Edward Brathwaite's the Arrivants and the Trope of Cultural Searching (Critical Essay)

One major thematic strand runs through the poetry of Edward Brathwaite--this is a quest for identity, an attempt to come to terms with a past that was overwhelming in itself "and still remains overwhelming in its undesirable intrusion into the present" (Romanus Egudu, 1978:8). Brathwaite's main artistic preoccupation is to achieve 'wholeness' through poetic reconstruction. For him, therefore, "the eye must be free/seeing--an attempt to retrieve his world through his poetic vision" (Michael Dash, 1970:122). In fact, the importance of Africa in West Indian writings cannot be overestimated, either as providing alternative metaphors of cultural difference or as a fully developed Negritude. This is in agreement with the assertion of David Richards (1990) and Aderemi Raji-Oyelade (2005). The business of this presentation is to isolate and foreground the motif of Africa in West Indian Literature using Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1981) as a launching pad. We cannot gainsay the fact that the trope of Africa is a recurrent feature of West Indian literature. As Kole Omotoso (1982) rightly observes, African people in the Caribbean suffer two major psychic wounds: