Beyond Place: Exile as Psychic and Cultural Dislocation in Selected Transcultural Postmodern Poems

Abstract

                Exilic literature holds a significant space in the world of literature. It attracts much interest and attention, especially within postcolonial studies, due to the nature of its contents as well as its thematic issues. This article investigates exile as not merely a geographical dislocation, but as a constituent form of subjectivity. It focuses on the transcultural poetics of Eavan Boland (1944-2020), Syl Cheney-Coker (1945-), and Sujata Bhatt (1956).  These poets write from the edges of nationhood, exile, or colonial legacies, present a subjectivity formed not by cultural purity but by fragmentation, negotiation, and loss.  Thus, poetic language becomes a site of psychic and cultural dislocation that interrogates, reforms, and rewrites identity.

              The study employs a Psycho-cultural theory, drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of “subjectivity”, “melancholy”, and the “stranger within”, along with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theories of the “third Space” and “unhomeliness”. The combination of Kristeva’s psychoanalytical approach, which examines the internal and emotive structures of subjectivity and loss, with that of Bhabha’s postcolonial perspectives on cultural identity as a negotiated object in a contested social terrain, creates a complementary conceptual paradigm to theorize how identity in exilic and transcultural poetics is inscribed and reinscribed. The discussion advances with a close reading of Boland’s “Anna Liffey”, Coker’s “Shadow”, and Bhatt’s “Whenever I Return”.

          The chosen poems express a poetic voice that is not only expressive but also reflective.  The study concludes, among other things, that exile is a form of temporal alienation, a stranger within, and a sense of estrangement through the collapse of time.