Arrivants

Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020) was a Caribbean writer and critic who wrote on the experience of black cultural life throughout the worldwide African diaspora. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Brathwaite was educated in Barbados and England and received numerous awards for his poetry and cultural studies, including both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. He was a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University starting in 1992 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2002.

This epic trilogy traces the migrations of African peoples in and from the African continent, through the sufferings of the Middle Passage and slavery, and dramatizes 20th-century journeys to the UK, France and the US in search of economic and psychic survival. The Arrivants exemplified Brathwaite’s ambition to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry, which would celebrate Caribbean voices and language, as well as African and Caribbean rhythms evoking Ghanaian talking drums, calypso, reggae, jazz and blues