A Republican Poet in the White Queen's Africa: Reading Harrison's “The Railroad Heroides”

Tony Harrison's “African poems” appear in the major poem sequence “The White Queen”, from The Loiners (1970), and are set in a range of historical periods and locations in West Africa. The poems in the sequence stand alone but are also thematically interrelated, addressing in different ways the colonial confrontation between Europe and Africa. In “The Railroad Heroides”, the second poem in the “The White Queen” sequence, the suicidal White Queen is holidaying in the Canary Islands, a Spanish colonial possession off the West African coast, and observing the relationships between a local African underclass and French soldiers on leave from Gabon, a former French colony in West Africa. My account examines the poem's activation of French and Spanish colonial histories in West Africa, and explores its political implications and its topical polemical circumstances. It registers correspondences between the rhetorical dimensions of the poem and contemporary political events and movements. Where critics have engaged with Harrison's politics, it is his class political analysis that has dominated the discussion, while his republican and humanist concern with colonialism remains under-appreciated. “The Railroad Heroides” is here discussed as a very fine example of a radical republican and anti-colonial poetic.