fixity in the opening stanzas to show how cultural resilience is negotiated and integrated
into the social consciousness of an unwilling western cosmopolitan nation. Taking us first
through the advancing powers of African diasporic music, the poet celebrates the
“polyrhythmic miles of Jazz” as led by Seyam Sinaj” (40). The reception that her
composition and performance enjoys can be measured in the following lines:
Your Songs traverse this land of hostile winds
you blow brainstorms into banquet hall of Moonchild
you die you live in song
you hate you love in song
you measure our joy in interplay of polyrhythms sounds (40-41)This is yet another angle to the apprehension of postcolonial hybridity; the fact that the
ambivalence of the colonized can result in a blend of both cultures and provide a
culturally resounding and refined alternative to western native cultural purism. This goes
to vindicate the optimism of Gilroy (2004: 119) on the “complex and challenging
narratives” that can be brought about in a “heterocultural metropolitan life by reducing
the exaggerated dimensions of racial difference to a liberating ordinariness”. It explains
why the heroine of “Earthchild” is understandably a personification of hybridity in that
positive drift of the word:
You walk away with our history braided on your head
all woven into cross-rhythms of hair each strand
so linked to every other strand each path
so linked to every other path each destiny
the destiny of every other single destiny (41)There is an instance of postmodern deterritorialization in the above, and the depiction of
the ever mobile songster-diva with a hybridity that infects; there is thus much ground to
agree that deterritorialization “implies [truly] the replacement of the bounded by the
unbounded... and the triumph of space over place”, as some scholars argue (Jacobs 2004:
30).