Violence, Identity, and Emotion:

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Abstract:

This paper investigates how war poetry becomes a medium for emotional expression and

ideological critique through a comparative study of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est and

Derek Walcott’s A Far Cry from Africa. Utilizing Postcolonial Theory, particularly the insights of

Frantz Fanon (with limited reference to Homi Bhabha), alongside Affect Theory as developed by

Sara Ahmed, the paper explores how both poets construct responses to violence shaped by their

respective historical and cultural contexts. Owen, a soldier in World War I, presents the

disillusionment of imperial warfare from within, exposing the hypocrisy of patriotic propaganda.

Walcott, writing as a postcolonial subject during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, reflects on

fractured identity and inherited violence within colonized geographies. By engaging Affect

Theory, the paper examines how these poems activate emotional responses like horror, guilt, rage,

and use sensory imagery to forge affective connections with readers. The study argues that both

texts convert the experience of violence into emotional and ethical reflection, transforming

personal trauma into political commentary. While Owen critiques nationalism from the battlefield,

Walcott interrogates divided loyalties born of colonial legacy. Together, their works reveal how

poetry captures the affective and ideological dimensions of war, shaping collective memory and

resistance across temporal and geopolitical boundaries.

Keywords: War poetry, postcolonial theory, affect theory, violence, emotional resistance

1. Introduction:

1.1. Background of the Study

Derek Walcott’s poetry is deeply rooted in ambivalence and divided loyalties, shaped by a

Caribbean identity entangled with colonial legacy. A. S. M. Iftekarul Azam notes that Walcott’s

work reflects a love for Caribbean culture, yet also a painful admiration for Western structures—

an emotional duality that echoes Fanon’s idea of the colonized subject who inhabits multiple,

conflicting worlds (Azam 1). In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explains how colonization

fractures identity and implants psychological conflict within the individual (Fanon 14–15).

Walcott’s A Far Cry from Africa embodies this tension, as the poet expresses both outrage at

colonial violence during the Mau Mau uprising and discomfort with the violent rebellion itself. As

Maryam Adil and colleagues argue, Walcott's poem is not merely historical but personal—a

product of inherited conflict, mixed ancestry, and cultural estrangement (Adil et al. 1). His poetry

becomes a space where the emotional cost of colonial history is exposed through a deeply divided

self.

Similarly, Wilfred Owen writes from within the imperial war machine but against its

glorifying ideologies. His poem Dulce et Decorum Est tears down the illusion of patriotic sacrifice

by revealing the raw, physical suffering of soldiers. A. Barış Ağır identifies Owen as a modern

war poet whose work breaks with the romanticism of earlier traditions, positioning his poetry as a

bold protest against nationalist propaganda (Ağır 167). While Visam Mansur critiques the elevated

style of Owen’s poem for potentially dulling its emotional impact, this paper, following Sara

Ahmed’s theory, argues that Owen’s vivid and haunting imagery intensifies the reader’s affective

engagement. According to Ahmed, emotions are not private but political—they "stick" to bodies

and narratives, shaping how people feel about violence, nationhood, and belonging (Ahmed 11).

Owen’s descriptions of a gassed soldier do not merely represent pain; they invite the reader to feel

it, transforming horror into empathy and resistance.

The emotional force in both poems operates through what Ahmed calls “affective

economies,” where feelings circulate socially and politically. Walcott’s conflicted tone and

Owen’s graphic depictions function not only as literary techniques but as tools to move readers—

to make them feel guilt, sorrow, rage, and discomfort. These emotional reactions are not accidental;

they are political. Both poets, in different historical and cultural contexts, show how violence

leaves marks not only on the body but also on memory, language, and identity. As Fanon explains,

the aftershocks of violence shape subjectivity (Fanon 18–19), and as Ahmed suggests, these

emotional traces are central to how we understand history and power (Ahmed 22). Thus, war

poetry does more than document suffering; it creates a collective space for remembering, feeling,

and resisting.

This paper argues that through the lenses of Postcolonial and Affect Theory, Wilfred

Owen’s and Derek Walcott’s poetry transforms violence into emotional and ideological rupture.

Fanon’s account of psychological colonization and Ahmed’s theory of emotional transmission

reveal how poetic form carries not only artistic expression but ethical and political weight. Owen

critiques nationalism from the battlefield; Walcott confronts the fractured identity inherited from

colonial rule. Together, they use poetry as a form of resistance—against war, empire, and the

emotional numbness that violence often brings. In doing so, their work calls upon readers not just

to understand history, but to feel its consequences and respond.

1.2. Methodology (Theoretical and Conceptual Framework):

This research adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach grounded in literary close reading

to examine how Dulce et Decorum Est and A Far Cry from Africa represent war as both personal

trauma and ideological violence. It engages Postcolonial Theory, particularly Frantz Fanon’s

critique of colonial violence and its psychological effects on both colonizers and the colonized.

Walcott’s poem is examined through Fanon’s ideas of internalized conflict and fractured identity

in the aftermath of colonial rule, especially as the poet grapples with inherited violence and ethnic

allegiances. Owen’s poem, while written from the position of a British soldier, also aligns with

anti-imperial sentiment by exposing how the ruling class manipulates nationalist emotion to justify

mass suffering.

Additionally, this study applies Affect Theory, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on how

emotions shape bodies, politics, and collective attachments. The analysis focuses on how both

poems evoke horror, guilt, and sorrow not just as literary effects but as emotional experiences that

connect readers to histories of violence. The visceral imagery of Owen’s gas attack and the

conflicted tone of Walcott’s voice illustrate how poetry functions as a sensory archive (Owen

challenges the glorification of war and patriotic deceit, whereas Walcott interrogates the inherited

violence and divided loyalties produced by colonialism) making pain visible and moral outrage

shareable. The combination of postcolonial and affective frameworks uncovers how poetry

operates not merely as a form of representation but as a mode of resistance that speaks through

feeling. Postcolonial and Affect Theory together reveal how poetry channels both historical

violence and emotional response. This dual lens helps expose how Owen and Walcott turn personal

and cultural trauma into political resistance.

1.3. Thesis Statement:

This paper argues that through Postcolonial and Affect Theory, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et

Decorum Est and Derek Walcott’s A Far Cry from Africa express violence not merely as historical

trauma but as an emotional and ideological rupture, where poetic form becomes a site for identity

construction, empathy provocation, and resistance to dominant narratives of war.

2. Analysis:

In both Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen and A Far Cry from Africa by Derek

Walcott, the poets use visceral, sensory language to evoke emotions such as horror, guilt, sorrow,

and moral outrage, transforming the poems into what Sara Ahmed calls affective economies—

where emotion circulates and binds individuals to collective histories of violence. Owen's soldiers

are described as “bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags,”

immediately displacing the romantic image of heroic warriors with that of grotesque suffering.

The line “blood-shod. All went lame; all blind” is especially striking in how it foregrounds bodily

pain, forcing the reader to confront the brutal physical cost of war. The emotional climax of the

poem occurs in the haunting image of a dying soldier: “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer,” a passage that collapses

bodily trauma into a deeply felt moral indictment. Similarly, Walcott’s depiction of colonial

violence is emotionally devastating: the phrase “white child hacked in bed” delivers a horrifying

image of innocent death, prompting immediate ethical discomfort. He juxtaposes this with the cold

rationality of imperial logic: “Statistics justify and scholars seize / The salients of colonial policy,”

exposing how intellectual distance masks emotional atrocity. In both poems, emotion does not

merely accompany meaning—it creates it. As Ahmed argues, emotions are not private states but

are shaped by history and circulate among bodies; these poems thus mobilize affect to forge

connections between readers and historical suffering. By immersing the audience in scenes of

unfiltered anguish, Owen and Walcott transform poetry into an affective archive, where pain

becomes legible, communal, and resistant to ideological sanitization.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est functions as a searing critique of imperial ideology,

dismantling the romanticized vision of war perpetuated by nationalist propaganda. The poem

culminates in a direct attack on the phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—the Latin

saying meaning “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”—which Owen famously

denounces as “the old Lie.” This final line exposes how patriotic slogans are weaponized to

manipulate emotions, particularly among the working class, who are persuaded to sacrifice their

lives in wars that ultimately serve imperial interests rather than their own. Drawing on Frantz

Fanon’s notion of ideological violence, the poem reveals how empire uses emotional rhetoric to

recruit soldiers into a system that exploits their bodies for the maintenance of colonial power. The

soldiers in the poem are not heroes but exhausted, broken men: “Men marched asleep. Many had

lost their boots, / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind.” These images strip war of

glory and depict it as meaningless suffering. The dehumanizing physical toll—“Drunk with

fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind”—suggests that imperial

warfare reduces human life to expendable material. Owen’s use of jarring realism is a form of

resistance; though he is a British soldier, his poem exposes how nationalistic fervor masks systemic

violence. Rather than glorifying battle, he shows war as a cruel mechanism that sacrifices

individual lives for abstract ideals. His critique aligns with Fanon’s view that colonial systems

preserve their power by distorting truth and demanding loyalty through emotionally charged

myths. In rejecting the “old Lie,” Owen rejects the moral legitimacy of empire itself.

In Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen presents trauma not as a distant concept but as a

brutal, physical reality inscribed on the soldier’s body, drawing the reader into an emotional

encounter with suffering. The moment of the gas attack is rendered in grotesque, sensory detail:

“Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

The soldier’s death is not quick or noble—it is slow, suffocating, and violent. Owen repeats the

words “guttering, choking, drowning,” creating a rhythmic echo of agony that haunts both the

speaker and the reader. Through Affect Theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s idea that emotions

move between bodies and become socially contagious, the soldier’s bodily trauma is transferred

to the reader as an emotional disturbance. Owen’s description—“If you could hear, at every jolt,

the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”—forces the audience to confront war

not through abstract numbers or heroic myths, but through the grotesque reality of a dying body.

This visceral imagery creates an affective archive where trauma is not merely represented but felt.

The intense bodily suffering becomes an ethical appeal: by exposing the horrifying truth of

warfare, Owen resists its glorification. He compels readers to reckon with the emotional and moral

cost of violence, thereby transforming private pain into a collective political statement. The poem’s

power lies not in argument, but in emotional transmission—pain becomes protest.

In A Far Cry from Africa, Derek Walcott gives voice to the fractured identity of the

postcolonial subject, caught between inherited colonial culture and indigenous ancestry. This

ambivalence is most powerfully expressed in the line: “I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” Here, Walcott captures the psychological conflict

described by Frantz Fanon—what Fanon terms the “split consciousness” of the colonized, where

the self is torn between admiration for the colonizer’s culture and loyalty to native heritage.

Walcott's inability to “choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love” reveals how

deeply colonial violence operates, not only through physical domination but through internal

division and identity dislocation. The colonial language that shaped his artistic voice is the same

one used to subjugate his people. This inner contradiction reflects what Fanon saw as the colonized

individual’s trauma: to speak and write in the colonizer’s tongue is to risk cultural betrayal, yet to

reject it is to abandon one’s tools of expression. Walcott’s anguish—“How can I face such

slaughter and be cool? / How can I turn from Africa and live?”—is not just personal, but symbolic

of the wider crisis faced by postcolonial nations struggling to reconcile violent histories with

fragmented modern identities. His poetry embodies this ambivalence, not resolving it, but exposing

it as a wound that cannot be easily healed.

Walcott’s A Far Cry from Africa critiques not only the violence inflicted by colonial

powers but also the violent responses it provokes among the colonized. He presents the Mau Mau

uprising and British repression as a tragic cycle, where brutality begets brutality. The symbolic

image, “the gorilla wrestles with the superman,” exposes colonial racial narratives—where the

colonized African is animalized as the “gorilla” and the colonizer idealized as the Nietzschean

“superman.” This juxtaposition reduces complex human struggles to a primitive conflict, revealing

how colonial discourse dehumanizes both sides. Yet Walcott does not idealize either. He calls it

“a waste of our compassion, as with Spain,” suggesting the repetitive futility of such violence.

This confrontation between native rebellion and imperial force leads to a deeper crisis: war not

only destroys bodies but also reshapes cultural and emotional identity. The poet, poisoned by “the

blood of both,” becomes a figure of inherited violence—carrying within him both the legacy of

colonial domination and the trauma of native resistance. This dual inheritance creates a profound

moral and emotional disorientation. War, in Walcott’s vision, is not confined to the battlefield—it

infiltrates the psyche, divides the self, and leaves scars that define what it means to belong or

betray. Through his conflicted voice, the poem questions whether identity can remain whole in the

aftermath of such historical violence.

In both Dulce et Decorum Est and A Far Cry from Africa, poetic form—through tone,

imagery, and structure—functions not merely as a means of representation but as an active mode

of resistance. Owen’s irregular meter and jarring line breaks mirror the chaos of the battlefield,

while his shift from past narrative to second-person address (“My friend, you would not tell with

such high zest...”) forces the reader into complicity, challenging them to confront the "old Lie" of

patriotic sacrifice. The visceral imagery— “guttering, choking, drowning” and “froth-corrupted

lungs”—transforms the poem into a sensory and moral indictment against glorified war. Similarly,

Walcott’s formal choices—his conflicted tone, his shifting imagery from natural beauty to human

carnage—underscore emotional rupture and ideological betrayal. The Edenic image of

“corpses...scattered through a paradise” collapses the idealism of colonial civilization into horror,

while the poet’s internal cry— “How can I turn from Africa and live?”—underscores the personal

cost of inherited conflict. Both poets resist dominant narratives: Owen dismantles nationalist

propaganda from within, while Walcott exposes the postcolonial self as split by loyalty and

language. In doing so, they do not merely recount the devastation of war—they make the reader

feel its emotional and ethical burden. Their poetry demands not distant reflection but engaged

response, making readers bear witness to violence as a shared, enduring legacy.

3. Conclusion:

In examining Dulce et Decorum Est and A Far Cry from Africa through the lenses of

Postcolonial and Affect Theory, it becomes clear that both Owen and Walcott use poetry as a

powerful medium to resist dominant ideologies and communicate the emotional realities of war.

Through visceral imagery, fragmented form, and emotionally charged language, Owen transforms

the physical suffering of soldiers into a critique of imperial nationalism, while Walcott’s conflicted

tone and symbolic representations of violence expose the psychological and cultural fractures

produced by colonial histories. Their poems function as affective archives, allowing readers not

just to comprehend, but to feel the horrors, betrayals, and traumas of warfare and colonization. By

embodying emotional intensity and ideological critique within poetic form, both poets resist the

glorification of violence and challenge their audiences to recognize war not as heroic, but as deeply

destructive to both body and identity. Ultimately, their works reveal how poetry can become a

space for ethical reflection, collective memory, and emotional resistance across temporal and

cultural boundarie.