Architecture within the Poet

A translation of the words of

The Arrivants; a New World Trilogy

By Kamau Brathwaite

Architecture with the Poet

When a practitioner starts their architecture, the common first step is to seek an act of mimicry. They try to find an architectural language through pre-existing building fabric, resulting in an ossified relationship between form and discipline.

For those who cannot find a language so easily, their search becomes an act of translation, one that often begins in literature. To guide such seekers, I have written a step-by-step approach to formulating a kind of architecture from literature.

One

A translation begins almost accidentally. Quick unconscious marks in the margins of books, the backs of receipts, in the creases of napkins and between the words of poets. This is the first sign of figuring: trying to work something out, to translate something, to hold a sense of architecture outside the architect and their education.

Two

Sometimes these sketches gain consciousness. Opening my copy of Kamau Brathwaite’s trilogy The Arrivants, I follow his writings of the diasporic journey with myPilot Gel Microtip Rollerball 0.4 mm. . These pen lines attempt to spatialise the smallest forms of literature, such as the “city of gold” or “ivory altars” [Fig.01]. Though these marks are shy, not fully sure of themselves, they begin to form a visual vocabulary.

Three

Brathwaite has previously questioned normative vocabulary by forming one of his own called ‘nation language’. His words are sonic, rhythmic and spatial. He has a way of writing that captures the histories of dispersal and migration across the Black Atlantic. This starts to seed an architecture of a different register: one which creates structure out of memory and gestures rather than through forms. Encountering Brathwaite through these acts of sketching makes the prior clear, something that Édouard Glissant described once as a type of poetics that “gives form to the memory of the Middle Passage,” and so, rhythms and relations are spatial acts rather than literary devices.

Four

I return to these sketches, redrawing. Again. This time, the sketches take on more than single sentences, and begin to visuals entire sections, Each stanza of II Kumasi becomes a separate drawing. Reading time becomes drawing time. Fig (02)

“the morning sun of seven hills greets you best, knows you blessed.”Fig (02)

Four

At some point, a form appears, it becomes something that is neither figurative nor architectural but hovers between the two, an in-between shape that feels translated rather than designed. This is usually the moment when the sketches accumulate into a drawing with direction. A comfort, or perhaps a confidence settles into the line. Enough to start imagining their context, materiality or lighting conditions. These forms, still provisional, still unresolved, carry the sense of the architect.

Reverse

In reverse, architecture in this poetry is measured as a practice of ritual, migration, and bodily negotiation rather than the production of buildings. In this process, sketching functions as the translator. Poetry becomes the (mis)translated; architecture, the misinterpretation. Yet it is precisely within this slippage that another mode of architectural practice emerges. Through a subsequent series of drawings, it asks how diasporic subjects construct “home” under conditions where permanence is impossible, territory is unstable, and shelter must be carried rather than occupied. The drawings - and I - learnt that a ‘home’ is approached not as a site, but as a cyclical condition, framing architecture as a state of becoming rather than a finished object.

Bibliography

Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books, 1984.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Prussin, Labelle. 1995. African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press / National Museum of African Art.

All drawing imagery by the author, Issi Nanabeyin.