“Would Be a Lonesome Old Sail Without a Song”: Popular Music in Postcolonial Literature

The French Canadian critic François Paré thinks that songs are a huge agent of cultural development, and affirms that minority cultures give the lyrics of classic pop songs, folksongs and popular songs an immediate literary value. In this essay I try to verify how English postcolonial writers use folk and/or singer-songwriters' songs in their works, both as themes and at a linguistic and structural level. Starting from Leonard Cohen, whose career as a singer and songwriter is forecasted in his autobiographical novel The Favourite Game, I take into account such novels as The Ground Beneath her Feet by Salman Rushdie and The Commitments by Roddy Doyle, whose protagonists are rock musicians. Yet, the core of my essay are those literary works where songs are so intertwined with fiction that they become part of it, such as Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan, The Nanny and the Iceberg by Ariel Dorfman, Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje and Ghost Light, by Joseph O’ Connor.