Part Four: Poetics: Carla Harryman, Derek Walcott, Schizoid Conflict:

Schizophrenic webbing of history is Alice Notley’s way of rearranging the perimeters of flat historic male-centered poetics. Postcolonial Poetics have at times, the mind-embattled dilemmas too: “To love the English language yet to hate English Imperialism,” a paradox that Jahan Ramazani discusses in the light of the St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott and his epic poem, Omeros. This parallel is similar with postcolonial writers who love French language but despise French Imperialism.

Abandonment or acceptance of one but not the other, this conundrum of the grieving poet is either victim or resistant. But being caught up in both creates internal and external battles. A Catch-22 of impossible and impassible verbal release, but this post-traumatic limbo has Walcott using old tropes of Greek heroes and ‘tropicalizing and twisting’ them into ‘vibrant new figures’ (Ramazani). His colorful new location still holds onto the old tropes and suffering common pains, leaving a universal definition. Ngugi wa Thiongo would most likely refer to the poetics that Walcott uses, as a work that cannot yet ‘decolonize’ itself.

In order for one to ‘decolonize the mind’, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo predominantly proposes that one must go back and retrace one’s own ambivalence and see why there is such an ambivalence? For some individuals, the semiotic, or even semi-detached, representation has crippled movement and this is due to having conceived a limited form of self-representation. Naive hallmark definitions are not wide enough to encompass the larger majority of diverse native perspectives, and forcing a universal on thought boxes-in growth. Postcolonial Poetics, as with the parallel but different Postmodern Poetics, fight the standard in-the-box perspective that the dominant institution continues to swallow. However some choose to re-dress the old tropes, while others want to deconstruct the mind control. To go outside dominant culture, and ‘motivated by the marginalized sense of being’, pushes certain poetics to remain outsider-art in order to not be capitalized on. Consumer culture manufactures a false sense of consent.

As with the linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent, Postmodern Female Language poets, like Carla Harryman, use a nonlinear/non-literary vocabulary drawn from sciences, philosophy, sociology, and politics (Harryman). Such poets are willing to break all the grammatical and syntactical rules. Breaking these determined rules in a literary format designed by men, which has always been linguistically consciously and unconsciously bias, leads to an enlightenment of how false rules and false restraints control individuals literally and literarily.

While Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Poetics have similar enemies of domination, the gender element seems to come secondary in colonial theory, while gender and racial elements come second to the larger Postmodern/Post-structural movement of Foucault and Derrida. Two oppressive mechanisms of control over others play out. This conflict of interest creates a schizoid pull and push of ‘loving cultural literature’ but ‘hating dominant oppression’, as with those who love the ideals of America but deplore the actions of the American foreign policy; For Carla Harryman, ‘rule of thought’ is not the same as ‘literary convention’. There are limits in decolonizing one’s thought if one chooses to remain in the global community. Harryman’s rule of thought, “is the convention on which the experimental work relies on and what the experimental work cannot question without destroying itself” (Harryman). 

The limit of complex power relations in poetics, in order to impact an audience, has to in some way relate to the very pre-dominance it rebels against. This Catch-22 of internal and external conflict of perception remains stressed in the use of wordage.    .... (to be continued) ....