Double Speaking Splinters of Truth: Towards a Feminist Poetics of Imperfection

“Double Speaking Splinters of Truth: Towards a Feminist Poetics of Imperfection” by Giovanna Covi is one of the contributions to the special issue titles Speaking Truth to Power of The Journal of Contemporary Thought (No 39, Summer 2014) edited by R. Radhakrishnan. It reflects upon which truths may be spoken and how to the displacing powers of globalization by postmodernist postcolonial feminist voices. By considering the legacies of Grace Paley and Edward Said, it emphasizes the need to join ethics, politics and poetics to propose the figuration of la dividua as a gendered, sexed, culturally creolized, relational subjectivity. It proceeds by addressing the articulation of double binds as production of non-totalizing knowledges and as the possibility of speaking splinters of truth to the assimilating powers of globalization. The article draws from G. C. Spivak’s aesthetic education, from the theories of E. K. Sedgwick and K. Barad and the poetics of A. Lorde, to foreground discourses that are performed intimately and freely and subjectivities that are irreducibly bound to the relation of the self with the other and the acceptance of speaking more than one language simultaneously. It reads texts by Jamaica Kincaid and Nikki Giovanni to support the theories elaborated by R. Radhakrishnan and L.Gandhi, respectively on the dharma and on an ethics of imperfectionism and self-ruination, as well as the use of ordinary language. In the process, the analysis embraces a practice of cultural translation as political action. It concludes by proposing a reading of Kincaid’s See Now Then as a deconstruction of romantic love and patriarchal kinship and as exemplary of la dividua’s imperfectionism and her radical location as a speaker on the edge between the will to power and the will to truth. This position, it argues, is shared by Nikki Giovanni’s poetry in its engagement with corporeal vulnerability and linguistic performativity.