The Black Atlantic Meets the Black Pacific: Multimodality in Kamau Brathwaite and Wayde Compton

Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness shifted the grounds of African American and Caribbean studies in its claim that nationalist—and cultural nationalist—frameworks for the study of black diaspora cultures neglected the productive cultural exchanges, cultural mobility, and “outernational” reaches of black cultures (17). He offered to the field the insight that in contrast to seeing identity as tied to “roots and rootedness” we might more productively see “identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). Twenty years later, Gilroy’s insights on the transnationalism of black diasporic culture are a standard for the field, yet perhaps it is time to explore further what happens when diasporic cultures are moved into unexpected territories—when they are pushed “off route,” so to speak. Vancouver poet Wayde Compton illustrates a commitment throughout his work to “rewriting a northern actuality” in the face of pressing and inherited diasporic narratives that render black Western Canadian experience, in his terms, “Afroperipheral”: “the appendix of the epic and the echo of the odyssey” (After Canaan 16–17). “In the periphery,” Compton argues, “there are things to be learned from owning and exploring oblique kinds of blackness” where “radical experiments of identity can be tried” (13). Compton engages with the inheritances of black diasporic culture through his citation of writers such as Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, and at the same time explores the cultural and creative possibilities of new circuits made possible through new cultural exchanges, challenging the idea that black Vancouver culture is merely peripheral to an already-established diasporic core. Gilroy himself anticipated this need for a reorientation of diaspora theory: “Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs … to be readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits which mark new journeys and new arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities” (86). That Gilroy’s remarks are made in the context of a discussion of contemporary music is significant here: Compton’s challenge to the unidirectionality of diasporic circuits is expressed through his evocation of musical remix and the sonic movement of culture through electronic circuits and the airwaves, making black Vancouver culture not a detour of the Black Atlantic but rather the generation of the Black Pacific.

More specifically, this paper will take up Compton’s use of multimodality broadly—addressing not just sound but the intersectionality of sound, text, and the visual, including visual poetry, poetry as object, and DJ performance—as the formal means for illustrating the ongoing evolution of concepts of “race,” culture, and diaspora, and for creating “radical experiments of identity” (After Canaan 13).¹ I will read his word and sound experiments through comparison with the multimodal work of Kamau Brathwaite, a pioneer in the looping together of multimodality and diaspora, and also explore Compton’s scholarly and poetic² engagement of Brathwaite as a mythology that underpins his engagement with the black diaspora.³

Wayde Compton is a Canadian British Columbian writer whose commitment to poetics, performance, and community-building is multi-faceted. He has written two collections of poetry, 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond, and a collection of essays, After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region; he has edited an anthology of black British Columbian writing and orature entitled Bluesprint that charts the history of black writing in Vancouver from mid-nineteenth-century pioneer writing to the present; he co-founded the Hogan’s Alley Memorial project, a historical public memory project focused on Vancouver’s first black neighborhood, which was destroyed in 1970; he is the co-publisher of Commodore Books, Western Canada’s only black literary press; and he performs hip hop turntabling with Jason de Couto as the Contact Zone Crew. His work attests to a deep commitment to, and cultural need to, fill in a diasporic gap—to “extend” a “sounding line … backwards into history,” as he says in Bluesprint (14)—and measure the translations of African, Caribbean, and...