Kamau Brathwaite: Poetry, Materialities and Climate History

Abstract

This work review a selection of poems by Kamau Brathwaite that belong to the anthologies: Islands (1969), The Arrivants (1973), Black and Blues (1976) and The Ancestors (1977). From the viewpoint of contemporary materialism, which encompasses both its transcultural variant and climatic imaginaries, I am approaching the cultural history of extraction in the English Caribbean. This means studying not only the socio-historical dimensions of the subaltern world but also the fractures between colonial history and environmental history. Instead of approaching Kamau's verses symbolically or allegorically, I observe that the author's poems exhibit a series of intertwinings between the human and the non-human within the precariousness of the plantation worker, as well as a material history of crops like sugar or cotton that transcends mere commodity status.