The Employment of Mythology as a Means of Empowerment in Selected Poems by Yeats, Dunqul and Lorde: An Intertextual Reading

The deployment of mythology is a form of returning to the roots in order to be empowered and gain a voice in times of crises. As the result of experiencing analogous oppressive power over W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Amal Dunqul (1940-1983) and Audry Lorde (1934-1992), they employed mythology to fight against oppression. W. B. Yeats, an Anglo-Irish poet, dedicated his early poems to the revival of Irish mythology in an attempt to maintain the Irish culture and heritage. In his poem “Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland”, his fictional folkloric figure Hanrahan sings a patriotic song to Ireland reciting the great Celtic mythical figures, who are deeply rooted in the minds of Irish people. Similarly, Amal Dunqul, an Egyptian poet, incorporated the Arabic mythology of Zarqa Al-Yamamah to convey the sense of loss after the 1967 Defeat. He criticized the deterioration in Egypt and Arab countries in the 1960s by drawing parallelism between the Egyptian society and the tribe of Yamamah. Comparably, Audre Lorde, an African American poet and a feminist, implemented African mythology to resist racism and sexism. In her poem “From the House of Yemanja,” she alluded to Yemanja, who is a Yoruban deity. This paper presents an intertextual reading of the selected poems written by Yeats, Dunqul, and Lorde. Intertextuality is a term coined by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. The intertextual reading explores the socio-political context, which is an integral axis in intertextuality and the allusion to myths evident in the poems.