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LYRIC POETRY AND POSTCOLONIALISMWeihsin GuiPublished online: 30 Nov 2007.

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 43, No. 3 December 2007, pp. 264–277ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online © 2007 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/17449850701669609

Weihsin Gui

LYRIC POETRY AND

POSTCOLONIALISM

The subject of self-forgettingTaylor and FrancisRJPW_A_266803.sgm10.1080/17449850701669609Journal of Postcolonial Writing1744-9855 (print)/1744-9863 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis433000000December 2007WeihsinGuiwgui@brown.edu

This paper examines postcolonial subjectivity through modernist and postcolonial theories ofthe lyric. I suggest that an aesthetic consideration of the lyric form and subjectivity mightforeground how the postcolonial lyric cherishes the concept of a bounded self while simulta-neously reshaping boundaries. Such a consideration might move beyond subjectivity andidentity formation by reading lyric poetry’s intervention in modernity as critique rather thanself-expression.

Keywords allegory; cognitive mapping; lyric poetry; modernity; postcolonial; subjectivity

The problem of the subject in postcolonial literature has been predominantly discussedwith reference to realist or postmodernist novels with their identifiable characters andnarrative frameworks. In this essay I examine how lyric poems written in the postcolo-nial moment construct and challenge subjectivity by departing from the conventionalcorrelation between the lyric’s expressive brevity and the immediate presence of anindividual, speaking self. As Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s modernisttheories of the lyric suggest, the lyric’s individuation is in tension with the social andhistorical conditions that make such individuation possible. This tension becomes evenmore productive at literary and political levels in the hands of such postcolonial writersas Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. Brathwaite and Walcott demonstrate how thepoetic “I” is a suturing of social and historical forces rather than the expression of analready existing individual or collective self and identity. I argue that the postcoloniallyric presents a speaking self as a ruse that becomes a caesura or crystallization of thehistorical and social processes inherent within the poem—the poetic “I” of the lyricdisappears into the language of the lyric. As such it is a mode of critical thinking thatholds up as objects of critique both the poetic speaker and the historical and social forcesnamed by that speaker. Instead of subordinating those forces to the priority of a speakingsubject in their work, postcolonial lyric poets approximate the concept (developed byBenjamin and Adorno) of the artwork as a crystallization of historical forces in literarylanguage that reorganizes these constitutive forces in insightful ways. I will illustrate thiswith close readings of three lyric poems by Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare, Malaysianpoet Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Singaporean poet Alvin Pang.

Even though some of the most prominent postcolonial writers espouse lyric poetry,there is a lack of attention to this form in postcolonial studies. Indeed, “even a haphazard

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review of the main works of scholarship shows that in the realm of representation, post-colonialism has almost exclusively been considered through the novel” (Edwards 2).Similarly, studies of lyric poetry have not related this form to postcolonial writing. Theessays in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985) introduce “structuralist and poststruc-turalist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response” approaches tothe lyric (Ho[scaron] ek and Parker 7). However, there is no consideration of postcolonial stud-ies, postcolonial literature, or its older incarnation, Commonwealth literature; indeed,most of the primary texts discussed in the essays are poems by Romantic or highmodernist poets. This may itself be symptomatic of the formal bias in postcolonialliterary representation. Compounding this omission, scholarship that does discuss bothpostcolonialism and lyric poetry relies on an idea of identity and subjectivity that standsoutside the literary text. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse argues for postcolonialpoetry as “new mediative cultural forms” that “visibly embed within themselves arelation of ongoing friction, tension, even rupture” (182). Ramazani relies on a closeidentification between cultural biography and literary representation and suggests thatpostcolonial poets are accomplished “less in announcing their hybrid experience than inforging aesthetic forms that embody it” (180). Establishing a determinate identityposition or subjectivity is highly attractive after the symbolic and material violence ofcolonialism. But instead of bracketing the postcolonial lyric with hybrid experience andidentities, I want to remove the identitarian framework and focus on what Ramazanidescribes as the relations of ongoing friction, tension and rupture. I aim to focus onrelations between existing criticism on Romantic or modernist lyrics on the one hand,and on Caribbean poetic language on the other to frame a discussion of lyric poems thatare postcolonial both in provenance and thematic content. An aesthetic consideration ofthe lyric form in relation to subjectivity might foreground how the postcolonial lyriccherishes the concept of a bounded self while at the same time reshapes these bound-aries. Further, it might move beyond subjectivity and identity formation by reading lyricpoetry’s intervention in modernity as critique rather than self-expression.

The lyric as allegory and crystallization

Paul de Man argues that lyric poetry admits the presence of a self which is a constructwithin the lyric’s own aesthetic form rather than an already-existing entity outside poeticlanguage. The tension resulting from the subject–object dialectic placed within a tempo-ral and allegorical sign system is, de Man argues, what marks the lyric’s participation inthe temporal dynamics of modernity. Yet even with this reformulation, “poetry does notgive up its mimetic function and its dependence on the fiction of a self that easily and atsuch little cost” (de Man, “Lyric and Modernity” 182). Thus, the task of critical readingis to make the lyric “give up” its mimeticism and subjectivity by opening up the text tovarious possibilities of meaning. De Man finds in the language of lyric poetry a tensionbetween what he calls a symbolic or representational sense of language, and an allegoricalor analogical sense. Ultimately, the allegorical register is what matters most, for “allallegorical poetry must contain a representational element that invites and allows forunderstanding, only to discover that the understanding it reaches is necessarily in error”(“Lyric and Modernity” 185). In these terms, the act of critical reading or the attemptto reach an “understanding” of the text is one of parabasis and counterfocalization: the

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lyric inexorably turns representational or symbolic language towards the allegorical sign-system that contains it.

De Man’s reformulation of the subject–object relationship within allegory is bothuseful and problematic for postcolonial studies of lyrical subjectivity: “allegory desig-nates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin”, it “renounc[es] the nostalgiaand the desire to coincide”, and “it prevents the self from an illusory identificationwith the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self” (deMan, “Rhetoric” 207). In a later essay, the sphinx in Baudelaire’s poem “Spleen” is“the grammatical subject cut off from its consciousness” and its song “is not the subli-mation but the forgetting, by inscription, of terror, the dismemberment of theaesthetic whole” (de Man, “Lyrical Voice” 72). The distance and renunciation of alle-gory has now intensified into a terrifying scission and dismemberment. On the onehand, allegory designated as the renunciation of nostalgia and self-forgetting chal-lenges the identitarian strands of postcolonial criticism that try to recover an individ-ual or a collective identity out of literary works. On the other hand, read on deMan’s terms of spatio-temporal distance and terrifying scission, the postcolonial lyricruns the risk of becoming a derivative, belated, and marginalized response to an origi-nary corpus of Euro-American texts, because the lyric is seen as primarily a Europeanor Anglo-American form belonging to Romanticism or high modernism. This wouldsuggest the impossibility of attaining an originary standard, that the poetry not beconsidered under its own conditions of possibility. Let me suggest that if the lyric ispart of modernity’s vocabulary of literary forms, then we can read postcolonial lyricsnot as texts distanced from their origins but as full participants in literary modernity.Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s discussions of literary form and historyoffer a way of retaining both the salutary renunciation of nostalgia and the challengingof identitarian criticism, while also attending to the contemporaneity of Euro-American and postcolonial moments.

Benjamin’s discussion of allegory underscores its temporality as a process of objec-tification and transformation. For Benjamin, the neglected dramatic form of theGerman Trauerspiel characterizes the work and function of allegory as opposed tothe valorized symbolism of romanticism. In the symbol, “destruction is idealized andthe transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption”, but it isin allegory that we see “history as a petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin, “Alle-gory” 166). Allegory does not presuppose subjectivity in literary works; instead, itobjectifies knowledge and history through literary language and form into a petrifiedlandscape. Allegory achieves this petrification and objectification by being both runeand ruin: both a fragment of history that yields interpretation and a merging of thathistory into literary language. Regarding the rune, “in the field of allegorical intuitionthe image is a fragment, a rune”, and “the false appearance of totality is extinguished”once critical reading unpacks the various forces that constitute the totality of that image(“Allegory” 176). Regarding the ruin, “history has physically merged into the setting [… ] history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that ofirresistible decay” (“Allegory” 177–78). Here, “irresistible decay” refers to the sense ofallegory as a fragmentary rune, suggesting a mode of analysis or taking apart. History,then, as expressed in allegorical and literary language, is a process of analysis andcritique. This occurs through the conjunction of form and content rather than theirseparation, as Benjamin writes: “the function of artistic form is as follows: to make

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historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into aphilosophical truth” (“Allegory” 182).

What philosophical truth can lyric poetry offer? The lyric does not seem to standalongside the story, the form that Benjamin laments is being overtaken by “informa-tion” and “sensation” (Benjamin, “Motifs” 159). Baudelaire’s lyrics serve an importantcritical function as “days of recollection, not marked by any experience. They arenot connected with the other days, but stand out from time” (“Motifs” 181). Thisdouble sense of “recollection” and “stand[ing] out from time” recalls the double senseof allegory as ruin and rune. What is allegorized in Baudelaire is “the disintegrationof the aura in the experience of shock” that is “the price for which the sensation ofthe modern age may be had” (“Motifs” 194). Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s lyric poemsas literary markers of the historical and experiential turn from storytelling (anarchaic form of narration) towards information and sensation, forms that mark “theincreasing atrophy of experience” (“Motifs” 159). In another context, Benjaminfurther explains this shock experience and auratic disintegration: “Thinking involvesnot only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. When thinking suddenly stopsin a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, bywhich it crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin, “Theses” 262–63). We may infer thatthe lyric form thinks through and critiques the passage from storytelling to informa-tion by a shock-effect that crystallizes and makes apprehensible the tensions between“the settlement of knowledge” and knowledge’s “irresistible decay” (to use the termsfrom Benjamin’s discussion of Trauerspiel) in contemporary social and historicalconfigurations.

The lyric as critique and self-forgetting

The allegorical power of the lyric as both crystallization and critique is furtherelaborated by Adorno, who articulates such critique in the triangulated tensionbetween the individual, society, and the work of art in “Lyric Poetry and Society”. ForAdorno, the opposition between the individual and the collective (in this case, society)cannot hold, just as for de Man the opposition between symbol and allegory is untena-ble. The lyric poem’s apparent guise of individuality and the conventional oppositionof the individuated speaking self against a larger collective body is an artistic ruse,because the readerly demand that lyric poetry be an individual utterance is itself asocially embedded desire. In fact, through the form of the lyric, the poet as speakingself and sovereign subject loses his or her fixity and becomes indistinguishable frompoetic language itself.

… the moment of self-forgetting in which the subject submerges in language is nota sacrifice of himself to Being. It is not a moment of compulsion or of force, [ … ]but rather a moment of reconciliation; language itself first speaks when it speaks notas something foreign to the subject but as his own voice. (Adorno 161)

Here, Adorno elaborates the poetic utterance of the speaking subject as a presenceof “self-forgetting” rather than self-identification or self-affirmation. Indeed, the syntac-tic subject of this passage is the temporal and discursive moment of the lyric speaker’s

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encounter and enmeshing with poetic language. The subject is now a creatureconstructed within but also open to the possibilities of poetic language. The lyricspeaker or individual subject does not originate nor define the meaning of the lyric, forthe lyric’s individuality is not “the expression of individual experience and stirrings ofemotion” (Adorno 156). Instead, through the lyric form, the poetic voice and what itspeaks of “participate in the generality of things” (156). Adorno elaborates this“generality” as:

the descent into individuality [that] raises the lyric poem to the realm of the generalby virtue of its bringing to light things undistorted, ungrasped, things not yetsubsumed—thus the poem anticipates, in an abstract way, a condition in which nomere generalities (i.e. extreme particularities) can bind and chain that which ishuman. (156)

We can understand the paradox of mere generalities and extreme particularities inlight of the historical relations of postcolonial nationalism and identity formation,because “the historical relation of subject to object, of individual to society” is “precipi-tated in the poem” (160). Adorno’s precipitation of historical relations is akin to thecrystallization of Benjamin’s shock experience that arrests the flow of thought andhistory, while the eschewal of the relation of self to society recalls the self-forgettingdiscussed by both de Man and Benjamin. The Adornian paradox invests lyric poetrywith a productive critical tension in relation to the postcolonial projects of nationalformation and subject constitution. Such recuperative projects offer subjective or iden-titarian positions—collective “mere generalities”—for people to assume, but whenthese generalities of nation, ethnicity, or national literature become bound andconstricting they in turn become “extreme particularities” that deny or exclude otherpossible relations or positions (“things undistorted, ungrasped, things not yetsubsumed”) that yet exist in the realm of the general.

These characteristics of lyric poetry as allegory, as rune and ruin, as self-forget-ting, crystallization and critique have been productively applied to romantic andmodernist lyric poems. Fredric Jameson’s study of Baudelaire’s poetry, for example,usefully draws on various ideas of the lyric and links them with the culture out ofwhich the poetry arises and to which it responds. For Jameson, Baudelaire’s lyric“Autumnal” marks the disappearance of both affect and the tragic spirit of highmodernism, resulting in a postmodernist sublimation, an “exhilaration” that “is notexactly an emotion or a feeling, not a way of living an object, but rather somehowdetached from its contents” (Jameson, “Baudelaire” 260). Yet the dissolution of thetragic spirit and the detachment of this subsequent exhilaration allow the sublime toserve a critical function akin to the precipitation of historical relations emphasized byAdorno. “The notion of the sublime” should not be thought of as mere sensation but“as a relationship of the individual subject to some fitfully or only intermittently visibleforce which, enormous and systematized, reduces the individual to helplessness”(“Baudelaire” 262). Jameson later revises this crystallization of the individual subject inrelation to systematic forces in his lengthy study of postmodernism, where it becomes“cognitive mapping” (Jameson, “Culture” 51). This non-sublime version of precipi-tated historical relations does more than “reduce the individual to helplessness”; it is,instead, illuminating and instructive.

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The lyric as nation language: conjugation, and caesura

Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott have often been regarded as writers of anglo-phone Caribbean poetry whose literary and linguistic projects contradict each other, butI am concerned with how their complementary treatment of poetic language appears,superficially, to create a collective subject out of native or pre-existing identities andcultures. On closer inspection, however, the terms of their literary creation arecompatible with those of allegory, self-forgetting, crystallization and critique that deMan, Benjamin and Adorno have addressed. Brathwaite and Walcott are cognitivelymapping and triangulating the lived experience of Caribbean peoples, the legacy of colo-nialism, the problems of postcolonial history, and the use of English as a poetic language.

Kamau Brathwaite’s insistence on a “nation language” is apparently premised on anessentialist notion of “the African aspect” of a “New World/Caribbean heritage” that canbe recovered and expressed in a hybrid form of English, “not the standard, imported,educated English, but that of the submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility,which has always been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface”(Brathwaite 311). Nation language, described as “submerged” and gradually emerging,can be characterized in terms of the allegorical ruin and rune that fascinate Benjamin. Itis a ruin, seemingly a fragment of a history that has physically merged into the backdropof the culture and set in motion Benjamin’s process of “irresistible decay”. Brathwaitemoves away from standard English towards nation language by turning from iambicpentameter to calypso, “an ancient form which was always there”, that “mandates theuse of the tongue in a certain way, the use of sound in a certain way” (312). Yet the asser-tion—“we are moving naturally towards now”—points to the sense of nation languageas rune, a fragment persisting in the present that demands and yields interpretation.Nation language is a fragment or rune that offers a tantalizing glimpse of a meaningfulpast and a prospective future. Even though it should express a pre-existing sensibilityand experience, Brathwaite interprets and defines it relationally: “it is an English whichis like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues.And sometimes it is English and African at the same time” (311). In comparing nationlanguage to the American blues and stressing the coexistence of English and Africanelements within the Caribbean, Brathwaite establishes its relational and coeval aspects.It is the conscious crafting of “total expression”, in which we see “the creation of acontinuum where meaning truly resides” out of “a historical experience where [people]had to rely on their very breath rather than on [ … ] books and museums and machines”(312). Nation language does more than celebrate orature as a direct expression of Carib-beanness, stemming from a bounded national community; it delineates a continuum ofmeaning that draws on immanent historical experience which it articulates in relation toother cultural forms of expression. The speaking “I” does not emerge out of a submergedsensibility into autonomous subjectivity, but rather becomes a series of relations, acontinuum rather than the determinant of meaning.

Similarly, Derek Walcott, in “The Muse of History”, distinguishes history as timeand myth, and distances himself from those who believe in the myth of “elemental man”(37). For Walcott, the veneration of elemental, mythic man and the fixation with therepetition of colonialism’s mistakes obscures the understanding of history as time, asboth ruin in the sense of its merging into decay and rune as a meaningful fragment thatextinguishes the totality of that merger. Out of this history, the historical relations of

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the postcolonial situation crystallize into poetry. Indeed, Walcott’s discussion oflanguage in the Caribbean context parallels Brathwaite’s nation language:

Today […] the West Indian poet is faced with a language which he hears but cannotwrite […] so his function remains the old one of being filter and purifier, neverlosing the tone and strength of the common speech as he uses the hieroglyphs,symbols, or alphabet of the official one. (Walcott, “Muse” 49)

This poetic language that Walcott “hears but cannot write” accords with Brathwaite’ssubmarine and emerging nation language. However, Walcott focuses on the role of thepoet as “filter and purifier” rather than an authorizing subject who wields language, posi-tioning him as a mediator between “the tone and strength of the common speech” andthe “alphabet of the official one”. Walcott’s concern is with the continuous sense of“living”, and how poetic language “combines the natural and the marmoreal” and “conju-gates both tenses [of past and present] simultaneously”, combining muscular commonspeech (ruin) which has merged into the background of the everyday, with intricate offi-cial vocabulary (rune) which fractures common speech, and foregrounds underlyinghistorical tensions (Walcott, “Antilles” 70). Walcott’s elaboration of poetic thought in“The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” recalls the crystallization of fragments andhistory in Adorno and Benjamin:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than thatlove which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fitsthe pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such love that reassembles ourAfrican and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration showsits white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Anti-lles. (69)

Walcott paradoxically requires a relational understanding of the historical forces thatmake up his “own world”, just as Brathwaite’s nation language is constituted by theimmanent experience of the Caribbeans and the relational context of American blues,English colonialism and African culture. The poet’s function of being a “filter and puri-fier”, now the “glue that fits the pieces” of the broken vase, the “love that reassemblesour African and Asiatic fragments” and “the care and pain” of Caribbean poetry alsorecalls Benjamin’s “configuration pregnant with tensions”. Out of the historical relationsbetween the African and Asiatic fragments, between the Caribbean present and its colo-nial past, crystallizes the living element of poetry. Adorno’s paradox of the speakingsubject who forgets himself completely, yet is entirely present in the poem, is figuredin Walcott’s passage as the “love” and the “care and pain” that reassembles and crystal-lizes. Because Walcott does not name the subject from whom this love emanates, selfand subject disappear into language, forgetting themselves in the “sealing of [the poem’s]original shape”.

The self-forgetting of the subject within the temporal and textual moment of thelyric poem has been observed in postcolonial literary criticism. Dipesh Chakrabartyargues of Tagore’s poetry that “the function of the poetic was to create a caesura inhistorical time and transport us to a realm that transcended the historical” (Chakra-barty, “Nation” 166). This transcendence is not literary escapism, for “the poem

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achieved its full political effect precisely because it did not carry out to the full anyone understanding of the political. Instead, it interrupted one definition of the politi-cal—the one that aligned the political with the realist and the prosaic” (“Nation” 178).This caesura is what Benjamin calls the shock-effect that crystallizes history andthought into a monad. Tagore’s “realm that transcended the historical” is whatBenjamin elucidates as “the function of artistic form”: to turn the historical content ofthe artwork into a philosophical truth that draws on history but is not reducible to it.Chakrabarty finds in Tagore an understanding of poetry as a “moment of practice” that“bypasses—and not just dissolves—the subject-object distinction” (“Nation” 175).Poetry carries a political charge and interrupts the definition of the prosaically politi-cal because it heterogenizes the literary imagination that Benedict Anderson, drawingon European aesthetic thought, considers vital for nationalism. In Tagore’s poetry, bycontrast, “this constitutional heterogeneity of the political mirrors the irreduciblepluralities that contend in the history of the word ‘imagination’” (“Nation” 179).Chakrabarty demands a shift away from the initial apprehension of the symbolic orrepresentational axis (that strictly defines the political) towards the allegorical, where“the subject–object distinction” is not only dissolved but also bypassed as lyriclanguage moves towards “irreducible pluralities” in the imagination, or what Adornowould call “things undistorted, ungrasped, things not yet subsumed” by the historicaland the objective.

Allegory as parabasis or a way of looking otherwise is illustrated by Gayatri Spivakin her reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace:

When Lucy [the protagonist David Lurie’s daughter] is resolutely denied focaliza-tion, the reader is provoked, for he or she does not want to share in Lurie-the-chief-focalizer’s inability to “read” Lucy as patient and agent. No reader is contentwith acting out the failure of reading. This is the rhetorical signal to the activereader, to counterfocalize. [ … ] This provocation into counterfocalization is the“political” in political fiction—the transformation of a tendency into a crisis.(Spivak 22)

Spivak’s idea of counterfocalization as a provocation to refocus our thinking onsomething other than what is in the text recalls Chakrabarty’s suggestion that poetryinterrupts the sense of the national and the political defined through realist proseand representation. The “crisis” that Spivak speaks of may be understood as thedissolving and bypassing of the subject–object distinction or the moment of the lyricspeaker/subject forgetting itself into language. For Chakrabarty and Spivak, allegoryas parabasis or counterfocalization is a decidedly political move that refuses the iden-titarian or subject–object-oriented “extreme particularities” that Adorno finds objec-tionable.

A thought once set into motion: Osundare, Lim, and Pang

The definition of the political as realist representation, however, is a refrain inmany discussions of modern African poetry in English. “Excursion” by Nigerian poetNiyi Osundare can be read as a celebration of the beauty of the African landscape

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and Africa as homeland in which the poem’s move “Homeward” (Osundare 23)illustrates “a longing for or an achievement of unity of being as the result of anoften long and difficult journey of homecoming” (Goodwin xvii). Similarly, anemphasis on how “the desperate socio-economic and political conditions of Africans”push them to “use indigenous African poetic techniques” (144) might explainOsundare’s anaphoric and incantatory style and his celebration of various Africanflora and fauna apparently untouched by European colonialism. However, thissynthesis of features of the African landscape into a new possibility of home avoidsan individual or collective self, and a nativist celebration of Africanness. The firststanza establishes the poem’s lively rhythms with its alliteration, consonance andassonance:

Past bush paths tarred by tireless treadingPast rocky outcrops rubbed smooth by stubborn heelsPast dandelions roaring silently at my wandering feetPast elephant grass fluted tusklessly by the wind. (ll. 1–4)

The alliteration and rolling “r”s of “tarred”, “tireless” and “treading” suggest the vitality ofa journey just begun, while the assonance and consonance of “rubbed smooth by stub-born heels” emphasize the unnamed traveler’s determination to wear down the harsh“rocky outcrops”. The last two lines combine synesthesia with playful punning: Africanfauna—lions and elephants—become conflated with the flora as “dandelions” and“elephant grass”. These majestic animals are now humble and docile, for the (dande)lionroars in peaceful silence, and the elephant (grass) no longer trumpets with its threaten-ing tusks but instead provides musical, flute-like accompaniment when the wind blows.Osundare’s wordplay can only occur in English and although the poem’s rhythmic andincantatory style of the poem marks the influence of African oral literature, this isneither nativist nor culturalist because Osundare revels in the plasticity of both thesound and the sense of English. This opening stanza neither reveals nor establishes alyric speaker or poetic subject other than in line 3, with the mention of “my wanderingfeet”.

In the fourth stanza, writing and language are introduced:

Past the lake lying namelessly in the registerof famous shrubsPast the duck which brailles liquid letterson its open facePast boulders and pebbles which answer the whisperof calling feetPast the quivering arrow of a noonward sun. (ll. 16–22)

The first-person possessive sense of “my wandering feet” loses its governing subject butgains direction, for the “feet” are now “calling” out to the “boulders and pebbles” that“answer” and implicitly guide their tread, leading to the most kinetically charged imageof the entire poem: “the quivering arrow of a noonward sun”. The poem’s apparentcelebration of nature and the African landscape has two major turning points: the trans-formation of its plants and animals into discursive elements, and, second, the dissolution

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of an already absent speaker or subject into a relational exchange that then allows thepoem itself as a discursive construct to attain a rhythmic and semantic crescendo. Thepoem’s climax follows in the concluding stanza that gestures towards but does notachieve a final destination:

Homewardwith a flower in one handHomewardwith a sun in the otherHomewardTo a house of sunful fragrance. (ll. 23–28)

The “noonward sun” becomes a “sun” held in one of the nameless traveller’s hands,balancing the “flower” held in the first. There is no sense of a substantive subject in thepoem’s closing lines, but this spectral subject enables the synesthesia of the final image:“a house of sunful fragrance”. Sight and smell combine to evoke a desired destination, abalance to the indeterminate self or subject.

The shift away from a definite subject or speaking voice also occurs in “Mango” byShirley Geok-lin Lim. Lim, educated in Singapore and America, is regarded as an Asian-American scholar and an anglophone Malaysian writer, and her poem, in combiningdetails of her American life with her hometown of Malacca in Malaysia, is partly auto-biographical.

A mango at the New York A. & P.at eighty-nine American cents each,heaped by apples: a stony red, puffyhybrid all the way from Acapulco,from corporate farms and rich Yankeeenterprises.

Then two days laterOlder Brother slowly drives me, Straits-born,home through narrow, rewritten Malacca.Before broken Chinese houses whose sonsand grandsons have left for Australia,umbrella trees drop welcome shade.Crescent mangoes like smooth-thighed trailer-girls from Siam gleam among sickle-drawnleaves.

I eat a green mango. Solid,sour, it cuts the back of the throat, torntaste, like love grown difficult or separate.More chilies, more salt, more sugar,more black soy—a memory of tartunripeness sweetened by necessities. (ll. 1–21)

An identitarian reading would emphasize how different kinds of mangos symbolizeLim’s diasporic mobility and hybrid ethnicity as an Asian-American and Straits-born

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Chinese Malaysian. But the poem brackets the speaking voice with a vivid description ofa mango in a New York supermarket from which the speaker is absent and ends byshifting from the first-person singular to the first-person plural pronoun. The lyric “I”emerges as the subject of the poem, but quickly dissolves into a series of sensory imagesand memories: in the second stanza, the speaker is both the indirect object (“OlderBrother drives me”), and then a simple subject (“I eat a green mango”) superseded byboth the mango (“it cuts the back of the throat”) and “a memory of tart unripeness”.This matches Adorno’s observation that the lyric poem is an act of “self-forgetting”, amoment in which the self dissolves into language. The poem forestalls any reading ofthis poetic moment or remembrance as an escape into nostalgia or a celebration ofhybridity:

Where do we go from here, carryingthose sad eyes under the mango trees,with our sauces, our petty hauntings? (ll. 22–24)

Here is a sudden shift—a counterfocalization—from the first-person singular (“ I eat amango”) to a grave reflection and interrogative challenge issued in the first-person plural(“Where do we go”). In Spivak’s terms, this transforms the tendency towards nostalgiaand sentiment attendant upon a diasporic subject’s return home into a critical self-ques-tioning about the problems associated with the exploitation of global capital as well asthe “brain drain” of human resources from the Third World to the First. The speakingsubject, here as in Osundare’s poem, enables this transformation, but the poem does notoffer itself as either a nationalist or nativist text; the lyric self may be the occasion forspeaking but it does not form the telos or culmination of the poem’s semantic and crit-ical thrust.

The dissolution of the subject into the poetic language of the lyric takes on strongernational dimensions in “To Go to S’pore” by Singaporean poet Alvin Pang; the word“S’pore” is a popular contraction of the word “Singapore”. Pang’s poem begins with aconventional description of hectic urban life and mass transit, but sharpens into acritique of the nation-state’s self-fashioning as a global cosmopolis:

To go to S’pore. Which stationfor S’pore, if not in a dream, at dusk, when rainglistens on chrome. When Mass RapidTrains and Light Rail Trains are borneto all corners. To leave in a hurry for S’pore,night and day, in August or in May, but early,but only if S’pore exists, if it is to befound within the boundsof this island and not justin the colour of my passport. (ll. 1–10)

The poem’s abbreviated title suggests a disturbance or interruption of the narrative timeand self-constitution of the national subject. Furthermore, its repetition of the infinitive(“To go to S’pore”, “To leave in a hurry”, “to come and go from”) recalls the repetition of“Past” at the beginning of each line of Osundare’s poem. These non-finite phrases do notspecify who performs the action, and determining who goes or leaves in Pang’s poem is

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as impossible as discerning who moves “past” the landscape in Osundare’s. But Pangdoes cherish Singapore as an abiding identification:

S’pore tugged every which way,S’pore clutched in the small palm of the sea,becoming and flowing in like tears, tides, currents,rivers run beneath the surface everywhere. (ll. 62–72)

The speaker’s exhortation “to go to S’pore” projects the national imaginary as a desti-nation or promise that is not yet fulfilled or completely realized—snared in thethroes of economic development and the anxious race in order to keep up withglobal capital, the nation space is inchoate and indistinct, with “every estate growinginto each other” and “everyone a leaseholder”. But even while preserving the idea ofthe nation, the poem opposes static definitions of national identity, refuses denota-tions such as “the colour of my passport”, and emphasizes the sense of beingSingaporean as conditional: “only if S’pore exists, if it is to be / found within thebounds / of this island” (ll. 7–9). The official nation-state is thus changed into aconditional nation-space, a contested site of meaning production. Pang’s poem maybe read as an immanent critique that establishes the circumstances of the nation asthe occasion for a poetic utterance (“To go to S’pore”), but, just as “S’pore” lies“clutched in the small palm of the sea”, such an utterance without a distinct subjectcircumscribes the national imaginary. It is a caesura, an interruption in the time andnarrative of the nation, just as the word “S’pore” introduces a semantic as well assensible pause into the nation’s name “Singapore”. The poem’s speaker submergesinto the language and description of various objects such as “weeds, attap, kampong /and five-foot way” (ll. 62–63), and “handbags and wallets” (l. 65). No longer acollective subject or a collection of like-minded subjects bounded by the homoge-neous empty time of a prosaic imagination, the nation becomes a space filled with ormade of objects.

In these lyric poems we see both Walcott’s conjugation of past and present and theloving reassemblage of fragments and objects and, through the articulation of fragments,Brathwaite’s total expression, a continuum rather than determinants of meaning. Thesepoems are instances of cognitive mapping, not cartographical illustrations of geograph-ical space, but caesuras or interruptions that bring historical relations into crisis andcrystallize them in literary form. This “enable[s] a situational representation on the partof the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which isthat ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson, “Culture” 51). Or, inAdorno’s terms, these poems, with their “sunful fragance”, “petty hauntings”, and“rivers run[ning] beneath the surface everywhere”, project “things undistorted,ungrasped, things not yet subsumed” by the individual or collective subjects of postco-lonialism and postmodernism. A greater appreciation of the role of lyric poetry in post-colonial literatures can begin once we transform assumptions of lyric form as subjectiveexpression into a literary “crisis” of self-forgetting and of figuring the care and pain ofreassembling the runes and ruins of history. To “regain a capacity to act and strugglewhich is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (“Culture”54) would require working through and not against the ruse of the poetic speaker whosepresence, even as it forgets itself, is instrumental in critical thought.

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Works cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Lyric Poetry and Society.” Trans. Bruce Mayo. Critical Theory andSociety: A Reader. Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner. New York:Routledge, 1989. 155–71.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.London: Verso, 1983.

Benjamin, Walter. “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans.John Osborne. London: New Left, 1977. 159–235.

———. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. HarryZohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 155–200.

———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans.Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Nation Language.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed.Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.309–13.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Nation and Imagination.” Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thoughtand Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. 149–79.

de Man, Paul. “Lyric and Modernity.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contempo-rary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 166–86.

———. “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss.” Lyric Poetry: BeyondNew Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Ho[scaron] ek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.55–72.

———. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric ofContemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 187–228.

Edwards, Brent. “The Genres of Postcolonialism.” Social Text 22.1 (2004): 1–15.Goodwin, Ken. Understanding African Poetry: A Study of Ten Poets. London: Heinemann,

1982.Ho[scaron] ek, Chaviva, and Patricia Parker, eds. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell UP, 1985.Jameson, Fredric. “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the

Referent and the Artificial ‘Sublime’.” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. ChavivaHo[scaron] ek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 247–63.

———. “Culture: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 1–54.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Mango.” What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, NM:West End Press, 1998. 26.

Osundare, Niyi. “Excursion.” The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English. Selected byAdewale Maja-Pearce. London: Heinemann, 1990. 134–35.

Pang, Alvin. “To Go to S’pore.” City of Rain. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2003. 19–21.Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

2001.Spivak, Gayatri. “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching.”

Diacritics. 32.3–4 (2002): 17–31.Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” What the Twilight Says: Essays.

London: Faber, 1998. 65–84.———. “The Muse of History.” What the Twilight Says: Essays. London: Faber, 1998. 36–

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Weihsin Gui is a doctoral candidate in Literatures and Cultures in English at BrownUniversity, USA. His dissertation, “The National Residual: National Consciousness andGlobal Culture in Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures”, examines how literature asartwork and critical hermeneutic both challenges and cherishes the national imaginarywithin narratives of globalization. Address: Box 1852, 70 Brown Street, English Depart-ment, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. [email: wgui@brown.edu]

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