Postcolonial Intertextuality: Bangladeshi Anglophone Poet Kaiser Haq’s Poetics

Kazi Shahidul Islam
Department of English, Bangladesh Army International University of Science and
Technology (BAIUST), Cumilla, Bangladesh, Email: shahidul.english@baiust.ac.bd

Abstract: This paper analyses the Bangladeshi Anglophone poet Kaiser Haq’s intertextual liaison with several canonical Anglo-American poets whose forms, particularly free verse, and themes he absorbed during his early exposure to literary studies and reinvented for his poetics. It argues that it is re-creation—not so much of destabilization or subversion of meaning contained in the canonical texts—that concerns the Bangladeshi poet. Through comparative analyses of some selected poems for postcolonial intertextuality in Haq’s poetics and its pragmatic consistency in Bangladeshi reality, this research corroborates that Haq’s poetics—for its umbilical cord to Western traditions—is geared towards the representation of a nationalistic consciousness that is characteristic of postcolonial Anglophone poets in the African, Caribbean and South Asian regions. With a primary focus on poetic influence and its relevance to postcolonial literary production even today, the paper comes down to a corollary that reading Haq’s poetry essentially calls for a contrapuntal, referential consciousness about Anglo-American traditions.

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