Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry

Abstract

Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry Noureddine Fekir (bio) This paper investigates some aspects and implications of self-reflexivity in the verse of modern African poets, poets of African descent, and others such as Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish, who are associated with resistance to different forms of oppression. Many modern African writers, such as Odia Ofeimun, Syl Cheney-Coker, and Frank Chipasula, wrote poems that were self-reflexive even Cheney-Coker as these poems criticized the political status quo. A pressing question is whether self-reflexivity is a fundamental feature of poetic writing, necessarily born from the inner desire of any poet, to explore the potentials of language while in the process of expressing their thoughts or feelings. This work investigates the use of such a strategy of writing in African poems and then undertakes to construct a genealogy of self-reflexivity to come up with an understanding of the psychological, phenomenological, and political motives behind the frequent resort of poets to this process of mirroring the very being of the text while they proclaim or advocate resistance, to the point of transforming the text into a verbal form of violence against the established political order around them. In this paper, I argue that self-reflexivity, as deployed in the resistance verse written by modern African poets and poets who share the same plight of oppression, is viewed as an integral and organic part of the project of resistance. Such a strategy inescapably springs from the political and intellectual engagement of the poets who see in the aesthetics of poetry a durable and transgressive nature, a perennial tool for warding off and resisting, at times violently, all forms of cultural and physical oppression. Self-reflexivity is defined in this paper as a moment that marks the poem’s recursive nature, where poets may contemplate the medium that they use in a gesture that seems at odds with the dominant tradition of poetic writing, which still persists today and which has generally been intent upon using verse to reflect one’s emotions or describe a specific worldly or metaphysical issue that is of concern to the speaker. However, when poets interrupt the process of representing the world around them or their feelings and veer toward describing the act of writing itself, this can only be viewed as a rhetorical act that counters the signifying nature of [End Page 67] language and offers a moment of reflection that is more akin to the process of contemplating one’s identity as if looking at a mirror. This moment where the poem mirrors itself that speaks about the creative act is one where the poet attempts to construct his identity as a creator of verse which may be viewed metaphorically as a process that is akin to what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, calls the “Mirror stage.” For Lacan, this stage takes place when the individual, the infant, for instance, looks at a mirror and recognizes himself by contemplating a looking glass. In Ecrits, he states that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (2–3). The individual recognizes his identity as coherent when he contemplates himself in a mirror or in a face that refracts the gaze. The self-reflexive moment in poetry is similar to this act, where the poet contemplates his creative process in order to make sense of his identity as a poet. Such a process is necessary to acquire a certain sense of presence, albeit a fake one, because identity construction is always imaginary for Lacan. What is noteworthy is that Lacan articulates such a desire to construct one’s own image within a social framework. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative,” he states that it is “the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the “concentrational” form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort...