Western imposed divisions, wars, and occupations are described by their effects on the land and on the speakers' psyches in all of the poems read for this week. From the flights of imagination and of location in Darwish's poem of diaspora, to Saadi's speaker's direct address to America, each poet mourns and forms the inarticulable loss of their connection to place.
In Duật's poem, the people in Giang Vo's Labor Market are literally of the land, "You are the dark earth." They carry scars from the American war and the French occupation. But, unlike the earth, they are conscious of the war's devastation on their geography, their health, and history. With the pressure of industrialization comes "new kinds of clouds," I think of smokestacks rising up from factories, polluting the air and offering a "new line of workers" who struggle daily with hunger and poverty in order to survive this post-war environment. Trauma is passed on to this "new life," quiet and omnipresent, humming behind the "look of quiet resolve."
Saadi also investigates the relationships between warfare and language, how the two work with and against one another. In the first stanza we have a few examples of this reciprocal mode: The French general calls the notorious prison of Nugrat al-Salman a "fort," "Liberation was better versed in topography," and the neutron bomb "distinguishes between / an 'I' and an 'Identity' (197)". The speaker echoes the blues form and brings it into his own form.
Saadi, in his readings, actually sings the blues sections. His blues are operating on a couple different levels in this work. On one level they are used to sing the depths of sorrow citizens of Iraq hold as a result of Saddam Hussein's regime and the U.S. war in Iraq. They also work as a way to break/experiment with convention. Saadi fuses the American blues colloquial lyric structure with Iraqi free verse to portray American influences on Iraqi culture. Saadi is both deeply critical of this influence and also views it as a complicated gift. In a similar move he asks: "Take the books of your missionaries / and give us paper for poems to defame you" (199). In his blues he alludes to Gilgamesh: "We are not hostages, America... / We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of drowned gods, / the gods of bulls / the gods of fires, / the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song". It is in this song--the fusion of African diaspora folk tradition and Iraqi folksong--Saadi can hold the mythic, the present, and the liminal.
Specific place names, the names and allusions to myth, the incorporation of different traditions into a single work--these devices are what help each of the poets we read for this week to write about their specific experience of history and space. In all the works there is a deep melancholy, death overwhelms with its closeness.
I'm always impressed and educated by your reiteration of a weekly assignment Avren. Your perception is acute and informed on levels that reveal a new view to me. Both Duật and Youssef (Saadi) made the biggest impression on me as well. Your seeing smokestacks into Duật's sky brought an entirely new understanding versus the esoteric one I was peering into. I'm equally pleased with your elucidation of the blues in Youssef's "America, America." This part of the poem felt like transportation to me, like moving the reader through the poem that addresses so many things American-specific. To align it to the blues inflicted on Iraqis by the U.S. helped to bring this poem I favored to even more sense, settling even more comfortably in my understanding of it.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your post(s) so much, it adds to how I reread and navigate poems. Particularly, I related to Duật's poem so much but had wondered whether I was envisioning the same specifics alluded to, or bringing too much of my own context. But you helped me get out of that thinking, think through what it made me imagine and relate too. We share similar first thoughts of industrialization, and the choice of words and overall language are what makes this piece so unique to me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your insights on Saadi as well. I interpreted the use of the Blues similarly but you laid it out in a way that informs my opinion further. This use of the Blues as the melancholic rebellious language that counters the traditional classical poetry!
Avren,
ReplyDeletePoets become referential to where the wounds are--whether on their own psyche or in their countries. I think this is where your points lead to in this blog and about both poets, whose work define the moments during and after occupation and invasion. What i appreciate about Youssef, is he riffed American music in his poems, long before it was a thing. He found the contradictions between the music and the manner.
Nicely done
e