How to Do Something in One Way

 Last year I visited Rachel Hadas's lit class at Rutgers and read them some of my poems. At the end of their semester the students wrote about a poem that made an impression on them. I'm so pleased that two people wrote about "A Whole History," a gay breakup poem, and one wrote about "Attribution," about the time at Oxford when I was caught for plagiarism.

The piece on "Attribution" was particularly perceptive, eloquent, and moving about the aftermath of colonialism. The student wrote, "The concept of this poem was one which I personally could relate to, having lived in South Africa for 4 years and also being from Zimbabwe which was a country that was colonized by the British between 1888 through 1980, I found out Jee and I have similar backgrounds in that aspect. I think when you've experienced living in the aftermath of colonialism even when in modern times you cannot forget about its existence because the residue still lingers to this day. The poem made us explore and ask ourselves, who are we really? Who would we be if we had not been told how to be or how to speak. Everything we do is an attribution to the people who were here before us and language has been passed down to us but it is never thought of that way and Jee sparks that conversation in his poem. Interestingly enough, we never think to question what has been taught from generation to generation. We just assume it's the right way. We are binded (blinded) by the imprint of colonialism no matter if we were born today or born a hundred years ago.... As I read the poem, I was intrigued by how the same thing 'being good in English' which positively affected his life in his home country and catapulted him to England, became the same thing 'being good in English' which negatively affected him when he relocated to England. Transitions such as this I have found can put a person's identity into question. A sense of identity can be stripped away, having known how to do something in one way your entire life only to be told it's the wrong way."

I love how the writer defines identity, not as a kind of essence, but as the knowledge of how to do something in one way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more