‘Voyage across Cultures and Climes’: Whiteness, Exoticisation and Alienation in David Kerr’s Tangled Tongues

ABSTRACT

A reading of the poetry by David Kerr, a British mobile professional in southern Africa, shows that he does not only cast a critical and ironic look at the various cultures and socio-political behaviours he encounters in his sojourns, but also at himself as a white man and at the actions of white people in Africa. This paper focuses on selected poems from Tangled Tongues that deal with Kerr’s positionality and sense of identity and those that depict the role of whites in Africa. I argue that in these poems Kerr highlights his sense of alienation and, using irony and humour, critiques the attitude and behaviour of whites as they relate to African people, their languages and way of life. A reading of the poetry also shows that Kerr is aware of the impact of white power and privilege in Africa and uses an ironic, self-denigrating and critical approach in dealing with his background as a strategy to destabilise whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• whiteness
• alienation
• unbelonging
• mobile professional
• exoticisation
• aid
• Africa

Notes on Contributor

Syned Mthatiwa teaches literature at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. He holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Malawi, and a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mthatiwa’s research interest is in ecocriticism or ecophilosophy more generally, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, oral literature, popular literature, poetry and the novel. He has published journal articles on literature both within and outside Africa.

Notes

1 Fr Pat O’Malley was Mapanje’s colleague in the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, and also a close family friend.

2 Numbers appearing after a title of a poem or an excerpt from a poem are page numbers from the collection.

3 He was medically retired from the University of Botswana in 2019 and went back to the United Kingdom. His exact location in the UK is unknown to my contact in Botswana.

4 Guilt that some whites may feel because of ‘the intrinsic benefits they perceive that they obtain simply because they are “white,” and, to compensate for this, they are overly sensitive, extremely aware, or excessively tolerant toward non-whites’ (Kirwan n.d., 3).