The Return of the Native: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Masks

By ABIOLA IRELE

In his book The Poet's Africa,
devoted to a comparative
study of the poetry of
Nicolás Guillén and Aimé Césaire, Josaphat Kuba-
yanda moves from the general observation that
"Africa is central to the Caribbean search for signifi-
cation" to an examination of the ramifications of the
African theme in the work of the two great Carib-
bean poets, not merely in its primary significance as
the mode of a counterdiscourse to Western repre-
sentations of the black race, but more fundamental-
ly as a focus for an enlivening sense of antecedents,
beyond the degradation of slavery, in the Afro-
Caribbean consciousness. Kubayanda's analysis
demonstrates that for both Guillén and Césaire,
Africa functions ultimately as a symbol of personal
redemption and as a source of new poetic and spiri-
tual values. It is therefore of interest to note that, in
his final appraisal of the perspectives offered by the
African vision in Caribbean literature as given ex-
pression especially in Guillén's redirection of the en-
ergies of Cuban negrismo and in Césaire's exultant
négritude, Kubayanda singles out the work of Ed-
ward Kamau Brathwaite as the most significant ex-
tension of the expressive field defined by the poetry
of the two older writers: "Of the contemporary
Caribbean writers in English, the Barbadian Edward
Brathwaite perhaps most effectively articulates the
Negritude consciousness of 'race,' history, and lan-
guage."¹

In its summary form, Kubayanda's statement
provides a first point of entry into Brathwaite's
work, drawing attention as it does to the thematic
connection between the earlier expression of black
racial affirmation, often centered on and colored by
an African sentiment, and the directions of Brath-
waite's poetry, in its extensive and anguished explo-
ration of the black condition in the world system in-
stituted by Western imperialism. Brathwaite's work
thus represents a reformulation of the abiding pre-
occupations of black literature in its most emphatic
thrust; indeed, the fact that his poetry issues from
the same climate of affective response to a common
experience and revolves around the moral preoccu-
pations that the experience compels has determined
an intertextuality reflected in the deliberate echoes
of Guillén and Césaire that amplify the tenor of
Brathwaite's own poetry.

We might infer from this conscious alignment of
his work to that of his illustrious predecessors that
Brathwaite has sought to give further resonance to a
common theme of black expression, pitched anew
to the actualities of his own time and circumstance.
But his poetry does much more than reformulate or
even complement, by relocating its points of empha-
sis, an antecedent testimony of black experience. Its
importance resides in the fact that it offers the first
and still the most comprehensive exploration of this
experience in contemporary literature. With the
publication of Rights of Passage ( 1967 ), Brathwaite
brought a new dimension--as well as a new lan-
guage--to a common theme, a dimension that con-
sists in the expanded historical perspective he pro-
jects upon the African experience in its full stretch
from the Old World to the New. As is well known,
this perspective was afforded him both by his pro-
fessional training as an academic historian and by
his personal experience of Africa as a material reality
rather than as an imaginative or ideological con-
struct.² It is primarily from this point of view that
the volume Masks ( 1968 ), with its determined focus
on the African foundation of diaspora black history
and consciousness, assumes its central significance
for the poems from Brathwaite's first trilogy, The
Arrivants, as indeed for the rest of his poetry.

Considering this significance, it is indeed curious
that Brathwaite's second volume has so far received
little critical attention. With the notable exception
of two perceptive essays by Samuel Omo Asein and
Maureen Warner,³ commentary on Brathwaite's
work has tended either to offer no more than per-
functory remarks on the volume, or even to ignore it
altogether. Yet Masks represents the pivot around
which the collective adventure recounted in The Ar-
rivants revolves. The ritualized passage to some
form of self-knowledge suggested by the title of the
first volume only begins to take on its proper mean-
ing in the second, in which the poet narrates in pre-
cise terms the phases through which he advances
toward an integration of the self through a reconcili-
ation with history. This process is merely hinted at
in isolated passages of ...