“Revision-ing” the Caribbean Mother: Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, and Pathways toward a Located Literariness

Abstract This essay reexamines the Caribbean mother trope in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean poetry and demonstrates how poets’ metapoetic practices in their maternal figurations cultivate a located literariness. Specifically, I investigate Kamau Brathwaite’s and Lorna Goodison’s revisionary poems, showing how they capitalize on and nurture mother-island symbolism through a foregrounded textuality or artistic reflection. Brathwaite reinvents his mother poems to enact a recursive textuality of locatedness. Goodison reconfigures mothers to magnify their art-cultivating roles, thereby affirming the brilliance of local arts that will in turn confer recognition on the Caribbean locale. Departing from a gender-focused approach that highlights Caribbean women poets’ subversion of postcolonial patriarchal archetypes, my reading illuminates the two poets’ kinship and continuity in nourishing a local Caribbean tradition through an ecology of revision. Ultimately, I demonstrate the significance of revision as a self-reflexive dimension of a Caribbean poetics of place and contemplate how postcolonial literature fosters a located literariness.