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.

In a 1991 interview with Erika Smilowitz for The Caribbean Writer, Kamau Brathwaite spoke of what he most often turned to when writing a new poem:

An image or a rhythm, or a rhythm-image. Not an idea. It might seem so when I talk, but that’s long after. I can conceive of what a poem would mean, but it’s basically an intuition. The image of a stone skimming across the yard in the dark against the glittering water at Runaway Bay, for instance, that created the poem.

And when asked subsequently how he conjured up this rhythm before setting it down:

I hear it, like footsteps or a heart rate, a literal rhythm. I suspect musicians and composers have that. It’s some kind of contour. (Smilowitz, 1991: n.p.)

Brathwaite is careful to emphasize that these points of departure — these “rhythm-images” — are in no way vague or impressionistic. “The image of a stone skimming across the yard in the dark against the glittering water at Runway Bay” is strikingly precise as a piece of descriptive language; rhythm is here defined as “literal” and compared to “footsteps or a heart rate”; and the claim that a poem’s meaning comes “basically” from intuition is not so much a sign of essentialist thinking as it is a reminder that rhythm is “basic”, that is to say, fundamental, and therefore the only ground from which a poem may be developed.

Brathwaite’s statements are an implicit defence of sound as the distinct medium through which poets think on the page. T. S. Eliot’s concept of the “auditory imagination” — “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word” (Eliot, 1986/1933: 111) — may be at the back of this, especially if we consider the importance of Eliot to his artistic development (Brathwaite, 1993a: 286–7). But the “skimming stone” is also connected, in Brathwaite’s writing, to a whole network of images about Caribbean history. From the poem “Calypso”:

The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands:

Cuba and San Domingo

Jamaica and Puerto Rico

Grenada Guadeloupe Bonaire

(Brathwaite, 1996/1973: 48)

The image he used to describe the musical basis of poetry here serves as the starting point for an origin myth of the Caribbean, setting the islands in motion. Brathwaite formalized these ideas about history and rhythm in his theory of “tidalectics”, which he defined in an interview with Nathaniel Mackey as:

Dialectics with my difference. In other words, instead of the notion of one-two-three, Hegelian, I am now more interested in the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear. (Mackey, 1995: 14)

Brathwaite describes Caribbean history as a confluence of repetitions, breaks, and reversals, rather than a clear line tidily punctuated by discreet events. He goes on to identify migration as the key feature of this history, as well as one of his most important themes and influences alongside the Bible:

The other big influence, of course, for me is history, as you say, the history of the sense of migration, the constant movement of peoples over the landscape of the world and how, from the very beginning, people have by their very contiguity influenced each other. That creolization, that interlapping of experiences — to me that has been the big thing. (Mackey, 1995: 23)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey aptly notes that as “a methodology, this [theory] foregrounds historical trajectories of migrancy and dispersal, and highlight the waves of various emigrant landfalls to the Caribbean and the process of settlement and sedimentation” (DeLoughrey, 2007: 164).

Since history and form are so closely tied in his imagination, I would like to examine how Brathwaite has used rhythm to think through the experience of Caribbean migration in his poetry. While many have discussed the formal qualities of Brathwaite’s verse, few have dealt with this important connection. Gordon Rohlehr (1981) and Andrew Rippeon (2014) have written aptly about the influence of different musical genres — blues, jazz, and bebop — on his poetry. Lee M. Jenkins (2004), Charles W. Pollard (2004), and Jahan Ramazani (2006) have convincingly traced the influence of Eliot’s modernism: the dislocation, the jazz-like rhythms, the emphasis on common speech, all of which Brathwaite “Creolized” in his own work. Charles Bernstein (1996), Peter Hitchcock (2003), and LaRose Parris (2015) have all demonstrated how Brathwaite carried out his theory of “nation language” in the poems. The relation between form and history, though, has been left largely undiscussed.

In this essay, I will focus on the first book in The Arrivants trilogy, Rights of Passage (1967), and study the way that the patterns of repeated sounds in each poem work in conjunction with, run counter to, and enter into a complicated relationship with, the apparent metre of the lines. ¹ These fluctuations are essential to Brathwaite’s project because they allow him to think diversely about the problem of migration — itself a process of change and fluctuation. In “History of the Voice”, he writes about the inadequacy of the iambic pentameter when trying to represent life in the Caribbean:

Over in the New World, the Americans — Walt Whitman — tried to bridge or to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of sound. Cummings tried to fragment it. And Marianne Moore attacked it with syllabics. But basically the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of the hurricane. The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. (Brathwaite, 1993a: 265)

The play of repeated sounds offered an alternative to iambic pentameter — a more adequate rendering of the migrant experience of Caribbean people. While the formal analysis I am about to undertake could be extended to Brathwaite’s work as a whole, I will limit myself to Rights of Passage for a couple of reasons. Though his later books return periodically to the theme of migration, The Arrivants is rare in dealing with it so centrally from beginning to end. At the same time, because of the narrative movement of the trilogy as a whole, it was important for Brathwaite to establish his migratory rhythms firmly in the first book so that it might support the shift to distinctly African rhythms in the third book, Masks. Moreover, the connection between history and rhythm which Brathwaite theorized is more clearly fulfilled here than in his later poetry. Unlike his books of the 1980s–1990s which test the boundaries between verse and prose (Sun Poem in 1982), and his subsequent experiments with typography leading up to his “Sycorax video style” (Trenchtown Rock and Zea Mexican Diary in 1993, Elegguas in 2010), Rights of Passage remains focused on the rhythmic possibilities of verse, thereby making it an important crux for his views on the relation between history, poetry, and form.

*

Rights of Passage begins with a sympathetic justification for those who choose to migrate to foreign shores. By describing an imagined journey through the African desert to the Atlantic Ocean, Brathwaite seeks to give a forcible and (indeed) audible sense of the strictures that motivate such travels:

Here clay

cool coal clings

to glass, creates

clinks, silica, glitters

children of stars. (Brathwaite, 1996/1973: 5) ²

The “Here” in this passage is the migrants’ starting point as much as it is the poem’s, and over the course of the first four lines Brathwaite takes us through a clutter of alliterative words meant to give a tactile sense of the land in question: “clay”, “cool”, “coal”, “clings”, “glass”, “creates”, “clinks”, “silica”, and “glitters”. Whatever swiftness the metre may offer through its quick succession of stressed, monosyllabic words — “clay”, “cool”, “clings”, “glass”, “clinks” — is weighed down and grounded by the pattern of repeated consonants, in particular the strong plosive sounds of “c” and “g”. (For the sake of consistency, throughout the rest of this article letters in bold will indicate stressed syllables, whereas underlined letters will indicate alliteration, assonance, or rhyme.) “Clay”-like “coal” is said to “cling” and linger on all that is “create[d]”, so that even the relieving breath provided by sky-bound “children of stars” in the final line — soothingly less cluttered than the lines that precede it, and lifted by the long, open “a” vowel of “stars” — remains firmly caught in the grip of “coal” and “clay”.

Under such stringent circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the figures in Rights’ opening movement would seek emancipation through travel. And indeed, many of the opening stanzas in Rights of Passage work hard to make the reasons for that migration perceptible. The remainder of the volume, though, is far more interested in the experience of migration than its inception. Brathwaite seems especially concerned with the question of whether or not journeying to a new home provides all the freedom and personal transformation hoped for by those travellers brave enough to take the migratory leap.

Brathwaite confronts this issue in the first transatlantic crossing he describes in Rights of Passage:

for our blood, mixed

soon with their passion in sport,

in indifference, in anger,

will create new soils, new souls, new

ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed

to the star by which this ship floats

to the new worlds, new waters, new

harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed

with the wind and the water

the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed

fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port. (11)

Much of the thinking about migration in this passage hinges on how the repetition of “fixed”/“mixed” either facilitates or halts the forward thrust and gathering momentum of the poem from one line to the next. The first instance of “mixed” in line 16 leads to a quickening list of all that the mixing of blood and passion will generate (“new soils, new souls, new | ancestors”). That acceleration is then curtly interrupted by the word “fixed” at the end of the second stanza. What follows may be, comfortingly, a resurgent list of everything this transatlantic crossing will produce (“new worlds, new waters, new | harbours”), as well as a catalogue of what the ancestors themselves will be “mixed” with during their voyage (“the wind and the water | the flesh and the flies | the whips”), but the speaker’s verbal energy is promptly brought to a halt once more by the return of “fixed” in line 25. And this time, the poem fails to recover from its rhythmical break. The final line of the section confirms what “whips” in the preceding line had foreshadowed. With “mixing” also comes imprisonment. The “pride of our ancestors” is here combined with “fear of pain”, and a “chained and unwelcoming port”.

Brathwaite’s changes in tempo might be interpreted, rather simplistically, as an attack on migration itself — migration as a deceptive process that ultimately “fixes” far more than it “mixes”. The obvious historical reference here is to the West Indian slave trade, and the distinctly sinister transformation implied in the voyage to a new life in chains. At the same time, Brathwaite generalizes the language of this section so as not to make it about a single historical moment. “New soils, new souls, new | ancestors”, “the star by which this ship floats”, and so on could apply to quite different contexts than those of the West Indian slave trade, in much the same way that the chains in “this chained and welcoming port” could also be taken as a metaphorical (not literal) image of violent constraint. The purpose of this passage, then, is to tackle the issue of whether migration to a foreign culture can actually lead to a complete transformation, or whether such journeys leave the migrant fundamentally unchanged.

Brathwaite offers a markedly balanced answer here by suggesting that while certain transformations are inevitable (“blood” is certainly changed by being mixed with “passion”, in much the same way that ancestral lines are redrawn by encountering a foreign environment), some of the migrant’s original traits necessarily survive and remain “fixed”. Moreover, the renewal that the migrant hopes for during his journey must yield to partial disappointment. Freedom invariably has its limits, and the migrant remains as vulnerable to the “star” that will guide him to his destination (“fixed | to the star by which this ship floats”) as to the sometimes quite chilling strictures of the country that will serve as his new home (“the fixed | fear of pain in this chained and unwelcoming port”).

Throughout Rights of Passage, Brathwaite is careful to show that the traveller’s conflicting experience rarely ends with his arrival on a foreign shore. Nor does a return home necessarily offer a sense of cultural belonging. In fact, many of the later sections about the migrant experience focus on how precarious that assimilation is, or how intimidating it can be for the migrants to try and reintegrate their original culture. The Caribbean remains, in Édouard Glissant’s terms, “une terre d’enracinement et d’errance” (a land of rootedness and wandering), where any feeling of at-home-ness is complicated by alienation, and the desire to keep travelling (Glissant, 1990: 229). In “Mammon”, for example, Brathwaite describes a man who has just returned to his native land yet feels out of place in it:

the limbo loving girls

he loved, stepped

on the pavements in stil-

etto heels, tipp-

ing staccato over orange

peels. (74)

Though the register is low and bordering on the comic, Brathwaite uses these lines very seriously to examine the returning emigrant’s sense of cultural unease. The central word here is “tipping”, and from a rhythmical standpoint the passage as a whole is built around a series of tipping points — split words and leaping enjambments — that mirror the awkward grace of the “limbo loving girls” stepping out in “stil- | etto heels”. The sense of awkwardness, of grace only partially achieved, comes from the specific way these line-end words are split, as well as the way this pattern is repeated across two stanzas. “Stiletto”, for instance, is usually divided up into three syllables (“sti-le-tto”), with a minute pause after “sti” to allow for a strong stress on “le”. The decision to split the word symmetrically at its mid-point (“stil- | etto”) — and “still” us with a pun just as we arrive at the enjambment — makes it unclear whether we should pause right when the stressed syllable begins or in mid-syllable. Even once we have read on and discovered that the word is “stiletto” (and not some other word that might demand a different arrangement of stresses), the awkwardness of the split remains. Importantly, Brathwaite then reproduces this effect severally throughout the rest of the section. “Stil- | etto” gives way to “tipp- | ing”, which also breaks after its opening stress and echoes “Stil- | etto” through its alliteration on “t” and its assonance on “i” (“stil-” into “tip-”). We then expect this to recur with “staccato”; and while the word appears in its entirety, the precedent set up by the first half of this passage does cause us to stumble over its three alliterative/assonant syllables.

The aim of Brathwaite’s repetition here is to preclude the very possibility of rhythmical stability. Not only is the first awkward leap followed by another, and yet another, awkward leap, but the recurrence of letters and sounds in all three cases both alerts the reader (preemptively, nervously) to the stumble about to take place, and increases that instability by having the same letters occur again but not in the exact same order or position. What we are privy to in this stanza, then, is a most graceless attempt at dance. The “stiletto heels” certainly suggest this to be an urban night scene — with the “limbo loving girls” going out on the town for a bit of entertainment — but the difficult “stepping” and “tipping” inherent to dancing, to walking in heels, and (for that matter) to navigating an unfamiliar environment, invariably betray the ingénue.

Brathwaite avoids stating clearly whose awkwardness the rhythm is intended to reflect. To be sure, the stanza’s tilting effects work quite well as a plain musical rendering of the “limbo loving girls” compelled to walk in heels and struggling as a result. From another perspective, the stanza’s staccato rhythms are also a reflection of the viewer, who follows the girls’ unnatural walk but nevertheless feels at a great distance from them. Both, indeed, are in a “limbo” of sorts — the girls for the uncomfortable footwear they have put on for show, the speaker for the anxiety he feels now that he has returned to his native land. Home must be somewhere, surely, but where if not here?

If there is any resolution implied in “Mammon”, it is in the specific choice of limbo, a dance often featured in West Indian carnivals. Wilson Harris has written perceptively about this tradition and describes it in the following words: “The limbo dancer moves under a bar which is gradually lowered until a mere slit of space, it seems, remains through which with spread-eagled limbs he passes like a spider”. Importantly for our purposes, the history of limbo is closely tied to the history of forced migration to the Caribbean: “Limbo was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passages. There was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders” (Harris, 1999: 156–67). Instead of remaining a symbol of slavery, however, limbo would come to be associated with the spider-trickster god Anansi and the resistance to historical circumstance. From Harris again:

The limbo dance […] implies, I believe, a profound art of compensation which seeks to replay a dismemberment of tribes (note again, the high stilted legs of some of the performers and he spider-anancy masks of others running close to the ground) and to invoke at the same time a curious psychic re-assembly of the parts of the dead muse and god. And that re-assembly which issued from a state of cramp to articulate a new growth — and to point to the necessity for a new kind of drama, novel and poem — is a creative phenomenon of the first importance in the imagination of a people violated by economic fates. (Harris, 1999: 159)

We know Brathwaite was alive to the link between limbo and migration because he makes that connection explicit himself in Islands, the third book of The Arrivants trilogy:

drum stick knock

and the darkness is over me

knees spread wide

and the water is hiding me

limbo

limbo like me (194–5)

Thus the limbo in “Mammon” also suggests the possibility of “a curious psychic re-assembly”, “a new growth”, to use Harris’ words. Brathwaite sets the migrant’s return within a ritual of social cohesion — a people re-membering after separation.

Rights of Passage, through its account of migrations past and present, can be said to participate in this work of re-assembly. But the book also manifests a counter-impulse to individualize its speakers through rhythm. Indeed, the attention Brathwaite devotes to each speaker’s distinct voice finds its fullest expression in the way he carefully selects specific patterns of sound to fit their particular anxieties, hypocrisies, and blindnesses. Much, for instance, is revealed about the speaker in “Folkways” through the insistent repetition of the word “now”:

But don’t touch

me now, don’t hold

me; for the good

God’s sake, if you scheme-

in’ now to relieve

me now, to sweet

talk me now, to support

me now, just forget

it now, please forsake

me now. (31–2)

“Now” is uttered seven times and (in every case but one) placed at the end of a clause or sentence. The word, with its drawled diphthong, seems to bring the poet to an insistent stop every time it reappears — to reinforce the speaker’s injunction and not to counteract it. The enjambment, however, as well as the quick succession of short clauses and the sharp stress on each verb the speaker wishes to forbid (“don’t touch me now”, “to sweet | talk me now”, “to support me now”, and so on), together lead to a quickening of rhythm — a rushing forward that betrays discomfort at best, distress at worst. The more this word is repeated, the more its actual tenor becomes painfully evident. This section’s bleak rhythmical drama is then sharpened and completed in the lines that follow:

Just watch

Me fall in the mud

O’ my dreams

With my face in the cow-

Pen, down

At heart, down

At hope, down

At heel. (32)

“Now” is first rhymed comically with “cow-”, then echoed far more poignantly by the repetition of “down” across three lines. The reiteration gets pushed to the end and edge of each line inviting a series of drops, to “heart”, to “hope”, and finally to “heel”. Each gets cancelled out, preemptively, by the “down” that precedes it. The style of the passage as a whole is consonant with the “improvisatory effects” of jazz Brathwaite identified in many West Indian works dealing with folk experience. But with one key difference. Whereas jazz, to Brathwaite, functions as both “a cry from the heart of the hurt man, the lonely one” and a “collective blare of protest and its affirmation of the life and rhythm of the group” (Brathwaite, 1993b: 58), the improvisatory rhythms in “Folkways” express isolation, loneliness, and grief. In fact, these sentiments are given additional weight from being written against the tradition they would seem to embody.

Where Brathwaite’s writing most fully overlaps with folk song (and jazz in particular) is in its adaptability. Throughout Rights of Passage, Brathwaite shows a keen ability to bend near-identical rhythms to widely contrasting ends, speakers, and situations. Consider, by way of example, the lines where Brathwaite ventriloquizes Tom’s flippant children with a rhythmic pattern quite similar to the one just discussed in “Folkways”:

‘But to hell with this, nuncle!

You fussy black Uncle

Tom, hat in your hand!

Cut the cake-

walkin’, man; bus’

the crinoline off the white woman,

man; be the black buttin’ ram

that she makes you

an’ let’s get to hell out’a Pharaoh’s land!’ (20)

As with the stanzas from “Folkways”, the speaker takes a monosyllabic word with a long vowel (here, “man” rather than “now”) and allows it to ricochet variously throughout the section — sometimes whole (“bus’ the crinoline, […] man”), sometimes fragmented (“an’”, “land”), sometimes buried in the elongated vowels of another word (“woman”). But the effect is starkly different from that of “Folkways”. Here the speaker extends the disrespectful drawl of “man” to a good many other similar words, such as “woman”, “and”, “ram”, and “land”. “Woman” is thereby soaked in disdain, and “ram” achieves a discomforting and baldly vulgar overtone in close proximity with “woman”. Consequently, even the children’s disregard for their native soil — referred to here as “Pharaoh’s land” — becomes an untenable slight. To feel that life at home is a limitation and a constraint is one thing; to turn a snide eye on the country of one’s birth, and all those who have sought to make a living there, is quite another.

With these lines, Brathwaite considers the moral risk migrants hazard when they embrace their journey too forcibly — disassociating themselves from their native land, turning their backs on their ancestors, and forgetting that the very opportunities they cling to so readily were made possible by the kindness and fortitude of those like “Uncle Tom” who made a home for them within its precincts. As Brathwaite demonstrates repeatedly throughout Rights of Passage, it takes love and strength to build a place which future generations can leave as easily as Tom’s children do in this section. At the same time, to show disregard for one’s forebears betrays a profound misunderstanding of history. Emigration does not (to Brathwaite’s mind) offer a clean break from a monolithic past, but should be understood instead as just one instance of a process that has been repeated variously across generations.

That being said, I do not wish to claim that Brathwaite’s whole attitude to migration is one of scepticism or disappointment. There are moments in Rights of Passage where the poet’s rhythms take on a radically different turn, where the patterns of sound and metre finally converge, and the promises of travel are fulfilled in an imagined future. Even Tom’s lyric early in Rights of Passage ends with inklings of resolution:

and hold my hat

in hand

to hide

my heart

hoping my children’s eyes

will learn (15–16)

The first four lines perform a clear synthesis of alliteration and metre — the repetition of the letter “h” accompanied, neatly, by a stress on each monosyllabic word it introduces (“hold”, “hat”, “hide”, “heart”). At first, the tone of the poem seems to darken with the addition of each stressed/alliterative word. He holds a hat in hand — bashful, deferential — out of a poignantly naïve wish that it will hide — not his head — but his heart. The optimism implied by the precise matching of stressed and alliterative syllable is recuperated, however, by the unexpected turn to “hoping” in the fifth line. Tom may have good reason to hide his heart at such a time, but he nevertheless has hope of a sort, and unlike the passage from “Folkways”, the rhythm here suggests that Tom’s hopes are not due to any sort of blind self-delusion. What does Tom hope for? That his “children’s eyes | will learn” (l. 127). The cure lies, it seems, in generation. Tom’s children may have treated him with cruel condescension elsewhere in this poem, but he still wishes that they will “learn” from him and carry his present knowledge into the future. His is not a desire for immortality so much as a longing for cohesion, permanence, and transmission across generations. Travel is here deemed entirely compatible with a sense of history. Dionne Brand expressed a similar idea in her recent book A Map to the Door of No Return: “There is a sense of return in migrations — a sense of continuities, remembered homes — as with birds or butterflies or deer or fish. Those returns which are lodged indelibly, unconsciously, instinctively in the mind” (Brand, 2012: 24). It is this vision of travel that Tom holds on to, and which Brathwaite develops and encourages through him.

The desire for continuity is hinted at — fulfilled partially — in the discreet slip of the letter “h” from “hoping” into “children”. By nestling the letter “h” in the very word that carries Tom’s hope in this section, Brathwaite reinforces the importance of “children”, and suggests that it is indeed possible (though not certain) that Tom’s wishes will be fulfilled. “Hope” endures, but very quietly, in changed musical form — the glottal “h” of “hope” usurped by the affricate /tʃ/ sound in “children”. Brathwaite achieves a similar effect by linking of “children” and “learn” through a near rhyme. Cohesion is here earned and not earned, hinted at but not entirely achieved, and thus depends on the how the remainder of the poem will play itself out (or, how the children’s futures will play themselves out).

The possibility of a successful transformation through travel is strongly hinted at in various passages throughout The Arrivants: small moments, for the most part, where Brathwaite proves himself cautiously optimistic that change can be achieved in spite of opposition. Even the frankly sinister image of animal carcasses decomposing in the African desert (immediately preceding the first Atlantic crossing in the poem) is salvaged by the precise way in which the passage unfolds musically:

dead bodies settle

and quiver

given up to the blanket

that covers and warms

from the heat of the final

cold; until suddenly burst,

the buzzing black zones that were

silence, swirl through the

sunlight, the left fest-

ering flesh they had covered

runnelled and holed like dust

under raindrops, soil

under rain. (6)

From a purely semantic perspective, this passage appears to suggest relief for the “dead bodies” described, only to then promptly deny them — and us — any kind of resolution. We begin with a soothing motion (bodies that “settle” and “quiver”, and the protective warmth of a “blanket”), followed by an equally promising “burst” of “sunlight”. Yet the wind and light do not bring about an ecstatic revelation or change, but a deadening image of what is “left” behind once the cover of a “blanket” has been ripped away: “flesh […] runnelled and holed like dust | under raindrops, soil | under rain”. The rain does not heal. Instead, it highlights the ruins of a body that will only change as it wastes away. The stanza that follows — in which the speaker points us to a better life “across the | dried out gut of the river- | bed” (6) — seems to confirm this scene’s function as a picture of the dead and dying world the migrants wish to leave behind.

As might be expected, the rather simple account I have just given does not match the experience of reading the passage from beginning to end, with full attention to Brathwaite’s deft play on sound. Though in the plainest sense the stanza is bookended by a pause (“settle”) and a return (to death and “dust”), the musical patterning continues to ripple forward and evolve from one line to the next through to the end: from the “b”s of “burst”, “buzzing”, and “black”; to the “s”s of “silence”, “swirl”, and “sunlight”; to the “f”s and “l”s of “left”, “fest- | ering”, and “flesh”; all the way down to the “d”s and “r”s of “runnelled”, “holed”, “dust”, “under raindrops”, and “under rain”. Despite the morbidity of the images themselves, Brathwaite depicts the world musically as a place of constant transformation. Death itself is seen as a state of genuine change, even if that change does not come in the form of a rebirth. The passage’s musical qualities enable the speaker to achieve a climactic resolution at the end of the stanza that firmly overcomes whatever horror the “fest- | ering flesh” of the bodies might elicit. Nothing to fear, then, even if the speaker’s desire for travel is given full credibility.

Indeed, it is important to note that Brathwaite never falls into a naïve praise of change for change’s sake. Throughout Rights of Passage he remains keenly sensitive to the motivations that underpin various kinds of resettlement, and how many migrants do not at all, in fact, yearn for a life of constant transformation. We see this in the final, and altogether unexpected, purpose he ascribes to travel:

Grant, God,

a clear release from thieves,

from robbers and from those that plot

a clear release from thieves

into our dish.

Grant, too, warm fires, good

wives and grateful children. (7)

The true nuances of this prayer become evident when we listen closely to its rhythms. The description of all the poet fears and wishes to get a “clear release” from (ll. 3–5) contains eight stressed syllables in all, but these are overridden by the sharp-stressed repetitions of “plot”, “poison”, “dip”, and “dish”. Importantly, the repeated sounds in this passage are not arranged symmetrically, but are instead scattered at different points in the stanza, either at the beginning or end of their respective lines. This creates a rhythm that is quick and glancing but also fundamentally unstable, uncertain, because of how impossible it is to predict (when going from one line to the next) where the repeated syllables will hit. In the last two lines, by contrast, where the speaker envisions an ideal life after his migratory journey, the music of the poem settles into a firm and studied sequence of desired entities, each with a clear opening stress: “warm fires, good | wives, grateful children”. The repeated “g”s here relate back to the opening prayer (“Grant, God”) — thereby cohering the poem into an orderly pattern. The future our speaker longs for is closely tied to the divine and is therefore (in terms of poetical composition) sanctified by the juxtaposition.

Brathwaite uses this passage to get at a most practical and, in a way, essential feature of the itinerant experience. Though the traveller begins with a prayer for “clear release”, what he ultimately desires is not a life of boundless freedom but one of stability — a time when his constant journeying forth will cease, when change will settle into familiarity, and when he will find, at long last, a pattern he can hold on to. “Release” is here seen not as a state of anarchic openness, but as the fundamentally human right to a safe and stable home; and migration can only bring about that kind of “release” if it comes to a close. While Brathwaite acknowledges that peace may lie beyond the migrant’s reach for some time, Rights of Passage remains a fundamentally optimistic poem in its ability both to examine the traveller’s life in its current state of flux, and envision (rhythmically) a point in time when the migrant will finally be able to achieve a kind of “fixed” life. After all, one of the special pleasures of this poem lies in its awareness that migration is experienced not solely as narrative, but as various changes in rhythm.