american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang
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EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 81<br />
reflect<strong>in</strong>g but <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g history. A key philosophical underp<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g of<br />
much postmodern <strong>the</strong>ory and literature—a suspicion of <strong>the</strong> “official<br />
story” and its master narratives, especially those that emerged out of<br />
enlightenment reason and narratives of “progress”—helped to shape<br />
an environment <strong>in</strong> which academics, journalists, novelists, and poets<br />
began to reexam<strong>in</strong>e history and narrative <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir works. The “breakdown<br />
of <strong>the</strong> ‘official story’ created space for o<strong>the</strong>r stories and o<strong>the</strong>r<br />
voices” (Geyh et al. xiii) <strong>in</strong> texts as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa’s revision<br />
of <strong>the</strong> myths that have <strong>in</strong>formed understand<strong>in</strong>gs of “America” and<br />
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). In Borderlands/La Frontera: The<br />
New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa suggests that a new oppositional<br />
consciousness develops only by revis<strong>in</strong>g received historical traditions<br />
and rewrit<strong>in</strong>g religious and cultural myths that subjugate women and<br />
<strong>in</strong>digenous people.<br />
One of <strong>the</strong> most powerful results of <strong>the</strong> question<strong>in</strong>g of <strong>the</strong> “official<br />
story” has been <strong>the</strong> advent of nuanced, creative models of history and<br />
memory that diverge from appeals to models of experience and logic.<br />
These models assume that historical prototypes omit (or simplify)<br />
important factors and forces, whe<strong>the</strong>r it is marg<strong>in</strong>alized and oppressed<br />
voices or geo<strong>political</strong> complexities. In Lat<strong>in</strong> America, “el boom,”<br />
which <strong>in</strong>cludes <strong>the</strong> fiction of Gabriel García Márquez <strong>in</strong> Colombia,<br />
Julio Cortázar <strong>in</strong> Argent<strong>in</strong>a, and later Crist<strong>in</strong>a Peri Rossi <strong>in</strong> Uruguay,<br />
among o<strong>the</strong>rs, focused <strong>in</strong>ternational attention on realismo mágico<br />
(magic realism). 2 Magic realism comb<strong>in</strong>es elements of literary realism<br />
with elements of <strong>the</strong> supernatural. The fiction of magic realism favors<br />
<strong>the</strong> “truth of sensation” over <strong>the</strong> “truth of fact” and stresses <strong>the</strong><br />
supernatural ties of <strong>the</strong> past to <strong>the</strong> present, 3 both of which suggest<br />
that history is never really past and that people often feel historical<br />
forces such as racism and colonialism as sensations as much as “facts.”<br />
Their alternative visions of historical forces countered <strong>the</strong> oppression,<br />
dictatorial power, disappearances, and skewed histories promoted by<br />
Lat<strong>in</strong> American governments.<br />
Many poems of equivocal agency take <strong>the</strong> motives and ideals<br />
(if often not <strong>the</strong> style) of magic realism as <strong>the</strong>ir implicit basel<strong>in</strong>e. For<br />
<strong>the</strong>m, <strong>the</strong> truth of sensation is more compell<strong>in</strong>g and powerful<br />
than <strong>the</strong> often co-opted and erased facts of experience and event. As<br />
such, <strong>the</strong>ir rhetorical strategies often (but not always) merge with<br />
those of novels such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Toni<br />
Morrison’s Beloved (1986), and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues<br />
(1995). These fictional works utilize techniques similar to Lat<strong>in</strong><br />
American magic realism to “<strong>the</strong>matize <strong>the</strong> fragmentary, disjunctive,<br />
and often contradictory nature of historical evidence . . . ra<strong>the</strong>r than