“Until the drum speaks”: Historicized Soundscapes in Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants

Abstract

This paper proposes that historicized soundscapes can situate language by merging words and music, which can turn poetry into a site for the decolonization of the mind, language, and culture by introducing a range of cultural experiences as an act of creolization. Through the analysis of three drum poems in Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, the presence of these soundscapes highlights tensions within language that allow the poet to weave webs of sound, a process that, on the one hand, complicates the relationship between individuality and collectivity as part of an aesthetic effort that emerges from fragmentation and, on the other hand, creates a framework where memory, history, and myth are tied together as part of a narrative that illustrates archipelagic thinking in order to represent cross-cultural imagination. Thus, this paper examines how soundscapes in poetry can become vehicles that generate a historical and mythological quality as ways to access and preserve history without fixing it to a specific point in space and time. Through a close reading of the drum poems, these features foreground Brathwaite’s different decolonial endeavors through counter-reading, translating, and reassessment of language to represent an Afro-Caribbean versioning of the epic as part of an extended cultural archipelago.