The Poetics of ‘Home’: critical-creative approaches to the representation of ‘home’ in poetry

Davey, James Edward (2024) The Poetics of ‘Home’: critical-creative approaches to the representation of ‘home’ in poetry. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

In its examination of poetry that has been produced by writers whose countries of origin were colonized (Moniza Alvi: India; Choman Hardi: Iraqi Kurdistan), the critical approach to the readings in this thesis is underpinned by postcolonial theory and literary discourses focused on post-colonial identity. The readings seek to address issues such as cultural hybridity, liminality, and the relationship between personal and cultural identity. Key critical resources are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, the authors, respectively, of the influential postcolonial1 studies Orientalism; In Other Worlds: Essays on Cultural Politics and the Postcolonial Critic; and The Location of Culture, as well as critical works that discuss the developing concepts within postcolonial scholarship, such as Dennis Walder’s Post-colonial literatures in English (1998), John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), Prem Poddar and David Johnson’s, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005), and the various essays in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017), edited by Jahan Ramazani. The concept of cultural duality occupies a central place in the literary discourse around post-colonial literatures; therefore, Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural difference, ‘hybridity’ and the ‘third space’ provides the conceptual vocabulary for much of the discussion of the poetry in this thesis. Readings in this thesis are further contextualized within theoretical concepts of ‘home’ drawn from overlapping critical theory such as Judith Sixsmith’s exploration of the experiential modes of ‘home’ in The Meaning of Home: An Exploratory Study of Environmental Experience (1986), Greg Madison’s concept of ‘existential migration’ (2010), Kim Dovey’s phenomenological approach to ‘home’ as a process of becoming, and Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny and underlying ambiguities in relation to the sense of ‘home’, as examined in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). Additional critical resources that help frame and develop the readings in this thesis include Carolyn Forché’s notion of ‘poetry of witness’ as literature arisen from ‘extremity’, and Elleke Boehmer’s writing on the poetics of terror in postcolonial literatures. This critical-creative thesis contains a book-length collection of original poetry titled Piano for Elephants that explores the various ways that ‘home’ can be created, experienced, expressed, reimagined, and renegotiated. The collection includes a sequence of dramatic monologues written in the imagined personae of speakers for whom ‘home’ has either been left, lost, or is in some way uncertain. The poems explore history, place, memory, identity, communication and miscommunication, difference and familiarity, at once personal and public.