Over the last four decades, the work of Tony Harrison has won him the status of England's alternative poet laureate, some of it reaching a mass audience through the medium of film and television. At its heart lies a radical republicanism often expressing itself through an impassioned dialectic between race, class and culture. Yet, despite the honours and critical acclaim that have punctuated his career, this aspect of his work has been less explored. Here, Nicholson examines the seminal influence on Harrison s poetry of his time in Nigeria, with particularly reference to his early collection The Loiners, and relates it to the analysis of colonialism developed by Frantz Fanon.
Tony Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa , in Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley ( Bloodaxe, 1991), p. 33.
2.
Jonathan Barker , ‘Peru, Leeds, Florida and Keats , in Astley, op. cit., p. 51.
3.
Tony Harrison, Collected Poems (London, 2007). All quotations are taken from this, except where otherwise stated.
4.
John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison , in Astley, op. cit., p. 236.
5.
Robert Young, White Mythologies: writing history and the West (London , Routledge, 1990), p. 174.
6.
Tony Harrison, ‘Black and white and red all over: the fiction of Empire , London Magazine, N.S. (Vol. 12, no. 3, August/September 1972), p. 91.
7.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952], translated by Charles Lam Markmann ( London, Pluto, 1993), p. 218.
8.
Tony Harrison, The Loiners (London Magazine Editions, 1970), p. 12.
9.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Alistair Fowler (London, Longman, 1971), Book 2, ll. 1-6.
10.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 333-4.
11.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [1963] (Harmondsworth , Penguin, 1980), pp. 8-9. I have modernised Thompson s gender use.
12.
Tony Harrison , ‘Crow Magnon , London Magazine, N.S (Vol. 10, no. 10, January 1971), p. 86.
13.
Elizabeth Tonkin , Narrating Our Pasts: the social construction of oral history (Cambridge, CUP , 1992), p. 2.
14.
Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa , in Astley, op. cit., p. 33
15.
Ken Worpole , ‘Scholarship boy: the poetry of Tony Harrison , New Left Review (No. 153, September-October 1985), pp. 1, 15.
16.
Ibid., p. 13.
17.
Astley, op. cit., p. 236.
18.
C.J. Classen ,‘Quo Vadis, West African education , West African Journal of Education (Vol. 3, no. 1, February 1959), p. 2.
19.
Paul Edwards ,‘English literature in West African life , West African Journal of Education (Vol. 4, no. 1, February, 1960), p. 3.
20.
Astley, op. cit., p. 89.
21.
Tony Harrison , ‘Foreword to Aikin Mata: the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, translated and adapted by T. W. Harrison and James Simmons (Ibadan, Oxford University Press , 1966), pp. 9-10.
22.
Ibid., p. 9
23.
Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa , in Astley, op. cit., p. 34.
24.
Aikin Mata, op. cit., p. 5.
25.
Ibid, p. 17.
26.
Ibid., p. 40
27.
Ibid., p. 77.
28.
André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London, Routledge , 1992), p. 48.
29.
Peter Levi, ‘Tony Harrison s dramatic verse , in Astley, op. cit., p. 158.
30.
Tony Harrison , The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus ( London, Faber, 1990), p. x.
31.
Ibid., pp. xiii, xxi.
32.
The various movements of the sequence are, respectively, Satyrae, The Railroad Heroides, Travesties, Manica and ‘from the Zeg-Zeg Postcards : each movement, in its turn, breaks into smaller movements, sometimes titled, sometimes not.
33.
Judith Butler , Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (London, Routledge, 1990), p. viii.
34.
Blaise Pascal , Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966), p. 95.
35.
Ibid., pp. 36, 89, 90.
36.
Frantz Fanon , The Wretched of the Earth ( Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), p. 27.
37.
Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa , in Astley, op. cit., p. xi.
38.
I borrow Fanon s adapted phrase from Howard McNaughton,‘The speaking abject: the impossible possible world of realised empire , in De-scribing Empire: post-colonialism and textuality, edited by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 218.
39.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., p. 229.
40.
Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa , in Astley, op. cit., p. 34.
41.
Fracastoro s Syphilis, translated by Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1984), p. 11.
42.
Ibid., Book III, p. 95.
43.
Cited in Bill Ashcroft,‘EXCESS: Post-colonialism and the verandahs of meaning , in De-scribing Empire, op. cit., p. 37.
44.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., p. 177.
45.
H.A. Gailey, A History of the Gambia (London, Routledge, 1964), p. 39.
46.
J.M. Gray, History of The Gambia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 391.
47.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p. 169.
48.
Ibid., p. 236.
49.
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, as cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., p. 124.
50.
Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry ( Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983), p. 69.
51.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., p. 97.
52.
Ibid., p. 165.
53.
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British experience (Manchester , Manchester University Press, 1990 ), p. 3.
54.
Cited by Richard Wilson,‘Introduction: historicising new historicism , in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (London, Longman, 1992), p. 6.
55.
Tony Harrison , ‘Black and white and red all over , op. cit., p. 92.
56.
Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., p. 54
57.
Peter Porter, ‘In the bosom of the family , London Magazine (Vol. 10, no. 5, 1970), p. 75.
58.
Rudyard Kipling: the complete verse, edited by M. M. Kaye (London, Kyle Cathie, 1990), p. 192.
