american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 81
reflecting but in creating history. A key philosophical underpinning of
much postmodern theory and literature—a suspicion of the “official
story” and its master narratives, especially those that emerged out of
enlightenment reason and narratives of “progress”—helped to shape
an environment in which academics, journalists, novelists, and poets
began to reexamine history and narrative in their works. The “breakdown
of the ‘official story’ created space for other stories and other
voices” (Geyh et al. xiii) in texts as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa’s revision
of the myths that have informed understandings of “America” and
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). In Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa suggests that a new oppositional
consciousness develops only by revising received historical traditions
and rewriting religious and cultural myths that subjugate women and
indigenous people.
One of the most powerful results of the questioning of the “official
story” has been the advent of nuanced, creative models of history and
memory that diverge from appeals to models of experience and logic.
These models assume that historical prototypes omit (or simplify)
important factors and forces, whether it is marginalized and oppressed
voices or geopolitical complexities. In Latin America, “el boom,”
which includes the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia,
Julio Cortázar in Argentina, and later Cristina Peri Rossi in Uruguay,
among others, focused international attention on realismo mágico
(magic realism). 2 Magic realism combines elements of literary realism
with elements of the supernatural. The fiction of magic realism favors
the “truth of sensation” over the “truth of fact” and stresses the
supernatural ties of the past to the present, 3 both of which suggest
that history is never really past and that people often feel historical
forces such as racism and colonialism as sensations as much as “facts.”
Their alternative visions of historical forces countered the oppression,
dictatorial power, disappearances, and skewed histories promoted by
Latin American governments.
Many poems of equivocal agency take the motives and ideals
(if often not the style) of magic realism as their implicit baseline. For
them, the truth of sensation is more compelling and powerful
than the often co-opted and erased facts of experience and event. As
such, their rhetorical strategies often (but not always) merge with
those of novels such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1986), and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues
(1995). These fictional works utilize techniques similar to Latin
American magic realism to “thematize the fragmentary, disjunctive,
and often contradictory nature of historical evidence . . . rather than