Poetry · A way to begin
Rights of Passage
Kamau Brathwaite · 1967
Synopsis
A sequence of poems that follows the Black diaspora: the departure from Africa into the plantation slavery of the New World, emancipation, then the journey of the West Indians who emigrate to Europe in the fifties, in loops between America, Europe and Africa. One figure, Tom, passes from ancestor to slave and to prophet. Work songs, negro spirituals, jazz, calypso and ska give it their rhythms, and the title plays on rites and rights.
Context
The book was published in 1967 in London by Oxford University Press. It opens a trilogy that two further books completed in 1968 and 1969, brought together in 1973 under the title The Arrivants. Brathwaite wrote it after his years in Ghana, where he had seen the country become the first independent African state. He later became the theorist of nation language, the speech of the West Indies used as a language of poetry, in an essay of 1984, and received the Neustadt International Prize in 1994.
Who it is for
Highly rhythmic poetry, made for the voice, which assumes some familiarity with the history of slavery and Caribbean emigration.
Prizes and reception
Together with the two books that follow it, it forms the trilogy regarded as its author's major poetic work.