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Keywords = Shara McCallum

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15 pages, 287 KiB  
Article
Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems
by Phillip Zapkin
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010024 - 7 Feb 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3623
Abstract
This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge [...] Read more.
This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Mythology & Modern Culture: Reshaping Aesthetic Tastes)
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