Razziaed memories, proud re-membering: Africa in Damas and Brathwaite

“Razziaed memories, proud re-membering: Africa in poems by Léon Gontran Damas and Kamau Brathwaite”
To poets and artists in the Caribbean Africa is always present, often with two opposed connotations – the violence of the slave-trade on the one hand and the mythic home country that functions as a source of pride on the other. The second celebratory approach is obvious at the very root of the Negritude movement (and for instance in the repeated statement by Damas ‘Le Blanc à l’École du Nègre’) or in Brathwaite’s writing about the circle as an image of harmonious communal living (‘the world was round and we the spices in it’) as opposed to the straight line (‘and they brought sticks rods roads bullets straight objects’), and his reference to Yoruba figures such as Sh/Xango, Legba/Eleggua or Yemanjaa/Sycorax. While focusing on poems and passages that are branded by the scars of destruction and the memory of brutal transportation I will also briefly discuss evidence of deep-rooted pride.