Edward Kamau Braithwaite
Edward Brathwaite was born in 1930 at Bridgetown, Barbados, from where he won a scholarship to Cambridge, to study history. He then worked for seven years in Ghana, as an Education Officer, returning to the West Indies in 1962. 'I had, at that moment of return, completed the triangular trade of my historical origins. West Africa had given me a sense of place, of belonging... And I came home to find I had not really left. That it was still Africa, Africa in the Caribbean.'
Brathwaite has since then combined his work as a poet with his work as an academic historian, in Jamaica and in New York. His first three books of poetry, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969), together make up what was later published as The Arrivants; A New World Trilogy. The trilogy is a work of reconnection, both personal and historical: 'If you're going to be an artist, you need to have roots. In Islands what I was saying was, OK, here we are in the Caribbean, why is it that Africa is still so absent?'
The Kikuvu name 'Kaumau', which he now uses in place of Edward, was given to Brathwaite in a naming ceremony in Kenya in 1971.
�Limbo' is from Islands, which concludes the poet's first trilogy. In a note, he explains that the limbo is "a dance in which the participants have to move, with their backs thrown backwards and without any aid whatsoever, under a stick which is lowered at every successfully completed passage under it until the stick is practically touching the ground. It is said to have originated - a necessary therapy - after the experience of the cramped conditions between the slave-ship decks of the Middle Passage [i.e. the journey from Africa to America]. Now very popular as a performing act in Caribbean nightclubs.'
Limbo is also, in early Christian theology, the place of transition where unbaptised infants await the Last Judgement.
Tatamkhulu Afrika was brought up in Cape Town, as a white Afrikaaner, before learning that he had in fact been born in Egypt in 1920, the child of an Arab father and a Turkish mother. When the South African government began to classify every citizen by colour, he refused to be classed as 'white', and chose instead to be classified as 'coloured'. He became a Muslim, and lived in Cape Town's District 6, then a thriving mixed-race inner-city community. In the 1960s, as part of its policy of apartheid, the government declared District 6 a 'whites only' area, and began to evacuate the population. Over a period of years the entire area was razed to the ground. Most of it has never been rebuilt.
'I think of identity as a sort of cloak which surrounds you, like environment. I've been brought up among South African people, particularly black people, who I love most of all. I think identity comes from experience.'
In 1984 the poet joined the ANC. He was arrested for 'terrorism', and banned from writing or speaking in public for five years. This was the point at which he adopted the name Tatamkhulu Afrika � previously his ANC code name - which thus enabled him to ignore the ban.
In 2000 Tatamkhulu was awarded the Sankm Literary Award for Mad Old Man Under the Morning Star, his last book of poems. He died in Cape Town in 2002. 'Nothing's Changed' conies from his third book, Maqabane ("Comrade'), published in 1994.
'The poem 'Nothing's Changed' is entirely autobiographical. It was after District Six had been dead for a good many years, and I hadn't been passing through it for a long time. But nothing has changed. Not only in District Six... I don't want to sound like a prophet of doom, because I don't feel like that at all. I am full of hope. But it's going to take a long time.'
Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, on the coast of Guyana, in 1950. She worked in Guyana as a teacher and as a journalist before moving to England in 1977. She now lives in Sussex with her partner, John Agard. Her first book of poems, i is a long memoried woman, won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1983. She has since published several further volumes of poetry both for adults and children.
'I feel at home now both in Guyana and in England. When I'm in Guyana, or another part of the Caribbean, I feel I belong there because I spring from that landscape, I'm still enriched by the myths and the legends and the landscape. But I also feel at home in this culture. I embrace both.'
'Island Man' is from The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984). 'Hurricane Hits England' is from Sunris (1996). In 1987, the southern coast of England was devastated by The Great Storm:
'The next morning as I walked around Lewes I was very moved by the sight of all the trees that had come down. They seemed to be like so many creatures, like beached whales... It seemed as though the voices of the old gods were in the wind, within the Sussex wind. And for the first time I felt close to the English landscape in a way that 1 hadn't earlier. It was as if the Caribbean had come to England.'
'Huracan' is the name of a Carib storm god. 'Oya' and 'Shango', also storm gods, belonged originally to the Yorubans of West Africa. Hurricane Hattie is a memory from the poet's Caribbean childhood.
Imtiaz Dharker was born in 1954 to a Muslim family in Lahore, Pakistan. She grew up in Glasgow, where she studied Literature and Philosophy. She now lives in Bombay, India, where she works as a poet, artist and film-maker. Bloodaxe have published two collections of her poetry, both illustrated with Dharker's own drawings.
'The reason I'm in India is because I married an Indian. And it has become home now. Though sometimes I feel as if writers don't have homes, that I belong in the cracks between countries, and I actually maybe prefer it that way. For me, my identity has nothing to do with nationality, or religion, or gender. It has to do with beliefs and states of mind.'
'Blessing' is from Dharker's first book, published in 1989, and 'This Room' from I Speak for the Devil (2001).
'The scene of 'Blessing' is the largest slum in Asia � Dharavi, on the outskirts of Bombay. Bombay is the city of dreams. They've come from all over India and they're living in conditions which to anyone else would look squalid but to them it really is the hope of a better life. And because it is not an official living area there is a shortage of water. So when a pipe bursts, it's like a gift...
'For me personally the poem 'This Room' is about making the definitions of nationality, religion, place, place of birth, geography, slip away � crash up through clouds. For someone else, it might be about something different. But for me it was about a moment of immense possibility, the improbable having the scope to arrive.'
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in New York in 1919. After spending much of his childhood in France, he studied at universities both in the USA and in Paris before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s, where he founded the City Lights bookshop and publishing company.
City Lights was at the heart of the Beat movement in the 1950s and early 60s, when Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and other poets created a style of free verse that was both radical and populist. The Beat Poets were the USA's 'angry young men', questioning some of the dominant values of American culture. They also placed exuberant emphasis on poetry in performance, often with jazz accompaniment. 'The kind of poetry which has been making the most noise here,' Ferlinghetti remarked, 'is what should be called street poetry... It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it once was, out of the classroom, out of the speech department, and - in fact � off the printed page. The printed word has made poetry so silent.'
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has continued to live and write in San Francisco, and in 1998 he was acclaimed the city's first Poet Laureate. He has written some thirty books in all, sustaining both the poetic style and the cultural values of his earlier work. He is also a painter. 'Two Scavengers...' was published in 1979, in a volume called Landscapes of Living & Dying.
image taken from: www.thedailystar.net Nissim Ezekiel was born in Bombay of Jewish parents in 1924. His father was a scientist and college principal, his mother principal of a school. After Bombay University , he travelled to England to extend his study of literature and philosophy. Ezekiel's first book of poems appeared in London in 1952, while he was working as a coal-carrier on an English cargo ship to earn his passage home.
Ezekiel has lived most of his life in Bombay , working as a teacher, literary editor, theatre director, and Professor of English at Bombay University . He has remained one of India 's leading writers of English, and his main poetic influences are from English literary tradition. His Collected Poems 1952-1988 was published in India by Oxford University Press in 1989.
In an article written in 1965, Ezekiel explained: I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider. India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India ... I am incurably critical and sceptical. That is what I am in relation to India also. And to myself. I find it does not prevent the growth of love. In this sense only, I love India .'
'Night of the Scorpion' is a poem of autobiographical memory, written in the early 1960s.
Chinua Achebe was born in 1931 in the Igbo region of eastern Nigeria . His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), describes the world of his grandfather's generation, and the impact on Igbo civilisation of the European colonisation of West Africa in the second half of the 19th century. His reputation as one of Africa 's leading novelists was secured with Arrow of God and A Man of the People.
During the 1960s Achebe worked in Lagos as a government broadcasting director, but returned to eastern Nigeria following a series of onslaughts on Igbo people. In 1967, Nigeria 's eastern region declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra . A bloody war ensued, in which the Federal Nigerian army blockaded Biafra , starving the rebel nation into submission. During this time, Achebe worked for the Biafran government. In 1971, after the war had ended, he published a volume of poems entitled beware Soul brother.
The book is divided into two sections, 'Poems about War' and 'Poems not about War'. 'Vultures' is from the second of these sections, which deals with the war's aftermath - the title of the section is at least partly ironic.
Beware Soul brother, which won the Commonwealth Prize, remains Achebe's only book of poems. In the 1970s he returned to fiction, publishing first a collection or short stories, several or which also dealt with the events of this period, called Girls at War. He has since worked as a Professor of Literature in universities both in Nigeria and in the United States .
Denise Leverton was born in England in 1923, the daughter of a Russian Jewish (later Anglican) father, and a Welsh mother. During the Second World War she worked in London as a civilian nurse, then in 1947 married an American writer and moved to New York . She was naturalised as an American citizen in 1956.
Levertov had written poetry since her childhood. After moving to the I USA. She joined the Black Mountain ' group of poets, including Roberu Creeley and Charles Olson, and soon established a reputation as a leading member of America 's avant-garde. Kenneth Rexroth later judged that 'she, more than anyone else, had led the redirection of American poetry to world literature.'
With the start of the Vietnam War, in 1966, Levertov found her view of the world transformed. 'We are living our whole lives,' she wrote, 'in a state of emergency? From this point, Levertov became a notable political activist, both as an opponent of war and as a feminist thinker. Her 1967 book, The Sorrow Dance, from which the poem 'What Were They Like?' is taken, expresses the rage and the sadness which the USA 's bombing of Vietnam 's population had induced.
Levertov continued to write poetry for another three decades, and was for many 'the most subtly skilful poet of her generation'. In her later works, her own Christian faith, and her determined spiritual vision, became ever more pronounced. She died in 1997.