The Decolonial Poetics of the Colonized

Colonialism, in its entirety, involves territorial, economic, political and cultural subjugation, appropriation as well as exploitation of another country and its people, with the intent and purpose of establishing one’s dominance. In fact, colonialism was not restricted to the countries and peoples of the Third World, but it was also applied to many other contexts. Thus, Western hegemonic discourse, through its various mechanisms of control and various stages of development, has for years inflicted its language and culture on the colonised subjects thereby forcing them to refashion the colonised self’s images and model as was given to them by the coloniser. Internalisation, self-abasement and loss of identity have become a reality when the colonized attempts, in the process, to outwit the colonizer. The social and literary evolution of former colonised spaces is often characterized by the affirmation of new voices emerging from indigenous peoples. In this context, a new tradition arose that seeks to reverse the historical binary thinking by which the West finds justification. In its agenda, its proponents have begun to elaborate and theorise their own new tradition; a discourse of the “other” whose aim is to rethink, re-read, and rewrite the coloniser’s view of the colonised. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this theory as a search for a lost identity; though some detractors believe it still colonizes oneself in the process and show that language and culture imposed on the colonised, have traditions, social structures and textures that are not appropriate to what postcolonial writers or theorists wish to covey.