colonialism. If the western form of modernity ever since its conscious conception and
practice by the West has always been about otherness (Jameson 2002: 111), this is
arguably because the measure of otherness has always been based on the analysis of the
cleavage evinced between the industrialized imperial self and the non-industrialized
(usually) colonized other. And thus promoted as the ultimate index of development, the
challenge for the formerly colonized has always been how to convert the aspiration for
industrialization into a concretely provincial experience. In fact, it will not be out of order
to regard this aspiration, desirable as it is, as another instance of “postcolonial mimicry”.
Nevertheless, for the entire “source” that Britain constitutes in the evaluation of the
development mediated through technology, there is another angle to it which rubs off on
the stifling of human relations and, one may add, prefigures the ascension of a post-
humanist credo.^44 This is the preoccupation of “The First Train to Liverpool”, a poem
which defies the mystifying powers of technology in order to point out its “natural
negatives”. Doing this for Mapanje involves taking a comparative approach between the
patently technologized space of Britain and the still communal and sparsely
technologized Malawi. It also involves an epistolary deployment as an alternative title to
the poem is “A Letter for Angela”:
No last minute haggling about prices
Of curry-chicken first at Balaka
No stinking Afro-wigs into your mouths
No leaping from bags of peanuts into
Baskets of tomato, cheerfully quarrelling
Nor finally sitting on half a buttock
Euston station contacts and dialogues
Through wires and innumerable papers
Only comfort welcomes aboard a sudden silence
That soon reigns, our eyes weighing and
Quickly avoiding each other between
The beverages and the local papers.
Runcorn station welcomes aboard a haunting
Quiet where men obviously build more paper
Walls against other men. No curios, no mats
No herbs sell through windows. No mothers
Suckle their crying babies. No jokes about
The rains held up by your charms this year!
44
Among other things, posthumanism valorizes the replacement of the human essence with machines,
partly as a way of pointing to the crisis in humanism; despite its apparent nihilism that renders it suspect
(although just like any other neologism), its rebellion against humanism has continued to engage scholars.
See Niel Badmington 2000.