Grappling with the “Postcolonial”

My Africana courses this semester have forced me to grapple with the term “postcolonial.” I have learned that this word is fraught because it describes a time period or phenomena which is defined or continues to be influenced by the traumas of colonialism.The Black World Editor’s Note summarizes this point well: “black people on both sides of the continent have very similar problems and a common source: that of colonialism and enslavement” (SOS 207). Even after countries have received independence, they still hold the burden of dealing with the effects of colonialism and, in many cases, watch a new breed, namely, neocolonialism, evolve.

Artists and writers have dealt with contemporary issues affected by colonialism in their work. In “To Make a Poet Black” Michelle Joan Wilkinson states, “the 1960s generation of Black Arts poets imagined themselves as black magicians making black poems in and for a black world” and “the new slogans included “art for people’s sake,” “art for survival,” and even “art for the revolution.” However, this type of activism through art does not only apply to the black community. Instead of allowing the postcolonial to be a divisive agent that separates people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds from each other, writers like Ntozake Shange (African American) and Victor Hernandez Cruz (Puerto Rican) display “diasporic consciousness and cross-cultural poetics” in their work, terms Ron Hernadez used to describe publications like Umbra magazine (Latin Soul 334).

Shange demonstrates her solidarity with those of the diaspora in Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography as a result of a shared colonial past:

there is no edge

no end to the new world

cuz i have a daughter/ trinidad

i have a son/ san juan

our twins

capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same

language/ but we fight the same old men

the same men who thought the earth waz flat

In a similar way, Cruz’s writing reflects  “a poetics of tensions between Spanish/English, rural/urban, and vernacular/literary cultures” (Latin Soul 335). This poem La Lupe illustrates the connection between Cuba and New York:

She embodied in gowns, capes,

dresses, necklaces, bonnets,

Velvets, suedes, diamond-studded,

flowers, sequins,

All through which

she wanted to eat herself

She salvaged us all,

but took the radiation.

Each time she sang

she crossed the sea.

From the Bronx

she went back to Cuba,

Adrift on the sails

of a song.