Part Five: Poetics: Carla Harryman, False Knowledge as Displacement:

Carla Harryman discusses in her performance piece Walking Backwards with Maintains, where she read aloud a ‘sacred text’ from the back to the front intentionally incorrect, retracing the previous progression of steps that lead to the Postmodern dilemma. What she comes to conclude is that knowledge is a false discourse. Knowledge is vague and selective in memory. Harryman reflects on Lyn Hejinian’s Writing as an Aid to Memory, and Kathy Acker’s Bodies of Work, and how the two writers “consistently search for ways to dissolve the mind/body split as a means towards individual and social liberation” (Harryman).

A more vivid outside of text reality is in Stephanie Urdang’s account of fighting two forms of colonialism, how the women in Guinea-Bissau fought the Portuguese for independence and at the same time had to fight the conceived understanding the male revolutionaries had of freedom, having to remind them that women are to be included in the new independent nation as active participants. “Women had virtually no mobility, in keeping with tradition, and were less likely to break from patterns set for them by their socialization” in pre-modern, modern, and even present settings. The overcoming of colonialism for women has continually been a two front process: one patriarchal and one racial (Urdang).

The individual and social liberation in colonial and modern times has passed into a dual fight that we still see today. The discourse of false knowledge that Harryman alludes to has left us with uncertainty in postmodern thought. The vague theoretical direction today seems to parallel the segment of Hopi prophecy where the lesson drawn from knowledge imposed upon a population when individuals, male or female, have been linked within a culture not of their own choosing leads to thinning of roots. The Hopi prophecy mentions that once an imposed culture has drastically diluted a previous indigenous culture in the name of progress, it becomes much harder to regain lost knowledge (Thomas E. Mails).

Postcolonial Poetics deals with the loss and hardship of regaining what has been lost in their respective cultures due to European Colonialism, while also trying to create new identities in their new national independence. Reclaiming lost knowledge, but also expanding local thought to not appear in the false ‘primitive-ist’ image that Europe had debased on them and maintains in looking down on tribal spiritualism.

Though the Hopi are not in a postcolonial paradigm, as former nations in Africa, Asia, and South America, due to having their land still occupied by the United States, the knowledge that stems from their traditions have been drained by the progressive notion of modern technology. The Hopi share with former colonial nations, and the Women’s Movement the challenge of creating a space of thought outside the dominant mainstream ‘globalized’ market system. Postcolonial Poetics is affiliated with a lexicon of terms, such as: displacement, transfer, and migration. 

Such context involves writers who aggressively re-orient the imaginative relation with one-self and one’s-beginning and one’s-ending to a cultural, bodily, and psychic past (Ramazani). For many postcolonial writers, such as Edward Said, they associate postmodernism as a lead towards nihilism and internal emptiness, particularly the male-centered postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida. But for Postmodern Female Linguist Poets, such as Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, the dissolving of the current psychic paradigm of nihilism and false knowledge can be actively resisted as they use their writing as a weapon to reclaim memory and liberation. Empty individuals with thin roots and social stagnation need to re-orient their imaginative relationship with one another. Poetics is a form of political theory that can start the process.    ... (to be continued)...