Kamau Brathwaite

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Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born May 11, 1930 as Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown , Barbados , † February 4, 2020 in Barbados) was an English-speaking poet , writer and co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He became known for his work on the cultural life of black Africans in Africa and the American diaspora .

Life

Kamau Brathwaite attended Harrison College in Barbados from 1945 and received the Barbados Scholarship in 1949 to attend Cambridge University , where he earned a BA in history. Around 1953 he began working for the BBC in the Caribbean Voices Program in London . In 1954 he graduated from Pembroke College with a diploma in education and in 1955 went to Ghana as Education Officer for the Ministry of Education on the Gold Coast . In 1960 he married the Guyanese Doris Monica Wellcome Guyana in Guyana while on vacation.

While in Ghana he wrote the play Odale's Choice , which premiered at the Mfantisman Secondary School in Ghana. A full production of the piece was later performed in Accra . In 1962 Brathwaite moved to the other side of the Atlantic and became a resident tutor in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies in St. Lucia . In late 1963 he traveled to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus in Kingston , to teach at the history faculty.

1965 returned Brathwaite after England back to at the University of Sussex with a thesis on the Creole society of Jamaica to do a doctorate . During this time he was one of the founders and secretary of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in London in 1966. In 1971 he founded Savacou magazine at the University of the West Indies for CAM . In the same year Brathwaite received the name Kamau from the grandmother of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in Limuru , Kenya , during his scholarship at the University of Nairobi .

Between 1997 and 2000, Kamau Brathwaite spent three maroon years at Cow Pasture , his now famous Barbados house built after a hurricane. During this time he married the Jamaican Beverley Reid .

Kamau Brathwaite was professor of comparative literature at New York University from 1991 .

He died on February 4, 2020 at the age of 89.

plant

Brathwaite advocated a return of Caribbean literature to African traditions, which he saw as the only way to regain an identity of their own. He was particularly interested in Creole languages ​​and musical techniques such as improvisation (which he dealt with in his 1967 essay Jazz and the West Indian Novel ). Brathwaite also wrote dialect poetry and studied religious rituals and musical styles such as reggae . Later works dealt more with political problems and revealed frustration with failing political upheavals in the Caribbean. In the 1990s, his poetry was also shaped by personal accidents and was more of an autobiographical nature; Hurricane Gilbert destroyed Brathwaite's house and library, and his wife Doris died. From the mid-90s onwards, he increasingly returned to his early ideas of a Caribbean culture and tradition. Brathwaite represented an image of the poet as a "divine interpreter" (for example, "interpreter of the divine"), who was a victim of materialistic thinking.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • Four Plays for Primary Schools , 1964
  • Odale's Choice , 1967
  • Rights of Passage , 196x
  • Masks , 196x
  • Islands , 1969
  • Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica , 1970
  • The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 , 1971
  • The Arrivants , 1973
  • Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean , 1974
  • Other Exiles , 1975
  • Days & Nights , 1975
  • Black + Blues , 1976
  • Mother Poem , 1977
  • Soweto , 1979
  • History of the Voice , 1979
  • Jamaica Poetry , 1979
  • Barbados Poetry , 1979
  • Sun Poem , 1982
  • Afternoon of the Status Crow , 1982
  • Gods of the Middle Passage , 1982
  • Third World Poems , 1983
  • History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry , 1984
  • Jah Music , 1986
  • X / Self , 1987
  • Sappho Sakyi's Meditations , 1989
  • Shar , 1992
  • Middle Passages , 1992
  • Zea Mexican Diary , 1993
  • Trench Town Rock , 1993
  • Barabajan Poems , 1994
  • Dream Stories , 1994
  • Words Need Love Too , 2000
  • Ancestors , 2001
  • Magical Realism , 2002
  • Golokwati , 2002
  • Born to Slow Horses , 2005, awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize 2006
  • Limbo , Oxford AQA GCSE English Anthology, 2005

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Eugene Benson, LW Conolly (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English , Routledge: London, New York (2005), Vol. 1, pp. 142ff.
  2. ^ University of Sussex awards honorary degrees , University of Sussex press release July 15, 2002, accessed September 13, 2010
  3. ↑ Noted Barbadian poet and historian Brathwaite dies. In: Jamaica Observer. Retrieved February 5, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Brathwaite, Kamau
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brathwaite, Lawson Edward (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Barbadian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Bridgetown , Barbados
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 2020
Place of death Barbados