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The Arrivants

byKamau Brathwaite

A New World Trilogy

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Containing Kamau Brathwaite’s first three poetry collections – Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969) – The Arrivants is the visionary book that transformed the direction of Caribbean literature for decades to come.

Exploring his homeland – its natural beauty, its violent history, and the technologies of survival that sustain its people – Brathwaite takes us on an odyssey of self-discovery as he wrestles with the complex cultural inheritance of the Caribbean and the existential quest for being in the African diaspora. During the era of global postcolonial independence movements, The Arrivants pioneered a distinctly Caribbean poetic expression, one that captured the rhythms of speech and everyday experiences of people on the islands and beyond.

Through the collisions of regional dialect, music, historical flashbacks, and excursions throughout Africa and the Americas, Brathwaite restores an African subjectivity and spirituality to Caribbean life and bridges the psychic rupture of the middle passage. Rich, imaginative, bold, The Arrivants is a vigorous and unforgettable volume that charts the emergence of one of the most unique poets of the twentieth century.

This epic trilogy traces the migrations of African peoples in and from the African continent, through the sufferings of the Middle Passage and slavery, and dramatizes 20th-century journeys to the UK, France and the US in search of economic and psychic survival. The Arrivants exemplified Brathwaite’s ambition to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry, which would celebrate Caribbean voices and language, as well as African and Caribbean rhythms evoking Ghanaian talking drums, calypso, reggae, jazz and blues

Lyn Innes, Guardian

About Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020) was a Caribbean writer and critic who wrote on the experience of black cultural life throughout the worldwide African diaspora. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Brathwaite was educated in Barbados and England and received numerous awards for his poetry and cultural studies, including both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. He was a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University starting in 1992 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2002.
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Details
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • ISBN: 9780241852644
  • Length: 288 pages
  • Price: £12.99
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