In Postcolonial Poetry in English (2006) Rajeev S. Patke draws attention to “the relative neglect of postcolonial poetry” caused by the academic tendency to “equate ‘postcolonial literature’ with narrative prose” (13). Perhaps this “relative neglect” can also be explained by the large number of postcolonial women poets who have chosen poetry as their preferred form of expression. Arguably ‘doubly colonized’, these women poets not only grapple with the colonizers’ language, poetic traditions and racism, but also with the role of what Nira Yuval-Davis in Gender and Nation (1997) calls “symbolic border guards and […] embodiments of the collectivity” (23) frequently imposed on them in the postcolonial struggle for identity.
In this seminar we will look at a variety of contemporary women’s poems in English from different postcolonial contexts, including Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. We will analyze similarities as well as differences in these poets’ attempts at forging their own voices and locating these in what could be seen as a third space between the colonisers’ and the colonized realm of experience. A course reader with all relevant texts will be provided. |
