Kamau Brathwaite. Poetry, Materialities and Climate History

Abstract

This work review a selection of poems by Kamau Brathwaite that belong to the anthologies: Islands (1969), The Arrivants (1973), Black and Blues (1976) and The Ancestors(1977). From the viewpoint of contemporary materialism, which encompasses both itstranscultural variant and climatic imaginaries, I am approaching the cultural history ofextraction in the English Caribbean. This means studying not only the socio-historicaldimensions of the subaltern world but also the fractures between colonial history andenvironmental history. Instead of approaching Kamau’s verses symbolically or allegorically, I observe that the author’s poems exhibit a series of intertwinings between thehuman and the non-human within the precariousness of the plantation worker, as wellas a material history of crops like sugar or cotton that transcends mere commodity status.