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  • Essay / Perspective of psychoanalytic criticism in the poem “A Far Cry from Africa”

    My article is based on such a critical approach to psychoanalytic theory and new historicist theory. It is generally accepted that new historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted in the context of both the author's history and the critic's history. New historicism recognizes not only that a literary work is influenced by its author's times and circumstances, but that the critic's response to that work is also influenced by his or her environment, beliefs, and prejudices. We could easily find these principles in the poem A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walcott. There is a precise historical context here. Walcott's times affected his poem. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay From the perspective of psychoanalytic criticism, literary texts, like dreams, express the unconscious and secret desires and anxieties of the 'author. The author's childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, etc. will be traceable in the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism", "condensation" and "displacement". I think they are important authors because they help to understand the author's message and that is why I used them to support my opinions. Derek Walcott is himself a black poet. This is why the point of view of psychoanalytic criticism is clearly present in his poem A Far Cry from Africa. His problem is the racial and cultural oppression that plagued the era of colonial occupation of Africa. It is also devoted to the dilemma facing Walcott himself, as he was born on the island of Saint Lucia in the British West Indies. As he grew up, he became aware of his mixed racial ancestry – he had white and black grandparents. A Far Cry from Africa was published in 1962. It tells the story of a specific uprising in British-occupied Kenya in the 1950s. Some members of the local Kikuyu tribe (Mau Mau fighters) led a fight cruel for 8 years against the pressure of colonization, which they considered illegal conquistadors on their lands. And this is what characterizes the New Historicist Theory, marked in Walcott's poem. In the poem, he is caught between the love of the English language, with which he expresses himself poetically, and the ancestral blood ties of his African family, oppressed by the very people whose mother tongue he needs to survive as a poet. The author tried to say that he lives in Santa Lucia, an island far from Africa, his cry has a long distance to travel to reach the African coast. The first verses printed by On the other hand, the future Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1948 himself sold them piece by piece in the streets of Castry, the capital of Sainte-Lusie. And in 1953, 23 years ago, he had to break away from his native country: in the small seaside resort of Sainte-Lusie there was simply no opportunity to study. While Derek received the most prestigious literary awards, it was money from theater productions that ensured his true financial freedom. A world that has survived the tragedy of colonization and slavery, a world with a stolen history that it has struggled to return to its own people. And he, almost alone, through a titanic effort, succeeded in creating the impossible: giving the people reduced to slavery, always humiliated, their own protohistory. These.