Description: Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite's long unavailable, landmark trilogy--Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)--now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its "Video Sycorax" typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the "intercovery") of Brathwaite's African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.
Brief description: Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020) was a vitally important Caribbean poet and critic who wrote on the experience of Black cultural life throughout the worldwide African diaspora. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, and educated in Barbados and England, Brathwaite received the Griffin Prize as well as Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. He was for many years a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2002.