Poetry, print, and the making of postcolonial literature

poetry (21). They were not to be alone, as Suhr-Sytsma reveals in what, for many readers, will be the book’s most exciting chapter. Mbari Publications, publisher of Clark, Soyinka, and Okigbo’s first books (62), received substantial funds from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Central Intelligence Agency front-organisation, responsible for cultural propaganda (63). The CIA also gave funds to Beier’s Black Orpheus; it is unknown how far Mbari were aware of their funding source. The links between the CIA and Mbari reveal how far the tides were turning in the world of cultural patronage at the end of Empire; the London literary world was now a dowdier relative to the well-financed cultural projects of the US government; the Meridian was moving Eastward. Poetry is a wide-ranging and ambitious work; obvious questions are calls for comparison. A core theme of Poetry is the growing assertion of literary margins over the metropole. In the case of West Africa, an immediate point of comparison is with the work of poets such as Senghor and the Negritude movement in French literature. Bush’s study with its focus on literary institutions makes for a particularly provocative comparison, while Germain’s work on music is also relevant. The example of writing in Arabic is also germane; the book trade across the Sahara, and the visits of scholars to Mecca or Cairo, helped establish intellectual debates, and refine rhetorical style (Kratli and Lydon; Ahmed). This latter example, reflecting processes of literary influence from the Middle Ages, suggests that many conflicts between African writers and their respective “metropoles” can be discerned if we turn the clock back, well before 1945.