Poetry, Sound, Resistance. Kamau Brathwaite's Jazz Aesthetics

Brathwaite's is a poetry in which words are conceived as pure sound; it is a space inhabited by musical echoes coming from Africa and America, in which Caribbean music, jazz, and blues redefine themselves. This fascinating migration of musical expressions, which the author enacts in his oeuvre, translates the sense and meaning of a personal life suspended between different geographies and cultures. Brathwaite's trilogy entitled The Arrivants (1973) represents a complex investigation of the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, in which the discovery of a dialogical relationship with the African continent allows Caribbean people to rewrite their own identity. Besides Caribbean music, a fundamental resource and language within the economy of Brathwaite's trilogy is represented by African American Jazz. Brathwaite defines jazz in contrast with the earlier blues of slave culture. To him, jazz is the sound, the voice, and the music of the 'emancipated Negro'; jazz has been from the beginning a cry from the heart of the hurt man, which can also be heard in the saxophone and trumpet of many performers. But the affirmation of such a genre does not come from the individual voice, but from the ensemble, the merging of the various instruments. In choosing jazz, Brathwaite chooses a cultural expression that represents a modern black experience in its movement from slavery to freedom, and from countryside to metropolis. Jazz provides a system of languages that voice the modernist sense of alienation, chaos, disillusionment and hope that characterises not only African American or West Indian literature but all subaltern cultures in the world. Such an approach blurs national borders, invoking a communal cultural/literary/musical experience of resistance.