Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s Postcolonial Banter and the paradoxes of spoken-word poetry

ABSTRACT This article reads the work of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, an activist and spoken-word poet who, as a British Muslim woman and postcolonial critic, is uniquely placed to articulate postcolonial concerns such as the mental colonization caused by colonial languages and the epistemic violence of colonial discourses. Further, an analysis of the author’s subject position demonstrates how Manzoor-Khan’s work vividly illustrates the predicament of the subaltern fighting to be heard. Her didactic metapoetry translates familiar postcolonial concerns into the 21st century by constituting a hybrid form between poetry and academic discourse, by introducing the vocabulary of postcolonial theory into the casual language of spoken-word poetry, and by employing rhetorical strategies that problematize the relationship between poet and audience as well as the rhetorical burden of producing “humanising” poetry. By analysing how she maintains a tense relationship with her audience, the article complicates what may be misunderstood as straightforward political poetry.