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Even though Edward Brathwaite’s poem The Ancestors, as its title suggests seems to be about our ancestry and the reclamation of it, the overall structure of the poem itself reveals insights into the struggles of the poet and delves into issues of identity. Central to the issue of identity is the question of language and how it gives voice to the “other”. Language, in this poem, also represents one of the ways in which Brathwaite attempts to give voice to the fragmented and scattered people of the New World.
The poem is divided into three main sections, with the first two sections seemingly structured within a narrative framework. Both sections are divided into two stanzas that provide us with the bulk of information about the persona’s ancestors as represented by his grandfather in Section one and his grandmother in the second section.
In section one, the persona openly acknowledges and accepts his relationship to his grandfather, who symbolically represents the Eurocentric, colonial “English” gentleman, by the use of the personal pronoun “my” in reference to him. This image of the persona’s grandfather as a “black English country gen
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The poet’s preoccupation with voices remains sustained throughout the poem as he attempts to give voice to the voiceless. The poems on a whole seem to suggest that the Blackman in the Caribbean despite being stripped of language, and cultural and religious practices due to the ravages of slavery, he is still able to survive in the West Indies. Brathwaite’s mastery of the use of language becomes self-evident in stanza two of the first section where Brathwaite avails our senses with the auditory images (battering, clinking, chipped, chopped) that reveals the orality of these sections. Abena Busia in Long memory and survival: Dramatizing the Arrivants Trilogy, an attempt by Brathwaite to “transcend and transform the limitations of life which have historically bound the Caribbean artist.
The second section deals with the Folk heritage as symbolized by the persona’s grandmother.
This struggle is largely played out in the poet’s use of language and his attempt to incorporate the Creole aspect into his work. The oral traditions are further highlighted with the references to “singing”, “songs” and “stories”. This view is further sustained by the persona’s admission that the only remaining thing he has left is “his hat”. This section seeks to answer the question of identity by presenting the traditional folk forms as a “viable alternative”. The trilogy, according to Busia, is a record of Brathwaite’s attempt to “create a poetry which reconnects the New World man in the Caribbean to his ancestral home through the use of language, word, word repetition, transformation, tone musical improvisation, nuance and reference based on the surviving correlates in the Caribbean island”. Through the auditory images, we can hear the noise of nature – “the nightwind man go battering through the canes, cocks waking up…” as opposed to the intrusive noise of the “Great caterpillar tractors” as they “clatter down the highway” to where “a diesel engine grunts where pigs once hunted garbage”. The reference to “I used to try it on” reinforces ideas of colonial mimicry that was introduced in the first stanza. On another level, this relationship could also be Brathwaite’s way of commenting on the gender roles that existed during and after the post-colonial era. The enduring nature of this tradition is highlighted in the persona’s speech that “All that I have of her is voices…telling us stories round her fat white lamp”. In the opening stanza, we are confronted with this by the poet’s use of the Standard English to convey the ‘Englishness’ of the grandfather who through his mannerisms and mode of dress becomes the quintessential English gentleman (lines 5 –13).
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