On Loss, Language and Poetry: Reading Ecological Grief in Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘scarscape’

Abstract

An ecological reading of Kamau Brathwaite's essay 'Caribbean Culture: Two Paradigms’. Responding to Ferdinand’s notion of ‘double fracture’, I suggest in this essay that there are at least two ways in which ‘Caribbean Culture’ speaks to what Cunsolo and Ellis (2018) call “ecological grief”. Firstly, the neologism of ‘scarscape’ highlights the ways in which space, like the body, bears the marks of its subjugation: a geography of scars that are continually reopened and obscured by further lacerations. Secondly, just as significant as ‘scarscape’ itself, is the poetics of its exposition, the particular kind of interpretative reading or listening that it demands.