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Title Page, Copyright, Foreword, Acknowledgements
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THE 2EA MEX1eAN D1ARY Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography WILLIAM L. ANDREWS General Editor [44.222.169.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:07 GMT) THE 2EA ME}(1CAN D1ARY 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986 With a Foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet The University of Wisconsin Press Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography WILLIAM L. ANDREWS General Editor A list of titles in Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography follows page 215 The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E BLU, England Copyright © 1993 Kamau Brathwaite All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brathwaite, Kamau [Edward]. The Zea Mexican diary / Kamau Brathwaite: with a foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet. 230 p. em. -(Wisconsin studies in American autobiography) ISBN 0-299-13640-X 1. Brathwaite, Edward-Diaries. 2. Authors, Jamaican-20th century-Diaries. 3. Brathwaite, Edward-Marriage. 4. CancerPatients -Biography. 5. Authors' wives-Biography. 6. Brathwaite, Doris Monica. I. Title. II. Series. PR9320.9.B6BZ475 1993 B1B-dc20 [B) 92-56924 FOREWORD Kamau Brathwaite is foremost among modern Caribbean writers in versatility and scale of influence.1 He is a formidable poet who has revitalized the geopsychic space of Caribbean poetry since the publication of his first volume of poetry, Rights of Passage, in 1967. He is the author of two outstanding trilogies and several other volumes of poetry that have redefined the meaning and centrality of Africa in Caribbean life and letters. His achievement as a poet has been complemented by major contributions in other areas as well. For Kamau Brathwaite is also a renowned historian and critic: his impact on Caribbean letters and, by extension, on Diasporan and American studies is to be measured in each of these areas, and in his projection of an aesthetic personality that has rejected disciplinary boundaries and achieved the transformative vision of poet, critic, and cultural historian combined. Brathwaite achieved international recognition as a poet with the publication of his first trilogy, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969). The trilogy , subsequently published as a single volume entitled The Arrivants (1973), registers the rootlessness and restlessness of the Caribbean psyche in contradictory impulses of migration and return. Brathwaite's trilogy trans1 Kamau Brathwaite has also published under the names Edward Kamau Brathwaite and L. E. Brathwaite. v [44.222.169.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:07 GMT) formed the values of Cesaire's negritude into an epic quest for the submerged, unrecognized, and unexamined dimensions of the African psyche in the Caribbean. Rights of Passage surveys the familiar trek of Caribbean peoples to the great urban centers of Europe and North America as a process of psychic disassembly that is arrested in the second volume of the trilogy. In Masks, the transformative experience for the rootless, alienated Caribbean soul occurs in the recovery of Africa as an ancestral landscape for modern Caribbean consciousness . The artistic and intellectual center of Islands and, indeed, of the trilogy as a whole, is the simultaneous demystification and mythification of Africa as the historical and symbolic core of the Caribbean psyche. In his autobiographical essay "Timehri,"2 Brathwaite arrogates the role of houngan in a broadly conceived Ceremony of Souls: In the Caribbean, whether it be African or Amerindian, the recognition of an ancestral landscape with the folk or aboriginal culture involves the artist and participants in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future. Through this movement of possession we become ourselves , truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for word (42). Brathwaite saw himself as the creator of a language, historical and poetical, that would unify the Caribbean community . He sought to infuse the strength of his vast experience and knowledge of the world in a willful Caribbeanization of the word. From early in his career, Brathwaite grappled directly with the English language as a 2 Published in Is Massa Day Dead?, edited by Orde Coombs (New York: Anchor, 1974), 29-46. vi psychic prison and with inherited speech genres as composing a site of struggle and resistance. Brathwaite, like Frantz Fanon and George Lamming before him, concluded that: "It was in langauge that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis)-use of it that he most effectively rebelled" (Creole Society 237). His poetry characteristically...