The Creole Experiment: Utopian Space in Kamau Brathwaite's Book

Kamau Brathwaite's writing covers a whole range of creative expression. The most distinctive is his now well known 'Sycorax video style'. Its experiment with different font sizes and layouts not only challenges the limits of the text but expresses a sustained engagement with the political reality of contemporary West Indian life. Brathwaite's 'creole cosmos' is an expression of both a global 'collision of cultures' and a utopian vision for which the Caribbean is presented as a model. In this sense, Brathwaite's work is in dialogue with current debates about the global dimension of creoleness and creolization whilst critiquing them at the same time.

This study reads the utopian aspect of Brathwaite's major 'video-style' works in conjunction with the concepts of Heimat (homeland) and 'concrete utopia' developed by philosopher Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope. As part of the utopian dimension of his writing project, Brathwaite interrogates and reinterprets the conventions of magical realism. Unlike mainstream Latin American magical realism, Brathwaite's work is radical in both form and content, developing a distinctly creole aesthetics.

Brathwaite'S vision of the 'magical reality' of the 'creole cosmos' questions the conventional meaning of utopian. His vision of a 'creole cosmos' does not refer to an ideal place, but is concrete in its reference to an often dismal day-to-day existence. One of the main objectives of Brathwaite's 'magical realism' is to find ways of connecting the act of writing with a sense of place and with the lived reality of the Caribbean in the hope that writing creates and recreates that reality.