Postcolonial Poetry

Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry

Jahan Ramazani

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• Ramazani, Jahan. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.

Postcolonial Literature

Since World War Two, writers from regions once part of the British Empire have produced a significant share of the most extraordinary imaginative literature in English.

postcolonial poets

1. Inventing new literary structures for cultural expression in lyric and experimental styles.2. Vitalized the language of poetry enriching it with sounds, rhythms and word play of creoles, pidgins, And local idioms. 3. Recast their cultural inheritance, remembered the histories that shaped them, and renewed local cultural recourses 4. New ways of aesthetically embodying, probing, and dramatizing the divisions and complexities of post-colonial worlds. 5. Built on their inheritances from the global South, the global North, and mixtures of these mixtures.

Explores exemplary poets from the postcolonial world, mainly from World War II to the present, approaching their achievements through the lenses of regional, historical, political, formal, textual, and comparative analysis.

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry

"Postcolonial"

poetry of English-Speaking peoples

1. The Caribbean
2. Africa
3. The Indian subcontinent
4. The Pacific Islands
5. The former settler colonies such as; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, especially non – Europeans; Ireland, Britian’s oldest colonies; Cyprus and Singapore; and of postcolonial Britain itself; particularly black and Asian immigrant and their descendants.

Colonialism

The practice of a nation extending often exploitative control over weaker, poorer people and territories, comes in many different varieties

English as the Language of Poetry

Step 1

Step 3

English is related to their shared literary and formal inheritances and linguistic resources

Important elements of poetry are its forms and sonic textures, its rhythms and wordplay, the resonance and weight of specific words in a particular order

Step 2

Step 4

For poetry, it result to a large and various range of idioms, styles, and forms

attention should be given to poetry's linguistic specificities and aural intricacies.

Postcolonial Studies

Form is patterns and structures such as Rhythm, Line Breaks, Phonetic patterning, Registers of diction and figurative language

Initiated by Edward Said’s landmark book Orientalism (1978)

Oral and performance poetries also are built on rhetorical, sonic and narrative structures that have a history

poetry has been ignored due to its strangeness, deliberate artifice and literary self-consciousness

Postcolonial poetry emerges out of social and political realities such as global inequities, racial oppression and imperial violence

poetic forms are tied to long literary histories that they echo, adapt, play with and against

Poetry can help renew the attention in postcolonial studies to the formal and literary aspects of postcolonial expression

Expansion of Postcolonial Studies

Just as the formal investments of poetry studies can help develop the role of aesthetics and critical commentary in postcolonial studies, so too the global dimensions of postcolonial studies can help widen the scope of poetry studies.

Postcolonial literary goals

• Alert to such large scale issues, styling itself inheritor of the mantle of the struggle for decolonization.
• Resisting empire, reclaiming the land of the colonization and restoring damaged precolonial histories and cultures.
• Colonialism often seeks to destroy the self-respect of dominated peoples, partly by distorting and degrading their cultural past.
• Struggling to restore that past a sense of self-worth, and pride in their natural and built environments.
• Cultures of the colonized world are each “a fit subject for poetry” helping to undo the “denigration and self-abasement” inflicted by colonialism.
• To see postcolonial poetry exclusively to ideological resistance and redemption is to oversimplify it.

Lorna Goodison "Nanny"

My womb was sealed with molten wax of killer bees for nothing should enter nothing should leave the state of perpetual siege the condition of the warrior. From then my whole body would quicken at the birth of everyone of my people’s children. I was schooled in the green-giving ways of the roots and vines made accomplice to the healing acts of Chainey root, fever grass and vervain. My breasts flattened settled unmoving against my chest my movements ran equal to the rhythms of the forest.

I could sense and sift the footfall of men from the animals and smell danger death’s odour in the wind’s shift. When my eyes rendered light from the dark my battle song opened into a solitaire’s moan I became most knowing and forever alone. And when my training was over they circled my waist with pumpkin seeds and dried okra, a traveller’s jigida and sold me to the traders all my weapons within me I was sent, tell that to history. When your sorrow obscures the skies other women like me will rise.

Lorna Goodison "In the Days of Sail"

In the days of sail, Don Cristobal embarked for Cipangu and India, give him propers, he was no coward Genoan and crew in three ramshackle ships. Imagine setting forth across the vast shoreless ocean of ambition; not knowing if they’d slip and fall off the edge of a skywide waterworld. I too these days share that exact same concern. I too today feel as if the Blessed Isle I set sail for is not the one on which I have made landfall.

If poems can’t always be seen as moral and ideological exemplars of anticolonial resistance, why should we read, study, and live with them?

Why read postcolonial poetry?

Michal Ondaatje "Buried"

Above ground, massacre and race. A heart silenced. The tongue removed. The human body merged into burning tire. Mud glaring back into a stare.

Thank You for your attention