Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

Abstract

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

Living Archives and the Project of Poetry Recurriculation in South Africa

“…Curricula ignored and invisibilised forms of indigenous knowledge (Fataar 2018;Jansen 2019;Mignolo 2005;Msila and Gumbo 2016;Sousa Santos 2014), as can be seen in the selection of literary texts, which tended to recycle Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, and other canonical authors. One strategy for decolonising knowledge, as Bridget Grogan (2020) and Grace Mavhiza and Maria Prozesky (2020) argue, is to select texts and topics connected with students' and educators' own contexts. 3 As poet Diana Ferrus asserts: "We don't need the Canon.…”