Pembroke College Cambridge

Portrait of Kamau Brathwaite Unveiled

Pembroke College has unveiled a portrait of Barbadian poet, historian and academic Dr Kamau Brathwaite (1930 – 2020).

Portrait of Kamau Brathwaite, painted by Errol Lloyd

The painting, by Jamaican-born artist Errol Lloyd, was commissioned by the College to hang in Hall. It is the first portrait of a BME Pembroke Fellow to go on permanent display.

"It is a great honour for us to be able to place Kamau amongst our other distinguished alumni, here in our Hall", said the Master, Lord Smith. "He was a hugely distinguished, major international literary figure. He put Caribbean literature very firmly on the literary map."

For Maya McFarlane, second-year undergraduate and Junior Parlour Ethnic Minorities Officer, the painting will "serve as a constant reminder that education is for all. Not regardless of your background, but because of it. We each have a rich perspective to share and that is something that really comes across in all of Kamau's work. You should never have to mould your voice to fit the narrative of others. Kamau taught us to write our own stories, create our own spaces, and that is the message that black students everywhere will carry around with us."

Errol Lloyd was present at the unveiling and spoke about his first encounters with Brathwaite, through his involvement with the Caribbean Artist’s Movement, which was set up by Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey in 1966. Its aims were to bring together Caribbean artists and writers living in the UK and spread wider awareness of their work amongst the wider British public.

When the College approached Brathwaite in 2018 to ask if he had a preferred artist, he immediately recommended Pembroke approach Lloyd, who has been a pioneer of black art and its advancement in the UK since the 1960s.

Unveiling of Brathwaite Portrait - Group shot

Lloyd produced artwork for the books of pioneering black publishers Bogle-L’Ouverture, New Beacon Books and Allison & Busby, as well as for mainstream publishers Random House, OUP and Penguin. In 1973, he was runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal for his work on My Brother Sean, by Petronella Breinburg. His commissions for bronze busts have included Sir Garfield Sobers, C L R James and Linton Kwesi Johnston. Lloyd also had a long association with the Minorities' Arts Advisory Service (MAAS), whose magazine, Artrage, he edited for a while.

Lloyd travelled to Barbados in 2019. He was acutely aware that Brathwaite had recently been in poor health. "It was obvious that I wouldn't be able to do the portrait there. So I had to do the sketches and take photographs and then go back to London and put things together and work from the sketches and photographs. Fortunately, I had done some sketches of him years ago, about thirty years ago. So I was quite familiar with his face."

"Kamau was a very spirited person. I didn't just want to do something that replicated his features, but I wanted to try to introduce some other element that elevated it and put it on an ethereal, sort of spiritual level." Indeed, he didn't want the portrait to fit in with the others in Hall. "I wanted it to be bold, like he was."

To mark yesterday's unveiling, and to celebrate the life of Kamau Brathwaite, the flag of Barbados, the Broken Trident, was flown above Pembroke.

Flag of Barbados flying above Pembroke

Brathwaite came to Pembroke in 1950 on a Barbados Island Scholarship to study for a BA in History and a Certificate in Education. In 2016 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke.

Brathwaite wrote a number of collections of poetry, including The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), Middle Passages (1992) and Born to Slow Horses (2005). His studies of black cultural life include Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984).

 

This work was recognised with a number of award including the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize, the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literary Criticism, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2018 PEN/Voelcker Lifetime Career and Achievement Award for poetry. He also received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In 2018, to mark his 88th birthday and the awarding of an Honorary Fellowship, the College Library mounted a display on Professor Brathwaite and his work. A blog post reflecting on the display can be read here.

 

 

Latest tweets

Pembroke College Cambridge