On Being and Remembering
Stories Our Grandparents Told Us
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lenora Hayes, Eugenie Almeida
This is a research project conducted using critical discourse analysis to study themes and patterns of discourse in African American and Hispanic American student essays about stories they were told by their family. We found that nine themes characterized African American student essays. There was some overlap between African American and Hispanic American discourse about stories they were told by their family but there were major differences between African American student discourse and Hispanic American student discourse about stories they were told by their family.
"Journey to Love": William Carlos Williams’s Introspective Journey and His Testament to the Sacredness in the "Thisness" of Life
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gail Shanley Corso
The collection, "Journey To Love," dedicated to William Carlos Williams’s wife, Flossie, was written after he suffered debilitating effects of serious health issues. As the now elderly, disabled writer, Williams creates these sixteen poems, characterized by a shifting point of view, and his quizzically yet honest voice about the sacredness in details of everyday life. The older Williams affirms truth in his recall of images that in their “thisness” memory keeps alive. From the initial image of the lone Negro woman clasping her newspaper- wrapped bouquet of marigolds “as a torch,” Williams imagines her walking through the early morning streets, an alternative image of Lady Liberty. She represents otherness, difference, not just a woman walking the streets alone, but rather, a streetwalker. This image reflects a bit of the times, an image of survival, an image of one breaking out of the norms of social acceptability; the simple marigolds she holds symbolize sexuality. The older Williams discovers truth in such an image as he reminisces upon images in his memories. These peak memories paradoxically maintain a vitality of their own, for as he writes, “Memory/ is liver than sight.” Each of these sixteen poems reflects Williams’ interiority as husband, son, and poet, “This was I,/a sparrow./I did my best;/farewell.” The sacredness in the ordinary, in the "thisness" of those images of life that he witnessed, in the "thisness" of his own life is revealed as Williams identifies with that lone sparrow, both an ordinary or common bird now separated from the community of other sparrows, yet one that in Christian beliefs symbolizes the hope for God’s care, concern, and perhaps, forgiveness. Several intense poems integrate the personal pronoun, “I” and the collective “we” showing his double consciousness about his body, soul, and mind—his disabilities, his limitations as a poet, his life as a husband, his life as the “pink locust.” In yet another poem, the persona of a female reflects on male female relationships and hopes that in a furious storm she and her husband can stick it out together, as “so solidly had our house been built.” She wishes this image to “the final fury,” or as the reader might understand the wish, “till death do us part.” He portrays the wife as the image of fidelity. Through this collection of poems, Williams reveals his beliefs that in earlier poems affirm life with its beauty in love, loss, and grief, and presence of grace and dignity in ordinary details, and perhaps in broken places. In his role as a physician, witnessing the birth of over 3000 humans, he affirms the beauty of the birthing process —“ They enter the new world naked,/cold, uncertain of all/ save that they enter. All about them/ the cold familiar wind... But now the stark dignity of/entrance ….” Williams asserts, how “they [we]/ grip down and begin to awaken” (Spring and All). …. Through his poetry, Williams affirms this “stark dignity” this beauty of life in the ordinary, often stark details of our being.
Cillini : The Children's Burial Grounds of Ireland
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Duffy
The Cillini spread across rural Ireland, dotted along margins in the corners of fields and the interiors of circular fairy forts, each of its rocks a marker, each stone a grave. The Cillini take up root as traumatic sites of oppressive religious practices. They are the sites of unconsecrated burials, of suicides, and mainly of unbaptised infants. Based to the concept of Original Sin in Catholic doctrine as construed by Augustine of Hippo, unbaptised children were banned from consecrated ground. They were assigned to wander in perpetual purgatory, taken from their mothers at the dead of night and hidden from sight. The fairy fort offered a ring of protection, of curses to keep out intruders and destructive farming practices and the potential for a different afterlife to keep these children safe. My current film and visual material with Cillini as subject matter will be discussed in this paper. Harrowing spaces are explored using drones to create an emotive sense of place, an eerie encounter between worlds, the contemporary and the ancient, the world of the living and the world of limbo, of fairy lore and tragedy in a landscape embedded with sorrow. Whilst these sites were intended to foster exclusion, trauma and being forgotten, my work Is to aid in remembrance. In evoking new memory spaces, there are opportunities for stigma to be removed and communities to be able to grieve and begin the process of healing, free from the constraints of doctrine.
