Re-Reading of Agency and Eroticism in Senghor’s ‘Be Not Amazed’ and ‘Totem’

Abstract

This paper is a critical re-reading of agency and eroticism in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s influential poems, ‘Be Not Amazed’ and ‘Totem’. Historically, Senghor’s Negritude poetry has been critiqued for priotizing African identity and romanticizing the black female form as a submissive emblem of motherland. Nevertheless, this paper looks at the complex interface of self-determination and longing. Therefore, the critical reduction of Senghorian eroticism to a simple aesthetic nostalgia presents the gap addressed by the researcher in this paper. This exposes the obscurity of poetic role of being an active struggle and psychological reclamation. It is, consequently, rooted on a theoretical framework of Negritude aesthetics integrated with postcolonial feminist theory, demonstrating that eroticism serves not as a passive retreat, but as a dynamic exercise of agency. Uncovered through an analysis of the thematic and structural signficance of both poems, the paper investigates how Senghor uses sensual imagery to reconstruct Afrocentric prejudice. On the whole, this paper attains a basic purpose of reframing Senghor’s poetic eroticism as a fundamental, decolonial device. It exposes the poet’s subversion of common notions of submissive stereotypes and the sensual landscapes associated with Senghor’s poetic corpus, especially poems ‘Be Not Amazed’ and ‘Totem’. This paper confirms the prevalence of the complex, self-actualising African perception that dynamically contradicts colonial objectification in order to salvage both physical and cultural self-sufficiency.