In 1974, Edward Kamau Brathwaite published his much-cited essay “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” in the journal Daedalus. A little-known aspect of the essay’s history is that it also heralded the end of Brathwaite’s friendship with the Panamanian-Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey. Their friendship, integral to the influential Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), never recovered from Brathwaite’s piece, which contained a strongly critical passage on Salkey’s 1959 novel, A Quality of Violence. What follows is the letter Brathwaite wrote to his aggrieved friend on 9 May 1974, shortly after the essay appeared. A poignant mix of apology and defensiveness, the letter is also a position paper that explains Brathwaite’s coinage and practice of “communal/impersonal” criticism (Brathwaite, Letter to John La Rose, 15 Mar. 1975; Brathwaite, Letter to Andrew Salkey, 9 May 1974).
In 1973, John La Rose, founder of New Beacon Books and a mutual friend of Salkey and Brathwaite in CAM, had asked the latter for an introduction to the New Beacon reprint of Salkey’s novel. Brathwaite wrote Salkey that he was “glad as rass” to do so, since “is one o we books that permanent, man” (Letter to Andrew Salkey, 9 Nov. 1973). In the same letter Brathwaite considered sending La Rose his original rave review of the novel, published in a 1960 issue of the Barbadian journal BIM, assuring Salkey he would do “WHICHEVER IS BEST FOR THE BOOK FOR THE STRUGGLE.” In January 1974, Brathwaite updated Salkey that he “got involved with revising an important paper for daedalus” (Letter to Andrew Salkey, 12 Jan. 1974). As he put it to La Rose, the “piece dedicated to QoV [A Quality of Violence] forms, you will realize, one more stage of African in the Caribbean” (Letter to John La Rose, 30 Apr. 1974).
“The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” outlines four kinds of “African presence” in Caribbean literature. Brathwaite categorizes Salkey’s novel as “the literature of African survival,” which does not make “any attempt to interpret or reconnect [survivals] with the great tradition of Africa” (81). Even as he praised the novel’s “dramatic power,” Brathwaite faulted Salkey for inauthentically depicting spirit possession and rituals in the Jamaican syncretic religion Pocomania, or Poco for short, which emerged in the 1860s as part of the Great Revival (85).Footnote 1 Salkey was not writing in a vacuum: Poco had long been an object of writerly fascination, appearing in Una Marson’s play Pocomania (1938), Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction account Tell My Horse (1939), and Claude McKay’s novel Banana Bottom (1933). According to Brathwaite’s close reading, Salkey’s “knowledge and involvement falter” as the novel “approaches the central and most sacred experiences of the tonelle ,” the inner area of the sacred space (the “hounfort”) in vodou ceremonies (85). Salkey’s “verbs … are all suddenly wrong,” since, according to Brathwaite, “the description of [spirit] possession demands of the writer a choice of words, of traditions” (86). Salkey “opts for the Euro-rational/descriptive” tradition, failing to “celebrate with his worshippers” (86). Salkey had failed to let his writing be possessed by the very rites he invoked.
Some critics agreed with Brathwaite, describing Salkey’s ambivalence toward Pocomania, for example, as “an odd blend of attraction and repulsion” (Chang 170). Readers were shocked by the novel’s graphic depiction of two Pocomania leaders who ritualistically flog themselves to death in a cruel mimicry of plantation violence. In his appraisal in the 1990s, Mervyn Morris concurred that the novel presents Afro-Caribbean “ritual” as “sensational spectacle” but also pointed out how “Brathwaite ignores the fact that the information he examines is, in the novel, filtered through the eyes of Marshall and Brother Parkin,” two mixed-race spectators of “small planter” status (101). Recently, Stacy J. Lettman has reread the seemingly colonial values of the narrator as a deliberate usage of “third person limited” and “unreliable narration” (55–58). Brathwaite reversed his stance on the novel in part because, by 1974, he had extensively researched and written about Afro-Caribbean folk practices. Brathwaite’s revision also exemplifies a generational shift among Caribbean intellectuals who contested the authenticity of earlier literary representations of “the folk” (see Owens). Throughout the 1960s, after Jamaican independence, both academic research and popular knowledge of African “survivals” had become central to a new Afrocentric national consciousness (see Thomas). Brathwaite’s introduction had to recontextualize Salkey’s novel for a new era.
Brathwaite’s conceptual coinage of “communal/impersonal” criticism must be understood as both a defense of his Daedalus essay and an attempt to soften the personal blow of his critique for Salkey. In this letter, criticism became “a form of diasporic affinity that [was] intense and intimate precisely because” of its “agonistic” character (Ellis 8). Brathwaite explains his coinage of “impersonal” criticism as an “experience of possession”: “we have to allow the group and then the personal hands and touches in the group, to bring us back … with communal/impersonal love” (Letter to Andrew Salkey, 9 May 1974). Invoking the plea for “impersonality” in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Brathwaite also recalls the tradition of modernist criticism he absorbed during his studies in Cambridge (see Kalliney). His forward slash posits a dialectic between communality and impersonality, since possession rites cannot occur without community.
“Hope Andrew won’t think I’m attacking him in my comments on Quality,” Brathwaite had remarked to La Rose (Letter to John La Rose, 30 Apr. 1974). Salkey, however, lamented that he found the piece in the pages of an American academic journal, not in “a-we ting” (Brathwaite, Letter to Andrew Salkey, 1 Mar. 1975). And the letter backfired: Salkey took “impersonal” criticism all too personally. Brathwaite’s “long reply” was a doomed attempt to save the friendship and the community they had built together (Letter to John La Rose, 28 May 1974). La Rose, much to Brathwaite’s chagrin, reprinted A Quality of Violence without any introduction. Fifteen years later, Brathwaite still regretted the affair, writing to Salkey: “You have never really forgiven me for that review” (Letter to Andrew Salkey, 14 Mar. 1989).
mona/9 may 1974
dear Che,
this is an important—certainly crucial—moment for us as brothers and as strugglers in the cause of caribbean freedom and expression. strivers.Footnote 1
when we sit down to write, we have to be honest: impersonal: whether creative or critical. and to do this: to be able to do this: we have to keep on trying to grow, to learn, to experiment: widen the eardromes of our world. and it can’t be just “personal,” as Cheryll Williams still holding in her tribute to EM: but collective/impersonal: since what we doing is about we, and is for we future.
and when we finish the enterprise: which to be is like the experience of possession: that’s why i use terms like impersonal and collective/communal: we have to allow the group and then the personal hands and touches in the group, to bring us back. and we got then to listen: we got to listen to what the others say about the particular incarnation. to grow on living/learning/growing, we have to undergo this listening in patience and we have to have the confidence to know/feel that what we hear comes to us, also, with communal/impersonal love. in this way we explore, offer, and are accepted; and in accepting, return what we have learned from the self/group in to the pool: and the waters themselves become richer.
now both of us, my brother, and John [La Rose], understand this process. it is the instinctive consciousness of this that brought us together; and in the years of working and listening together and to each other, i think we have confirmed this. many times you have told us stories of other west indian writers who have not been able to complete and therefore contribute to this circle. they have hurt you hard; but, because of yr vision and resources, you have gone on giving and building and you are now, thank god, entering into a particularly rewarding period. in recent times, i have had to face up to similar experiences and john entire political life, as he prefers to see/put it, has exposed him to and prepared him for this.
now for the first time, i have written something, out of this endeavour, which is critical of a certain aspect of your work: of an aspect of an early stage in the development of yr work. the point i was trying to make in daedalus (and i’ve made it with regard to our critics in “caribbean critics” and elsewhere: and it applies to me as much as to us: in fact, it involves self/discovery) is that our education and historical experience has made us ignorant, in many cases, of our folk culture; and when not “ignorant,” certainly ambivalent. but what is miraculous is that despite that, some of us have made to effort to understand, to learn and in doing so, have initiated a process which is liberating us.
the examples i had intended to put forward to indicate this were from Vera Bell, Sherlock and G Lamming.Footnote 2 and then i had wanted to show how quality of v had transcended this: as in its final symbolism it does. i said that in my 1960 bim review: and that is still my view. but in my daedalus piece i was concerned with our language in the hounfort. and on returning to quality to record yr contribution, i discovered that in essence, yr lang was really no different from vera’s or philip’s or george’s. no diff, that is, in essence: in its deposit of ambivalence. at first i was surprised. and i saw and thought about this for a long while; and then i began to read all the hounfort material i cd get my hands on (this is why i cdn’t leave off to go to uganda)Footnote 3: and i began to recognize a diff in essence between the folk material and our own reconstructions of it; and i came to see your place within the collective. that yr lang was “the same” as us/others shd never have been a surprise at all. despite yr individual genius, you after all still shared our common experience, education and reaction. it is simply that when i reviewed quality years and years ago now, i myself was also further away from the hounfort than i am now. but it’s not a “change of tone” towards quality, my brother; but, i hope, a deeper understanding. for me, it now a more complex work. the structural problem, though, was: should/cd i, in a massive footnote, make all these distinctions? the piece, after all, was not only about quality …Footnote 4
listening to you now, i realize that i shd have made that effort: and in fact, there are drafts here that contain something of this effort. and when John, like a godsend, sent to ask if i’d write the intro to quality for his reprint: i recognized that the problem was working itself out. that’s why i said that instead of a reprint of my bim essay, as you’d suggested, i’d like to do an entirely new piece. i have to try to come to terms with yr book all over again: and as an effort of growth: not as a change of tone: because as i work at it, yr work comes to mean more and more. not static, but dynamic. and i predict that to each new generation of west indians, quality will come to mean something new and more. that’s why from i’ve been here on this plantation, i’ve been waging an e-ccentric battle to have it recognized on the english dept’s syllabus. (present check discloses that it aint there right now: john’s reprint therefore becomes even more crucial)
but let us say—for the sake of argument, andrew—that i’d come out and reversed my bim view of quality—and i’d done this out of all the love at my heart—what would we have done? would you have written me, as you felt you had to, over this daedalus aspect? i hope you would have. and i would have replied as i do now. and after? would we have been able to continue to feel as brothers towards each other? wd you have really been able to trust/accept my integrity and impersonal intention? wd you have been able to convey this to me in a way that wd have preserved our wholeness? wd i have been able to listen to yr honest reaction, expressed with all the love and impersonal concern with which you wd have been capable? i hope so. i sincerely hope so. cause if we can’t do this; and god knows how humanly difficile it is—but we can’t do it and communicate it: then we still lost, my brother. the fragments will still hold sway.
that’s why i began by saying that this moment is important. not for me/you, but for us. for our culture. we’ve got to learn to deal with the personal aspect of brotherhood. that’s why i want to assure you that i’m listening to what you’ve written. that i want to learn from what you say and to tell you that in daedalus there was no intention of “tendentious critical,” extra-literary writing. what i tried for there is my concept to literary criticism: it’s a seamless garment, i think, with all that i’ve done before: the appreciation of a work within what i take to be its socio-cultural and psychological context; and a testing for its literary integrity by an examination of the words on the page and aesthetic structure: cause i feel (see “jazz and the wi novel”) that it is here: in the aesthetic structure and models: unwilled expressors of the collective/individual pysche: that we can most nearly come to terms with the art (image of reality) of the work. hence my examination of the words used in the hounfort. (i’d also wanted to ask you: you will note i made only indicative comment in my text: what weight/significance/interpretation: in 1974: should we give to the urinating on p. 66 of quality. i can see it as a rain-making symbol: indeed you are quite explicit about this. but what are the artistic vibrations of the word?)
you also say/point out that the ambivalence i record as yrs is in fact the ambivalence of yr characters. now you can say that, it seems to me, because you are writing a novel with characters. but suppose it was a novel without? what wd i do with the words? or suppose like vera and sherlock, it is poem: where the words are naked? won’t i have to take the words as from the ink of the heart? in any case, the analysis i offer in daedalus has not to do with the words of the characters, but of the narrator. and unless i’m told otherwise, i accept the convention that the narrator is our closest link with the novelist: or if not the closest; at least [the] most direct link with him.
with respect to n. 64 on p. 105: there was no patronizing intention at all. have you ever known me to possess that quality? i’m glad, though, that you’ve queued me into the correct historical info. i really wasn’t aware that anancy’s score (in toto?) went back as early 52/54.Footnote 5 as you say, the role of publishers in distorting, thru failure to publish, the full measure of one lit contribution is something that we must take up—and soon. it’s happened and is happening to me too: both in creative work and in history but when i spoke about the influence of the 60s on yr development, i was thinking of 3 crucial events that i know about: yr return to ja (when van was there and when you fell ill); stokeley in london: along with cam and yr direct involve, with john and others in the education of black chn; and yr visit to cuba. all this i have subsumed under the term black consciousness, in its full pan-african cultural sense of style, focus and commitment: though i realize now that i’ve never stopped to ask you if you interpret it otherwise: failure of my listening. do you in fact see it as third world, personal, or something else? do you object to “labels”? in the case of sherlock, as say, too, with R. T. Smith, i note a definite new blk/african spiral in their work during or as a result of this period.
r.t. has been able to revise his “plantation” notion of the origin and nature of wi family structure.Footnote 6 philip has been making some v dread, non-estab noises (with post-rodney vibrations/connections) and his west indian nations (cf. his history of the wi with Parry)Footnote 7 has an african and folk dimension which is real GROWTH: and i’ve publicly said so in my review of wi nations in the daily news. Footnote 8 i see anancy’s score in the same light; and this is not to deny yr pre-malcolm, pre-stokeley blackness. how cd i deny or wish to deny any black west indian’s blackness: my work, after all, stresses continuity. and the exciting thing about quality: one of the cardinal excitements of quality: as i read it in 1959/60: and this was repeated by bill carr in islands in between Footnote 9: is that almost for the first time in the anglo-phone caribbean, and certainly more intransigently than it had ever been done before: the african oriented folk is given presence, visibility and finally, symbolic stature. the symbol used is that of crucifixion: and it is here that the ambivalence: the creolization: has its resolution: and it is here, therefore, that one (like me, in 1974) might wish to enter commentary. but it will not be a patronising commentary, it will not be an attempt to change or take away; but rather to add, to relate to the dynamic complexity that yr vision has provided. because yr instincts have prob explored far more than even you are aware of there, my brother, that’s why i say that each new generation will return there anew.
all this, i see now, shd have been down in that daedalus. one simply has to try harder. to strive for a way of getting it all down. to making the fragments fit. but when i referred to anancy’s score in my blk consciousness footnote: i was trying to explain its energy of language. now questel in tapia found, to my surprise, that yr lang in score was formulaic.Footnote 10 he based it on lit analysis; but on a lit analysis that did not take into account, it seems to me, literary development. my blk consciousness “label” (?), though, is an attempt to indicate just that: that even, though, as you tell me now, the score dates back to 52–54, its essence has been altered by what happened in the 60s: people can now more easily appreciate what you are after. but not only that, you yrself have been able to bring a more subtle aesthetic sense and model to yr words. and the differences, i think, are crucial. (again, perhaps, i shd have gone into all this in daedalus: but believe when i say that i write serially: as in the long poems: and that i will return to all this again and again). take for instance the only story of yrs from score that i knew before score: “anancy” in blk orpheus 5, may 1959.Footnote 11
now what i’m going to say here is learned from working on my daedalus piece and dealing with their editor: a most interesting and creative passage. when she rec’d my long article, she went thru it with a fine tooth comb, trying to condense and, as she admitted, leaving out ideas, phrases and words, that she did not understand. her action, i realized at once, was honest and honestly based on cultural difference. (and this she happily admitted: and so the relationship became even more creative.) the key to this was her editing of my present continuous tenses and my infinite verbs: e.g., becoming; to a finite, definite is. as soon as we both recognize this: editing and being edited became a rare pleasure.
now what i’m saying here is that my infinite verbs were/are signals of a certain kind of perception, which i call black, admittedly different from daedalus: but capable of symbiosis. these same indefinite verbs i find in anancy’s score (1973): but don’t see in “anancy” (1959). watch this:
1959: I’m going to tell you a story about a spider. The spider’s name is Anancy. the story is such a wonder story that not even Anancy himself would want to tell it. And that’s the mystery of things; believe me.
1973: I going tell you a story about a spider perhaps not. The spider name Anancy… .
better still, watch this
1959: When his mother and father were pleading, all he was doing was stretching out his arms and yawning a wide tired yawn, and going on like he was bored and frightened about total nothing in the world.
Later on that same day, he went back to his mother and because she was so sad, Anancy whispered some nice-nice words in her ears …
1973: When the mother and father pleading pretty please, all Anancy doing is stretching out his /him?/ arms and yawning a wide tired yawn, and going on bored and frighten-up about total nothing in the village or in the world. Later on that said same day, he checking back to the mother, and because she so sad, he whispering some nice spider son words in her ears …
now those revisions, it seems to me, reflect an unconscious and therefore v significant aesthetic decision. in the 1973 version, you are, more than in 59, eroding standard english, and moving yr lang nearer an ideal persona of ananse. and this desire, this choice, i say, is not only personal, but part of a communal effort—caliban’s—at finding a style based on the lang/life of the folk
did your life in the 60s contribute to this, or not?
… . .
i cd go on like this for a long time. am i reaching you? are you receiving this? i can only wait in patience for yr understanding and the return of it to me. the immersion in the impersonal experience is what we have to undergo. “the af presence in carib lit” is not the first time i’ve gone under. it is there in my wrestle with orlando’s sociology;Footnote 12 with louis james’ islands in between. orlando, it seems, ignored what i had to say altogether. he has never said a word. never reacted: to me. and has remained, as far as i can judge, himself. i noted this with admiration the night, at cam in london, that j. hearne launched that rhetorical attack on him also. in louis’ case, he was bitter. and it is my clear impression that i’ve lost him as a friend. certainly his vibes towards me change noticeable after my review. i can only hope that i don’t become too self-conscious about what i impersonally attempt to say; cause i may begin in counting in terms of friends, the cost of the effort. and friends are, in the long run, within the human time allotted to us, worth more than the effort. therefore i’m sorry—indeed scared if you feel that i’ve (willfully) misrepresented you. if my best efforts at articulation are seen as a distortion of yr long patient excellence. i can only assure you that i wish to come to the clearest possible bell of understanding.
… … .
on fri night (may 3) we played the tape of JAMAICA. i [and] 5 of my students plus rupert and oshogbe; kofi kayiga and mukisa; arthur drayton; omowale; bob stewart; mervyn and helen, and a few more …Footnote 13
it was a good evening, which i tell you about later …
… . .
marc and ken (dem two) are here now. started at the barn last night. the kind of occasion when we miss greatly you and john …
love,
K
11 May 1974
JAMAICA. i had orig plan to tape this eve. but since it was informal in me yard, wid people jess relax around, i decide it can’t be fair to pick up what them say off-de-cuff kinda. and in any case, i wudda have to walk round wid de mike to pick dem: which wudda been self-conscious like.
the first thing that emerge was that this was a v jamaican poem: lang-wise; sense of history; and characterization. for instance, some of the students say that them know or hear bout Bag-o-wireFootnote 14: though i sure that the one you mean mussa pass before them come along: and rupert point out how you use cross-roads/burnt ground wid de fire in de poem.
lang-wise of course, the i inta histry now is a boss sequence; and the cadence-return to it at the end, v moving, master. but what hit everybody was the cumulative effect of the reading; so that by the time you hit the proverbs towards the end of part 2, everything hitting home baps baps baps. that section v accurate write, my brother.
but the heavy discuss come in with how the poem optimistic: unlike most of we work; and how this stem from you v of histry using 38 and 65 and 38 FOR DE FEWCHA. Thanks and give tanks
K
