Strange Fruit

In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour.

Strange Fruit charts a movement from the pain of poems “written along the v/edge & coast of death and carrefour”, the despai...