Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Lawson Edward Brathwaite was born on the eleventh of May 1930 at Bridgetown, Barbados, the son of Hilton Brathwaite — a Barbadian railway clerk — and Beryl Brathwaite. He was raised in the Bridgetown Black middle-class community of the late-colonial Barbadian period.

He completed the bachelor's degree in history at Pembroke College of the University of Cambridge in 1953 — and the doctorate in history at the University of Sussex in 1968. He took the West African name Kamau in 1971 at a ceremony at the household of the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

He served as an education officer of the Ministry of Education of the Gold Coast and Ghana from 1955 to 1962 — at the principal post-independence Ghanaian Nkrumah education-building period — and was the principal Caribbean educational-officer presence in the principal post-1957 Pan-African moment.

He was named lecturer in history at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1962 — and held the principal Mona history-faculty position from 1962 to 1991. He was named professor of comparative literature at New York University in 1992 — and held the principal New York University position from 1992 to 2010.

He published the principal Arrivants trilogy at the Oxford University Press at London — Rights of Passage of 1967, Masks of 1968, and Islands of 1969 — the principal poetic trilogy of the principal post-independence Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. The Arrivants traced the principal middle-passage-Africa-and-Caribbean diasporic memory across the principal post-1962 Caribbean literary canon.

He published the principal second poetic trilogy Ancestors at the New Beacon Books at London in 1977 to 1987 — Mother Poem of 1977, Sun Poem of 1982, and X/Self of 1987.

He was awarded the principal Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry in 1976, the principal Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1994 (for the X/Self volume of 1987), and the principal Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America in 2015.

He coined the principal concept of nation language at the principal History of the Voice essay of 1984 — the principal Anglophone Caribbean concept of the principal post-independence Caribbean Creole-and-Standard-English poetic tradition.

He died at Bridgetown, Barbados on the fourth of February 2020 of natural causes, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the author of The Arrivants.