Curve Warp Corpse: D. S. Marriott, E. A. Markham, John La Rose, Maud Sulter, and Bhanu Kapil

Abstract

In this article, I read selected texts by D. S. Marriott, E. A. Markham, John La Rose, Maud Sulter, and Bhanu Kapil, reading the racial formation, poetic form, and performance of identity in these texts in terms of ‘curve’, ‘warp’, and ‘corpse’. I define and redefine these terms as movements, directions, and forms of reading, structuring my discussions accordingly, with regards to the subjects of migration, social relations, racialisation, and representation. I offer my selection and my readings of the writers and texts according to the following areas of research: representations of social relations and racial formation in poetry; dissimulation and obscurity as methods and forms that enable the resistance and refusal of visibility; performance of identity as representational strategy that also reveals the possibilities and impossibilities of representing subjectivity, existence, and life. My methodology combines historical and biographical contextualisation of the writers and texts, theorisation of race and representation, and close reading. My objectives are to promote the selected writers and texts, to offer a contribution to existing literary criticism and the ongoing study of race and poetry, to share my readings and to invite further reading and sharing. The texts include poetry, fiction, personal narrative, and visual art, as well as literary and art criticism and critical theory, primarily: Marriott’s essay ‘Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life’ (2016) and the poem ‘Pot Kettle Black’ (2011); Markham’s lecture ‘West Indian Writing in Britain: Is It True to Type?’ (1998) and the poem ‘Lambchops Has a Problem’ (1976); La Rose’s poems ‘Not From Here’ and ‘Me As Well – The Blackman’ (1966); Sulter’s poem ‘Historical Objects’ (1989), the text and visual artwork Zabat (1989), and the anthology Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990); Kapil’s book Ban en Banlieue (2015).