Questioning as utopian practice in Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite’s first volume engages critique and questioning as an exemplification of a utopian impulse that results in an emergent critical consciousness. By looking at how interrogative and inquisitive moments might give form to potential resistance, the essay elaborates how Rights of Passage is the site of and vehicle for a variety of oppositional refusals, inquiries, and dreams that enact a utopian impulse. Written at an historical moment of widespread questioning and challenging, Rights of Passage offers through the characters who inhabit its pages, instances of subtly probing attempts to grapple with, understand, and potentially change their worlds.

In his 1970 essay “Timehri”, Edward Brathwaite recounts his excitement at first reading George Lamming’s classic 1953 novel, In the Castle of My Skin. It was there, according to Brathwaite, that he first heard, “breathing to [him] from every pore of line and page” the “words, the rhythms, the cadences, the scenes, the people” of his native Barbados (Brathwaite, 1970b: 37). In a scene Brathwaite discusses in his essay, Lamming’s main character G’s friend Trumper returns from an extended stay in the United States. Trumper plays for his friend a selection of songs by the heralded Black artist and activist, Paul Robeson:

“You know the voice?” Trumper asked. He was very serious now.

I tried to recall whether I might have heard it. I couldn’t.

“Paul Robeson,” he said. “One of the greatest o’ my people.”

“What people?” I asked. I was a bit puzzled.

“My People,” said Trumper. His tone was insistent. Then he softened into a smile. I didn’t know whether he was smiling at my ignorance, or whether he was smiling his satisfaction with the box and the voice and above all Paul Robeson.

“Who are your people?” I asked. It seemed a kind of huge joke.

“The Negro race,” said Trumper. The smile had left his face, and his manner had turned grave again…He knew I was puzzled…At first I thought he meant the village. This allegiance was something bigger. I wanted to understand it. (Lamming, 1991/1953: 295)

What we know – and what Lamming knows when he writes these words – is that coming to the precipice of understanding through the desire to understand is only the beginning of a very long road. Neither G nor Trumper may ever entirely comprehend what that allegiance and that conception of “my people” may ever fully mean. In spite of this, they desire and seek to grasp it and its purpose in their lives to come. By reading similarly pregnant moments in Rights of Passage in which ordinary people attempt to articulate an emergent consciousness, in this essay I make the case that this, Brathwaite’s first published volume, absorbs a stammering, nascent questioning that is at once contestatory and revelatory, and hence potentially emancipatory.

Whereas in subsequent volumes Brathwaite will turn towards an emphasis on the numinous and the sacred, pivotal to Rights of Passage is the artist’s recognition that his own gestures towards self-actualization are on the same level as the challenges and questions posed by his more quotidian characters. The struggle of human beings to articulate the forces that subordinate them, as well as the subsequent articulation of responses, is crucial to Brathwaite’s poetic investigation of the scope and direction of emancipatory hopes. In such a context all questions are significant, in so far as they represent a challenge to the structures, beliefs, and actions that repress the kinds of emancipatory hopes and impulses I refer to here as utopianism. I will demonstrate that questioning in Rights of Passage is the site of and vehicle for a variety of oppositional refusals, inquiries and dreams that enact a utopian impulse. Through his depiction of “little” ¹ questioners asking big questions in Rights of Passage Brathwaite does not offer us the space of utopia, but the engine that drives its continual reformulation within the spaces and moments at the edge of catastrophes and on the horizons of change.

The tragic narrative of displacement and rootlessness has traditionally been understood as the staging ground for Rights of Passage’s recitation of diasporic malaise. While the bulk of the critical commentary has focused on migration as an important kind of “passage” for Brathwaite’s work, this essay centres on a different kind of “passage”. It attempts to engage Rights of Passage as a book that instead stresses people’s passages towards a new and critical consciousness. History in this sense begins with consciousness and the first step towards consciousness for the figures in Rights of Passage begins with interrogative challenge. This inchoate moment at which a sometimes not fully articulated questioning emerges is an essential transition. In Blues People (1963), his influential study of Black music “in White America”, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) notes that it “was a decision Negroes made to leave the South, not an historical imperative” (Jones, 2002: 96). I realize that my referencing Jones’ book on music in the United States may seem out of context here. Nonetheless, while obviously referring to movement that occurred post-slavery, Jones’ point that such a decision “must have been preceded by some kind of psychological shift” (2002: 96) reminds us that while history may be about large historical forces, it is also importantly about people, their human choices, and their continual capacity for change. Such decisions may appear retrospectively as major upheavals, but as I want to show in Rights of Passage, they are decisions made up of a series of moments of questioning, feelings of dissatisfaction, and glimmers of understanding. How Brathwaite renders those moments indicating potential passages to new conceptualizations of self and world is an issue that is often muted in discussion of Rights of Passage, overwhelmed in the focus on that volume’s more evident epic historical sweep.

Brathwaite quotes Lamming’s novel in the autobiographical “Timehri” to call attention to the conundrum of the writer who attempts to “speak about ‘the people” when “those to whom he refers have no such concept of themselves” (Brathwaite, 1970b: 38). Of primary significance here for me in reading In the Castle of My Skin alongside Rights of Passage is the new insight that Trumper gains and the sparks of G’s desire both to grasp this insight along with his own position within it. The value of apprehending one’s own sense of self as an individual within and connected to a larger group and global network is particularly notable in the passage from Lamming’s novel. It stands in stark contrast to having the parameters of one’s own identity passed down from a more powerful, but ultimately still foreign, experience. The more obvious glimmer of burgeoning group identity (the “allegiance” involved in “my people”) matters deeply. For my purposes here, however, this moment resonates due to the stated desire to divine and then articulate such a connection and, consequently, to imagine what such connection might mean for the boys’ sense of themselves in the present and its potential for the future. Trumper’s exercise of what Walter Benjamin once referred to as the “securest of our possessions…the ability to exchange experiences”, has meaning for the sharing of the communion in the experience and the feeling (Benjamin, 2000: 77). Centrally, however, it has a great deal of meaning for the introspective energy that it illuminates. The power of this passage lies not in that these people have “no such concept of themselves” as a people, but that such an emergent conceptualization is imminent and, inasmuch as it pivots on a human faculty of divination, immanent.

The passage with G and Trumper intimates that the “psychological shift” that occurs is sparking questioning and glimmers of understanding in both characters. In capturing such a shift, Brathwaite himself recognized that there was more than just physical movement involved in these migrations. He focuses on those who have been caught in and formed by the processes of what he calls in the poem, “Calypso”, “nigratin’” (Brathwaite, 1996/1973: 50). ² Through this particularly resonant pun, he locates Rights of Passage in the aggrieved communities whose subjectivities had been crucially bound by the contours of slavery, colonialism, and racism. The malapropism is not meant as mockery. “Nigratin’” links space, movement, and the structural and affective legacies of racial exploitation through which the Black diaspora comes into shape. Migrations occur throughout human history; nigration begins with the Middle Passage. Through a simple consonantal substitution, Brathwaite embeds important layers into nigratin’, capturing the fact that Blackness as a modern condition is conceptually yoked to the processes central to – and beginning with – European colonial slavery. While the poem’s statement that a newly unemployed young man is compelled to go “nigratin’ overseas” hints at the punishing process through which the migrant will become a “nigger” (and become conscious of that as somehow being fact), Brathwaite’s volume calls its reader’s attention to other potentialities embedded in the people subject to a history of continuous and as yet unfinished nigrations.

What if we then thought about nigratin’ as a way of inaugurating a process that calls for the afflicted people to recognize a common, historically determined consciousness in response? Seen this way, nigratin’ might be understood as another name for the passage that Trumper undergoes as a result of his physical passage to and from the US in Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin. It results in a consciousness that Trumper has encountered but is not yet able to adequately convey. The narrator, G, is only just being introduced to this consciousness, but is clearly affected by it. In turn, this recognition calls upon these two young men to reformulate new senses of and new approaches to their situation. Such a creative endeavour would insist that they reformulate their senses of the past, come to terms with the realities of their presents, and begin to envision and anticipate – even in the face of failure – what a better future would be like.

Although utopianism, as such an impulse for a better future, is often viewed as a clear moment of change, in truth people must recognize that their world is fundamentally flawed before they begin to imagine another way of existing. In this essay, utopianism does not go so far as to refer to wish-fulfilment or the formulation of alternatives. In moments of challenge, questioning, or critique, the voices from Brathwaite’s volume that I examine in the second half of this essay do not present models of utopian worlds or spaces. Rather, they offer us illustrations of catalytic moments of change.

In Rights of Passage, published almost a decade and a half after Lamming’s novel, Brathwaite pursues the idea that a potentially revolutionary consciousness does not first have to be declarative; it is first imaginative and inquisitive even in such incipience as expressed by Lamming’s G as the desire to understand. Before turning to the core of my reading of Brathwaite’s poems, I want to outline the particular way that I am connecting questioning to an emergent critical practice that elaborates a utopian impulse. Utopianism is sparked during moments of reflection by ordinary people on oppression, hungers, and struggles. By especially addressing moments of questioning that might be easily overlooked, Brathwaite’s depiction of dissatisfaction with current realities or their attendant explanations allows for the exploration of new possibilities and explanations and their projection into a potentially better future.

Utopianism and emergent consciousnesses

Using utopia in the Caribbean context is tricky. Islands, particularly those in the Caribbean, have historically had a troubled relationship with the idea of utopia. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey points out,

since the colonial expansion of Europe, its literature has increasingly inscribed the island as a reflection of various political, sociological, and colonial practices; in texts from Thomas More’s Utopia to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the island is a material and discursive site for experiments in governance, racial mixing, imprisonment, and enslavement. (2010: 213). ³

In addition, the selling of the islands in the Caribbean to tourists as a paradise has continued to flourish to the detriment of local peoples, ecologies, and representations. However, following Avery Gordon (2005) and others (see Levitas, 2010; Kohli, 2009; Anderson, 2006), I want to reinforce here a distinction between utopia as specific place or rigid plan and utopianism as a process by which emancipatory hopes for better lives and futures are formed and reformed. Ruth Levitas argues for the necessity of distinguishing “between utopia as compensation, as escapism, as fantasy” and “utopia as a vehicle of criticism and utopia as a catalyst of change” (2000: 199). The ability to explore, conceive, and finally articulate what might be better, how it could be better, or most crucially what keeps things from being better is a potent and crucial feature of utopianism as a conceptual and creative process.

Gordon foregrounds the actual and potential responses of our imaginations, capacities, and intellectual faculties of divination in an essay on Cedric Robinson’s Anthropology of Marxism. There Gordon recounts the deep impact made by Robinson’s uncovering of Marx and Engels’s dismissal of a western socialist imperative that had even preceded their own writings, or the existence of capitalism. ¹ Particularly resonant for Gordon is Robinson’s contention that the two architects of modern Marxism “displaced a socialist motivation grounded on the insistence that men and women were divine agents” (quoted in Gordon, 2005: 24). This revelation, combined with Robinson’s retrospective illumination of this imperative’s existence long before Marx came onto the scene, is significant to the direction of my thinking here. It amplifies a revitalized sense of the utopian that reminds us, in Gordon’s words, that we might instead “measure our freedom less by what subordinates us and more by what we are capable of divining” (2005: 25). Fate, fortune, circumstance, the gods, and of course socio-political forces all can subordinate us. Still, Gordon’s emphasis on envisioning “ourselves as divine agents…to see ourselves as the executors – not the supreme rulers, but the guarantors of our world and our imaginations” (2005: 25, emphasis in original) concentrates on our own conceptual power and its primary role in our capturing and potentially transcending that which subordinates us. Such an emphasis on “divining” as a human and secular function is central to both the initiation and sustenance of emancipatory struggles. Brathwaite provides us with moments when this process begins amongst ordinary people. Not only that, but those moments (as we will see) are often on the surface deceptively ordinary.

Even though Marxism has been long associated with utopian thought and Marxism’s principal concern is with the capacity for genuine and meaningful expression of “the people”, this is not to claim Brathwaite as a Marxist. But it is to claim that there is, in his work, an abiding concern and presence for what Robinson adduces as a main impulse undergirding Marxism as well as its secular foretokens. That is at bottom a concern with “the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation” (quoted in Gordon, 2005: 24). Represented at key points in Rights of Passage is evidence of the incipient refusal of the marginalized and the unheralded to accept dominant narratives in favour of, as Gordon puts it, “what we are capable of divining” (2005: 25). The questioning – and by that I refer to the literal questions asked as well as the different forms through which questions and challenges are posited – gives form to potentials for resistance and human divination that remain as crucial now as they did during the period of Robinson’s pre-Marx explorations. These questions are central to an often-faltering process of awakening. Sylvia Wynter rightly cautions that “there can be no utopian saltationism, ⁵ whether in politics or epistemologies…discontinuities can erupt only out of seedbeds that have been empirically pre-prepared for them” (Scott, 2000: 159). Struggle does not simply form at a discrete moment. It involves a series of moments – some grand and some tiny – that hopefully coalesce in productive ways. Neither, of course, does the desire for and subsequent envisioning of new and better worlds emerge distinctly and fully formed.

Rights of Passage is introduced into print during a period of politically-centred creative activity in the post-WWII Caribbean. Wynter has distinguished it as a historical moment at which there was an elemental demand for a “new imaginary”, a “counter imaginary…that recognizes and seeks in some way to enable the voice of the popular” (Scott, 2000: 168). In his essay “Foreward” [sic], published in an early issue of the journal Savacou, Brathwaite highlights the significance at that moment of a revelatory questioning through which the concerns of the people and the artist could converge. He begins by flatly stating that a “‘revolutionary questioning’” ⁶ is the “implicit concern of a significant number of the writers gathered here” (Brathwaite, 1970a: 5). Brathwaite points out that while not “propagandistic or even overtly rhetorical”, literary and aesthetic concerns shape the questioning and from these questions come “new shapes and forms” (Brathwaite, 1970a: 9). Although “Foreward’s” focus is ultimately on the creation of a newly engaged writer, compelled by such interrogative activity “out of the tower, out of his castle, out of his ego” (1970a: 9), the writer’s society and his people, as Brathwaite shows in his poetry, have themselves been participating in a similar kind of – although perhaps more implicit – revolutionary questioning. Brathwaite, along with his characters in Rights of Passage, responds to the demands of their historical moment to refashion, reimagine, and reshape. In doing so, they transmit a key impulse in utopianism.

In “Foreward”, Brathwaite implores artists, whose vocation resides in reimaginings and reshapings, not to see themselves as being above their society. While Brathwaite’s essay is centrally concerned with the roles and goals of society’s artists in relation to the specific historical moment, in Rights of Passage, published only a few short years earlier, Brathwaite has already begun to coalesce the epistemological struggles of the artist with that of some of the more marginalized members of the society. It is not only those who are philosophers or poets by vocation who are aware of the state of the world. While the case could be made that those figures are perhaps better able to communicate that state or better equipped to give shape to, as Gordon put it, “what subordinates us”, Brathwaite demonstrates that similar articulations by the modest and the marginal deserve our attention.

To be sure, there are many actual questions (in the grammatical sense) asked throughout Rights of Passage. Although no doubt significant, my concern here is instead with how some of the central figures in this text are conceived of presented as questioners, given Rights of Passage’s focus on the spirit as well as the letter of critical inquiry and analysis. I now turn to readings of key moments in Brathwaite’s volume to examine what, in this moment of “revolutionary questioning”, they question and in what sometimes inarticulate ways they nonetheless voice their challenges and their critiques.

Quiet challenges

Challenge in Rights of Passage comes from unlikely places. That improbability underscores one of the more underappreciated gestures in Brathwaite’s volume: the use and recalibration of the figure of Uncle Tom. The first section of Rights of Passage, “Work Song and Blues”, centres on Tom, in a conscious reference to the eponymous hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2007/1852). While Brathwaite’s writing of the figure Tom has been discussed and admired, its audaciousness has, I believe, not been fully reckoned with. Not only does Brathwaite sympathetically recast Uncle Tom, providing him with a nuanced inner life not hinted at by Stowe or the many who will use “Tom” as at once accusation and judgement, but Brathwaite also installs diasporic connections and a subtly powerful instance of resistant questioning in this usually deracinated, subservient character.

Cast in Rights of Passage as a figure of ambivalent piteousness as at once “father / founder / [but also as] flounderer” (15), Brathwaite’s Tom is mocked, despised, and rejected by his children:

They call me Uncle

Tom and mock me

these my children

mock me

they hate the hat

in hand

the one-

roomed God

I praise. (17)

Paralyzed with self-doubt and indecision in the present, Tom fears for the future and is haunted by the past. Charles Pollard maintains that “Brathwaite’s choice of Tom is more in keeping with the standard postcolonial narrative strategy of reconfiguring the marginalized Western character”. As support, Pollard quotes Brathwaite’s statement that the choice of Tom stemmed partly from the poet’s admitted inability to “find in my mind a Jamaican slave…So I had to go back to the only slaves I knew”, starting with those in Stowe’s novel (Pollard, 2004: 67). But of course, Tom (or, as Brathwaite’s character is detractively called, “Uncle Tom”) is not merely a literary representation of a slave. Notwithstanding the fact that, as Wilson J. Moses has written, ⁷ this was a figure embraced by nineteenth-century Black nationalists as an aspirational model of Christian piety and honour, Uncle Tom has been transformed into shorthand for the rankest and basest of race traitors. By the 1960s, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reminisces, “Uncle Tom” had become “synonymous with self-loathing”, with decades of frustration emptying into the name’s transformation into “the embodiment of ‘race betrayal’ and an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts” (Gates, 2007: xi). Particularly within radical Black politics was the derogatory usage of “Uncle Tom” and its gerundial cousin “Tomming” – a designation of utter and final dismissal.

In the context of a 1960s transition into a radical Black Power politics, Brathwaite’s sympathetic use of Uncle Tom is striking. Unlike the often shallow deployments of the “Uncle Tom” indictment, Brathwaite’s Tom is a complex characterization. Tom in Rights of Passage has real, if faltering, connection to African memories. By rehabilitating a figure whose very name signifies an unbreachable remove from active struggles for black freedom, Brathwaite demonstrates not only sympathy for Tom but also the very real possibility that Tom’s forbearance and prostration might not be total and, moreover, that his resistance may not be immediately evident. He maintains conflicted African diasporic connections. As befits the contradiction and ambivalence that characterizes the volume as a whole, Tom’s connections are both generative and submissive. First Tom invokes diasporic connection through the crops that connect the different spaces where Africans landed: “Grow on, cotton / lands / go on to the bottom / lands / where the quick / cassava grows” (12), referencing crops that connect the lands where Africans landed with those from where they came. Conversely, Tom’s diasporic connection is also evidenced through submissiveness mouthed through a variety of idioms: “Massa, yes / Boss, yes / Baas” (15). Finally, Tom worries for his mocking children’s rejection of past and future for the rapacious, soulless pleasures of the fleeting present.

Worry and concern are not, however, challenges. Tom’s sadness over his sons’ self-immolative embrace of white stereotypes as touchstones of their identity ends the poem, “All God’s Chillun”, with a series of questions:

These my children?

God, you hear them?

….

When release

from further journey? (21)

After a numbered section break, the poem ends with a remarkable entreaty from Tom:

Ease

up, Lord. (21)

This simple statement, which makes up the entirety of the poem’s final section, is mightily suggestive. Is this plea, or directive? The shrug of resignation and acceptance could easily follow the questions Tom asks about his children. Certainly the poem’s concluding statement, “Ease / up, Lord”, might be highlighted for implying a melancholia that Pollard characterizes as expressing “submissive lament” (2004: 92). Even so, the questions that build to the end of this poem concluded by the statement “Ease / up, Lord” signal an as likely expression of overwhelming frustration and anger. Additionally, if we are indeed meant to connect Brathwaite’s Tom and Stowe’s iconic character, we must take account of Tom’s steadfast Christianity. Brathwaite has already attested to this through an earlier reference to Tom’s children’s contempt for his praise of his “one-roomed / God” (17). As noted earlier, Stowe’s Tom was considered remarkable (and at one point deemed admirable) for his unflagging devotion to the Christian God. And yet here we have an understated, but potentially powerful instance in which Tom “talks back” to his God, presuming not to plead but to enjoin. This Tom, wretched, ridiculed, discarded, and abandoned, is actualized here through his effrontery, muted and fleeting as it might seem. While not as dramatic as the celebratory climactic moment towards the end of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in which a once prostrate, degraded figure

…is on its feet

the seated nigger scum

unexpectedly standing

standing in the hold

standing in the cabins

standing on the deck

standing in the wind

standing under the sun

standing in the blood

standing

and

free, (2001/1947: 47-8)

Brathwaite’s Tom’s assertion is quietly forceful. “Ease / up, Lord” is an instance of a potentially powerful articulation of opposition to the force of original Authority, especially given the purportedly total acquiescence of the Uncle Tom figure. To have someone like (Uncle) Tom oppugn God by telling him to “Ease / up” is Brathwaite’s introduction of the potentially earthshaking notion that perhaps it is the marginal human who will conceivably take control of grappling with those questions he asks before the section break, even as their resolution may fly in the face of ideas and forces by which they have organized their lives and their sense of the world.

Further amplifying the contention that Tom’s statement should be read as closer to injunction than entreaty is Brathwaite’s use of the term “Lord”. For “Lord” represents, in the context of a slave figure such as that which Tom is meant to be, an utterance through which the sacred and the lay converge. This conjunction occurs within the realm of authoritative power. Even if we were to refuse the idea that Tom here questions the unquestionable power of God, we would still need to reckon with the associations that “Lord” has with aristocracy, land-ownership, and concomitantly, slavery. Here the poem provides a reverse echo of the utterances of docility and deference shown earlier in the poem: “Massa, yes / Boss, yes / Baas” (15). In the context of Tom’s life – and the lives of countless others in similar situations – “Lord” is only but a small step away from “Massa” and “Boss”. Tom’s quiet audacity is notable for the glimpse it provides into a nascent critique and potential refusal of the dictates of authority. Again, while perhaps not as grand as Césaire’s “standing and free” moment, Tom’s statement implicitly calls into question the Lord’s judgement as well as the Lord’s plan. What one notices here is not only Tom’s presumption to challenge, but the beginning of his articulation that something is not right, not just, and perhaps that things need not be this way.

Simple questions

In Rights of Passage, these sorts of glimmers of articulation and intuition are particularly rippling. In the poem “The Dust”, such a moment of questioning serves to produce a critical and utopian practice in the face of deprivation, loss, and cosmological capriciousness. The poem has been justly lauded for its flair for faithfully reproducing the language, rhythms, and tones of those women whose voices it represents. In Fifty Caribbean Writers, Mark McWatt describes the poem as “a splendid vignette of fairly narrowly focused concern in a work that treats for the most part of large historical movements and entire civilizations. These characters therefore provide a sense of balance and comic relief, as they speak their concerns in Barbadian dialect” (1986: 62). Derek Walcott, against whom Brathwaite has been often contrasted, in his review of Rights of Passage, finds in the poem evidence of Brathwaite’s development as a “master technician” (1993: 44). Velma Pollard’s approach to it is as “a near perfect expression of the life, music and philosophy of the people who have been described as the ‘basis of culture’” (1980: 41), while Nathaniel Mackey proclaims it one of the poems that, through its use of West Indian patois, evidences Brathwaite’s success at “letting the people speak” (1993: 155). I want to extend Mackey’s point by noting the way the poem lets the people, particularly the self-distinguishing Olive, ask. They question as well as request. In Brathwaite’s poem there is not much of a gap between requesting and demanding. Futurity and potential lie, in this poem, in the bridging of this gap.

“The Dust” opens with a series of welcomes amongst a group of Barbadian village women who meet at a local store. Although the poem’s primary voice belongs to Olive (the other women mentioned are Pearlie, Eveie, Maud, and Maisie), as Matthew Hart points out, the poem is more akin to a “vocal documentary in which the separate voices are only relatively autonomous” than a “dramatic poem with distinct characters” (2010: 125). The poem works to create a communal subjectivity via its amalgamation of these multiple voices. The voices mingle and at moments lose their autonomy only to reassert themselves with a strategically placed use of a name to reorient the discussion. In that sense, Brathwaite creates a piece in “The Dust” that might be cacophonous, but is instead choral. While this contributes to the folk ethos of the poem, pointing to the struggle between the individual’s desire to be heard and the group’s desire for cohesion, here in “The Dust”, it is key that one voice emerges to lead and direct the narrative.

Beginning with salutations, some friendly verbal jabbing, and fairly mundane chatter, the poem takes an abrupt turn during the last half of its stanzas. Olive begins to recount a story told by an elder, here called Gran’, about the eruption of a volcano. Gordon Rohlehr (1971) has convincingly argued that this refers to the infamous eruption of Martinique’s Mount Peleé in 1902. However, the geographical and historical specificity of the reference isn’t of paramount concern here: for the poem’s central point lies less in the fact of the event, and more in the existential responses of the afflicted. This event, of which Olive has no experiential evidence, still resonates through the passing on of the tale from Gran’ to Olive and her friends, and is then once again told by Olive as an act of re-memory. Olive introduces the history: “you remember that story / Gran’ tell us ‘bout May / dust?” to which an unnamed member of the group replies, “No! What nother fuss / that?” (65). Although Olive asserts that Gran’ has told the group this story, they rebuff the memory and indeed Olive’s narrative, as well as its veracity:

What you sayin’, chile!

…

Now how you

know! Any-

body live there? You

know any-

body from there who

live out near here? (65)

Olive authors an essential narrative about an overarching connectivity corresponding to their own past, present, and future. Dismissing such affronts to her narrative’s authority and effectiveness, Olive guides that story about the eruption away from the mundane demands of who, what, when, and where into the more philosophical purposes her story ends up having. Moreover, although Olive humorously mocks those who suffer the eruption as people from a place where they speak in “language tie-tongue”, speaking “as if cahn unnerstan’ / a single word o’ English”, (67) she rejects her listener’s implication that her knowledge should necessarily be a local knowledge. She need not know “any- / body from there who / live out near here” in order for her story to serve a more broadly noetic function.

While Olive’s tale is superficially about the natural and experiential havoc created by the volcano’s explosion, we learn that in keeping with Brathwaite’s text’s goals, her story is very much a cogitation about the responses that people have to moments of profound adversity and inexplicable destruction. Olive continues:

An’ if you hear people shout!

how they can’t find the way

how they isn’t have shelter

can’t pray to no priest or no leader

an’ God gone an’ darken the day! (67)

This philosophical groping directs the poem through Olive’s tale and to the poem’s end. There, appropriately, Olive draws her listeners into a rumination that connects what is for her and her compatriots ancient history to a meditation on their own lives:

ev’ry day you see the sun

rise, the sun

set; God sen’ ev’ry month

a new moon. Dry season

follow wet season again

an’ the green crop follow the rain.

An’ then suddenly so

widdout rhyme

widdout reason

you crops start to die

you can’t even see the sun in the sky;

an’ suddenly so, without rhyme,

without reason, all you hope gone

ev’rything look like it comin’ out wrong.

Why is that? What it mean? (68-9)

Flummoxed by life’s capriciousness and the inevitable presence of disorder within an apparent order, abandoned by the forces of authority and direction (God, the priest, the leader), Brathwaite’s character ends the poem with these lines, that, in shades of Tom’s “Ease up / Lord”, might easily read as a lament. “The Dust” moves through such a wide range of topics, emotions, and tones that we must read its end as similarly wide-ranging. In these simple questions – “Why is that? What it mean?”– we find a concretion of the revelatory, the contestatory, and the anticipatory that Brathwaite unveils in Rights of Passage.

Commentators often foreground the questions that Brathwaite asks in Rights of Passage’s poem “Postlude/Home” as comprising the central questions of the volume, as well as the broader The Arrivants trilogy:

Where then is the nigger’s

home?

In Paris Brixton Kingston

Rome?

Here?

Or in Heaven?

What crime

his dark

dividing

skin is hiding?

What guilt

now drives him

on?

Will exile never

end?

….

When the release

from fear, bent

back

unhealing history? (77-8)

Brathwaite inserts these brooding, afflictive questions into Rights of Passage’s penultimate poem as unequivocally big questions. In addition, the forthrightness of the concerns that emerge in the questions from “Postlude/Home”: exile and home; freedom; guilt, fear, history, lay out the terms of the narrative’s inquisitive thrust and offer the poet as the driving consciousness. For all that, the simplicity of the two questions that end “The Dust” has caused them to be overlooked as key, driving questions. The directness of “The Dust’s” questions is compounded by the poem’s manifest attention to a faithful rendering of the everyday language of the women, for which the poem has been justly praised. While the success in representing what Brathwaite would years later christen “nation language” is certainly significant in the poem’s achievements, the emphasis on the “little people” of the folk should not obscure the big concerns they also have. Olive’s questions are consequently meant to be understood as on a par with the grand questions the poet asks in “Postlude/Home”.

In most critical discussions of the poem, the village women have been approached as a group, as the women who “speak their concerns in Barbadian dialect” thus, vis à vis what they illustrate about the folk. It is necessary to reaffirm that in spite of the choral nature of the poem’s earlier stanzas, it is Olive who emerges as the central figure, distinguishing herself in a way that the other women do not and who, at the moment of the poem’s utterance, perhaps cannot yet. Initially concerned with the more quotidian events in their sphere and asking more unremarkable questions (“how Darrington mule?” asks Olive) (63), her character expands the scope of the conversation and thus the poem through her concern with global and regional occurrences. In spite of the implicit challenges enclosed in the poem’s deployment of dialect and dialogue, it is important to look at the fact that Olive distinguishes herself as the most explicit of the voices and indeed the one who questions most straightforwardly.

As mentioned earlier, Olive’s insistence in telling the story and gleaning lessons from it appears to run counter to the desires of her audience. Her listeners want empiricism. Olive rejects this by insisting that what is instead important is what emerges from this memory of this event. She puts herself and her audience into the minds of the people long ago afflicted by some supernatural event and left without leader, without priest, even without God to guide them. When Olive vexes one of the women by blaspheming, a listener implies that she does so as an unnecessarily showy theatrical gesture:

But you int got to call

the Lord name in vain

to make we swallow

this tale! It int nice,

Olive, man! (66)

Olive is quick to assert that God “know that uh sorry” (66) and the moment barely registers for her except as a medial caesura to her tale. Olive does not shift the invocatory drive to another leader, whether holy or political, but takes the reins of narratorial and interrogative authority onto her human self and through the consciousnesses of her listeners. In spite of her momentary blasphemy and her recognition that the sufferers were abandoned by God, there isn’t enough evidence in the poem to suggest that Olive has abandoned God. She nonetheless leads up to a large-scale questioning that carries within it the seeds of a potentially emancipatory and secular inquisitiveness. As with Tom, Brathwaite ends this poem that appears to focus so much on the mundane – right down to the commonplaceness of the language the poem’s voices speak – with a question that seeks to understand and implicitly desires to explain what might only be called God’s will or plan. He thus posits the human capacity to interrogate those sorts of unsuitable explanations and to, potentially, discard them. Olive attributes and accepts the natural rhythms of life to God but there is the notion that the plan breaks down: “suddenly so / widdout rhyme / widdout reason” (68). The disruption of cycles and divine plan leads to Olive’s own moment of anticipatory divination. While I don’t mean to suggest that Olive is now poised to answer questions about geological disturbances, latent in her musings are the seeds of an unwillingness to simply accept even the cosmological without question. This is not as much a moment of interrogative irresolution as a signal of an anticipation of conceptual models that may help the people apply those questions on an even broader scale. The poem thus ends by accenting the scope of human faculties for divining.

Towards the end of the poem Olive makes visible potentially inconceivable connections between the unforeseeable tragedies (in the destruction and violence of the volcanic eruption) and the unspeakable devastation of the enslavement of millions upon millions of people from the African continent. The poem’s concluding questions bear strong resemblance to those questions St. Clair Drake has stated have plagued the “more reflective” of the people of the Black Diaspora: “Who are we?” and “Why have we suffered this fate?” For Drake, these are questions through which they seek to unravel the “twin problem of uncertain identity and powerlessness” (Drake, 1970: 10). The leaderlessness and the neglect, if not the betrayal, of the gods that Brathwaite depicts in the opening poem of Rights of Passage are revisited in the terror and the wails of wanton, natural destruction invoked in the story about the eruption.

We are not told anything about the listeners’ response to Olive’s final philosophical cascade, but we might reasonably conclude (and maintain hope) that the spirit of inquiry continues après la lettre. This poem, which rings throughout with the most prosaic of notes, ends with Olive’s meditation on the profundity of natural forces and culminates in these questions through which the prosaic and profound coalesce. After all, “Why is that? What it mean?” are the kinds of questions incessantly asked by both children and philosophers. Olive’s questions suggest a desire for the unanswerable and the desire to nonetheless fashion an answer. In other words, the question indicates the profound desire to critically engage and fashion, or subsequently refashion as needed, a worldview. Certainly, the questions of why that is and what this means are in many ways simple and basic. I read those sorts of questions as encoding transformative oppositional possibilities emerging in what we might see as the unlikeliest of spaces and even during otherwise unremarkable conversations. To ask why things are and what they mean is here a utopian gesture that has embedded within it a desire to fashion an answer – whether through faith or reason – as well as a potential desire to not accept that things are this way and must thus necessarily remain this way. Utopianism here is once again situated in the processual rather than in the discretely spatial sense in which utopia has traditionally been deployed and consequently marginalized. The desire to exercise aesthetic capabilities of fashioning answers lies within the desire to understand one’s surroundings and potentially exercise the capacity to change it.

Brathwaite locates within such moments an essential conjunction of artistic and political impulses. While asserting her reason, Olive’s interrogative approach surges into areas that resist reason. Olive as questioner, as intellectual, and as Brathwaite’s poetic creation, arises out of that “frontier zone” to which Wynter refers, as “the zone that was the negation of the order of the printed page” (Scott, 2000: 169). Matthew Hart is one of the few critics who has noted the important orthographic slippage occurring during the last two stanzas. The text moves from the couplet “widdout rhyme / widdout reason” to the more standard spelling “without rhyme / without reason”. A simple instance of code-switching might explain such a shift. And yet, I want to argue that if we see the end of “The Dust” as a moment in which the consciousnesses of the poet and the people unite, as the concretion Brathwaite calls for in “Foreward”, we gain much from thinking about the second, “standard” instance of “without rhyme / without reason” as an echoing of the writer’s own voice. As a result, the couplet elaborates Brathwaite’s own questioning and challenging as an artist, especially in poems such as “The Dust”. His deployment of “nation language” in this poem is noteworthy. Brathwaite has posited Anglophone nation language as “an English that is not the standard, imported, educated English, but that of the submerged surrealist experience and sensibility” (1995: 311). Its “surrealism” is observable if it is understood as part of a literature produced as “acts of refusal”. These acts, according to Simon Gikandi, are “generated by the tensions between the hegemonic European language and African forms of poetic expression” and in which “oral languages take revenge against institutionalized poetic forms” (1991: 727). For the Western poetic enterprise in which Brathwaite is enmeshed and against which the African diaspora has been defined, rhyme and reason typify systems of order that are increasingly being interrogated during the time of Brathwaite’s writing of “The Dust”. “Widdout reason” does not, as Olive shows, mean devoid of reason. Instead, in Brathwaite’s hands, it signifies the possibility of an alternative reason and, by extension, alternative expression. Rhyme and reason here are not just central components to a clichéd remark. These are categories and strategies that are being questioned, challenged, and refashioned better to epitomize marginalized peoples and desires.

“Without reason” circles us back to utopianism. For is the irrationalism of utopia not one of the main points that supposedly ensures its doom? Not that a totalizing sense of utopia as a closed system of perfection is itself without reason. After all, utopia in the oft-derided sense is viewed as being too rigidly conceived, so that the very stuff of life is sucked from it. That dismissed utopia is purportedly a place that is either too rational, thus removing the luscious mess and indeterminacy of human life from it; or it is too irrational, as something that has never happened, will never happen, can never happen and thus we should banish it from our thinking. Anything bound by such rigidity is destined to fail. What is in the end more generative is to consider where it could be and where we might have missed it. The interrogative moments at the end of the poems I have examined are often understated yet still potent. Whether they point to a defiant discontent or a more subdued one, these are challenges by which Brathwaite evokes the seeds of a change in consciousness, the glimmers of understanding in the stuttering formation of a critical consciousness that allies the poet and his people in a unified project, if not a project for unity.