Heron's Canoe explores the intersections and folds within the history
of the collision between the cultures of Africa, Europe and the
Caribbean. Focusing on the journey the Yoruba gods made with slaves from
West Africa to the Caribbean, on resonances with Amerindian myths
concerning the scattering of their gods, and on the transformations of
each within the creolising, hybridising culture of the Caribbean, Mark
De Brito's poem is a highly original meditation on the both the nature
of the African diaspora and the nature of history. He makes imaginative
use of found text from historical sources, translations of Yoruba
prayers and invocations, but there is always a deeply personal tone to
these carefully crafted poems.
Heron's Canoe is the English translation for the Carib name of a
constellation that lies in the region of Ursa Major, significant to
Amerindian myths of origin, which Mark De Brito's poem connects to other
myths of origin, particularly those of West Africa which reached the
Caribbean in the submerged belief systems and religions of the African
slaves. De Brito joins that small group of Caribbean poets and novelists
whose work explores the existence of a distinctive Caribbean cosmology
as the root of a nativist literary aesthetic.
De Brito's approach is both personal and intellectual: as a Black
British person who has explored his Trinidadian family roots and through
them the manifestations of Africa in Trinidad in the Orisha chapelles,
but also as a writer inspired by the work of Wilson Harris in his
emphasis on the importance of the broken and buried legacies of the
Caribbean.
Mark De Brito was born and lives in the UK. His family originated in
Trinidad.
