american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 89
Simic’s terse, laconic lines, Harjo’s long, prophetic lines style
imagination as capable of creating change. One critic calls Harjo’s
“highly political imagination” a “weapon in an anticolonial national
struggle” that works to “decolonize our very spirit otherwise hegemonized”
(Hussain 52). Harjo uses imagination as—in the words of
Frantz Fanon—“a historical process of becoming” (28) and the postcolonial
tale she writes describes the process of recreating community
not through television and guns but through dreams and imagination.
As such, “A Postcolonial Tale” re-imagines myths—first the creation
story and second the colonial encounter, presumably between white
settlers and Native Americans.
As in other poems of comprehensive equivocal agency, Harjo opens
her poem with an immense, global horizon, but with a difference; she
makes it commonplace and grandiloquent: “Every day is a reenactment
of the creation story” (104–105). 7 Because the “creation story”
happens daily, it is a source of knowable community, but it also
remains a source of mystery. In the poem’s second sentence, “We
emerge from / dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering
power of / dreaming stuff.” The language here is elusive, fantastic,
and consciously enchanted, but not haunted as in Simic. We know
immediately that the speaker, who remains a “we” throughout, is
concerned with community, collective experience, and imagination.
Yet this story or “tale” is not the key to unlocking another world as
“This is the first world, and the last.” In the poem’s cosmology, the
stakes are high because there is no redemption in a world beyond.
Whereas imagination may be highly compartmentalized in a white
Euro-American worldview, in many Native American traditions it is
closer to boundless. Jenny Goodman, amongst other critics, claims
that Harjo, a Muskogee Creek Indian, uses traditions “that expand
narrow definitions of political poems” (49). As part of her mythopoeic
ethos she uses iconic figures such as the trickster crow; indeed, in the
imaginative construct of “A Postcolonial Tale,” “we” are never “far
from the trickster’s bag of tricks.” The trickster, most importantly, is
seemingly able to restore order to the postcolonial world by freeing it
from Enlightenment reason. Thus freed, the community is at liberty
to imagine itself anew. 8
Before there is a possibility of redemption via the imagination,
there has to be a fall, not from original sin, but from the sin of colonization.
In “A Postcolonial Tale,” the colonial encounter is itself a
creation story. During colonization a new world is created and cultures
are transformed. Indigenous people, Harjo suggests, were
“stolen” and “put / into a bag carried on the back of a white man