Postcolonial Poetics in the English language discussed in Jahan Ramazani’s book The Hybrid Muse, in particular, ‘the globalization of English-language poetry’ be it in India, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Kenya, Nigeria, etc; reflects the hybridization of ethnic muses writing within the linguistic contours of their indigenous lexicon, metaphors, rhythms, dialects, and genres to create new exciting possibilities with their resistance. The exposure and flushing the English canon with Third World entries is not just in English but also other colonial languages, like the parallel of Patrick Chamoiseau’s ‘word-scratcher’ of Creole tradition fighting back French. But using English as an example, if the claim that English as a language still oppresses people when the oppressor is no longer physically present in foreign lands, then Postcolonial Poetics and poets struggle and fight back this invisible threat by extending the dictionary of thought, as others would say, ‘displacing the alphabet’. The nature of postcolonial poetics is to displace the alphabet.
Similarly but differently, yet still a hybridization of thought; Postmodern Female Language Poetics comes into being with the writers’ refusal to naturalize the language of the text (Marjorie Perloff). In particular, Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue’s We Who Love to be Astonished, propose that oppositional poetics from mainstream have ‘roots that lie in the politicized literature of the earlier era,’ but associated more with the abolitionist, labor rights, civil rights, and women’s rights movements than with the accepted institutions of the ‘capillary network’ (Hinton).
The emphasis of poets, such as Kathleen Fraser, align with continual experiments of traditional marginality where “untraditional woman scientists as an analogue for the experimental woman poet” have been “searching for the element which had not yet been imagined” and has ‘not yet been named’ (Kathleen Fraser, Eileen Gregory). “Dropping into a place beyond” the illusory gesture,” the poet uses codes of sensuous possibilities beyond desire and matter of choice to affectively challenge previous geographical and grammatical borders (Gregory).
Displacing the language of the dominant grammar and extending the written possibilities to go beyond what has been institutionally limited is a common thread in Postcolonial Poetics and Postmodern Language Poetics. One would dissect the dissent in the word: Antidisestablishmentarianism. Break it down to establish of a stable –ish, like in fetish, but not. A more so called normal or common refusal to change; here, the refusal is to the institution of established literary poetics. A Mentarian is someone who represents something, in this case someone who represents the established hegemonic order. But then there is the disestablishment, those mentarians who want to disembowel the whole thing because the false establishment with its false literary legal-codes does not affect nature, because nature is always changing. Language is always changing. But the anti- is there too, to reflect those who are against the natural evolution of change, the conservatives that want to stop the nonviolent protestors; anti-dis- is a double negative. The double negative does not equal a positive, nor can we get too far ahead of ourselves and stretch it to 'anti'-anti-dis-establish-mentarian-ism. The traditionalist or conservative needs to get over it, that social evolution is inevitable, and freedom for growth is palatable outside the institution’s unstable walls.
Postcolonial Poetics, as Jahan Ramazani begins with, can start with William Butler Yeats as a platform for dissent. Yeats can also be a lead for Postmodern Poetics. This is where Modern Poetics trails towards the post-movements. (to be continued)...
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