Maroon In/securities: Kamau Brathwaite on Colonial Wars of Xtermination

Abstract

If Kamau Brathwaite’s more recent work has been concerned with contemporary questions of security — such as 9/11 in his poem “Hawk” (2005), urban crime in his book Trench Town Rock (1994a) or various forms of death and dying in his Elegguas 2010) — a turn to Brathwaite’s wider body of writing and his scholarship also reveals a broader concern with questions of in/security. His work usefully demonstrates what Pat Noxolo and David Featherstone have discussed as “a longer historical perspective and a wider global perspective” on in/securities which “unsettles the newmillennial, US-centric quality of post-9/11 security preoccupations” (2014, p.604). While Noxolo and Featherstone focus on the Plantation as a particular site for mapping this historical view of in/security and theorize “slavery as in/security”, in this paper I want to use the concept of maroon in/securities as another way of engaging histories of in/securities (2014, p.604). In
turning to marronage, I want to trace relational spaces of colonial in/securities not singularly bound to, although indeed not separate from, the operations and brutalities of the Plantation. Instead, I use Maroon practices, strategies and spaces as important narrative sites that afford
another perspective on the violence of plantation life and its insecurities.