Shar

by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

1 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Edward Kamau Brathwaite is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

Brathwaite held a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and was a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum.

Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770 - 1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.

Reviews

[Jeppe Lauridsen]

Edward Kamau Brathwaite was a Barbadian poet, he died earlier this year, and Shar is one of the lesser known works of this lesser known poet. The poem is a response to Hurricane Gilbert, which hit the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 5 storm. It caused a mud-slide, which destroyed Brathwaite's collection of Caribbean culture: "drafts unpublished manuscripts letters diaries artefacts books books books thousands of miles of tapes LPs", possibly one of the largest archives of Caribbean poetry in the world. In this sense, the fact that both the poem and Brathwaite himself are so unknown is a tragedy of grand irony ...

The poem begins with a lamentation of what is lost in the storm (the storm being Gilbert, yes, but also "the five hundred years of Columbus dragging us here"):

wood
has become so useless. stripped. wet .
fragile . broken . totally uninhabitable
with what we must still build

The grief and sense of loss in the poem (of culture, of place, of identity, of expression) is so clearly evoked that you can almost sense the lump in the throat, the rage, the frustration of it all:

And what. what. what . what more. what more can I tell you
on this afternoon of electric bronze

but that the winds . winds . winds . winds came straight on
& that there was no step . no stop . there was no stopp.
ing them & they began to reel . in circles . scream. ing like Ezekiel's wheel

However, despite this sense of loss, a voice grows organically out of the wreckage. It is marked by what Brathwaite has called Sycorax-style, a change in typography, where the words no longer occupy the page like neat little schoolboys, but are so large that a few lines take up entire pages. They usher in a grand moment of affirmation (I can't do more than just embolden the text here):

Un/til
at last

stone

lone/ly
at first

&
slow/ly

out of the valleys. smoke. trail. trial. song

again that cicada^like whisper
but from skin not echoing shell
from bone not timbrel of pestilence

SONG at last SONG

from the throats of the five hundred thousand
the hands

clasped to bellies of pain & the rocking of agon

but
SONG . SONG . SONG

In the face of the loss of an archive, a culture, a voice, all one can do is amplify. Consider this a recommendation of what should be a better-known poem, a better known poet, and a better known culture.

[summer (oscar wilde’s version) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up. an incredibly powerful poem spanning multiple pages that makes excellent use of space and text size as the titular hurricane becomes more powerful. the sound that flows through this poem is genius for how it captures the hurricane, a natural phenomenon brathwaite wanted to highlight for its prevalence in his life as an islander that is overlooked by white northern readers.