The Caribbean Presence in African Literature

• In Event: African-Caribbean Connections

Description for Program

Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1974 article, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” made a crucial intervention into the understanding of Caribbean literature, asserting the need for scholars to recognize and categorize the African roots underlying writing by West Indian authors. This paper proposes to reverse these traditional lines of influence by looking at how Caribbean literature might be seen as a fundamental force in the birth of African literature. The paper will begin by examining Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Homecoming (1972), which discusses the Kenyan author’s discovery of and authorial debt to George Lamming, the Barbadian novelist and thinker. Subsequently, the paper will go on to look at how Ngugi’s seminal novel of Kenyan independence, A Grain of Wheat (1967), deploys techniques with strong resemblances to Lamming’s own, earlier novels. In performing this comparative work, the paper aims to illustrate the fluidity and interconnectivity of African diasporic literary production, in which the struggle for Black freedom and justice moves across the Atlantic Ocean (and back) in multiple, sometimes unexpected ways.

Author

• J. Dillon Brown, Washington University in St. Louis