Stilled Voices Unmuted

To engage the ever-proliferating critical apparatus that purportedly illuminates the postcolonial text is to encounter invocations of an undefinable space, fraught with equivocation, resistant to consonance, calibration or resolution and, as such, undergirded by irrevocable obstructions. The narrative discourse borne of this encounter can but adduce one or another variant of ignominious defeat. In the optic thus proffered, the labyrinth that is « the postcolonial experience » is in a constant state of flux, inchoate, unmoored, unbounded, and thus stingingly subject to the contortions of the unsayable. However hermeneutically justified such readings, they bespeak but one dimension of an inordinately complex, polyvalent enterprise. For the postcolonial text - rooted in errantry, multifarious, amorphous, and assuredly less acquiescent than subversive - apriorily debunks unidimensional or dismissive over-determinations. As such, the would-be unsayable must be defied and transgressed to accommodate a new space wherein the long silence of the past is superseded by the clamoring of voices too long anchored in subjugation. For Zobel, Oyono and Ousmane, the struggle for metaphysical and linguistic liberation is compellingly metaphorized and replete with generative signifiers, however tainted by the past. From the vestiges of former stillness, there emerges a counter-discourse: a new and irrevocable poetics of postcolonial triumph.