“Mind-Worlding” and the Signifying Chameleon: Poetics of Reading Modern African Poetry

Abstract

In this article, to explore the signifying chameleon as a reading framework I developed for Anglophone poetry, I deploy purposively selected poems from J.P. Clark, Jumoke Verissimo, Kofi Awoonor, Wally Serote, Sindiwe Magona, Wole Soyinka, and Uche Nduka. By illustrating with their poems, the study theorises mind-worlding poetics as constituted in the chameleon current which enfolds poetics and politics. Therefore, it demonstrates how the mind and poetry enact unconscious currents and the signifying chameleon’s imbrications of text and context. The study argues that African poetry behaves like the chameleon in its enactment of, and adoption from, its oral currents to the pluriversal environment. This study offers in the main the poetics of reading African Anglophone poetry using the chameleon framework. As both an arboreal animal that adopts the colour of the environment and adapts to its temperatures, the chameleon suggests the relationality of poetry to its dynamic environment in the way its cultural unconscious informs both poetics and politics in Africa and beyond. This dynamic environment reveals connected concepts—adoption and adaptation—which foreground the chameleon theorisation of Anglophone poetry. First, “adoption” invokes the primordial tripod that refers to unconscious currents of oral motifs and indigenous ideas. Second, “adaptation” foregrounds Western, postmodern styles that pivot on coordinate and pluriversal chameleon tenets, which are connected to the world in its rather dynamic, pluriversal reflexes.