those same stairs, there would have been an even deeper and quite different kind of irony. I am heir (I suppose) to much of what that ‘mythology’ represents, but the Marines—and I myself-—would have been uncertain of my exact relationship to it. In fact, I may well have been more concerned with the bayonets than with the precious scripts they were protecting. Once, for instance, travel¬ ling by train in Germany where the Army of Occupation was still very much in evidence, I was challenged by two Marines to produce my ‘card’. I did my best to explain that not only was I not a soldier in disguise; I was not even an American. The more looming of my two inquisitors hitched up his belt (he had two heavy revolvers on it, so it kept slipping down), and demanded again to see my ‘card’. Reluctantly, because I thought I had read somewhere that it should be surrendered for inspection only to those in ‘constituted authority’, I surrendered my British passport. The Marines had a good long doubting look at it and then, not really satisfied but thwarted by those crowns and lions, they threw it back in my face.

But mythologies are necessary. The American negro has moved (or at any rate is moving) from Civil Rights to the darker neighbourhood of Black Power. Even before this, Aime Cesaire in the Francophone West Indies, has enunciated his liberating concept of negritude.

In the English-speaking West Indies we have not (yet) developed anything similar. Some see the failure to do so as very parlous indeed: the persistence of a ‘slave mentality’. Others see it as an honest stance: the refusal to create new shibboleths for old. Yet others regard the whole question as painfully neurotic, the expression of a basic inferiority complex. Rights of Passage reflects this triple view. It is based on my own experience of that old triple journey: in my case, from the Caribbean to Europe, to West Africa and back home again; and through its various rhythms attempts to illustrate what home—or lack of home—means to these who up to now have been unable to afford the luxury of a mythology.

The seeds of Rights of Passage, however, were planted during the eight years I lived and worked in Ghana. This experience (which is more fully recorded in a second long poem. Masks) brought me to the realization that the home—the true imaginative and spiritual home—of the ‘rootless’ Afro-American and West Indian was in Africa, though the peoples of Africa were themselves immigrants—tribes who had also had knowledge of journeys—in the case of the West Africans, from somewhere within the Sahara and perhaps beyond, into the forests of Guinea, Ashanti and the lower Niger. The journey across the Atlantic on the infamous ‘Middle Passage’ of slavery was therefore only another stage of this diaspora. Looked at in this way, the ex-African ‘rootless’ exile began to take on a new significance and comfort. And returning myself to the West Indies in 1962, I became aware that the islands themselves were as much geographical extensions of Africa as they were Atlantic outriders and off-shoots of the American continent. There was, in fact, a remarkable physical and meteorological link with West Africa largely ignored by or invisible to geographers and totally missing from our common conscious¬ ness. It was this: in December to about February every year, a drought visits the islands. The green canefields take the golden deciduous crispness of scorched parchment. The blue sky burns muted. The dry air rivets the star nights with metallic cold. It is our tropical winter. This dryness, unexplained, is put down to ‘lack of rain’.

But living in St. Lucia at this time, I watched this drought drift in towards the island, moving in across the ocean from the east, obscuring Martinique, obscuring sails beating towards Castries. And I suddenly realized that what I was witnessing—that milky haze, that sense of dryness—was something I had seen and felt before in Ghana. It was the seasonal dust-cloud, drifting out of the great ocean of Sahara—the harmattan. By an

obscure miracle of connection, this Arab’s nomad wind, cracker of Fante wood a thousand miles beyond, did not die on the sea-shore of West Africa, its continental limit; it drifted on, reaching the New World archipelago to create our drought, imposing an African season on the Caribbean sea. And it was on these winds too, and in this season, that the slave ships came from Guinea, bearing my ancestors to this other land.

And so the poem grew—a making of a tale of deprivation, paradoxically balanced upon a sense of hope, of continuity and of unity : fragments that still held secrets of the whole. And this paradox came to be expressed in the poem by the counterpoint between the broken lines of the verse, and the shifting but basic rhythms of its impetus:

E- gypt in Af¬ rica Mesopo¬ tamia Mero- e the Nile silica glass and brittle Sa¬ hara, Tim- buctu, Gao the hills of Ahafo, winds of the Ni¬ ger, Kumasi and Kiver down the coiled Congo and down that black river that tides us to hell

The rhythms, in a sense, convey a great deal of the meaning of the poem. The drum¬ like beats of its African beginning (‘Drum skin whip/lash’) give way to the blues of the ‘slave’ sections, which in turn develop into the boogie-woogie train rhythms of emancipa¬ tion and the jazz phrases of urban ghetto life and the creole dialect speech rhythms of the peasant countryside.

Alongside these rhythms, and accompanying them, are the physical journeys into temporal space of the Negro peoples of the New World, and certain metaphorical journeys into time against which the physical journeys are counterpointed. The black immigrants journeying from the Caribbean to Europe, for instance, cross the path of their ‘discoverer’, Columbus, journeying in the opposite direction. The persona, Tom, also undergoes a series of transformations—from ancestor to slave to prophet to Uncle Tom, and is finally translated into an image of the past out of which the future springs. The journey, the ‘passage’ of the title, becomes, in other words, a ritual, a rite, which is also a right, a possession. It is a rite and the possession of the Negro peoples of the New World. But I like to think that its meaning can be further transfigured into the rites and possessions of all those who have suffered loss and cultural catastrophe.

© Edward Brathwaite 1968

Rights of Passage is published by Oxford University Press, to whom acknowledgements are due, for permission to use copyright material. Cover by Winston Branch

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RIGHTS OF PASSAGE Prelude

Folkways The Journeys

Wings of a Dove

Edward Brathwaite