Homecomings Without Home.' Discrepant Poetics of Exile and Return in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite

This essay addresses the question of how, in contemporary Anglo-Caribbean literature, the intersections and reciprocal transformations of the themes of home, exile, and return are expedient for the construction of hybrid, post-colonial and post-modern poetics of identity. A comparative analysis of the work of two of the most significant contemporary Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, shows how poetry may serve as a privileged site to renegotiate processes of production and articulation of hybrid subjectivities, of cultural and linguistic translation, as well as of cultural exchange. In their works, Brathwaite and Walcott deal with the uprootings, violent encounters and turbulent processes of hybridization which gave shape to the Caribbean. For both of them, home is a most complex, composite, even disturbing concept, a concept which, nonetheless, is crucial to tackle in the process of articulating collective and individual identities. While Edward Kamau Brathwaite, advocates a rediscovery and acknowledgement of the African component of Caribbeanness, Walcott strives to find sophisticated ways of feeling at home in the English language, literature and culture which he loves but which he cannot help considering as alien. By highlighting the continuities and the differences between these two poets and their stylistic choices, the essays argues that for both of them writing poetry is a way of being contemporary an exile at home and at home in exile.