The poetics of mobility, proximity and emb'race in Joyce Ash's A Basket of Flaming Ashes and Beautiful Fire

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Ndi, Gilbert Shang:
The poetics of mobility, proximity and emb'race in Joyce Ash's A Basket of Flaming Ashes and Beautiful Fire.
In: Lokangaka, Losambe ; Tanure, Ojaide (Hrsg.): The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature. - London ; New York : Routledge , 2024 . - S. 378-392
ISBN 978-1-032-50048-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003396697-35

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Abstract

The predominance of the novelistic form has been prejudicial to the analytical attention paid to African and Afro-diasporic poetic imagination. Despite the paucity of critical engagement, some of the most conceptually innovative literary voices have emerged from poetry produced by a generation of (relatively) recent African immigrants in the West. Joyce Ash's poetry attests to the redefinition of belonging, mobility and the quest for “human emb’race”. I argue that her poetry is based on the poetic construction of proximity, immediacy and the ample appropriation of the human experience across the brick walls of race and exclusivist nationalism. As part of a generation of diasporic poets for whom home remains a physical and not just an imaginative reality, she foregrounds the connection with her roots/routes, not as a hermitic and nostalgic yearning, but rather as a source of spiritual energy that can be mobilised to enhance an englobing and ennobling sense of shared humanity. I examine these assertions through a thorough study of her poetry collections, A Basket of Flaming Ashes (2010) and Beautiful Fire (2018), enriching my analysis with a decolonial take on Fanonian ethics of love as a locus of ethical interpellation and a medium for globalized citizenship.