ABSTRACT
As a child, the Kamau Brathwaite skidded a pebble from the beach outside his home in Newstead, Barbados, across the water. In his mind, 'the stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands/Cuba and San Domingo/Jamaica and Puerto Rico/Grenada, Guadeloupe Bonaire. Brathwaite uses the trope of the game 'O'Grady says', with its verbal repetition, to dramatise the effects of British education. The punning title of Sun Poem shifts the focus to father/son relationships, and is prefaced with the names and birthdates of five fathers in his family tree. Modern consciousness becomes electronic as Brathwaite composes directly onto the screen of his Applemac computer, patterning words and phrases, assaulting the received conventions of words on the page. He has not been alone among Caribbean writers in exploring the paradox of 'stone' as a symbol for the Caribbean predicament.
