‘Home was always far away’: intertextual and intermedial poetic appropriations of double consciousness in Sujata Bhatt's Pure Lizard

TLDR: The authors argue that Bhatt's recent poetry collection explores a poetics of diasporic transformation by renegotiating and appropriating W.E.B. Du Bois's term, double consciousness, as she draws on the idea of the individual who is characterized by several, albeit warring, identities.

Abstract: In her poems, Indian-born, American-educated and German-based poet Sujata Bhatt examines the relationships between literature, diaspora and memory. Specifically, she employs a variety of personae (lyrical voices) that bridge continents, languages and identities. In her most recent poetry collection, Pure Lizard [Bhatt, S. 2008. Pure Lizard. Manchester: Carcantet], Bhatt uses intertextual and intermedial poetic strategies to explore and convey the heterogeneity of the Indian diasporic experience. Echoing Stuart Hall's notion of diaspora, I argue that Bhatt's recent poetry collection explores a poetics of diasporic transformation by renegotiating and appropriating W.E.B. Du Bois's term, ‘double consciousness’, as she draws on the idea of the individual who is characterized by several, albeit warring, identities. In this light, I will analyse the ways in which Bhatt's writings as well as her larger poetic project both overcome and re-enact the unsettling predicament of her own as well as her personae's displ...