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Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2006.0072

1080-6601

Jahan Ramazani,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity Jahan Ramazani (bio) I arise and go with William Butler Yeats to country Sligoville in the shamrock green hills of St. Catherine. So begins a recent homage by the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison.1 We walk and palaver by the Rio Cobre till we hear tributaries join and sing, water songs of nixies. Dark tales of Maroon warriors, fierce women and men bush comrades of Cuchulain. We swap duppy stories, dark night doings. I show him the link of a rolling calf's chain And an old hige's salt skin carcass. This Afro-Caribbean poem for a Euromodernist traverses cultural, racial, and gender boundaries via intersections of place names—Sligo, Sligoville; mythical heroes—Ireland's Cuchulain, Jamaica's ex-slave rebels; and premodern magic—Yeats's mysticism, Jamaica's skin-shedding witches and neck-chained, calf-like ghosts. Goodison Irishes Jamaica—its hills become "shamrock green"—and Jamaicanizes Ireland—Cuchulain now has Afro-Caribbean "bush comrades." Apostrophizing a dead poet who often discoursed with the dead, Goodison writes, "William Butler, I swear my dead mother / embraced me. I then washed off my heart / with the amniotic water of a green coconut."2 Conjoining myths and magic, topography and words across hemispheres, Goodison figures her intercultural relationship with Yeats as [End Page 445] reciprocal exchange ("We swap duppy stories"): his work has changed hers, and, notwithstanding chronology, her postcolonial reception of his metaleptically transforms it. Poetry, she suggests, is for crossing boundaries between the living and the dead, between times, places, cultures. The space of a poem is neither local—a securely anchored signifier of Jamaican authenticity—nor global—a placeless, free-floating noumenon. It is a translocation, verbally enabling and enacting, between specific times and places, cross-cultural, transhistorical exchange. This intercultural conception of poetry is central both to Euromodernism and to what Martinican theorist and writer Edouard Glissant has called the cross-cultural poetics ("poétique de la Relation") of the Caribbean.3 Yet postcolonial criticism has sometimes represented the relation between postcolonialism and Euromodernism as adversarial. Now that the postmodern is no longer seen as an outright rejection of the modern, we also need to reconsider whether and to what extent postcolonial literatures repudiate or "write back to" an imperial Euromodernism. In his pathbreaking analysis of Afro-Caribbean fiction, Simon Gikandi offers a nuanced statement of the agonistic position: "Caribbean modernism is opposed to, though not necessarily independent of, European notions of modernism." Gikandi thus proposes a "Third World modernism distinct from the prototypical European form, which in Houston Baker's words, 'is exclusively Western, preeminently bourgeois, and optically white.'"4 The authors of Toward the Decolonization of African Literature assert a sharper divide: "African literature is an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literatures. It has its own traditions, models and norms." The influence of Euromodernist "privatism" can only obscure authentic African expression under "dunghill piles of esoterica and obscure allusions."5 Bill Ashcroft and John Salter represent modernism's influence beyond the metropole as unambiguously imperialist: "The high-cultural discourse of modernism, with its imposition of a set of largely uncontested parameters upon a non-European cultural reality, may be seen to be metonymic of the operation of imperial domination. Modernity and modernism are rooted in empire."6 But far from being an obstruction that had to be dislodged from the postcolonial windpipe, Euromodernism—in one of the great ironies of twentieth-century literary history—crucially enabled a range of non-Western poets after World War II to explore their hybrid cultures and postcolonial experience. For these poets, the detour through Euromodernism was often, paradoxically, the surest route home. In his History of the Voice, Kamau Brathwaite offers one of the most vivid testaments to the importance of Euromodernism for the postcolonization of postcolonial literatures. T. S. Eliot, he asserts, was the primary influence on Caribbean poets "moving from standard English" to creolized English, or "nation language": "What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone. That is what really attracted us to Eliot." Emphasizing the oral/aural medium of transmission and thus assimilating Eliot...