Polifonia, uso ironico del linguaggio e ‘poetica della relazione’ nella poesia di Benjamin Zephaniah

Abstract

This article deals with Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry and it focuses on its polyphonic quality, its ironic language, and its similarity to Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’. One of the most striking feature of the black British poet is his irony, which functions as an effective revolutionary act as it subtly reveals hypocrisies and prejudices. Benjamin Zephaniah’s subversive use of language is aimed at opening the boundaries of the literary canon and of the very idea of Britishness, in the same way as postcolonial authors do. Being himself a ‘product’ of cultural hybridisation, Benjamin Zephaniah creates a syncretic network of intermingled voices and personae, a sort of polyphony in Bakhtinian terms. Therefore, his poetics bears resemblance to Édouard Glissant’s idea of ‘creolisation’, according to which every identity is in fact a mixture, which is ‘happily’ and inevitably changing through a relationship with the Other.