Continuities in Kamau Brathwaite's Latest Published Collection Eleggas

Continuity is a key word in Brathwaite’s work, especially after the ‘Rift Years’ of his first ‘Salt period’ at the end of the 1980s. Whatever the publishing format, even in interviews, Brathwaite’s writing can no longer be divided into verse and prose, poems and essays. It runs as one powerful and tumultuous river, including lyrical and reflexive moments, fluctuating between the syncopated rhythm of jazz and the halting flow of a breathless prose. Re-using former poems is part of an almost manic strategy of incorporation, which also includes mythological and literary references, and working on multiple meanings and on porte-manteau words. I propose to examine the versatility of forms in his latest collection, Eleg guas (Wesleyan UP, 2010).
Bringing various elements together begins with the title of the collection, which consists of ten chapters, three of which are differently laid-out excerpts from his elegy to his first wife, The Zea Mexican Diary (1987). Other sections are re-cycled from earlier collections such as ‘Poem for Walter Rodney’ (from Third World Poems), ‘Stone’ (from Middle Passages), ‘Défilée’ and ‘Ark’ (from Born to Slow Horses). However, they are never reproduced as such, they have been slightly or radically changed, and tracing such changes will be part of my enquiry. The last chapter but one is dedicated to the sea, to Yemanjaa, to Sycorax, to a ‘simple woman’, who beyond the violence of the Middle Passage presides over a gentle reconciliation under the sign of love and seals, also in the combination of languages, another recurrent continuity in Brathwaite’s work, that between Africa and the Caribbean.