Abstract

The pairing of two of the Caribbean’s best-known poets, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, to many, evokes the tensions and antagonisms of a specific moment in the history of Caribbean literature. While this critical history is an important background to both works, the resulting polarization of Brathwaite and Walcott as two poets offering wholly incompatible views on the place of Africa in contemporary Caribbean and black consciousness, problematically ignores the important points of convergence. Rather than stressing only what divides these two poets, this essay overcomes the opposition of these two poets by suggesting the ways in which both Brathwaite and Walcott pre-empt dominant questions and themes in contemporary postcolonial theory.