Where Atlantic Meets Eliot

Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite's "The Arrivants" and T. S.
Eliot's "The Waste Land"

Author(s): Neil ten Kortenaar
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 15-27
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819982
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Where the Atlantic Meets
the Caribbean:
Kamau Brathwaite's The
Arrivants and T S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
Neil ten Kortenaar
Paul Gilroy's ground-clearing work The Black Atlantic

invokes W. E. B. Dubois's notion of double consciousness to characterize the
black diaspora's relation to modernity: the Black Atlantic cannot not desire the
modem values of liberty, equality and justice upheld by the Enlightenment, but is
kept outside at once by the racial terror that seems as inescapable a part of the
project of modernity as its pretended universality and by a memory of the pre
modem, whose surrender would be a loss for which modernity can offer no com
pensation. The Black Atlantic is not merely the black equivalent of universal
processes, in the way that the French Revolution, in C. L .R. James's understand
ing, made inevitable the concurrent appearance of Black Jacobins in Saint
Domingue. At the same time, Gilroy's title can be read as an assertion that the
Atlantic is itself black. Slavery is not an anomalous or vestigial experience, nor i
it the special experience of blacks, but "part of the ethical and intellectual heritage
of the West as a whole" (49).
Gilroy is explicitly concerned with questions of continuity and change in th
constitution of identity in the black diaspora. I am more interested in the relation
of part to whole. My interest is in the greater field that the notion of a Black
Atlantic implies, in the Greater Atlantic that is always black but not only black
The double consciousness that characterizes the Black Atlantic corresponds to a
doubleness in Gilroy's notion of modernity itself: modernity is imagined as an
external force to which the Black Atlantic must respond, but it also always
includes the experience of the black diaspora. Gilroy dates modernity from
Hegel's discussion of the master/slave dialectic. This modernity is the
Enlightenment project of universal humanism, what we might call the White
Atlantic. Modernity, however, cannot be properly thought without registering
the experience of African slaves on New World plantations. The wealth they gen
erated made the Industrial Revolution possible, and the slave plantation was the
site where the surveillance and discipline that characterize modern labor condi
tions were first developed. Even as Gilroy's Black Atlantic is outside the White
Atlantic and cannot be inside it, it is always a part of a Greater Atlantic, whic
cannot be imagined apart from its blackness. The double consciousness of the
Black Atlantic arises because the White Atlantic imagines itself and is imagined
as coterminous with the Greater Atlantic.
16 Research in African Literatures
We can make sense of Gilroy's stereoscopic vision of black experience (at

once inside and outside) by making the distinction that Zygmunt Bauman mak
between the project of modernity and modem consciousness. The project of
modernity has the Enlightenment goal of imposing a rational order on nature a
on society. It is the project of mapping, ordering, and defining, the project of sc
ence, of modern social organization, and of the nation-state. This project, wh
we have called the White Atlantic, claims universality, but itself creates th
ambivalence that it abhors by at once inviting others to participate in whitene
and refusing them participation because they are not white. The will to order,
its desire for totalization, generates the very ambivalence that it would abolish, a
ambivalence felt first by Jews and other "strangers." In the inevitably ambivalen
experience of Jews in Europe Bauman sees "a vantage-point from which the de
est insight into the modern human condition could be had" (149). This ambiva
lence is what Bauman calls modern consciousness and what I have called the
Greater Atlantic: an awareness of the bankruptcy of the modern project and of its
denial of the deepest truth, that human beings are not geometrical. The ambiva-
lence towards modernity is Gilroy's double consciousness and it made of blacks
"the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and
difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a
century later" (221).'
If, as Gilroy suggests, blacks became the first modem people a century before
white Europeans, what is the modernity that in the twentieth century characterizes
whites no less than blacks? In particular, what is the relationship between the
Black Atlantic, which Gilroy calls "the counterculture of modernity," and the
counterculture of literary modernism? Bauman sees in twentieth-century literary
and artistic modernism a recognition of the deformation caused by the project of
modernity: modernism marks the moment "when modernity turned its gaze upon
itself and attempted to attain the clear-sightedness and self-awareness which
would eventually disclose its impossibility" (3nl). Thus Bauman accounts for the
great affinity felt by Europe's Jews for the aesthetics of modernism. We can frame
the question of the Black Atlantic's relation to modernism by looking at the rela-
tion between Edward Kamau Brathwaite and T. S. Eliot: Brathwaite the West
Indian poet whose poetic trilogy The Arrivants had imagined, 25 years before
Gilroy, a common black experience that encompassed not only Europe and
America but also Africa and the Caribbean, and Eliot whose classic of high mod-
ernism The Waste Land Brathwaite has acknowledged as a poetic precursor.
'On Margate Sands.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing'
The Waste Land 11. 300-05
Neil ten Kortenaar 17
nothing
nothing
so let me sing
nothing
now
let me remember
nothing
now
let me suffer
nothing
to remind me now
of my lost children
"Tom," The Arrivants 13
When as a young man Brathwaite travelled on a scholarship to Cambridge,

he naively thought that knowing The Waste Land and Macbeth by heart would be
enough to win him acceptance as a citizen of the world (Barabajan Poems 56). Of
course, he was quickly undeceived. The universal heritage for which Shakespeare
and Eliot were metonyms and of which The Waste Land was not only a part but
also summarized excluded the black "son of the empire" who made claims on it.
He would be measured by it but was not to think it was his. Brathwaite's rela-
tionship to Eliot's epic formulation of high modernism can therefore be seen as
emblematic of the Black Atlantic's relationship to the White. The Waste Land held
out the promise of an Archimedean, sibylline perspective on tradition and history
and then withdrew that promise from the colonial reader.
That is the reading Brathwaite has recently offered in the autobiographical
Barabajan Poems, and it resembles the reading that Houston Baker gives to the
relations between high modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. That reading,
however, is complicated by the fact that elsewhere Brathwaite has explicitly
acknowledged Eliot as a precursor (qtd. in Rohlehr, Pathfinder 66). He has always
expressed his own postcolonial struggle against "Miltonic pentametrics"
("Newstead to Neustadt" 654) and the "dissociation of sensibility" ("Timehri" 29)
in Eliotic terms and identified the Euro-American modernists as allies. A young
Brathwaite saw Eliot, Pound, and Joyce as achieving a "'colonial' breakthrough"
by offering an alternative to the "English Romantic/Victorian cultural tradition
which still operates among and on us" ("Jazz" 72-3).2 Indeed, Gordon Rohlehr,
the critic closest to Brathwaite, wonders if we can ever determine how much in
The Arrivants trilogy "is owed... to the structure of T. S. Eliot's 'Wasteland,' and
how much to the instinctive groping for an architecture, appropriate to expressing
the crucial tensions in West Indian societies" ("Literature and the Folk" 68).
The attraction of Eliot's modernism was not its European provenance nor its
canonized status but its affinity with Caribbean experience. Long after his trilogy
was published, Brathwaite explained that the West Indian poets who made the
breakthrough from standard English to "nation language," an African-based lan-
guage closer to the folk and to West Indian musical rhythms, "were influenced
basically ... by T. S. Eliot" ("History of the Voice" 286). In Eliot's recorded voice,
with its "dry deadpan delivery," young West Indians who were listening to Bird,
Dizzy, and Klook could hear "the «riddims> of St. Louis" (282n34). In ot
words, what the West Indian poet heard in the classic modernist was the Eu
American's own creolization.
Brathwaite's discussion of "[w]hat T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and
the Caribbean" ("History of the Voice" 286) finds corroboration in Ralph Ellison,
who said of The Waste Land:
I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understand-

ing. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to jazz than were those of
the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand them, its range
of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong. (qtd.
in Helmling 842)
Brathwaite's response to Eliot reminds us of a poet who was not (just) the snob
and anti-Semitic Anglo-Catholic high priest of the European literary tradition, a
forgotten poet who will have to be recovered if we are to remove modernism from
its association with the White Atlantic and relocate it in the context of a Greater
Atlantic. This is the poet of whom David Chinitz observes, "Eliot's patented
cadences-his characteristic rhythms, the ways he uses rhyme, the tonal contours
of his lines-were learned from, or discovered in, the sound of popular music.
Every moment that he sounds 'like Eliot,' Eliot is alluding to jazz" (245-46).
What this Eliot represented to Brathwaite was not the White but the Greater,
always already creolized Atlantic. Brathwaite could learn from Eliot because Eliot
had already made use of the rhythms of the black diaspora. This is a point made
by Michael North, who stresses the element of linguistic imitation and racial mas-
querade in the letters and early experiments of the modernists. For Pound,
Black dialect is a prototype of the literature that would break the hold of
the iambic pentameter, an example of visceral freedom triumphing over
dead convention. The dialect in modernism is a model for the dialect of
modernism, since black speech seems to Pound the most prominent prior
challenge to the dominance of received linguistic forms. (North, Dialect
of Modernism 78)
This discussion of the relation between creolization and modernism complicates
our usual understanding of these terms. West Indian creolized culture is com-
monly located on a continuum stretching between oral folk culture, African in
origin, and European literary traditions, including modernist aesthetics.3 In this
model, modernism is the European contribution to Caribbean creolized culture
and is opposed to the pole of the folk. As Brathwaite's acknowledged debt to Eliot
reminds us, however, modernism, as well as being the European pole in a
creolized identity, already presumes the African-based folk forms implied by jazz.
Modernism and creolization fold into one another.
No one is more responsible for the creolization model of West Indian culture
than Brathwaite himself. He has defined creolization as the process of intercul-
turation whereby Europe and Africa "set up a symbiotic relationship with each
other; so that conquerors are conquered and the colonized colonize" ("World-
Order Models" 63). Brathwaite's Caribbean is always already the result of inter-
culturation, so that neither Europe nor Africa has been left untouched by the other.
Yet, Brathwaite's notions of creolization are primarily intended as an affirmation
of forgotten African continuities that balance the influence of Europe. In

Brathwaite will later argue that the difference is a difference in kind: Europ
a missile culture, while Africa's is a capsule culture that can face all kinds of pr
sure to its shell without suffering damage to its inner kernel ("Carib
Culture"). Where Gilroy sees a black Atlantic partly inside and partly outs
another, necessarily doubled Atlantic, Brathwaite imagines a black Atlantic
balances the white Atlantic, that bears its own principles of continuity and
its own internal motor of development. Gilroy is critical of "narrow nation
perspectives" that seek "to ensure the tidy flow of cultural output into neat, sy
metrical units" (29); symmetry is what Brathwaite is about.
There is a paradox in Brathwaite's notions of creolization that resembles
paradox in Gilroy where the outside is always inside. The logic of creoliza
requires that Africanized Europe and Europeanized Africa always be distingu
able as Europe and Africa; the hybridization of cultures presumes that cultu
remain ever pure. This is a paradox that defies logical understanding but th
very familiar to everyone in the contemporary Atlantic region. It suggests that
olization should not be regarded as the sum of the different ingredients that m
up the West Indies, but rather as a particular relationship that defines the elem
in the first place.
If Eliot's modernism is a function of his creolization, may not the conv
also be true-that creolization is best understood, not as the expression of
indigenous West Indian soul, but as the form that modernist ambivalence tak
the Caribbean? The advantage of seeing modernism not as the European con
bution to Caribbean creolization but as something that the Caribbean and Eu
share is that in describing Caribbean modernism we establish the limits o
European equivalent, which are not the limits of modernism itself. If we are go
to understand the modernism of the Greater Atlantic, we will have to look a
appeal for Cesaire as well as for Breton, for Brathwaite as well as for Eliot.
intention is not to deny the triumphant national culture given musical and lite
expression in the West Indies but to suggest that national cultures are best und
stood in an international system. To suggest that creolization is the form that
ern consciousness takes in the Caribbean is to note how much The Arrivan
resembles and subverts Eliot's Waste Land.
II
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?
The Waste Land, 11. 19-20
And that no doubt will ever hit
us, the worm's mischance defeat us, dark roots
of time move in our way to trip us; look, we dance.
"The Forest," The Arrivants 116
Eliot's epic represents at once the White Atlantic, the hegemonic authority
Brathwaite must counter with an authority of his own, and the possibility of a
Greater Atlantic that can serve as a model for Brathwaite's own subversive
project. It is tempting to forget for a moment the subversion that Brathwaite heard
in Eliot and to define Brathwaite's poem by its symmetrical relation to Eliot: as at
once opposed and complementary. The result is too simple a reading of bo

poems, a misreading that we will afterwards have to complicate but that has
virtue of accounting for how both poems are most commonly read. Juxtapo
the two poems makes us read The Arrivants as a tale of the tribe that reminds r
ers that The Waste Land itself, concerned as it is with the seemingly unive
"mind of Europe" (Selected Essays 39), is but a tale of the tribe.
Even as The Waste Land laments that the modern world has left the poet w
nothing but shards and fragments, the poem is commonly read as an invitation
see a larger whole. The poem, for all its emblems of despair and impotence,
claims great authority and power. The individual who can contain the tradit
who can see how "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and withi
the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence
composes a simultaneous order" (Selected Essays 38) is assured of a position
that tradition. It is precisely the power to at once constitute and join a tradition
has made Eliot's epic of despair and impotence so attractive to so many (Helm
843). Brathwaite cannot tap into the power of the White Atlantic, but he can
what Eliot the ex-colonial has done and define a previously unidentified trad
for himself, an African-based tradition of spirit and music that his poetry
declares defines him. Brathwaite's revolutionary decolonizing stance has in
mon with Eliot's conservative and romantic anti-capitalism "its defense of cu
as a principle of social unity against the economic and political fragmentatio
modern civilization" (North, "Eliot, Lukacs" 173).
Eliot emphasizes what Frank Kermode calls "the need for moder men to
members of a larger polity than that of their own province-to accept their nat
ality yet aspire to membership of a more abstract empire embodied in La
Europe" ("Introduction" 21). Eliot argues that the poet "must be aware that
mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he learns in
to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind which cha
and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, wh
does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of
Magdalenian draughtsman" (Selected Essays 39). If we can see this transperso
mind at work in The Waste Land, with its echoes not just of Elizabethan
wrights and medieval poets, but also of primitive fertility rites culled from
works of anthropologists like Frazer and Levy-Bruhl, then we can recogn
similar motivation in Brathwaite who juxtaposes the traces of slavery and e
that mark the alienated reality of the black diaspora with voices and sounds
recall an original African tradition, a tradition of ritual stretching back across
turies and across a continent, in which, even if all has been forgotten, nothing
been lost.
The protagonists of the poems, Tiresias in Eliot, Tom in Brathwaite's Rights
of Passage (an allusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe and not to Eliot), are much-
suffering selves characterized by permeability and instability, forever dissolving
into other selves existing at other times and in other places. Eliot argues that the
"progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of per-
sonality" (Selected Essays 40) and favored a ventriloquism that would allow other
voices to speak through him. The Waste Land's original title was "He do the
Police in Different Voices." Brathwaite, too, seeks to subsume the poet's personal
experience in a larger epic formulation. He practices an aesthetic of "the self
without ego, without I, without arrogance" in order to express an awareness

understanding of community, of cultural wholeness, of the place of the indivi
within the tribe ("Timehri" 33-34). The poet who cultivates impersonality
speaks with the voice of tradition adopts the tones of a prophet, addressing
ety at once in bitter tones of denunciation and with the promise of healing. Th
are many features of Brathwaite's technique that might be said to echo Eli
the absence of transitions, the chorus and cacophony of different voices, the p
ence of foreign languages, the need for notes to explain to readers the meanin
erudite allusions, the presence of fragments of other, often ancient texts, and
inclusion of popular, nonpoetic registers. Both poets figure the malaise of m
nity in terms of sterility, aridity, sickness, corrupt and joyless sex, hollowness
empty ruins (in Eliot the chapel perilous, in Brathwaite Tom's cabin). In b
poems the malaise of the modern world is blamed on amnesia: in Eliot the v
of the buried living welcome the "forgetful snow" (63); Brathwaite points to
slavery has been forgotten and denied by the "spades," the cool heirs of the
Tom. The objective of both poets is somehow to make the unconscious cons
to heal the Waste Land we must ask about the heaps of broken images and
they mean. According to the common reading, Eliot's ambition is to wake u
society that had sleepwalked its way into World War I, which he does "by ad
istering therapeutic shocks of perception managed by startling juxtaposition
materials and innovations of form" (Helmling 844). Brathwaite's project is s
lar; it is described by Simon Gikandi thus: "Brathwaite begins with the ass
tion that black or Caribbean identity cannot be found in a reconciliation bet
the alienated self and its Euro-American figures of desire; rather than se
overcome this gap, the self must come to terms with the history of its repres
like a mental patient who cannot be cured until he or she has spoken the tr
of childhood" ("E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of Voice" 735).
If there is a whole that can be made of the fragments, it is outside English
maybe even outside language altogether. The poems include other languag
even animal sounds (the jugjugjug of the nightingale, the drip drop of the thr
the cocorico of the cock in Eliot's poem; the akoriko of the cock in Brathw
poem), and, in particular, hearken back to an ur-language: "Da Datt
Dayadhvam Da Damyata," says the thunder; "dam dam damirifa damirifa
keen the mourners; and "kon kon kon kon kun kun kun kun," beat the dru
Eliot's poem ends with invocations in Sanskrit, the nearest equivalent to an
European Ur-language, while Brathwaite's journey to Africa involves larg
tions of Akan-language prayers. The outside perspective that might offer a
of wholeness requires a return to "ancestral" languages, languages that the
have had to learn and that most of their readers will not know. The return to
languages of "origin" does not supply lost origins, but serves to question
language. If there is a whole, it is located outside or beneath or in the spaces
between language.
For both poets, to travel east is also to go back in time, to the premodern, to
a world of ritual and myth before the dissociation of sensibility associated with
linear history. At the end of Eliot's poem, the perspective shifts to India, at once
outside and before Europe. In Masks, the second volume of his trilogy, Brathwaite
transfers his focus to Africa, the site of roots. Eliot admired the vision offered in
Frazer's Golden Bough of a single myth underlying all of human consciousness,
"one that included a mythic platform for seeing all history more comprehe
sively" (Brooker and Bentley 32). The allusions to myths of dying gods, of cyc
cal seasonal renewal, of sacrifice and healing may be no more than an arbitra
scaffolding employed by modern literature, as Eliot suggested Joyce used t
Odyssey in Ulysses (Selected Essays 177), or they might be something more: t
racial unconscious that lies beneath all that the moder world knows and that
mocks and judges the modern soulless present. So, too, in Brathwaite's poem, rit
ual puts Africans in touch with the cyclical patterns underwriting history.
Libations allow them to invoke the blessings of the beneficent spirits and to ward
off the malevolence of other spirits, for there are always both.
The symmetry between postcolonial and modernist ambivalence explains
why many of the same terms are used for discussing both. The Waste Land
described by Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley as occupying an "episte
mological limbo" (20), an in-between space between the old certainties o
European modernity that are no longer sufficient and something new that has yet
to be created. Limbo is precisely the space where Gikandi locates Caribbean lit-
erature in his Writing in Limbo, and it is the title of one of the poems i
Brathwaite's trilogy. Such symmetry does not imply identity, of course; indeed th
opposite. The two invisible poets disappear to different locations, which can be
explained by distinguishing the different relations the two creole poets have to th
White Atlantic/missile culture that continues ever. Eliot who sees himself as "a
nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to his own language" also longs
for the security of the metropole (North, Dialect of Modernism 80). When Eliot
experiments with black dialect, writes North, blackness is as much feared as it is
desired: "being black means to Eliot either to be everything or to be nothing, to
have the freedom and the power of the cosmopolitan modernist or to be locked
alone in utter darkness" (85). Eliot's poetry serves to contain his fears and con-
firm the standards of the metropole even as it threatens those standards. For
Brathwaite, on the other hand, it is the promise of transcendence held out by
Cambridge and The Waste Land that spells utter loneliness. He has to find another
home. For him, Africa at once represents an alternative to the metropole, makes
possible a display of cosmopolitan modernism, and offers the security of a home
where the poet had not originally hoped to find one.
Both poets seek to heal a dissociation of sensibility characteristic of moder-
nity, but Eliot's response to the fragmentation he saw around him was to long for
a new Rome, while Brathwaite always identifies himself with "the hooded
hordes" that threaten Babylon.4 The Waste Land is concerned, Robert Young sug-
gests, with recuperating "the 'primitive' animal vitality and emotionalism of the
lower races" for the "regeneration of a tired, degenerate, vulgarized, mechanical
European civilization" (52). The healing that Brathwaite, on the other hand, envi-
sions for the fragmentation of the modern world implies the abolition of the
distance between the poet and the folk. The lower is not taken up into the higher:
the higher recognizes its participation in the lower.
III
The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and west-

ern asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not
an accident.
Note to 1. 309 of The Waste Land
When I argue that creolization is the form modernism takes in the Caribb
and that the echoes of Africa in Brathwaite are also echoes of Eliot, I am not
ing that Brathwaite's vision of African continuities be subsumed under
ernism, but the reverse: I am defending nationalism against the charge of
consciousness. Gilroy, who has no use for symmetry, comes close to dism
black nationalism as inauthentic because it borrows from European notio
nation and race:
This reverence for the Folk bears the clear imprint of European roman-
ticism absorbed into black intellectual life by various routes. In an influ-
ential study of the folk roots of African-American poetry, Bernard Bell
has shown how organicist Herderian notions about the value of folk art
and its relation to other kinds of cultural production came to dominate
criticism of black art and literature and to be an important element within
the tenets of nineteenth and twentieth-century black nationalism. (156)
Gilroy disapproves of black authors who seek such folk roots and favors those
who are openly engaged with western modernity. But, of course, by his own logic,
there is no authenticity that is betrayed by engaging with ideas that are also found
in Europe. We cannot dismiss black nationalism because somehow derived from
Europe, nor can we see nationalism as somehow anti-modern and something that
blacks must get over in order to see their indebtedness to modernity. I think it is
possible to imagine a black nationalism that avoids the pitfalls of symmetry by
being fully cognizant of its own modernity, a nationalism that seeks to return to
the folk and the vernacular not because these are anti-modern but precisely
because they are moder, a nationalism that stands always in relation to other
partial identities. Such a nationalism, according to my reading, would be
Brathwaite's.5
To read Brathwaite's poetry as if he offered African roots to the Caribbean in
any direct way is to simplify him to the point of misreading. He is better read as
a meditation on the nature and invention of roots. Brathwaite's Africa belongs to
the same order of humanity as the soulless present. The home of myth and ritual
is resolutely historical. The second section of Masks, entitled "Path-finders,"
presents the story of a people in motion. Brathwaite sees an African history char-
acterized by a succession of empires that, starting south of Egypt, move ever west-
ward along the edge of the Sahara, and then southward through the rainforest of
the Akan kingdoms until they reach the ocean. It is as though African history has
always shadowed the translatio imperii, the westward movement of empire that,
since Virgil, has been seen as characteristic of Europe's history. Indeed, the motor
of history directs Africans to the Atlantic as much as it did Hegel's Europe: at the
end of their transcontinental journey the first-person plural voice stands before the
ocean, ironically called the "white river," and asks, "O new world of want, who
will build the new ways,/the new ships?" (122). As John Hoppe writes, "it is not
that Brathwaite presents us with a misplaced people, but that it is the misplace-
ment, their movement within a larger structure of conquest and exile, that histor-
ically and continually constructs this people" (98). The roots of rootlessness are a
primeval deracination.
Brathwaite's Africa is in fragments, fragments that stand in uncertain relation
to the fragments of the diasporic present. Brathwaite can be made to sound as if
he found healing for the individual in the transhistorical group, but The Arriv
is best read as an exploration of the relation of parts to whole, of "the mod
'problem' of the individual personality vis-a-vis the group" which he relates to
problem of "the individuality of the group ... within the context of a wider
ety" ("Jazz" 58). Similar issues are raised by Brathwaite's ambivalent relation
The Waste Land. Eliot may have identified himself with the tradition of Virgil
Dante, but Brathwaite locates him in the New World and black tradition of "
Dizzy, and Klook," in other words, in a tradition that Brathwaite himself jo
that of the creolized Greater Atlantic. Africa is already characterized by disp
ment; Eliot is already part of Brathwaite's own tradition: there are no simple, s
consistent wholes for the individual to join or oppose.
It is the urgency with which he treats the relation of parts to whole th
Brathwaite has in common with Eliot. Michael Levenson reads The Waste La
as an attempt to find an epistemological equilibrium between two intolerable
tions: an extreme solipsism that would doom all perceivers to the closed circ
their own experience ("We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking o
key, each confirms a prison," lines 413-14) and an idealism that offers the
hope that all experiences can be grounded in a single Absolute. Eliot's respon
the problem of parts and whole, Levenson suggests, is to recognize that indi
als do not exist as separate monads but neither are they part of a single Abso
rather they always exist in relation to each other and it is those relations that m
up the larger "meaning-giving system" of tradition (187). No fragment ca
understood in isolation, but neither is there a single narrative that will make s
of the fragments, in effect, make them no longer fragments. Fragments re
resolutely fragmentary, and yet their juxtaposition posits a relation. Leven
writes that "[f]ragments of the Buddha and Augustine combine to make a n
literary reality which is neither the Buddha nor Augustine but which inclu
them both" (190). He goes on to argue that the poem "develops not by resol
conflicts but by enlarging contexts, by establishing relations between contexts
situating motifs within an increasingly elaborate set of cultural parallels-
widening" (201). As Eliot juxtaposes antiquity and modernity, India and Eur
primitive ritual and contemporary speech, he constructs ever larger systems b
on ever more complex relations among the fragments, systems that n
represent points of arrival but that are always challenged and superseded
juxtaposition with the next fragment.
Brathwaite connects the moral and political relations of part to whole, of i
vidual to group, to the dynamics of jazz where the solos of saxophone and tr
pet are heard against the life and rhythm of the group ("Jazz" 58). In
according to Brathwaite, there is no prearranged score to guarantee an order t
of the parts. Instead, each new part responds to and builds upon what came bef
changing the relations between the parts that have preceded it even as it enters
relation with them.6 Jazz, of course, is what Brathwaite has said he heard in E
Brathwaite's description of jazz resembles Eliot's own theory of the relati
between tradition and the individual talent. To join the literary tradition, the
vidual must be able to conceive of his predecessors as constituting a single o
yet the relations between all the members of that order are irrevocably cha
when the contemporary individual joins.
The most interesting convergence in the modernism of the two poets

resemblance of Brathwaite's musical analogy to Eliot's epistemology. The
lem we have raised of how the White, Black, and Greater Atlantics are rela
best answered not by identifying any of the categories with either Elio
Brathwaite, but by considering the paradoxes both poets generate by the u
fortable juxtaposition of fragments. Eliot and Brathwaite suggest that par
always defined by their relations with each other. The White and Black At
cannot be known in isolation, as if they were independent of each other, a
neither can they be grounded in a single Greater Atlantic that can be seen
for any attempt to define the whole is likely to end up reaffirming a part f
whole. They will have to be seen as parts forever in relation whose changin
tions are what define a whole.
Brathwaite is best read as freely improvising on the materials offered by
Eliot: in short, as doing to Eliot what Eliot was himself doing in his poem. When
put alongside The Waste Land, The Arrivants forces us to read its precursor not as
a monument to the mind of Europe but as itself a fragment, whose meaning lies
not in the vision of a whole it offers, but in its relations to other such fragments.
If to put Buddha alongside Augustine, as Eliot does, is to widen the context in
which both are considered, to put Brathwaite's Rastafarian Fire Sermon in "Wings
of a Dove" alongside Eliot's evocation of Buddha is to widen the context further.
We are forced to recognize the incomplete nature of fragments-something The
Waste Land itself taught, but that its canonization in places like Cambridge makes
all too easy to forget-and the way that fragments derive their meaning from their
interpenetration.
The creolized Greater Atlantic is not the sum of the White and the Black
Atlantic, of Eliot and Brathwaite, for it can already be discerned in Eliot
However, discerning the Greater Atlantic in Eliot requires the juxtaposition of the
Brathwaite poem to bring it out. Brathwaite's and Eliot's poems will have to be
read side by side, in a juxtaposition that always asks, "How are these two frag-
ments related?" We must resist the temptation to reduce the one to the other and
the perhaps equal temptation of denying a relation. Only by keeping both in view
can the Greater Atlantic be discerned. Or rather, it is their juxtaposition that bring
into being whatever Greater Atlantic can be discerned and whatever Caribbean
home can be built.
NOTES
1. Gordon Rohlehr, the black West Indian critic writes: 'The World Wars caused a
of displacement which Blacks had already known because the Middle Passage
their First World War. Europe experienced a sense of displacement, dislocatio
diaspora through which Blacks had already lived. Colonial situations, then
extremely contemporary and universal modem situations, insofar as they are situ
of cultural loss and shock. Blacks have lived in a very active and concrete way th
tentialism of which Sartre writes, which is why Sartre can take up the colonial
and write about it with a certain clarity, and also why a number of Black or col
writers are attracted to existentialism. The colonial man has become an icon of the d
placed modern man" ("The Space Between Negations" 113).
2. George Lamming, a fellow Barbadian, also recognized in Eliot a fellow colonial wh

modernism expressed his sense of exile as an outsider from the New World (64).
3. Rohlehr describes the continuum thus: "If the oral tradition directs our attention to
assemblies of people, the lime, the calypso tent, church, grounation, cult, drum, dance,
performance, narrative, song, and sermon, modernist aesthetics highlights the sepa-
rateness or the alienation of the individual, who is placed or lost in a universe of open
possibilities, where he must create self, style and form,...many of our writers have been
simultaneously attracted to both sets of possibilities, so that the same works may con-
tain the tension between two poles of shaping, as well as two modes of being. In some
writers, indeed, the poles are complementary, and curious continuities exist between
them" ("The Problem of the Problem of Form" 3).
4. A later Brathwaite does display a curious warmth towards Rome, which he sees as
marking a moment of equilibrium before the great destabilisation that would culminate
in the disasters of missile culture ("Metaphors of Underdevelopment" 36).
5. Brathwaite warns West Indians against the argument "'our experience' is in fact the
world's" by which, I think, is meant Western Europe's, certainly Britain and North
America. I would dispute this and I would also add that those people who delight to
share our experience as 'international,' as 'cosmopolitan' tend to see it only as those
things.... It is my contention that before it is too late we must try to find the high
ground from which we ourselves will see the world, and towards which the world will
look to find us." ("Jazz and the West Indian Novel" 107-08)
My own argument is that it is because the Caribbean's experience is the world's that
West Indians can find a "high ground" that is their own.
6. Rohlehr describes Brathwaite's technique thus: "'Structure' became for him the way
the different movements of the poem modified each other and contributed to the wider
architecture of the whole work. Contrasting tones of voice embodied in contrasting
poetic sequences form part of this structure. It becomes difficult to isolate one section
of the poem from another and comment on it outside of its immediate context, or with-
out regard to how it relates to the work as a whole. Moreover, since Rights of Passage
is conceived of as the first part of a trilogy, its structure is modified as one proceeds
through Masks, and then Islands. The complex architecture of the trilogy makes for
retrospective irony, thematic development and variation, and an increasing density of
language as key-words acquire fresh accretions of meaning and suggestivity with each
usage" (63-64).
WORKS CITED
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. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford UP, 1973..
. Barabajan Poems 1492-1992. New York: Savacou North, 1994.
- . "Caribbean Culture: Two Paradigms." Missile and Capsule. Ed. Jiirgen Martini.
Bremen: University of Bremen, 1983. 9-54.
. "History of the Voice." 1979/81. Roots 259-304.
. "Jazz and the West Indian Novel." 1967-68. Roots 55-110.

. "Metaphors of Underdevelopment: A Poem for Heran Cortez." Africa/Europe:
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Leuvense Schrijversactie, 1984. 35-57.
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Where Atlantic Meets Eliot

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Where Atlantic Meets Eliot

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Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite's "The Arrivants" and T. S.

Eliot's "The Waste Land"

Neil ten Kortenaar

Paul Gilroy's ground-clearing work The Black Atlantic

We can make sense of Gilroy's stereoscopic vision of black experience (at

'On Margate Sands.

When as a young man Brathwaite travelled on a scholarship to Cambridge,

I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understand-

of forgotten African continuities that balance the influence of Europe. In

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

once opposed and complementary. The result is too simple a reading of bo

without ego, without I, without arrogance" in order to express an awareness

The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and west-

The most interesting convergence in the modernism of the two poets

2. George Lamming, a fellow Barbadian, also recognized in Eliot a fellow colonial wh

Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of C

. "Jazz and the West Indian Novel." 1967-68. Roots 55-110.

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