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THE DEATH OF A POET
"I didn't know Brathwaite was dead. Was he shot, then? Who shot him?" I had half a dozen phone calls expressing concern for the prematurely murdered poet. It was February 1993, and I had just published Kamau Brathwaite's "I Cristobal Colon." It had arrived in the post like the best kind of surprise, but unfortunately/conveniently too late to allow a precise Columbus 500 tie-in. A celebration, perhaps, of Columbus's first pair of jeans. The phone calls were the fault of his own satiric introduction:
Shortly after he was assassinated on a podium in New York City on 13 Oct 1992, Kamau Brathwaite deciphered and read a document recently come into his possession purporting to be a hitherto unknown letter of Columbus, the authenticity of which will probably never be agreed on among the scholars of the Admiral.(1)
Irony is not always fully appreciated. The literary world does not always get beyond the first line of poems it subsequently feels perfectly qualified to discuss. Brathwaite suffers more than many, possibly because what he is doing seems so visible and possibly because of the resentment his "video style" seems to spark off in some academic circles: "This is not the function of Caribbean poetry," you seem to hear in the subtext of some conversations. "It's like Ezra Pound on drugs. Why doesn't he get back to what he was doing in The Arrivants." Maybe things are different in the Caribbean, maybe things are different in the USA. England can be a very conservative country.
I came into contact with Kamau Brathwaite when I was the editor of an arts paper for the North of England called The Page. It went out as a tabloid supplement to a regional newspaper, reaching a general readership, and as a separate freesheet, distributed via libraries, arts venues, and other information centers, where it was picked up by an arts/literature-specific readership. I published a lot of poetry: it was a huge opportunity to break out of the self-imposed limitations of literary and academic audiences. True, not everybody read the poems; but large numbers did, and the impact sometimes achieved a freshness of reaction that is all too often missing: amazement at the amazing, wonder at the wonderful.