1. If you know the poem Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, comment on how Almallah's poem homages and repurposes it.
2. Write a close-reading of the last part (part 6 of the poem)
3. Discuss the poem in comparison with other texts read in class and taking into account Mary Louise Pratt's concept of "contact zones".
2. The 6th part of the poem has a third-person subject, contrasting directly with the fifth part, which is an I.
ReplyDeleteIt speaks of a Phelbas, a character from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland", which I won't be covering in this comment, the interesting part is the fact that he is portrayed as "really the Palestinian" a direct comparison between the character and the notion of what it means to be Palestinian, related nevertheless with segregation, suffering and displacement. The text has very few adjectives; I counted 5 in total. It is a very graphical part. Every sentence has one or even two verbs, agentive ones (slip, count, think, pass, click, swipe). It is very compact, short sentences; the subject doesn't drift from He until later in the verses.
"Ge counted his bones every night / his teeth too". This verse can have many meanings. I interpreted it as a sign of malnutrition, as one who gets too skinny can count the bones in one’s body. It could also mean, especially the teeth part, that he was counting valuable items, as teeth are often sold in exchange for other goods in these war sites.
The sea is portrayed as an escape from the suffering, a “death by water” would certainly be more wishful then by the tracks of an army tank, it is nonetheless a fresh site for these Phelbas who feels it as a threshold between the “burning sands” (a reference to hell) and the body of water which allows oneself to escape from the walls of the desert. Alas, arriving at the sea, we understand that it gives no quick death, nor a relief from death itself.
The last section of this part is directed to us, Europeans; the shift of the subject from He to You implies a certain accusation. It calls on us, who watch these massacres of Palestinians via the screen of the smartphone or some TV news channel to ask for sympathy, for compassion, to alert that in the past, Palestinians were also handsome and peaceful as we, Europeans, are now.
Almallah's poem clearly dialogues in a stylistic way with Elliot's poem "The Waste Land". We see this through the employment of not only back and forth between both texts, where they seem to dialogue, for example with the opening line in "The Waste Land" - "April is the cruelest month" and Almallah's reply "April is not that bad actually", but we also see a common use of fragmentation and rapid shifts in voice between both texts, like with the relationship discussed in "The Waste Land" in the paragraph "A game of chess" and in the rapid dialogue of part 3 with Safiyya. We also see the use of repurposing, Almallah uses countless references from "The Waste Land" in his poem like evoking the Hofgarten or "The son of man" and most promently Phlebas, and whilst doing so giving them new meaning. We see this as he argues Phlebas is a real Palestinian, using Phlebas as a way to criticize current days events contrasting its use in "Death by water". Instead of talking about Phlebas as a marker of the inevitability of death, time and worldly success like Elliot, Almallah constrats him to the Palestinian people and their sufferings by alluding to malnourishment, as we see its with the verse "He counted his bones every night", and to the wishes of death by water, conjuring a notion that the water symbolized freedom and escape from the burning sands which could be argued represents suffering. We also see this repurposing in "The game of chess", where although Elliot alludes the board game as a way to express the typist's mundane routine of knowing and expecting every situation "And if it rains, a closed car at four". Almallah utilizes "The game of chess" to express the current geopolitical situation, where world leaders wage war through their troops "Where do they find pawns to sacrifice themselves" as they stay safe within their own countries "while kings and queens huddle backstage, twirling their fingers".
ReplyDelete