The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (review)

Abstract

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.