Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2 On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3 A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4 Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations
- 5 Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6 ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy's Différance
- 7 Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8 Living in History
- 9 An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10 Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11 Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The half-light of foreign tongues
Writing from his own experience of postcolonial displacement, Homi Bhabha observes in The Location of Culture that
The title of this chapter – DissemiNation – owes something to the wit and wisdom of Jacques Derrida, but something more to my own experience of migration. I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of foreign cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language.
Such ‘disseminations’ are at the heart of contemporary experience, whether those of migrant workers collectivised in the very process of their individual displacements, or of poets who, like Derek Walcott – as his early and uncollected poem ‘Postcard’ records – had to learn in his expatriation to ‘slough off / This love of landscape that's self love’, and recognise that ‘To change your language you must change your life’. What Walcott calls here the condition of being ‘Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles’, in which ‘I earn / My exile’, corresponds to Bhabha's ‘gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues’. The process of inward migration to the old imperial centres over the last half-century has had a profound transformative effect on the language of the metropolitan culture, an effect summed up in what Walcott calls, in The Arkansas Testament, the ‘mongrel … black vowel barking’ of a ‘darkening English’ (pp. 10, 15). The displacement of the semi-colonial peripheries to the capitals of the global economy produces, that is, a displacement in the language of the hegemonic culture, appropriating, transforming, repossessing its discourses, alienating ‘native’ English into a world of difference where, in the terms of an archaic imperial narrative, it ‘goes native’. Language is never innocent. A struggle for owner-ship, a logomachia, is perpetually being fought on its terrain.
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- Poetry & Displacement , pp. 123 - 140Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007