Langwij a thi guhtr

Abstract

Asked about his international reception, Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard said: “The same linguistic politics of colonisation and countercolonisation occurs in different and many parts of the world, throwing up the same stratagems that the locally mainstream will put into some little locally marginalised classification-box. My phonetic dialect work nowadays is sometimes bracketed—outside Scotland that is—with counter-colonial Black writers like John Agard, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m happy enough with that.”¹ His qualification—”outside Scotland that is”—is crucial: at once the poetry responds to the intricate particularities of local context, and reaches beyond that context to attain solidarity with other poetries embedded in and shaped by different histories of colonization, but whose “linguistic politics” offers up the same truths. An oppositional politics against a colonizing “locally mainstream” becomes a poetic praxis, a series of stratagems whose politics lies in its continual probing of the possibilities of poetic form.