Event overview
Joan Andzeuh Nche (Goldsmiths, University of London)
The regions of St Lucia and South Africa have experienced problems of displacement and misrepresentation. As a result, the desire to belong and lay claim to a place becomes necessary. My focus in this paper is to show how both poets use images of the land to simultaneously talk about their landscape and their lover. I assert that their lover is symbolized through female images which they associate with their land or country. In a comparative approach, I will examine how both poets are concerned with the assertion of oneself and how using poetics of a double statement, personification, metaphors and imagery they give voice to their landscapes in poetry.
The theoretical framework underpinning this paper is Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation where he articulates the fact of dispossession from one’s homeland as the petrifying experience of ‘being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away from protecting gods and a tutelary community.’ Such dispossession is resolved through ‘a poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.’ My aim is to foreground the impact of this ‘Relation’ in the writing of multiracial societies such as South Africa and St Lucia. I am interested also to show how through landscape painting, each poet values difference and negotiates identity.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov 2018 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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