Unsettling the coloniality of power: form, grievability, and futurity in Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996)

Abstract

This essay reframes Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996) around coloniality of power and Derrida’s ethic of learning to live finally. Focusing on form or rhetorical structure, we argue that Opoku-Agyemang’s poems on Cape Coast Castle and the slave trade suggest that the possibility of grievability and giving voice to the disremembered is contingent on the disavowal of silence and unsettling the coloniality of power of Cape Coast Castle. The paper shows that Cape Coast Castle is a contestatory site where imperial voice and power are confronted with alternative voices and that the disavowal of silence constitutes a potent rhetorical and ethico-political strategy for learning to live finally or futurity.

Keywords

• coloniality of power
• cape coast castle
• form
• silence
• grievability
• opoku- agyemang