Caliban’s New Masters: Creolizing Archetypes in Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants Trilogy

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TrilogyI major part of Kamau Brathwaites poetic work has been devoted to excavating and reclaiming submerged African retentions in the Caribbean, and the New World more generally; and critics have, of course, stereotypically constructed his aesthetic practice in a binary relationship with the work of Derek Walcott, who has often been viewed as a more Eurocentric poet. 1 While Walcott turns to the Iliad and Odyssey and to Crusoe and Don Juan for departure-points, Brathwaite, so the argument runs, looks towards Africa, to the Golden Stool of Ashanti, to Ogun, Legba and Ananse.It is not difficult to discredit the starkness of this straightforwardly oppositional pairing of the two writers.Brathwaites African project has from the first been conducted within the parameters of the creolization model of Caribbean culture that he first developed in his doctoral thesis, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820; 2 and Walcott has been equally concerned with creolizing his archetypes

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