IN A LETTER that has now found its way onto the Internet, poet and New York University lecturer Kamau Brathwaite writing of his homeland Barbados laments: "I cannot even die here now. No strength to even burn myself upon this pasture as I want to do."
The emotionally charged letter is a response to the way he is being treated by authorities in the matter concerning the construction of a road in the vicinity of his property.
It so alarmed the poet's many friends and well-wishers around the world that a campaign of support has got under way through a website called Save CowPastor set up on the initiative of Tom Raworth, a poet residing in Cambridge.
Brathwaite conscientiously objects to the negative ecological, social and cultural consequences of the road; for in building the road, the authorities have unleashed the moral equivalent of Sauron's menacing army of orcs in the Tolkien trilogy – disrupting
a simpler way of life, uprooting trees, ravaging some of the last grazing lands for livestock (many of which have perished), preventing the 75-year-old poet from establishing a sanctuary for the arts at the location, possibly even desecrating
an African burial ground.
This affair brings to mind that once fashionable phrase "the death of the author" – the title of Roland Barthes' landmark essay – perhaps not in the nuanced way intended
by its now quite dead author.
I was thinking more of the stark difference between the way the state treats a living author and a dead one; that is, the way the state can antagonise, or even persecute, an independent-minded intellectual, only to exploit his memory as a national figure in death.
It seems that dying is sometimes the only thing you can do to advance your career
as a poet. This may account for the disproportionate number of suicides among poets compared with every other type of artist.
So I ask: what is the likely scenario when the author in question dies?
At that time, I imagine, the authorities who have done everything to thwart the establishment of Brathwaite's cultural institute will, with every cliché they can think of, ceremonially and tearfully laud his long and productive literary life.
Finally, he will be officially acknowledged, his life's work symbolically claimed as a national treasure, and his name used for all kinds of purposes. In time, he might have a school, an auditorium, a roundabout, or better yet a new airport road named after him.
Even then, his books might hardly be read in his native land and his archive neglected or forever lost, a thing of dreams as mythical as Shangri-la or Kubla's pleasure-dome.
Poets are well accustomed to dealing with ambiguities in their work, but the contradiction between what is being done now and what will inevitably be said when Kamau Brathwaite goes on his further journey will hardly qualify as paradox,
but be revealing of a far more uncomplicated dishonesty.
In his writings, Brathwaite has shown himself to be a loyal foot soldier in the cause
of the underprivileged denizens of the Third World.
He has been, moreover, a tireless cultural ambassador abroad, personalising the thematics of economic disparity, social displacement and cultural diaspora through his sustained and inventive use of highly musical Barbadian and Caribbean vernaculars.
Like Basho and many other poets of world renown, Brathwaite is an indefatigable traveller and most emphatically a poet of place, a landscape artist whose painterly eye illuminates the specific sites of his journey: Brown's Beach, Cattlewash, Cambridge, Ghana, Kingston, New York and now CowPastor.
Lee Jenkins and Alex Davis of University College Cork, wrote recently on the Save CowPastor website: "We know Barbados because of and through his poetry, using his words as our map to the island."
Brathwaite's aesthetic, however, clashes with the official touristic image of the island, which has been sold abroad for generations. Some years ago, one of the New York dailies headlined an interview with Brathwaite with his words "hotels squatting
on my metaphors".
That official image of the island is not only based on largely false assumptions about the expectations of tourists, but it is a continuation of the myth of exotic places that was one of the most potent hallucinations of colonial psychosis.
At the very least, Brathwaite is owed a public apology for being pushed so far to the edge of thinking and doing the unthinkable.
Adorno famously wrote that "after Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry". But poetry, if it serves any profound purpose, is a way of dealing with such devastation.
Apparently robust and still enormously productive, Brathwaite remains a missed opportunity for Barbados. In the active years that he has left, the poet seems determined to make his final contribution.
There is probably no more credible resource person in matters of culture; and his extensive archive could still be used as a significant point in a powerful matrix for the development of the diverse Caribbean arts communities – that is, if the authorities were interested in anything other than cynical patronage of the arts.
