Aesthetic transgression, writing pain, and the construction of female subjectivities: Joyce Ash’s Beautiful Fire

Abstract

Joyce Ash’s Beautiful Fire focuses on womanhood and its thematization in multiple contexts. In this collection of poems, she presents a historical trajectory of the struggles of the woman for self-definition. Her exploration of the plight of womanhood sheds light on cultural stereotypes associated with such figuration as she seeks to contest and reconfigure female identity in new cultural and geo-political spaces. In this paper, I explore the meaning of the woman as writer as she ventures into forbidden masculine spaces and claims those spaces for herself. This sense of intrusion is indicative of female resistance and reinvention. I draw from the spirit of Ellen Kuzwayo’s biography Call Me Woman, incidentally the title of the first section of Ash’s collection, to establish a framework for analysis of the poems. I make the claim that the woman writer’s use of the pen to create new genres, the biography in verse, is a mechanism of resistance, self-definition and empowerment.

Keywords:

• African Diaspora
• writing pain
• female empowerment

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ernest Dominic Cole

Ernest Dominic Cole, PhD is the John Dirk Werkman Endowed Professor and Chair of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, where he teaches Postcolonial literatures of Sub-Saharan Anglophone Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Previously he taught African literature at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, The Gambia College, and the University of The Gambia. He has published two monographs—Theorizing the Disfigured Body (2014) and Space and Trauma in the Writing of Aminatta Forna (2017) and two collected volumes—Emerging Perspectives on Syl Cheney Coker (2014), with Eustace Palmer, and Ousmane Sembene, Writer, Filmmaker, & Revolutionary Artist (2016), with Oumar Cherif Diop. His current research is on return migration of the African diaspora and his monograph is tentatively titled Black Bodies in White Spaces: The Politics of Migration, Diaspora, and Return.