Edward Brathwaite Nation Language Analysis

The diversity of postcolonial poetry and its multilayered forms and linguistic variations are uniquely represented by another postcolonial poet, Edward Brathwaite. Brathwaite is credited for defining “the nation language”, as English in the Caribbean is marked by creolization and significantly influenced by the African heritage. Caribbean language may be English in some lexical features, but, Brathwaite argues, “in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions it is not English, even though the words as you hear them might be English to a greater or lesser degree” (Brathwaite, “Nation Language” 311). The English in the Caribbean is thus completely different from the English used in India or Africa thereby making it a more contextual

However, the time has obscured the poet’s memory, and the journey back becomes a challenge, “the paths we shall never remember / again: Atumpan talking and the harvest b’ranch- / es, all the tribes of Ashanti dreaming the dream / of Tutu, Anokye and the Golden Stool, built / in Heaven for our nation by the work / of lightening and the brilliant adze: and now nothing” (Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy 13). For Brathwaite language becomes an important marker of Caribbean identity, and its centre is the Caribbean oral form, “So beat dem drums / dem, spread / dem wings dem, / watch dem fly / dem, soar dem / high dem, / clear in the glory of the Lord” (The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy 44). These short lines, and the repetition of “dem”, with a rhyming ‘d’ produce a musical flow. The natural pauses with the line breaks and the use of Caribbean creole, as it is spoken by the common man on the street, perhaps demonstrate what Brathwaite means by the “Nation Language”. Brathwaite considers orality as the central power in Caribbean culture and his writing. Poetry as the oral form of expression, spoken rather than written, is exemplified in many of his poems in which a reader is forced to pay attention to repetitions, reading and rereading until the natural rhythm is found. He is aware of the usage of speech in his poems carefully weaving the intricacies of not only the speech but also the visual representation of it. Particularly, spacing in his poems attest to the reproduction of the natural emphasis and modulation that pertain to the Caribbean speech. Brathwaite understands it as his role to recover and critically assess his history and African heritage, and transmit them into an imaginative intellectual purview to illuminate the