topics: |  poetry | india | critic

Excerpts

'Bleddy Macaulay's minutemen! Don't you get it? Bunch of English-medium
misfits, the lot of you.' Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh p.55


	How could they
	  have let a man
	who knew nothing
	    about geography
	divide a country?  p.57
            - [Sujata Bhatt, Partition; My mother's way of wearing a sari
		  2000: p.34]

Lakkdasa Wikkramasinha: To write in English is a form of cultural treason.
(Goonetilleke 1991: xiv).  In 1982, R. Parthasarathy b.1941, confessed that
he had been 'whoring after English gods.'

Culture consciousness precedes linguistic consciousness and the latter
depends upon the former.  By encouraging a foreign language system to be a
fit medium for creative writing we bring our already low-value culture still
lower.  It is doubtful whether this writing will add any "Indianness" to
World writing in English.
		- Bhalachandra Nemade, Marathi novelist, 1985 (p. 60)

Yasmine Gooneratne, in "This Language, This woman"
	So do not call her slut, and alien
	names born of envy and your own misuse
	that whisper how desire in secret runs p.60
	    (D. Goonetilleke ed. Modern Sri Lankan poetry, Delhi Satguru
		Publications 1987 p.5-6)

Keki Daruwalla: The Mistress

	No one believes me when I say
	my mistress is half-caste.
	...
	her consonants bludgeon you;
	her argot is rococo, her latest 'slang'
	is available in classical dictionaries.
	She sounds like a dry sob
	stuck in the throat of darkness... 1982:22

Organization

Part I: Postcolonial history and poetry
    Ch 2: Marlene Nourbese Philip: In whose language Am I... beautiful
Part II: South Asia; Southeast Asia; the Caribbean; Black Africa; and the
	Settler Colonies (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand)
Part III: themes in postcolonial poetry - voyage, self-exile, translation.
	Analysis of work by Derek Walcott, Kamau Braithwaite, Arun Kolatkar,
	Ee Tiang Hong, AK Ramanujan, and Agha Shahid Ali.

Review

The book is exceptionally well produced, and is easy to navigate, with a
detailed index and helpfully titled sections. There are also concise
overviews at the beginning of each section allowing the reader to
interrogate each chapter’s content before reading on. The wealth of
material included in Patke’s book will inform and delight the lighter
reader, and also lead the deeper researcher onto a multitude of further
sources. His poetic interpretations are well thought out and sensitive,
presented in such a way as to encourage the reader to ruminate further on
elements that he lacks time to further explicate. Patke’s book would
therefore prove an excellent teaching text, directly encouraging both
student and teacher to not only engage with his own discourses on
postcolonial poetry but to engage with the wider body of work that he has
drawn on. Coupled with a highly involved verbal discussion on the topic, I
feel that this text has the potential to provoke even the inexperienced
student into responding fluently to postcolonial poetry. This book was a
pleasure to read, as well as highly informative. Patke’s exceptional
writing style and his adept handling of such a vast body of information
secures it as a very useful research and teaching text.
- Laura Blakeman, http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue12/blakeman.htm