Erosion, Noise, and Hurricanes: A Review of Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry

Resumen

Edward Kamau Brathwaite has written and published extensively throughout his career as a history professor, poet, and internationally recognized scholar. I need not go into the ways in which his past work informs this text; yet we should understand at least that Brathwaite has been writing about "nation language" for a long time, whether or not he deemed to call it such at the time. Brathwaite’s text shows that historical studies of Anglophone Caribbean language(s) are not new. But they have not done what he is attempting to do: to go beyond "grammar, syntax, transformation, structure." He does note that there have been a few "pioneers" with concern for "more formal literary criticism," and he names specifically "H. P. Jacobs (1949) on Vic Reid, Mervyn Morris (1964) on Louise Bennett, and most of Gordon Rohlehr’s work, beginning with Sparrow and the Language of Calypso (1967)."