Rights of Passage
A sequence that carries Black people out of Africa and across the world — movement out of a drying interior, the crossing in the hold, plantation and market in the New World, then the twentieth-century passage on to London and New York. Voices arrive and leave without introduction, and the metre keeps turning into drum, blues and calypso rather than settling into English pentameter. The first volume of The Arrivants, and the work in which Brathwaite began arguing for the Caribbean vernacular he would later call nation language.
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Attributes
Genre
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 62% · 14 shared
- 59% · 13 shared
- 57% · 13 shared
- 54% · 12 shared
- 54% · 11 shared
- 54% · 11 shared