Kamau Brathwaite’s Rhythms of Migration

Abstract

This article considers Kamau Brathwaite’s formal articulation of the migrant experience in Rights of Passage (1967). More specifically, it demonstrates how Brathwaite uses patterns of repeated sound — and the way those repetitions work in conjunction with, run counter to, or enter into a complicated relationship with, the metre of a line and stanza — to explore the role of migration in the Caribbean. This rhythmic principle closely mirrors his theory of Caribbean history as “tidalectic” rather than “dialectic”, cyclical rather than linear. Thus the rhythmic shifts described in this essay enact, and give poetic shape to, a historical reality specific to the poet’s native region.