Linguistic dissonance and the quest for a Caribbean voice in the poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Theoretician and proponent of a “Nation Language” meant to provide the Caribbean peoples with a decolonized set of words and concepts adapted to their particular worldview and historical experience, Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite did not, as might have been expected, elaborate a monolithic Creole poetics. Instead of basing his creative work on the “defense and illustration” of one particular, localized language, Brathwaite experimented with linguistic plurality and dissonance as means for an opening of the possible. This poetic project is at the core of his 1973 trilogy The Arrivants, where the friction between Standard English, Bajan, Jamaican Patois, African American Vernacular, Haitian Creole and Akan parallels the different territories, voices and historicities of the African Diaspora. The experiments with linguistic and cultural frictions make the reader question his/her own linguistic reflexes and imagine new communities.