Navigating Understanding
Self (Dis)placement in Mahmoud Darwish’s Tibaq - A Contrapuntal Reading on Edward Said: Understanding Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Esmael
Mahmoud Darwish’s Tibaq demonstrates how the self, in becoming an object of its own examination, can decode itself and reach a new understanding of its identity. The poem is an imaginary conversation between Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said that is purported to have taken place in Said’s last years. Both writers share a passion towards writing, the Palestinian diaspora and the exilic spirit of a perplexed identity that is in search of its origin. The poem, unlike Darwish’s earlier texts, discusses the issue of language and its relation to identity formation. Said is lost in translation in Darwish’s poem. Said’s dilemma stems from being bilingual yet being unable to use both languages fluently. The contrapuntal reading of the poem not only focuses on the linguistic dilemma that Darwish highlights but also reveals the dual alienation of Darwish and Said. In this poem, Darwish alienates Said, making him a prototype of the Palestinian-Americans who are lost in translation. The formation of the self in this poem seems to be a process that comes before language and binds the two together in a common heritage, even if the political framework is lacking. The issue of self-formation underlies linguistic identity and argues for the connection between the two. The analysis of this poem shows how Darwish and Said attempt to reach another level of community through contrapuntalism, not on the linguistic level alone but on geographical and historical levels as well.
The Landscapes of Disability Knowledge
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vivian Delchamps
This paper explores the diverse spaces in which disability literatures and knowledges are produced. The environments are often soft (beds, couches), warm (bathtubs, pools), fragrant (verandas, kitchens), and natural (forests, oceans). These spaces are described in loving detail in historical literary texts such as Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and are also ever-present in the writings of modern-day scholars of literary disability studies and chronic pain including Mel Y. Chen, Travis Chi Wing Lau, and Michael Snediker. Such landscapes teach us to better understand how the needs of ill and disabled people shape the production of knowledge and transform broad social views regarding pain and ableist discrimination. This essay will ultimately argue that prioritizing comfort and safety over capitalist productivity empowers diverse contributions to the ways humans understand language and life within an ableist society. The landscapes of disability knowledge prompt new appreciation for the natural as well as human-made spaces that allow bodies and minds to simultaneously rest and create.
How Poetry Allows the Trauma of Child Abuse to Speak View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shelly Beamish
This research explores how the affordances and constraints of the poetic form partner with the nonverbal memories of child abuse survivors to articulate previously unarticulated suffering. The objective of this research was to discover how poetry facilitates the telling of this unspoken trauma. This research contributes to literary trauma theory and to understanding confessional poetry as a particular form of trauma expression. The practice-led research methodology involved the researcher writing poetry about her experiences of child abuse, refining, and editing the writing for poetic excellence, and then analysing and identifying the poetic techniques that allowed her to access previously inarticulate trauma. With the support of a psychologist, the researcher followed poetry’s lead, writing about the past according to the affordances and constraints of the poetic form. What she discovered is that engaging in a dialogue with poetry equips the child abuse survivor to access hidden and unspoken trauma stored in nonverbal parts of the body. The poetic forms of repetition, metaphor, defamiliarisation, the uncanny, and the double empower a survivor to engage in a journey of understanding and representation. Poetry, as a form that mirrors trauma memory, facilitates the transformation of an unspoken past, restoring agency to the survivor.
