Caribbean Poetry Discuss the thematic and stylistic characteristics of Grace Nichols's poetry (focusing on her poems "Waterpot," "Without Song," and "Old Magic"), and compare these to the thematic and stylistic characteristics of Kamau Brathwaite (focusing on his poem "Starvation and Blues").

Grace Nichols's and Kamau Brathwaite's poetry is about claiming a distinct Caribbean identity separate from that of Western Europe and the United States. To this end, the poets use local vernacular and speak about the experience of Afro-Caribbean people.
Nichols's poetry attempts to reclaim African folk heritage and the dignity of slave women to provide a rich history of the African diaspora. For example, in "Waterpot," Nichols writes about the experience of slavery. She writes, "The daily going out/and coming in/always being hurried along/like like...cattle." She uses a simile, comparing slaves to cattle, to describe the way in which they are constantly asked to tend fields without rest. The slave woman described in the poem holds herself erect "like royal cane." This is another simile in which the woman is compared to what she harvests--sugar cane. She holds herself with pride and makes an attempt to express her pride in the only way she can, but the overseer sneers at her "pathetic display of dignity." Nicholas uses local objects, such as sugar cane, to express the woman's self-determination. In "Without Song," Nicholas writes of children who are so stricken that "They have fallen/into exile/moving without song/or prayer." In these short, staccato lines, she describes children, perhaps slaves, perhaps poor and starving, who are suffering so much that they don't have a song, as most children do. The song and prayer stand, in a metaphorical way, for the joy and hope of children who have good lives. The exile she writes about is an allusion to the exile of slaves from Africa in the New World, in addition to the exile of the Jews in the Bible. In "Old Magic," a nameless African woman speaks about the experience of slavery.
Like Nichols, Brathwaite uses vernacular but does not concentrate on the experience of women. Brathwaite's "Starvation and Blues" uses a form of Caribbean vernacular to reinvent English literary tradition. For example, the poem begins, "This is no white man's lan'," which echoes the first line of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" ("That is no country for old men"). His poem uses the rhythm of blues in lines such as "this place is empty bottles/this place is a woman satisfied." The poem uses the rhythm of the blues and images from the Caribbean to express the experience of living in the Caribbean and having a culture that has been transported from Europe and America but that has been remade and re-imagined in the Caribbean.