Abstract
Bámgbóṣé studies African women’s poetry as a significant vehicle for framing imaginative and discursive responses to the violence of colonial experience in Africa. Considering that critical works engaging the colonial question in modern African poetry often limit their critique to anticolonial poetic production of men excluding women’s intervention, this chapter interrogates the gender gap in literary discourses on imaginative responses to colonialism in the African poetic text. Through a rereading of the images of colonialism in ten poems of Alda do Espírito Santo and Maria Manuela Margarido, this chapter unpacks the textual/imagistic intricacies and assertive force of female poetry in service of the anticolonial imaginary within the specific context of São Tomé and Príncipe. The rereading radically challenges the androcentric consciousness of African poetic discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
Romanus Egudu, Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978).
- 2.
Ibid., 8.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid., 28.
- 5.
Mabel Segun, “A Second Olympus,” in Reflections: Nigerian Prose and Verse, ed. Frances Ademola (Lagos: African University Press, 1962), 67.
- 6.
Ibid., 67.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
“Mount Olympus,” Greek Mythology, accessed March 19, 2016, http://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Places/Mount_Olympus/mount_olympus.html
- 9.
Frank Mowah, “Modern African Poetry,” in Studies in Poetry, ed. Ademola Dasylva and Oluwatoyin Jegede (Ibadan: Stirling-Horden Publishers, 2005), 103.
- 10.
Babatunde Omobowale, “Anglophone West African Poetry,” ibid., 111–123.
- 11.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 82. According to Trouillot, the unthinkable “is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.” The idea that other ways of doing and being are inconceivable outside the normative frame of possibility is resonant in the notion of the unthinkable.
- 12.
My commentary hinges on the consciousness of the power of imagination and the imagination of power in the remaking of the myth of the nation. The implication of this patriarchal mode of consciousness is that it assumes women cannot imagine political struggle; consequently they cannot hold power. Moreover, it is within this consciousness that the history of anitcolonial struggle often celebrates men as the postcolonial nation-maker which erases the roles of women in the struggle.
- 13.
Tanure Ojaide, Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays on African Poetry (Durham: Carolina University Press, 1996), 95.
- 14.
Ibid., 98.
- 15.
Maria Manuela Margarido, “Landscape,” in The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry, ed. Stella Chipasula and Frank Chipasula (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995), 102.
- 16.
The couplet in its ambiguity also makes historical reference to António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo (New State) regime in Portugal. Portugal, Patrick Chabal explains, “was from 1926 a repressive dictatorship with systemic censorship and thus little scope for free expression. Under these conditions, not only was Portugal’s cultural life stunted, but creative cultural ‘influences’ between metropolis and Africa, which were so important in the cases of the British and French empires, were severely limited.” See Patrick Chabal, A Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 19. Many writers ran into problems with the state during this period even in the Portuguese colonies. In fact, both Margarido and Espírito Santo were harassed and persecuted by the International Police for the Defense of the State in the late 50s and early 60s. See Claudia Amorim, “Alda Espírito Santo (Alda Graça),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 367: African Lusophone Writers, ed. Monica Rector and Richard Vernon (Detroit: A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, 2012), 83; Chipasula and Chipasula The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry, 223.
- 17.
Alda do Espírito Santo, “The Same Side of the Canoe,” ibid., 104.
- 18.
Stella Chipasula and Frank Chipasula, ed. The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995), 101–111.
- 19.
Donald Burness, Ossobó: Essays on the Literature of São Tomé and Príncipe (Trenton: African World Press, 2005), 126–133.
- 20.
Niyi Afolabi, “The Taming of the Trickster Bird,” preface to Ossobó by Burness (Trenton: African World Press, 2005), xiii.
- 21.
Chabal, A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 33.
- 22.
Gerhard Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe, to 1800,” in Encyclopedia of African History, vol. 3, ed. Kevin Shillington (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005), 1318.
- 23.
Ibid., 1319.
- 24.
Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe, 1800 to the Present,” ibid., 1320.
- 25.
Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe: From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 28.
- 26.
Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe, 1800 to the Present,” 1320–1321.
- 27.
Burness, Ossobó, 6.
- 28.
Margarido, “You Who Occupies our Land,” 101.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Margarido, “Socope,” 101–102.
- 32.
See note 28 above.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9. Hall’s conceptualization of race, although in another historical context, as a mode of “abstractions” galvanized to perform particular economic, social, and political functions is useful in thinking about how Margarido constructs the superficiality of race in the poem.
- 35.
See note 31 above.
- 36.
Burness, Ossobó, 149.
- 37.
Margarido, “Socope,” 101.
- 38.
Margarido, “Landscape,” 102.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Margarido, “Roça,” 102.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 103.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Espírito Santo, “The Same Side of the Canoe,” 104.
- 46.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), 13.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
See note 43 above.
- 49.
Espírito Santo, “Colonist Cocoa,” 132.
- 50.
Nancy Van Styvendale, “The Trans/Historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 203–223. Van Styvendale’s notion of trans/historicity of trauma attends to the cumulativity, collectivity, intergenerationality, and intersubjectivity of colonial trauma which challenges the singular and fixed conception (in time and space) of event in trauma theory. Van Styvendale writes, “[t]otheorize the trans/historicity of such an event-which-is-not-one [the multiple trajectories of trauma] is to focus on the way in which the prefix “trans” attaches to the historicity of trauma a sense of moving across or through—rather than beyond—history” (see 218).
- 51.
See note 47 above.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
See Hodges and Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe, 43–45.
- 55.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (October 1984): 1–9.
- 56.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 15.
- 57.
Espírito Santo, “The Same Side of the Canoe,” 105.
- 58.
Ibid., 106.
- 59.
Ibid., 103 (emphasis added).
- 60.
Ibid., 104.
- 61.
Espírito Santo, “Where are the Men Chased Away by that Mad Wind?” 106.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March/May, 2007): 253.
- 64.
Espírito Santo, “Where are the Men Chased Away by that Mad Wind?” 106–107.
- 65.
See Burness, Ossobó, 38–41. Burness explains the inhumane condition of the jail, Fernão Dias, as a place of terror and torture where thousands of people confronted excruciating pain and death. The Zé Mulato was the head torturer and António Luís Coelho was the grand inquisitor.
- 66.
See note 62 above.
- 67.
Shalini Puri, “Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement,” small axe 41 (2013): 60.
- 68.
Espírito Santo, “Where are the Men Chased Away by that Mad Wind?” 107.
- 69.
Ibid., 107–108.
- 70.
Ibid., 107.
- 71.
Ibid., 108.
- 72.
Espírito Santo, “Far from the Beach,“109 (emphasis added).
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992); Seibert, “São Tomé and Príncipe, to 1800,” 1318–1320.
- 75.
Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, 17.
- 76.
Ibid., 16.
- 77.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
- 78.
Espírito Santo, “Grandma Mariana,” 110.
- 79.
Espírito Santo, “Mama Catxina,” 128.
- 80.
Espírito Santo, “The Same Side of the Canoe,“104.
- 81.
Espírito Santo, “Grandma Mariana,” 110.
- 82.
Ibid., 111.
- 83.
Ibid., 110.
- 84.
Ibid., 111.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Ibid., 110.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Espírito Santo, “Mama Catxina,” 128.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Ibid., 128.
- 91.
Ibid., 128–129.
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Omobowale, Babatunde. “Anglophone West African Poetry.” In Studies in Poetry, edited by Ademola Dasylva and Oluwatoyin Jegede. Ibadan: Stirling-Horden Publishers, 2005.
Puri, Shalini. “Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement.” small axe 41 (2013): 58–73.
Segun, Mabel. “A Second Olympus.” In Reflections: Nigerian Prose and Verse, edited by Frances Ademola. Lagos: African University Press, 1962.
Seibert, Gerhard. “São Tomé and Príncipe, to 1800.” In Encyclopedia of African History vol. 3, edited by Kevin Shillington. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
Seibert, Gerhard. “São Tomé and Príncipe, 1800 to the Present.” In Encyclopedia of African History vol. 3, edited by Kevin Shillington. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Van Styvendale, Nancy. “The Trans/Historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer.” Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 203–223.
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Bámgbóṣé, G. (2019). Images of Colonialism in the Text of Two African Female Poets. In: Kalu, K., Falola, T. (eds) Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96496-6_4
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