Possessing the Landscape: Kamau Brathwaite in England, 1950–1955

This chapter focuses on the early work of Kamau Brathwaite – then known as Edward Brathwaite – produced while he was a student at the University of Cambridge. It begins by providing a biographical account of his position as a Barbados Scholar within the broader context of British Commonwealth students in the post-war period. This is followed by an extended reading of the short poem ‘The Day the First Snow Fell’, demonstrating how Brathwaite’s phenomenological lyric resonates with the contemporaneous work of Frantz Fanon. The argument discusses the bibliographical afterlives of the poem, including a key passage in the major essay ‘The History of the Voice’. The focus then shifts to Brathwaite’s relationship to F.R. Leavis through a reading of his short story ‘The Professor’. It concludes by tracing the importance of the Guyanese radical Walter Rodney to Brathwaite’s thinking as the 1960s drew to a close.