NewWorld/NewWord Style

Subtitled "a black caribbean blues perspective on post-cosmological disruption & redemption in the new millennium" (1: 11), Magical Realism is the Barbadian poet-critic Kamau Brathwaite's nonstandard complement to Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Feris's standard work Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. The editors of this indispensable collection remark in their introduction, "excess is a hallmark of the mode."¹ Brathwaite takes this to a whole other level in his extraordinary two-volume intervention, written throughout its 711 pages in the author's sui generis version of "nation language." For Zamora and Feris, magical realism is a postcolonial mode, and as such it is "an international commodity," albeit, as they concede, one with a Latin American preponderance (2). For Brathwaite, the genealogy of "MR" is rather more complex and extensive, finding its source in the European arrival in the New World, in the era Brathwaite elsewhere terms the "AlterRenaissance."

The German art critic Franz Roh coined the term "magical realism" in his 1925 essay "Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism." The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier would subsequently offer a revised model, lo real maravilloso americano, arguing in his 1949 manifesto-essay "On the Marvelous Real in America" for a uniquely American genesis of magical or marvelous realism and noting, of its New World practitioners, that "our style is reaffirmed throughout our history" (83).² In Brathwaite's account, as in Carpentier's, magical realism is closely imbricated with, indeed is the product of, the colonization of the New World, and for Brathwaite as for Carpentier, "style" is inseparable from "history": "MR in the Americas," Brathwaite tells us, "emerges from the two great continental cosmological catastrophes" of colonialism and slavery (2: 475). So "MR is not simply/only a 'genre,' a 'style,' a 'trope,' a 'lit. term' ... but a kind of cultural gene" (1: 66).

In Brathwaite's thesis, magical realism is one strand in a bifurcated tradition of New World writing, the cultural coordinates of which are "Dorado" and "Sisyphus." "Dorado" is magical realism, the characteristic mode of Latin American, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean writing, but also associated with Anglophone New World writers such as Wilson Harris, and termed "Dorado" because the mode "remains close to the hope? The dream of a ?New World & chooses a procedure ... that relates to this" (1: 81). "Sisyphus," the aesthetic practiced by Orlando Patterson, V. S. Naipaul, and other Anglophone Caribbean writers, is so termed because it involves "a surely pessimistic toil towards constantly manipulated destinations of success/achievement/liberation" (1: 81).

Brathwaite's magical realism is a broader church than Carpentier's construction of it as an indigenous mode of the Americas. For Brathwaite, magical realism is a disruption of Western linearity, as are "impressionism, cubism, surrealism, negritude, xistentialism, 'scream of consciousness'" (1: 212). Marianne Moore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mao Tse-tung are all practitioners of magical realism in Brathwaite's "cultural cosmology" (1: 66), as is W. B. Yeats, and there is some resemblance between the "Map of Cosmos" in the first volume of Brathwaite's text and the cosmic arcana of A Vision. In a profound sense, Brathwaite's book shares with Yeats's "the need to restore cosmology."³ Magical Realism, then, is less literary criticism or literary history than an exercise in mythopoesis, an ambitious attempt to "establish an inventory of our cosmogonies" of the kind for which Carpentier had called some forty years previously (87).

Brathwaite's text also concerns what he calls "my own relationship to MR"—"a violent intervention of circumstances" (2: 406). His experience of "certain significant personal central disruptions of cosmos" (2: 407) is paired with other instances of "cosmological disruption" (1: 222) such as Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas in 1492. Brathwaite's "Time of Salt," chronicled in the "Notebooks of Salt" subsection of the second volume of Magical Realism—comprising the death of his wife, Doris Monica Brathwaite, in 1986, the destruction of his library and archive in Irish Town, Jamaica, by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and his near-death experience...