A Sense of Arrival

Book excerpt: In A Sense of Arrival, Kevin Adonis Browne blends literary, visual, and material forms to present a narrative of Caribbean blackness. Arguing that the story of Caribbeanness cannot be told through words alone, Browne interweaves essays, memoir, autotheory, and narrative verse with documentary photography, portraiture, Rorschach blots, and images of his own sculptures and art installations. Browne labels this multimodal approach and rhetorical form “Caribbean nonfiction,” and he uses it to conceptualize arrival as a theory of being. Arrival is practiced through forms of status, return, belonging, nomadism, self-exile, love, loss, presence, and haunting, each of which expresses the vast complexity and urgency of Caribbeanness. At the same time, arrival emphasizes and extends Caribbean ways of being, knowing, and doing. Throughout, Browne challenges readers to follow the archipelagic sensibilities of the Caribbean to look beyond black death and apprehend the inherent optimism and beauty of arrival. A singular meditation on the art and process of Caribbeanness, A Sense of Arrival is a statement on how the black Caribbean self comes to be.