A tale of two wives: The transnational poetry of Patience Agbabi and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

Abstract

This article approaches transnational poetry through the recent engagement of medieval studies with the theoretical frame of postcolonial studies, which raises questions about periodization, contact zones and axes of power. The intersection of postcolonial theory and medievalism has uncovered global interconnections across time and space through a transnational dialectics investigating the contemporaneity of the Middle Ages and modernity. The article traces the transnational affiliations connecting Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath” and the work of two contemporary women poets of the African diaspora, British-born poet of Nigerian origin, Patience Agbabi, and Jamaican Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who have recontextualized the well-known character of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the space of the metropolitan African diaspora. While Breeze’s poem, published in 2000, imagines that “The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market”, Agbabi has reworked the Wife’s vivid language in the voice of a Nigerian businesswoman in “What do women like bes’?” from her 2014 collection Telling Tales. The article suggests that, by exposing the transnational flows and “crossover” skills already present in Chaucer, Agbabi and Breeze engage in a continuing conversation which contributes to our understanding of both medieval England and contemporary Britain as, in Bill Ashcroft’s term, “transnation”.

Keywords:

• Transnational poetry
• Patience Agbabi
• Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze
• African diaspora
• The Canterbury Tales

Notes

1. Among the several edited collections connecting medieval studies and postcolonial theory, see Cohen (2000) and Kabir and Williams (2005a).

2. See, respectively, Spiegler (2000) and Holsinger (2002).

3. The poem extensively revises and expands the short poem “The Wife of Bafa”, included in Agbabi (2000), with the addition of the Wife’s Tale.

4. It is worth noting that the origins of “Dutch Wax” testify to this transnational, global flux. Although commonly identified as an African fabric, its complex history involves Javanese batik being first imported to Holland in the 17th century, and then factory-produced textiles sold in West Africa in the 19th century by European traders (Appiah and Gates 2010, 290).

5. In Gilbert and Gubar’s (1979) words, on the other hand, she is even portrayed as “a direct spoken-woman for the perspective proto-feminism of Chaucer” (79).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [FFI2013-47789-C2-1-P].