Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Transnational Anamnesis: Creolizing Columbus in the English Caribbean Collective Memory

Abstract

In 1974, with Contradictory Omens, the Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite coined the term Creolization—from the Spanish word criollo¹—to analyze the intercultural transformations of post-plantation Jamaican society. In this study published a decade after the independences of the former British West Indies, Creolization was for Jamaica what Ortiz’s transculturation had been for Cuba: a process of compensatory cultural affirmation in the longue durée, negotiating the need for remembrance and forgetting among the people of the Caribbean. In 1983, Brathwaite expanded the analysis of Creolization to the Caribbean archipelago as a whole in a short essay called Two Paradigms: Missile and Capsule. While Contradictory Omen looked at transculturation in Jamaica only, Missile and Capsule proposed a larger historical counterpoint to read the archipelago from its very first geographical birth as multiple and fragmented islands, and to examine “the culture of the Caribbean in space and time” (Brathwaite 1983, p.12). In resonance with Ortiz’s Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azúcar, Missile and Capsule stressed the beauty and efficiency of Taíno culture, a canoe-relational culture that facilitated the communication between small islands, thus dealing with geographical fragmentation:

When there were Caribs, you could communicate from island-island by canoe. You stand on the Morne, St Lucia, and you look out across the water wind to Martinique.