ABSTRACT

As a child, the then Edward (now 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 R ico/ Grenada, Guadeloupe Bonaire . . .’/ He was to write that ‘all I have written since, if sense, comes out of this genesis’,2 a stone ‘blooming’ into islands, a defining moment of his creative imagination.3 The epiphany radiated back to the creation of the Caribbean area out of coral and volcanic magma, and forward to present time and space, shaping, as it did for Wilson Harris, ‘a mythology that marries us to rock and hill’.4 In 1972 the adult Kamau stood on the same beach and again skidded a stone, and found inspiration for a second trilogy.5