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  • Lamentin
  • Kamau Brathwaite (bio)

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Edouard Glissant, Saint-Malo, France, 31 May 2009.
Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.

[End Page 100]

for Edouard Glissant 1928-2011

it will haffe be a poem tho i can't turn it off & oneven tho it drips its sorrow through the nightmore than regret. wetwhen i touch yr hand that evening. gracious

and thoughtful as ever and so full of the world .cultivating the threshes even when you must have been so sleeplessly illnot talkin about it. even into yr pillow .walking the creaks in yr slippers until the soft of the dawn O La Lézarde

and the hills. these waves of interior & the history you make of iteven tho it was never ours. not even yours wrestling the shadowsbut at least it was intimate & comforted by many verbs & intuitions -to grow us all out of the earth like the yam. like the rhizome out of its grave

and its limitless memory of relations. and there was nvr no zonein the colours of creole. so many tongues. so many variouslips. such light. That's why you cd speak w/such pebblesthe room listening yr harbour . even tho there was never no future or faucet [End Page 101]

Produced by Kamau Brathwaite in his Sycorax Video Style

Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite is a distinguished historian, literary-cultural critic, and poet, as well as a friend and colleague of Edouard Glissant. After a long career teaching in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, he now teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. A founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and a founding editor of Savacou, Brathwaite is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Among his most recent books are Ancestors (2001), MR (Magical Realism) (2002), Words Need Love Too (2004), Born to Slow Horses (2005), and Elegguas (2010).

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