Indigenous poetics

A few weeks ago, the news media in the United States and beyond were filled with discussions regarding the arrest of a Harvard University professor in his own home by a police officer. The professor in question was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and he was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct. They were subsequently dropped. President Barack Obama, who is a friend of Prof. Gates, got into the act when he, at a press conference said that the police had acted 'stupidly.' This generated a firestorm of protests. Later, he walked back on his comments and invited the professor and the police officer for a beer at the White House. It was popularly referred to as the 'beer summit.' I am recounting all these events not because I wish to revisit this unfortunate incident; my reason for talking about Henry Louis Gates is because he is one of the most distinguished African American literary scholars, and what he has written in the past has a direct relevance to some of the issues confronting us as Sri Lankan writers and critics and concerned readers.

Prof. Henry Louis Gates has been referred to as 'the most well-known African American scholar'. He is a university teacher, writer, public intellectual, a television personality and academic entrepreneur. His television series, 'African American Lives', which dealt with the genealogy of some prominent African Americans, had a profound impact on many of those who watched it. In terms of our own interest as writers and critics and informed readers in Sri Lanka, his works such as, 'The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism' 'Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self' and 'Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars', have much to offer.

In 'The Signifying Monkey', he sought to focus on the relationship between African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature; he underlined the need to recover an authentic black voice. He explored traditional African myths and poetry and highlighted the tropes of the trickster and Signifying Monkey as a way of fashioning an African-American narrative poetics; drawing on Western theories of structuralism, which he had studied at Cambridge, England, he pointed out how in traditional African narratives repetition and alteration came to occupy key representational strategies. By uncovering these, Gates sought to come up with a framework of analysis that could be productively deployed in understanding the deeper structures in the texts of African American writers such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Houston, Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed.

In 'Figures in Black, Henry Louis Gates initiated a creative dialogue between the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom and African-American literary texts as a way of re-possessing and re-interpreting these black texts. He observed that the challenge is not to shy away from literary theory but rather to translate it to the local idiom renaming principles of criticism where suitable, and applying these to the re-understanding of indigenous texts.

As he astutely observed, 'to imitate these theories of criticism dawn from the Western literary tradition, or attempt to apply them as if they were universal procedures similar, say, to surgical techniques, would be both naive and subversive, because theories of criticism arise from a remarkably small group of specific texts.'

Reading Gates' work, I was reminded of Martin Wickramasinghe's endeavours in the field of Sinhala literary criticism. What he sought to accomplish in works such as 'Sinhala Vichara Maga' and other critical writings was to fashion an indigenous poetics while engaging fruitfully Western theories of literature. Gunadasa Amarasekera attempted to carry this ambition further by giving this desire a social and political edge. Works such as 'Abuddassa Yugayak' and 'Nosevna Kadapatha' bear this out. It is interesting to note that one of the criticisms levelled against Henry Louis Gates was that he was not sufficiently political. For example, another prominent African American Literary critic, Houston Baker, commenting on the 'Signifying Monkey', remarked on the 'curiously apolitical cast of his arguments.' What is interesting about Gunadasa Amarasekera's critical and interpretive writings is that he convinces us that he is fully cognizant of this need.

There is a real need for us to engage Western literary and cultural theory. At the same time, we have to be mindful of the dynamics of contemporary knowledge production, and how politics, in the broader sense of the term, becomes an inescapable factor.