T. S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho from the Perspectives of Posthumanism and Post-Deconstruction

The tripartite relationship of Anyidoho with fellow poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, who employed modernist elements and techniques, emphasized precisely what Eliot desired for Western culture: a transformation and a living tradition that communicates with the past not as a lifeless monument but as a living, experiential entity, forming diverse Deleuzian plateaus [1] – see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) – branching out in different dimensions. The domain of modernism expands through artistic methods and an understanding of the language and culture of postcolonial poetry. The question of exile is linked to the adoption and imposition of cultural patterns, but it is no longer solely about physical space. Postcolonial poets have shown that exile is not just a physical location but a state of consciousness of an individual who, without a group or foundation, becomes one among many, locked in their own world despite being surrounded by people in metropolises. Therefore, in the study of structures and fundamental philosophical assumptions, post-deconstruction and post-humanistic elements and values are introduced into modernist poetry in contrast to humanistic values in postcolonialism.

In this paper, a theoretical framework of deconstruction, which manifests as an interpretative approach in the analysis of the poetry of Anyidoho and Eliot, has been articulated. Subsequently, the paper will elucidate the deconstructive voids discovered in meaningful wholes that are contextualized by the introduction of new lines of inquiry into previously analyzed existing poems. Anyidoho advances beyond the modernist Eliot in his treatment of voids that acquire and construct meaning through their spatiality. In the poem ‘Memory and Vision for Children of Musu’, the following lines are encountered: ‘A people once enslaved, they say/are too often too willing/to be a People Self-enslaved’1 Highlighted in italic by Milena Vladić Jovanov. (Anyidoho 26), which not only materialize voids but also embody a distinctively deconstructive approach, suggesting that a nation has ‘voluntarily’ become an enslaved nation. Such deconstructive writing implies that this nation has been shaped under the influence of slavery. The graphic deconstructive expression indicates that it was subjected to enslavement but never acquiesced to it. The intricate metatextual quality implies that the poet is cognizant of the dual nature of slavery and articulates it in a deconstructive fashion. That both Eliot and Anyidoho connect tradition with voice is confirmed by the lines of the Ghanaian poet: ‘And those who took away our Voice/They are now surprised/They couldn’t take away our Song’2 Ibid. (Anyidoho 31).

The initial segment of this paper is dedicated to exploring the similarities and differences in the ways Eliot and Anyidoho interpret the connection between tradition and voice. In Eliot’s case, a substantial portion is devoted to examining the status of the poetic subject Tiresias, who, despite being capable of using the first-person pronoun I, cannot guarantee the firm sense that Poirier describes, but is, as the author suggests, in pursuit of meaning. Similar to Eliot, Anyidoho employs the relationship between voice and tradition, wherein his poetic subjects, whether in dramatic dialogues, halo poetry, or introspection about space and the narrativization of space-time as per Homi Bhabha, consistently maintain a stable voice.

Eliot did not traverse the center of contemporary culture like Anyidoho but sought the center in cultural models deconstructively. Although Eliot and Anyidoho share similarities in linking voice with tradition, they do exhibit differences. Consequently, a section has been devoted to the analysis of the poetic subject Tiresias in Eliot’s work, to demonstrate that even the sole subject in Eliot’s poetry capable of declaring I is semantically distinct from the certainty and uniqueness of I. Anyidoho, on the other hand, even in the complex meta-qualities where he distinguishes between the twins of Europe and Africa, ensures that each possesses its own I, thereby establishing its own perspective.

In T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, scholars such as Harriet Davidson, Charles Altieri, Helen Vendler,3 See Harriet Davidson. T. S. Eliot and Heremeneutics. Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Also see Helen Vendler. Coming of Age as a Poet. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003) Also see Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture. An Aesthetics of the Affects. (Ithaca. London: Cornell University Press, 2003). Also see his Lectures at Berkeley edited online. and many others interpret the concept of voice as a means to achieve unity on a structural level. This entails finding a structural center that can govern the disjunctive and fragmented nature of the poem, ultimately uncovering a shared meaning. For the structural center,, they often select verses that are graphically marked and belong to Prufrock’s ‘Pervigilium’, specifically lines 70 to 74, which do not belong to the published version of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

As Paul de Man suggests,4 See Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight – Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). interpretation is simultaneously blindness and insight. In other words, as Derrida notes, the center of the structure is both within and outside it. ‘The center is not center. The concept of centered structure – although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistēmē as philosophy or science – is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.’ (Derrida 1978) Derrida’s notion of centred structures, where the center is both within and outside the structure, corresponds to Paul de Man’s idea of interpretation as being twofold – it is both insight and blindness. Just as interpreters seek the center of the structure, hoping it will provide them with meaning, they also search for a singular voice through which the poetic subject can address itself with the first-person pronoun I.

Peter Hühn emphasizes that the poem ‘Portrait of a Lady’ has a narrative character. There are narratives of the lady and the gentleman, which overlap and conflict. There is also a superior voice that shapes the self-awareness of the poetic subject, as the author highlights. I would like to add that there is also a reader’s narrative, as it is the reader who reveals the connections between the lines of allusions in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’, as well as ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ If one takes a closer look, the poem has a dual structure without any leading voice. One is oriented towards the reality of the poetic subjects, describing the salon, an evening in the park, a concert, senseless conversations, polished manners, and so on, while the other is oriented towards culture and literature, with the latter lacking a single center or a single voice. No voice could be attributed to or be recognized in the lines that Peter Hühn calls the textual mark of the gentleman’s self-awareness, alluding to Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’: ‘If music be the food of love, play on;/Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken and so die./That strain again, it had a dying fall […]’ (Shakespeare 93). In ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ one encounters the line, ‘This music is successful with a “dying fall.”’ (Eliot 11) Unless the assumption is made that the poetic subject is metatextually given and reflects the poet himself, which is not the case here because the character of the gentleman could not have ‘known’ about the hidden allusion to Shakespeare, Eliot’s poetic system provides interpretations with multiple conclusions. One of them is the depiction of reality through human characteristics: as people are, so is reality. Prufrock speaks of everything except love, which is indicated by the intertextual reference in the title of the poem. The gentleman doesn’t hear the lady, and there is a complete absence of communication in the poem. Eliot employs a cultural model, relying on Shakespeare and his own internal poetic model, linking ‘Portrait of a Lady’ with ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, as evidenced by the lines within quotation marks in the former, suggesting that Eliot is now quoting himself, without relying on Shakespeare as a foundation. Eliot equally values both voice and tradition, while critically questioning traditional values as well as contemporary ones, as he has not bestowed upon them a stable voice.

In Eliot’s system, everything is displaced, and there is no foundation anywhere. In the poetry of Kofi Anyidoho, one finds a more humanistic world, full of voices of sorrow, joy, debate, but voices that are more human. The poetic foundation is much clearer and is not, even when exposed to meta-qualities, separated and fragment. The disunity and fragmentation in Eliot differ from the divisions in Anyidoho. Turning to the ‘compound ghost’ from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, the division, which represents différance in creating identity in relation to non-identity – i.e. the external and the other in relation to the inner self, which, as J. Lacan would put it, is not singular from the beginning because it represents a Gestalt in motion – in a comparative analysis with meta-qualities and division found in Anyidoho, presents a different cultural model. The entire scene in ‘Four Quartets’ is permeated with elements of uncertainty and double meanings that lead from the linguistic level, where expressions such as ‘metal leaves’ (Eliot 140) create an atmosphere of uncertainty and ghostliness at the thematic level. The time of the encounter is unknown because the encounter is ‘in the uncertain hour before the morning’ (Eliot 140), nor is the place of the meeting known since ‘of meeting nowhere, no before, no after’ (Eliot 140). Not even the appearance of the dead teacher the poetic speaker encounters, the ‘compound ghost’, is known. This scene, no matter how much it contains the negation of the conscious by what constitutes it, shifting its basis away from the center, thus leaving it in an aphoristic passage where questions are posed and answers are given but never final, has one of the hallmarks of modernism that Eliot brilliantly used: the division of the self which reflects the divisions and differences in culture, gaps that are irreconcilable.

At the same time, this semantic level reflects and intertwines with the structural one, opening a new poetic theme: a dialogue with one­self. Not just any dialogue but a time-bound dialogue in which one self speaks to its other self from another time, connecting the selves of different times into a new self. Such a transformation is vividly portrayed but is surrounded by an eerie atmosphere that suggests that the encounter of such selves within one person can take place on the level of self-encountering imaginary spectral beings. All of this makes the world Eliot describes deeply post-humanistic, unreal, just as the cities and characters he describes are both unreal and real, with London, topographically described, being realistic, while the faces are overlapping instead of being singular, which he states through the character of Tiresias in the footnotes of ‘The Waste Land’. The cultural example he chose has already undergone a transformation in the sense that it was once within the body of both a woman and a man. When the poetic speaker in ‘Four Quartets’ hears himself in this scene, he hears the other’s shout. The relationship between the two is strongly emphasized.

Such a relationship will also follow in Anyidoho’s poetry, with the difference that, in his poetry, especially in the poem ‘The Song of a Twin Brother’, the voice will be clear, as well as the messages it conveys. The foundations won’t bury each other, and the culture he describes is the culture of individual life and the life of the African community within. Their intertwining builds the idea of the identity of exile in a foreign space that becomes imbued with culture, no matter how much the given space changes. Since Eliot’s voice and the role of the poetic speaker are duplicated, yet the foundations of that voice unclear, the difference in verses allows for more clarity to ensue.

Anyidoho writes about two twin brothers. The fact that they are twins suggests that they are the same but also different. Similar to Eliot’s poetic speaker, who takes on a double role, being the same but still different, and who hears his own voice as if it’s someone else’s, Anyidoho portrays an imagined dialogue between twin brothers who are similar but different because they have chosen different worlds: one African, the other Western. In this dialogue, akin to the critical stances and dialogues of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound and the play of personae, Anyidoho conveys the role of an individual in African society and what it means to be in one’s own country yet in exile. The same but different, the twins are like the face of the god Janus, representing the Western and African worlds. The twin who stayed in Africa tells his brother that, without roots, there is no future. Furthermore, concepts such as name, voice, word, and song have a special meaning in Anyidoho’s poetry. The twin brother gives his name to the winds: ‘I give your name to the winds./They will roam the world and find your ears’ (Anyidoho 55). Voice and song have not only a metatextual form but also deep political nuances. In the poem ‘Lolita Jones’, ‘and so they says my name is Lolita Jones?/But that ain’t my real name/I never has known ma name our Name./[…] Ma Name cud`a been Sculptured/Into Colors of the Rainbow/Across the bosom of our Earth’ (Anyidoho 29), he goes on to carve out the political and cultural nuance: ‘But you see: Long ago your People sold ma People./Ma People sold to Atlantic’s Storms./The Storms first it took away our name/And it tried to strip us of our Soul.’ (Anyidoho 29) A poem is not just an artistic piece; it is a communal song of an African nation – the song of the people.

The notion of tradition can be similarly applied to poets like Kofi Anyidoho, a Ghanaian poet, and two Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, who are part of African culture. Postcolonial poets have constructed their own traditions; they haven’t merely inherited and adapted them. In their works, more clearly can one of the most important aspects of Eliot’s understanding of tradition from his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ be observed, and that is the quality of metamorphosis. ‘This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.’ (Eliot 5) Such a poet is Kofi Anyidoho. Tradition in his poetry merges the contemporary spirit, as required by individual talent, and portrays the socio-political reality. At the linguistic level, the poet playfully engages with modernist elements in a postcolonial context. Anyidoho simultaneously weaves three levels: the linguistic, the socio-political-thematic, and the cultural-African. Linguistically, two lines are to be followed: the historical-etymological, as in the name of the African state Zimbabwe and the river Zambezi that flows through Zimbabwe and Zambia. Anyidoho playfully introduces graphical elements in a modernist fashion, separating the initial three letters ‘Zam and Zim’ from ‘Bia-Bezi-Babwe-Zambia’, creating a wordplay and a connection between the great Zambezi River, the state of Zimbabwe, and Zambia. The linguistic level is also political because it introduces the historical context of colonial dominance and Western culture over Zimbabwe, as well as later uprisings and Zimbabwe’s liberation. The intertwining of linguistic and historical-colonial experiences suggests that none of the three levels is independent.

In other words, each exists within the other but does not undermine the other. The critical aspect, which also exists on the linguistic level, is reflected in the historical-contemporary perspective: those who ruled, like Queen Victoria, and those who colonized are now facing the changing nature of water. The concept of water and the metaphor of water are ancient symbols of transformation, power, and the dual nature of creation and destruction. From a poetic and philosophical standpoint, the question arises: which of the two aspects predominates – creation, the birth of nature through water, or destruction, the downfall of civilizations through floods? Eliot employs the metaphor of water in ‘Four Quartets’, particularly in ‘The Dry Salvages’, within lines ‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,/Patient to some degree. […] Then only a problem confronting the builders of bridges./The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten/By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,/Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder/Of what men choose to forget’ (Eliot 130). The river is a destroyer deity, yet ‘His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom’.

In contrast to Eliot, who emphasizes both the constructive and destructive powers of the river, Anyidoho emphasizes the river’s constancy, contrasting it with the images of societal constructive and destructive forces. The constancy of the river, which is African and persists regardless of changes in power, whether colonial, corrupt, or liberating, is highlighted. The river is a blessing for all, for humans, animals, and nature as a whole. Eliot is tied to an urban landscape, featuring images of the river’s presence in a child’s room and garden. In contrast, Anyidoho is connected to images of the sky, the earth, and the entirety of nature. Zambezi is not just a river passing through Zambia and Zimbabwe, just as the Danube is not just German, Austrian, Serbian, or Romanian. Zambezi is an African river, just as the Danube is a European river. Therefore, the poetic subject in Anyidoho’s work conveys, ‘History is but the Future/We should have known in the Past’ (Anyidoho 48).

Reality is also presented from a political perspective. Anyidoho plays with the names Victoria Falls and the reign of Queen Victoria. These names also allude to both water and the reign of the English monarchy. It’s important to note that Anyidoho’s verses also hint at the kingdom that existed in Zimbabwe: ‘The mysteries of these lands/Are deeper, loftier than/The Empire Builder’s dreams’ (Anyidoho 48). Kofi Anyidoho also engages with personal pronouns. Initially, he plays with the pronoun in the third person singular, which relates to Queen Victoria, and subsequently, he employs the pronoun in the third person plural, which pertains to the knowledge of governance and various rulers of Zimbabwe, cities, as well as the African people who should be familiar with their history. By saying that, ‘one of these days/Old Victoria shall have/to Gather her Wayward Children Home/If only she knew’ (Anyidoho 48), the transition from the personal pronoun in the third person singular to the third person plural is accompanied by historical and political elements and is reflected in the linguistic choice. ‘Mutare Rusape Harare/Chirendzi Chipinge Chirundu/Chimanimani Bulawayo Mbaalabala/The Souls of these Names/Are older than the Time/We count across our Mind’s spaces. […] If only they knew. If only’ (Anyidoho 49-50) further demonstrates his play with personal pronouns, where he reverts to the third person singular, focusing on Victoria, who symbolizes the decline of her rule, signifying the fall of colonial governance. This transformation is also evident graphically in the language: ‘So one of these days/Poor Victoria shall have/To trek her dreams across her own safari of pain/Poor Victoria shall have/To go back home to her QueenDom Gone. […] Victoria FALLS ……..!’ (Anyidoho 50). Linguistically, Anyidoho exemplifies the essence of Eliot’s concept of tradition using a practical illustration. It is not merely about the past merging into the present and vice versa, but rather a Heideggerian5 Martin Heidegger: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, band 65, Herausgegeben von Friedrich-Wilchelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main, Satz und Druck: Poeschel & Schulz – Schomburgk, 1989), 27. sequence of presents. In this understanding, tradition, as a concept, exists contemporaneously with the future. The present provides a sequence of pasts and insights into the future, emphasizing a constant modification of the past into the future.

Heidegger also emphasizes that being, as an individual, is grounded and phenomenologically appropriated by an event. Moreover, Being, as essence, as Logos, is also appropriated by an event, while simultaneously bestowing the event upon a multitude of beings. Sein is a part of Da Sein, and vice versa. In other words, there is no pause in Aristotle’s conception of time as movement, where the present, identified with the presence of Logos, would be a singular point, nor does it align with Hegel’s interpretation, where the present equates to Jetzt. Heidegger6 See M. Heidegger. Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). considered this view of time vulgar, as it fails to recognize that movement exists even within the point itself, which serves as the center, with one half encompassing the past and the other, the future. Thus, the present is inherently fluid and constantly erased. What does this essentially mean for the poetry of postcolonial poets?

Kofi Anyidoho espouses poetic convictions aligned with Heidegger’s discourse on a modified present, as exemplified in the verses from ‘Memory and Vision’: ‘Time before Memory./Memory beyond Time’ (Anyidoho 22). The expression ‘Memory beyond time’ can be intertextually connected to the phrase ‘The endless saga of AncestralTime’ (Anyidoho 22), while ‘Time before Memory’ articulates a reimagined reality and temporal experience, inviting the poet’s compatriots on a journey: ‘We all must make into our Past/in order to come to terms with our Future’ (Anyidoho 23). The poet reconfigures the past and present into an altered present since ‘For Five Hundred Years and more we have/journeyed into various spaces of the Earth./And everywhere we go we must confront/dimensions of ourselves we did not know were there’ (Anyidoho 23).

Structurally, these lines not only resonate with Heidegger’s reflections on time but also with Anyidoho’s previously discussed engagement with deconstruction theory. The contextualization is inherent within the text itself. Thus, the lines can be interconnected both internally, through textual mechanisms, and externally, through contextual means, resulting in thematic enrichment. The theme of political and geopolitical emancipation from Western influence on the African continent is introduced, as evidenced in the lines: ‘It cannot must not be/that the rest of the world came upon us/picked us up/used us to clean their mess/dropped us off into trash’ (Anyidoho 24).

Simultaneously, Heidegger’s conceptualization of time can be linked with Anyidoho’s poetry and the perspectives of Homi Bhabha, who is significantly influenced by deconstruction. In the essay ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, the title itself embodies the impact of deconstruction, signifying the dual meanings of the concepts of dissemination and nation. These concepts can be considered both separately and in conjunction. Initially, the term pertains to the concept of dissemination, followed by the dissemination of a specific concept, namely, the nation. The nation, akin to the philosophical notion of dissemination, is precisely realized through altered, modified concepts of time, which entail a modification of space, or the present, which, through its temporal pattern, transforms space and endows the nation inhabiting that space with the attributes of nationality and the ownership of identity, ranging from individual identity to the tradition of identity.

As Bhabha highlights in his essay, citing European poets, particularly Goethe, the focus is on distinct nations and spaces. Nevertheless, he also asserts that modernism is problematic precisely due to spatial boundaries, as they are reinvigorated in ‘ambivalent temporalities of the nation/space’ (Bhabha 294). Bhabha engages with phrases that are positioned deconstructively, not in terms of either/or but rather both/and. The nation is part of space and vice versa, yet it is essential to temporalize different spaces, achievable only through narrativization, that is, through song and narrative, recounting the history of the nation and its future prospects through the modification of the present, which encapsulates the lived experience of the nation. Thus, Bhabha playfully engages with the concepts Out of many, one and The many is one in a deconstructive manner. This leads to Anyidoho’s understanding of identity.

During a conversation with him upon his receipt of a lifetime achievement award in Serbia,7 Kofi Anyidoho received the lifetime achievement award ‘Golden Key of Smederevo’ in the Republic of Serbia at the international poetry festival ‘Smederevo Poets Autumn’ in 2022. The award committee consisted of Prof. Dr. Milena Vladić Jovanov, president, and committee members Prof. Dr. Boško Suvajđić and M. A. Tatjana Lazarević Milošević. Predrag Pešić and Milena Vladić Jovanov translated selected poems into Serbian. he articulated his view on the identity of his nation and his literary expression of it, stating that identity is rooted in heritage. I then referenced Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who also endeavored to reconnect with African traditions, particularly through the deity Ogun, to establish a new tradition shaped by the presence of colonialists and conquerors. Notably, Brathwaite incorporated modernist poetic conventions in his work, which extend beyond a mere graphical or visual style, akin to that of Paul Claudel, to a complexity and maturity comparable to the expressions of both Eliot and Anyidoho. In a certain regard, Anyidoho has transcended Eliot in the graphical articulation of meaning, a feat Poirier deems challenging within modernism. The spatial voids in Anyidoho’s poetry exhibit a more pronounced impact than the fragments in Eliot’s work. These voids, along with the influence of modernism on African poets and the reciprocal impact of postcolonial poets on modernism, evoke the concept of exile, previously discussed in this paper. Eliot, Anyidoho, Brathwaite, and Walcott share the experience of exile, unified by their use of the English language. According to Bhabha, this implies the adoption of the terms of the occupying nation. Hence, their exile can be perceived as twofold: they exist in exile but also transcend it by locating their roots and exerting their influence within the linguistic and cultural sphere of the English language and its associated nation.

Eliot’s reader assumes a more elevated role than that of a semantic reader, involving the development of various semiotic reader roles, whereas Anyidoho addresses readers from African culture, and surprisingly, although they are all different, they are comprehensible to readers in various spaces and times. The political role is not solely about the preservation of African art but also its new development. The fragmentation and disintegration of colonial culture after the Great War influenced a multitude of artists. For Wallace Stevens, Pound, and Eliot, culture becomes a project to rescue art. From an artistic perspective, the poetic texts of these poets reflect not only a dual relationship with culture, in terms of the search for a foundation that will negate modernity due to the lack of communication, empathy, and humanity in contemporary interpersonal relationships, but also the impossibility of actualizing the cultural manners of the previous era because civilization has surpassed them. Richard Poirier, in Poetry and Pragmatism, therefore, states that modern art is actually not a search for meaning but a search for hints of meaning. Poirier mentions in the context of Robert Frost’s poem ‘For Once, Then, Something’ that the very title of the poem ‘indicates a willingness to celebrate not a gift of meaning but only an inconclusive promise of it’ (Poirier 145). Is the meaning clear, or is it only a hint, or does it already exist in Kofi Anyidoho’s position?

The political moment is also a play on words between the name ‘Victoria Falls’ and the fall of Queen Victoria. In African culture, as well as in a Western context, it is quite clear what this means. But what transpires here is a conversation about the impossibility of finding a center, a voice that would be common to the entire West, and such a voice did not exist in the twentieth century. Such a voice has emerged in the twenty-first century within the media narrative, but it shares its fictional nature and thereby becomes exactly what it is not: a departure from the idea of any truth, acquiring manipulative characteristics. If it is homogenized, the question arises as to what makes African culture unique. Brathwaite is from the Caribbean islands, Walcott as well, and Nancy Morejón is from Cuba. However, in all these poets, including Kofi Anyidoho, a poetic image appears that is clear to all readers. One of them is the singing of songs, the creation of poetry, which, in Kofi’s case, is associated with the history of ancestors, music, and the art of eloquence that can compete with any Western tradition. In Brathwaite’s case, it’s the graphic form of poems that he shares with Kofi Anyidoho, which somewhat resembles the musical scales of live song performance that Western poetry cannot afford because it lacks the musicality and the relationship of the poet as a bard to his own poetry. In the case of Walcott, there is a critical moment of Western culture as he speaks of modern African cannibals who will eat the body of Christ, reminiscent of biblical symbols that refer to the most potent prayer, ‘Our Father, give us our daily bread.’ It also alludes to the symbolic communion in which Christ’s body becomes bread, and His blood becomes wine. Nancy Morejón talks about the body of a black girl that occupies the space of her movements but spreads like an image of African culture over Cuban culture.

Readers of Anyidoho’s poetry would all understand it, just as they would understand Morejón’s poetry. They are all interconnected intertextually with their unique inner echoes. However, Anyidoho also addresses contemporary themes of exile, movement, and migration, both departure and arrival. He emphasizes his origins similarly to Kamau Brathwaite when he sings of Ogun. However, he also has a metatextual and critical moment shared with Walcott when Walcott writes about Crusoe’s journal, reviving in the reader’s consciousness the first outcast, Crusoe, who imposed his culture and the trials he went through, realization for greater clarity of what his culture is in comparison to all the ‘good Fridays’, as Walcott states in his poem. Crusoe is alone in ‘Crusoe’s Journal’, and he imposes rules that are not in harmony with the nature he finds himself in. By imposing the rules of ‘white culture’, Crusoe goes into self-exile. Defoe’s first modernist novel showed that at its core, Crusoe is alone.

Neither Eliot nor Pound, when he claims that a poet is one who has ambitions to change the world, and thus the culture, and that poets – contrary to Shelley’s statement – are the true legislator of the world, managed to create a community that would respect or at least apply these laws. Although he refers to his origins – the troubadour poets – in ‘Piere Vidal Old’, Pound didn’t succeed in forming a community. In the poem about the contemporary poet ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, even though he complains about the conditions and themes that modern poets describe, he fails to invoke a cultural community in the consciousness of the contemporary reader. Eliot, on the other hand, won’t be understood by any community that follows the culture he invokes until they feel what that culture has felt. At the same time, both poets are solitary, and both poets refer to a culture that needs to be known but whose time has passed. Although they refer to an educated reader, whom they create through the act of reading their poems, leading to new insights into what that culture was and what was lost within it, both poets, despite the collaborations they had, remain solitary. For example, they might not have had a twin brother, someone who is different but whom culture and community call to return. I think they didn’t have one when I compare the role of the poet and the poetic work as well as its echo with Anyidoho’s ‘The Song of a Twin Brother’. Unlike Eliot and Pound, where an individual voice turns to culture, Anyidoho’s poetry turns to African culture, which stands like a Janus-faced sculpture, turned towards itself and the whole world.

In ‘The Song of a Twin Brother,’ Anyidoho illustrates exile in a markedly different manner. Exile isn’t merely a physical place; it’s a psychological space, a state of consciousness: it’s being estranged from one’s own culture. These two brothers differ in that one embraces Western customs while the other calls him to return to Africa. One has departed while the other remains. However, in that act of remaining, poetic destiny conveys to us what has occurred in the absence of his twin brother, embodied in his other self. Anyidoho navigates through the realm of the English language, as it’s his secondary language alongside his mother tongue. With this secondary language, he has also adopted another culture. Have we adopted African culture? Do we comprehend his poems, which have been embraced by the younger generation, with contemporary music often using his verses? This prompts the question of what the twin brother symbolizes within the framework of English language and culture.

For instance, Eliot sensed this when he expressed in a letter to his friend Mary Hutchinson8 See T. S. Eliot. ‘To Mary Hutchinson’, The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Volume I. 1898–1922. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). that he was a ‘metic’. As a member of that culture by language, Eliot doesn’t feel entirely at ease. The reason for this discomfort lies in the subtleties to which he doesn’t feel connected in the culture he writes about. The space he belongs to is not the space that Anyidoho or Morejón have. It’s not the black female body or the twins who speak in the same voice about departure and remaining in the same culture. It’s Eliot’s voice, an American in the English tradition. This is also demonstrated in the lines in Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ in the form of ‘compound ghosts’. Eliot’s poetic persona converses with himself, with an instructor, who is himself – sometimes familiar and known, sometimes entirely unknown. He is one and many from the culture to which Eliot’s poetic persona beckons. However, the two don’t recognize each other, and if they do, they do so in a post-human world where the leaves on the asphalt are metallic.

Anyidoho’s twin, although possessing metatextual qualities and metaphorically invoking himself as a twin, does not contain post-humanist elements. On the contrary, it is presented in the form of a lament that is not condemnatory. The dialogue unfolds as both turn to African culture, one who has departed and the other who has remained. In the space of their dialogue, a political thought emerges as to why one left and the other stayed.

Far from believing that Western culture’s adherents wouldn’t understand, they are separated only by wars. It’s difficult for someone of Austrian origin to understand that Italians took away South Tyrol, where Austrians still reside. I believe that everyone is in exile from their own cultures, the boundaries of which have been transcended by postcolonial culture, becoming something one must not only consider part of modernism and contemporary times but something one wants to embrace.

Anyidoho has developed a different role for the poet, in which he represents the heir to his ancestors and continues the poetic lineage of his own people, where poetry has been sung and written. The poet is a word gatherer, sharing them like a tree, reminiscent of Kamau Brathwaite’s poem ‘Ogun’. They create objects for a new civilization and words for a new culture. In light of the theoretical insights presented, it is feasible to contemplate the notion of postcolonial modernism or modernist postcolonialism, considering the significant contribution of postcolonialism to the modernist poetic tradition as delineated from the aforementioned world.