Tape as postcolonial medium

Make It the Same grows in part out of my fascination with the effect of new media on how poetry—and culture at large—is made. When I began the book, I was thinking for the most part of digital media. However, in the course of my research I became interested in how some of the changes that we associate with digital media were anticipated by media practices that developed in the mid-twentieth century. I also discovered how anti-colonial and postcolonial poetic and artistic innovations in the mid-twentieth century were inseparable from innovations in media practice. Hence the title of the first chapter of Make It the Same: “Postcolonial Media.” In this chapter I focus on the example of Kamau Brathwaite’s innovative use of new media and especially of the reel-to-reel tape recorder.

In Make It the Same, I show how Brathwaite used tape to write (and repeatedly rewrite) his epic Arrivants trilogy. I also note the pivotal role that tape played in the Caribbean Artists Movement, which Brathwaite helped found.

I draw on the tape archive of the Caribbean Artists Movement in a recently published essay, “Global Rhythms: Setting the Stage for World Poetry in 1960s London,” as I explain in a piece just published on the University of Toronto Press Journals Blog, part of which is reproduced below.

Fifty years ago this June an extraordinary reading took place in London. John La Rose brought together a Caribbean cast for a staged bilingual French-English performance of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land).

The 1969 bilingual reading not only marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication of Césaire’s revolutionary poem; it also arguably represented a highpoint in the collective artistic and intellectual efforts of the Caribbean Artists Movement. The bilingual performance spanned one of the Caribbean’s main linguistic and political divisions—a legacy of colonialism that the Caribbean Artists Movement sought to overcome. The reading also embodied the Caribbean Artists Movement’s emphasis on the diverse patterns of speech in the Caribbean. It brought together performers with the distinctive speech of several islands, including Césaire’s “native land,” Martinique. One of the founders of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Kamau Brathwaite, would later term these various speech patterns “nation language” to emphasize their importance to the postcolonial cultural and political independence that the Caribbean Artists Movement sought to foster and to celebrate.

For fifty years this reading has been almost forgotten and might have been forever, had it not been for the prescient archival instincts and technological savviness of the Caribbean Artists Movement’s founders, including La Rose and, especially, Doris and Kamau Brathwaite. When the Caribbean Artists Movement was founded in London in 1966, the Brathwaites insisted that practically every public event and discussion be recorded. Their efforts yoked the librarian Doris’s instincts as an archivist with Kamau’s (then Edward’s) instincts as a poet and lover of new technology.

Kamau Brathwaite’s experiments with tape recording had begun over half a decade earlier. I have written elsewhere (in my book Make It the Same) about how Brathwaite used tape to compose his ground-breaking epic poem, The Arrivants. But his and Doris’s use of the tape recorder to create an audio archive of the Caribbean Artists Movement was arguably just as significant an achievement in the history of Caribbean culture.

A year ago I visited the wonderful George Padmore Institute, where copies of these tape recordings, collected by La Rose and others, are now housed. The George Padmore Institute sits above New Beacon Books, Britain’s first black publisher and bookshop. La Rose founded New Beacon Books in 1966 and played a key role in the establishment of the institute. Thanks especially to Sarah White (John La Rose’s wife and collaborator) and Sarah Garrod (the institute’s archivist), I was able to listen to the Caribbean Artists Movement recordings and to assist the institute in making digital preservation copies of this historic tape collection.

You can read the full post here.