UWI mourns Brathwaite

The University of the West Indies (The UWI) has paid tribute to Barbadian poet and academic, Kamau Brathwaite, who died Tuesday, aged 89.

In a statement yesterday, UWI Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Hilary Beckles said Brathwaite had been known as the keeper of the abeng, the conch shell which, inspired by Africa, was used among mountain Maroons and other freedom fighters to spread manifesto messages.

“The ‘abeng man’ grew a barberless beard, wore a roster of Rasta tams, sliding across our campuses, feet unchained in leathery slippers, and could never speak at a table without this thumb throbbing to the inner sound... ,” Beckles said.

“Our abeng blower took his task more seriously than many contemporaries were willing to admit. This was not Kamau’s thing; this was our war, our daily battles for justice, rights, and reasonableness.”

Beckles said when he worked with Brathwaite in the Department of History at The UWI’s Mona campus, the latter chose to live in a village on the edge of the Blue Mountains.

“Primordial poet of the middle passage, and philosopher of the ‘inner plantation’, our abeng man took the words of empire, mangled their meaning, deformed their structure, and decolonised their meaning in order to promote the rebellion against the inner estate where the real bondage of his people had persisted beyond the lawless Act of 1834 that ignored ‘Ewomanpation’ for ‘Emancipation’ when women were the majority on the plantations,” the vice chancellor said.

“Regrounded in Ghana, where he discovered the abeng and began his journey as the craftsman of Afro-Caribbean words and the poetic verses they yield, our abeng man coMmingled a life of teaching, instruction, researching, writing and under-the-tree reasoning, with a commitment to academia, love of The UWI that sometimes he thought ripped at his ribs, and concern for the poorest at the door.”

Brathwaite’s death leaves novelist George Lamming as the sole surviving Barbadian contributor to post-war Caribbean English literature, following the death of novelist Paule Marshall in the United States.