Ancestors by Kamau Brathwaite

Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite’s long unavailable, landmark trilogy––Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)––now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its “Video Sycorax” typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the “intercovery”) of Brathwaite’s African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.