Psychosomatic Expressions in Selected Poems of Maya Angelou and Kamau Brathwaite

Existing scholarship on Maya Angelou has examined her poetry in relation to racial and gender identity, resilience, liberation, autobiography, orality, and the representation of Black womanhood, while studies of Kamau Brathwaite have largely focused on Caribbean history, African cultural memory, colonialism, diaspora, nation language, rhythm, and formal experimentation. However, the relationship between psychological experience and bodily expression in the two writers' poetry has received comparatively less sustained attention, particularly from a psychosomatic perspective. This article argues that bodily imagery, physical sensation, movement, voice, and rhythm in selected poems by Angelou and Brathwaite provide important means through which psychological conflict, traumatic experience, memory, resilience, and identity are articulated. The study is theoretically grounded in trauma and embodiment studies, drawing on concepts that connect psychological experience, corporeality, memory, and representation. Methodologically, it employs qualitative textual analysis and comparative close reading of selected poems by the two poets, examining bodily images, somatic expressions, corporeal metaphors, movement, voice, and rhythmic structures in relation to the psychological and historical experiences represented in the poems. The study expects to show that the body functions not merely as an object of poetic description but as an expressive medium that makes psychological distress and historical memory perceptible. It further anticipates that, while Angelou frequently uses bodily assertion, movement, voice, and posture to negotiate suffering and affirm individual identity, Brathwaite more strongly links corporeal experience to collective memory, ancestral history, rhythm, and cultural survival. By bringing the two poets into comparative dialogue, the study seeks to demonstrate how psychosomatic representation can illuminate different forms of embodied experience within African American and Caribbean poetic traditions.