m. nourbeSe philip (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry) talks with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about Kamau Brathwaite’s tremendous collection, Born to Slow Horses, the lineage of Brathwaite’s complex and playful work, and her own poetic connections to Brathwaite’s writing.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

Born to Slow Horses by Kamau Brathwaite • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys • The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon • The Tempest by William Shakespeare

From the episode:

m. nourbeSe philip: When I first came upon Kamau, I had been writing for a while and the issues that he has been engaged in, I was also engaged in, which is to say: similar anxieties around trying to find, for me, the literary form of this particular language. Because for me, there’s certain things that just don’t happen in standard English, like, carnival for instance and those kinds of things. I have a long essay written in what he called nation language.

I always had a bit of a resistance to that because of my resistance to the idea of the nation and all the negative things that come out of that. Most recently I’ve been thinking maybe when he said nation state, he meant maybe the collectivity of the Caribbean islands but I really resist this idea of these individual islands being these little micro micro nation states.

So for me,, the word that I chose was demotic, coming from that Greek word demos, meaning after people. So I talk about the Caribbean demotic, but I share with him that interest in using that language to speak about some of our deepest issues and dreams and desires and so on.