Abstract
This article analyses Emmanuel Ngara’s collection of poetry Songs from the Temple. It argues that through some of the poems in this collection, Ngara forges an anti-colonial nationalist discourse that problematises hegemonic colonial narratives, which claimed that the black subaltern did not have history, culture and civilisation prior to the colonial interloper’s presence. Ngara’s main strategy in unseating these accounts is to lay claim to a flourishing precolonial culture of the Shona people on one hand, foregrounding their history and cultural symbols, and on the other through the use of artistic elements from the oral traditions of their society. This article contends that the incorporation of orature into Ngara’s written narratives of resistance disrupts and subverts hegemonic definitions of written poetry in as much as it anchors his nationalist vision in cultural spaces that the black subaltern has the potential to identify with.
Highlights
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Zimbabwean poet Emmanuel Ngara, through some of the poems in his poetry collection, Songs from the Temple (Ngara 1992), locates his voice of resistance to colonial hegemony as well as the identity of the envisioned post-independence nation in the precolonial past of the colonised
The hallmark of Ngara’s critical and theoretical work is its use of Marxist literary theory to investigate how ideology impacts on both content and form of African writing
The forte of immersing his nationalist discourses in the subaltern’s indigenous cultural sites is that it localises his vision in as much as it gives his voice a sense of authenticity, which resonates with the collective consciousness of the other
Summary
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Zimbabwean poet Emmanuel Ngara, through some of the poems in his poetry collection, Songs from the Temple (Ngara 1992), locates his voice of resistance to colonial hegemony as well as the identity of the envisioned post-independence nation in the precolonial past of the colonised. The collection Songs from the Temple that is discussed in this article is the only substantial artistic work to date by Ngara, who is more renowned for his work as a literary critic than for his creative output. His sizeable corpus of literary criticism includes works such as Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel (1982), Teaching Literature in Africa (1984), Art and Ideology (1985) and Ideology and Form in African Poetry (1990). Ngara has edited collections of criticism on African writing, namely, Literature, Language and the Nation (1989) and New Writing from Southern Africa (1996) both of which engage, from various perspectives, with African literature, written both during and after formal colonialism
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