Kamau Brathwaite: Poetry, Materialities and Climate History

This work review a selection of poems by Kamau Brathwaite that belong to the anthologies: Islands (1969), The Arrivants (1973), Black and Blues (1976) and The Ancestors (1977). From the viewpoint of contemporary materialism, which encompasses both its transcultural variant and climatic imaginaries, I am approaching the cultural history of extraction in the English Caribbean. This means studying not only the socio‐historical dimensions of the subaltern world but also the fractures between colonial history and environmental history. Instead of approaching Kamau's verses symbolically or allegorically, I observe that the author's poems exhibit a series of intertwinings between the human and the non‐human within the precariousness of the plantation worker, as well as a material history of crops like sugar or cotton that transcends mere commodity status.