Stock-Taking in the Guise of Some Semantic Gymnastics: A Raw Poem for Geoff, in Honour of Hena and Anna

Could it be that relics of a half-digested reading oi Jumpers wanderThrough my mind? But that would prove that literature affects usIn a way, does it not? Anyway, I remember how it all began.We prided ourselves on siding with the underdog and discoveredThe fate of minorities. Some of us took refuge in the lean-to ofThe Commonwealth, while others started to take issue withEnglish Studies, even degraded it to Eng.Lit. (downsizing had yetTo be invented) or dreamt up Cultural Studies of a particular kind.It all started with the flag-independence of Ghana and professorialAggrandizement, which no longer convinced rebellious students.The way Anglistics saw itself came more and more under fire.Unwittingly we applied the core-periphery paradigm, wormingAway from the margins of the field, or so we were told. SomeColleagues of our up-and-coming generation were eager to fawnOn profs in power positions, where they defined the rules of theGame (defending the status quo of the system) and insisted that,With us, it was just a matter of sour grapes. We extolled the periphery,They maintained, because we lacked the ability to play ball with the core.Could these be the times when unheard-of Soyinka might be a matchFor time-honoured Shakespeare? No way, they thought, but they wereAlready on the retreat.For we had started to get organized. We got our act together and formedAssociations and thus became internationally active, before networking andGlobalization had become common coinage. We experimented with 'NewLiteratures in English' and were proud of the non-totalizing plural, only toEnd up in the maze of postcoloniality. For, in the meantime, another slurHad appeared on the scene. Against a backcloth of postmodern trickery,We were accused of lagging behind, inasmuch as we defended some sortOf lingering partisanship. It took the mainstream a terribly long time toPerceive, in its 'ethical turn', that some aspects of postmodernism had beenNothing but a ploy to play into the hands of the neo-con revoltOf 'depoliticizing the Culture Wars'.Now, I fear, the maggots of success arc in the process of feeding on theGreen leaves of our beginnings. We have made it, to a degree, and we haveThus arrived. We have arrived in the centre of a field which seems to takeMany of the formerly marginal positions for granted, it is true. …