Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, The

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Burt, Steve

Ramazani, Jahan. 2001. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $50.00 hc. $17.50 sc. x 223 pp.

Classrooms and journals in the United States devoted to poetry save space for recent Iowa workshop graduates and for nineteenth-century magazine poets but not, ordinarily, for Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967), whose fusion of T. S. Eliot with Ibo oral forms made him Nigeria's first significant English-language poet. Seek Okigbo in academic postcolonial studies and you may have to look for a long time: if poetry critics have overlooked writing form India, Nigeria, or Singapore, postcolonial theorists and literary historians (at least in the United States) have understandably given poets short shrift, since (as Jahan Ramazani writes) poetry is "a less transparent medium by which to recuperate . . . history, politics and sociology" (2001, 4). Nevertheless, if poetry is to retain, or expand, its place in the global life of literary studies-and in the reading habits of our students-it must, perhaps, have some role to play in postcolonial questions and spaces.

Such roles are what Ramazani discovers in these cogent and largely convincing essays. Ramazani (who began as a scholar of Yeats) offers (mostly) new and (largely) convincing appreciations of five individual poets (W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, A. K. Ramanujan, Louise Bennett, and Okot p'Bitek) along with two short chapters showing what these poets share. If Ramazani offers a unified argument about all five of his poets, it is simply that all count as postcolonial: all respond to "the potentially productive tension between an imposed" (imperial, English, Christian) "and an inherited" (local or national) "culture"; all five poets (each in his or her own way) "create imaginative forms to articulate the dualities, ironies, and ambiguities of . . . cultural inbetweenness" (2001, 6).

Least surprising-but, in some quarters, still needed-is Ramazani's chapter on Yeats: readings of "Easter 1916" and of other, less famous texts, show how Yeats could "write into verse his ambivalence toward his own emergent nation" (2001, 27). "Too anglicized to be Irish and too 'gaelicized' to be English, the Anglo-Irish Yeats typified the intersticial writer of the postcolonial world" (37). This may be common sense for confirmed Yeatsians; other readers may be shocked, or pleased. Ramazani then turns to Walcott's Omeros: this celebrated contemporary epic, Ramazani argues, complicates and partly undoes Walcott's earlier, negative reactions to race-conscious and Africanist visions. Rather than repudiating negritude or embracing a First World model, Walcott's wounded character, Philoctete, like Walcott's notion of poetry itself, includes both a consciousness of "racial, regional, national and gender loyalties" and an imaginative capacity for "discovering and creating resemblance [which can] confound tribal, ethnic, or national limits" (68-69).

The next chapters introduce three memorable poets of whom most readers in the United States have never heard. Of these, the most versatile is A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993). Though he spent much of his adult life at the University of Chicago (where he studied, and translated, South Indian oral verse), Indian poets and critics regard Ramanujan as a founder of modern South Asian poetry in English. Ramanujan's Collected Poems (Oxford University Press-New Delhi) reveals a considerable, self-effacing talent pre-occupied with embodiment, family, inheritance and descent, and with the contrast between his home grounds (in Mysore, where his family spoke English, Tamil and Kannada) and the cold city he never quite came to call home. For example, in "Waterfalls in a Bank," he describes

Ramazani's claims for Ramanujan confine themselves to his use of metaphor, a trope which carries (Green meta-phorein) a term from its home context to one far away. "Metaphoric transport across lines of nation and history" indeed takes place throughout Ramanujan's work: one early poem finds "the naked Chicago bulb/ a cousin of the Vedic sun" (2001, 81, 99). An explicitly postcolonial view of his oeuvre perhaps has to start there (81, 99). I missed, in this reading, a larger view of the psychology of this painfully personal poet; I also missed some account of why these fractured, skittish poems sound just as they do.

Louise Bennett (b. 1919) requires more contextual information for a narrower body of work: she has long been famed in Jamaica for poems-all in dialect, all in ballad stanzas-performed or read on radio. Jamaican "literary" poets once defined themselves against her but now acknowledge her powers as a creator of salt-of-the-earth personae, reminiscent of Robert Burns or Langsten Hughes. Ramazani concentrates on Bennett's humor, especially in early 1960s poems about Jamaican independence. He describes, for instance, "Miss Mattie," one of Bennett's recurring characters, an unsophisticated lady who speaks home truths (sometimes unintentionally), as in "Jamaica Elevate," where her exclamations both celebrate independence and mock nationalist self-importance: