Lauri Ramey, a critic, claims that much of “black” British poetry does not fit the mode of canonical poetry, even as it falls short of avant-gardism. She argues that while there is an oeuvre of “black” British poetry that is recognizably original, it is only a microcosmic part of that corpus that legitimately must be given the recognition of avant-garde poetry.
She defines avant-garde as an “assertive and strategic antithetical response to conventional modes of aesthetic expression, non-referential use of language, collage and fragmentation, and exploitation of formal properties such as unstable lyric subject positions” (79). Patience Agbabi is one of the few poets Ramey considers as satisfying the requirements of avant-garde “black” British poet.
Other critics excoriate black British poetry as situated in a rigid strait jacket because of the tag associated with it as “only good enough to be performed.” The marker of “only good enough to be performed” is a limitation some critics have argued as a problematic assumption that seemingly has stunted, even derailed the ambition of m any a black British poet.
Agbabi is conscious of the need to create poetry that is free from the rigid chains of regional color, which defines the poetry of some of her compeers.
Agbabi's Poetry as Carnevalesque
Her response to the problem was the creation of poetry that is enlightening, edifying, and revolutionary. Agbabi’s poetry breaks the mode of conventional poetry writing with its torpedoing of traditional poetry forms. Her poetry is situated in the category of postmodernist carnevalesque and avant-garde “black” British poets because her poems are a synecdoche of reality, even as they exult in chaos and cacophony.
The spirit of light-heartedness, in fact, can be traced to Bakhtin’s idea of the canivalesque. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin uses the term, carnival, to apply to festivities such as the Mardi Gras celebrations during which both the subaltern and the more privileged classes are fleetingly liberated to torpedo all forms of written and unwritten social and ecclesiastical laws.
The carnevalesque form is also a celebration of popular culture, such as fairs and spontaneous folk dramas, including puppet shows and vaudeville comedies. Because the world of alterity is primarily concerned with fundamental issues of survival and sustenance and reproduction of life, the language of carnival is largely concerned with the body, eating, sex, and death.
It is also characteristically playful and typically involves sensuous imagery. In carnevalesque discourse, matters of the body are given a humorous treatment. It is not too funny as one might find in situation comedy or too serious as one might discover in high drama; it is situated between the two. It is this doubleness that gives carnival its grotesque or ambivalent quality, which is starkly different from official discourse, the language of power and hegemony.
Effacing of Masculinity
Agbabi’s second volume of poems “Transformatrix,” delineates a swathe of feminine endeavors that defy and efface inherent masculinity in patriarchal societies. Indeed, she creates women whose modus operandi is that they can do whatever a man can do and, probably, better. In effect, she creates female personas who are mothers, women going through changes, and women who take delight in traveling to satisfy their adventurous verve.
She also creates some female personas who struggle with their identities. Like many of her compeers’ poems, the poems in Agbabi’s Transformatrix can be performed, but it will be a fallacy of reductio ad absurdum to suggest that Agbabi is simply a performance poet, for many of her poems can be analyzed by using the classical hermeneutical standards in the interpretation of the poetry of, for example, Shakespeare, Yeats, or Auden.
Agbabi can be placed in the category of postmodern avant-garde poets because her poems are not a means to attain reality; her poems are a synecdoche of reality, even as they exalt in chaos and cacophony.
Postmodernism
The postmodernist mode of the poems in Transformatrix substantiate its avant-garde quality. Much as avant-gardeism is an assertively tactical reaction to conventional modes of aesthetic expression, it is also situated in a mundane realm in which avant-garde artists reconcile their political beliefs with their aesthetic brilliance without compromising either.
In that mode of expression, avant-garde artists re-position and re-configure their art to engage social issues with a sympathetic panache toward contemporary life. Avant-garde artists also infuse their art with psychological imagery to render it somatically enriching. As a result, avant-garde artists are able to give a synchronic and diachronic representation of some social concerns as they attempt to address issues relating to moral stasis and conundrum.
For the most part, avant-garde artists believe that art must not be for art’s sake, so they develop a salubrious attitude as they attempt to unravel some of the perennial problems embattling society. Indeed, it is refreshing to note that, avant-garde artists practice their principles in a spirit of light-heartedness through satire to assist in providing solutions to some of society’s problems.
Samuel Doku - Samuel O. Doku is a full time lecturer at Howard University. Before switching professions, he was a seasoned journalist with the ...
Join the Conversation