16 - Breaking New Ground

Summary

Building on Ramazani’s notion of the ‘translocal’, this chapter maps the multiple voices and ‘mobile positionings’ of an early generation of poets from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa who were performing and publishing in 1950s and 1960s Britain. Though some, such as Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), or Louise Bennett (Jamaica) did not settle in Britain permanently, their respective explorations with a variety of literary/vernacular/oral influences and forms had significant impact on the themes and writings of later generations of British-born diasporic poets. The main emphasis in this chapter lies on the richness of these individual contributions, which derived from diverse contexts as well as a range of different literary, cultural, and political influences. It also shows how their respective visions – whether Lord Kitchener’s calypsonian evocation of London, Louise Bennett’s vernacular colonisation of Britain in reverse, Wole Soyinka’s sardonic commentary on the ‘colour bar’, the hybrid influences of Dom Moraes’s quiet modernism, or E. A. Markham’s various personae – coincided and made a series of significant waves across the landscape of British poetry.