Palimpsest

FinsburyParkCarrots

It's for people whose histories and identities have been lost as their past was rewritten by colonial and imperial discourses. A palimpsest is a manuscript where a textual revision is written, say in pen, over an original version in pencil, partially obliterating it.


We are seen as absence, as a clear
void behind your telling of our tale,
but under all your words we bear
a history, a name. We'll blood the pale
words in which our othering is made.
We'll speak, Your histories are silencings:
you would the Empire's palimpsests would fade
the markings of our past imaginings.
Our past is still inscribed there. There's a Self
for us, a presence and a cipher in the light
dentings of your page. We'll feel their clear
patternings, imagining what might
reveal a way to make a past appear
behind the penned smotherings of long
cries, and we'll reshape them into song.

FinsburyParkCarrots

There's a mis-scansion in line three. The line now reads,

"but hidden underneath your words we bear"

Thanks.

grooveamatic

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

We are seen as absence, as a clear
void behind your telling of our tale,
but under all your words we bear
a history, a name. We'll blood the pale
words in which our othering is made.
We'll speak, Your histories are silencings:
you would the Empire's palimpsests would fade
the markings of our past imaginings.
Our past is still inscribed there. There's a Self
for us, a presence and a cipher in the light
dentings of your page. We'll feel their clear
patternings, imagining what might
reveal a way to make a past appear
behind the penned smotherings of long
cries, and we'll reshape them into song.

you've got some terribly original language usage here, quite exciting. 'blood the pale words'...blood as a verb.

'our othering is made'...the mind stretches for the image and is rewarded.

'the light dentings of your page'...that's just neat.

'penned smotherings'...my mind is now filled with a frantic series of vivid images that usefully compliment the content of your poem...form and function are in perfect swing.

kudos.

FinsburyParkCarrots

grooveamatic wrote:

you've got some terribly original language usage here, quite exciting. 'blood the pale words'...blood as a verb.

'our othering is made'...the mind stretches for the image and is rewarded.

'the light dentings of your page'...that's just neat.

'penned smotherings'...my mind is now filled with a frantic series of vivid images that usefully compliment the content of your poem...form and function are in perfect swing.

kudos.

Thanks, Groovy. Yes, I was thinking about ways in which colonial histories silence or "other" (verb) colonised peoples. And if colonial histories are palimpsests, obscuring pre-colonial histories obliterated by the colonial necessity to silence oppressed cultures, I thought maybe we could rediscover these lost histories by feel of history's page rather than by the distorted "lock" of history's narrative.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Er, "look", not "lock".

grooveamatic

what mean you by "the feel of histories page"?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Um, I think that it's very difficult for post-colonised people to re-discover their lost histories. There's often a fissure between the present and that notion of an original pre-colonial history that is all but eradicated by colonialism. For example, it's difficult for an Ibo Nigerian to "see" the actual point of view of his or her ancestors the nineteenth century when reading a racist colonial European account of the "suppression of savage custom" in the area. Like Gloucester in Shakespeare's "King Lear" the post-colonial writer must see the past feelingly. He or she must use creative imagination to touch the dents that worry the smooth impression of a Eurocentric view of the colonies. He or she must re-imagine through art and literature a politically committed recreation of a pre-colonial past. To feel the text of history with imagination is to find an imagined community and tradition in which to locate a post-Othered, empowered post-colonial selfhood.

As the descendant of Irish diaspora, I note this process of pre-colonial, Self empowering imaginings - feeling the texts of history - in the Celtic explorations of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and Joyce. The wrote at a time of a forging in the smithy of the Irish literary consciousness the soon-to-be created consciousness of a race.

grooveamatic

While this "imagining" of the past may be important and somewhat necessary (given the existing histories that are biased and ethno-centric) can't it be somewhat dangerous to marginally fictionalize the past? What if--simply put--you've got it wrong?

Of course, I'd imagine you come closer to some truths that way than by reading colonial history books. I'm just playing devil's advocate, really.

FinsburyParkCarrots

grooveamatic wrote:

While this "imagining" of the past may be important and somewhat necessary (given the existing histories that are biased and ethno-centric) can't it be somewhat dangerous to marginally fictionalize the past? What if--simply put--you've got it wrong?

Of course, I'd imagine you come closer to some truths that way than by reading colonial history books. I'm just playing devil's advocate, really.

This is a great argument. But does it matter except for "archaeological" value if you mis-imagine a forgotten history as long as it bolsters a sense of anti-imperial, cultural self awareness? This is perhaps what happened when Lady Gregory was writing about the mythical Irish warrior chieftain Cuchulainn: she was rewriting him in the image of what she saw as a valiant new Anglo-Irish Ascendancy throwing off the shackles of British rule in the hope of being the cultural inheritors of an imagined aristocratic literary and cultural identity. Was this dangerous? Well, without the Irish Literary Revival, Easter 1916 and the Irish War of Independence might not have happened.

Catch you later. Thanks for reading and chatting. I enjoy it.

grooveamatic

see you later, Finns.

perhaps you convinced me...although i am going to think about this more...

ruby

I sort of 'feel' history through songs...you know the old songs passed down for generations. You know when you hear something and it covers you in a blanket of goosebumps and you understand and 'know' it though you really couldn't know it all as you were never there at it's inception? I've come to believe that all that history and learning and experience gets passed down through one's blood. I know it sounds silly...I think it's part of knowing and accepting one's self. I think history is so alive it's impossible not to feel the living breathing people who created it.

shiftlesslayabout

I agree that 'blood the pale words' is just about fantastic.

coleen

you have outdone yourself on this one mr fins.

i'll be looking for a job in a little over a week....maybe i'll be reading the poetry forum like it's my job this way i can keep up with you and all the other amazing new talent around here.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Good luck with the job situation, Coleen.

I'm starting to like this denial of editing because people can see and talk about the process of composition and propose revisions to work as they evolve. It can't be healthy for bandwidth, but for art it might be useful. Anyway, here's a tweaked version of "Palimpsest".

We are seen as absence, as a clear
void behind your telling of our tale,
but hidden underneath your words we bear
a history, a name. We'll blood the pale
words in which our othering is made.
We'll speak, Your histories are silencings:
you would the Empire's palimpsests would fade
the markings of our past imaginings.
Our birth's inscribed there, yet. There's a Self
for us, a present cipher in the light
dentings of your page. We'll feel its clear
patternings, imagining what might
reveal a way to make a past appear
behind the penned smotherings of long
cries, and we'll reshape it into song.

FinsburyParkCarrots

ruby wrote:

I sort of 'feel' history through songs...you know the old songs passed down for generations. You know when you hear something and it covers you in a blanket of goosebumps and you understand and 'know' it though you really couldn't know it all as you were never there at it's inception? I've come to believe that all that history and learning and experience gets passed down through one's blood. I know it sounds silly...I think it's part of knowing and accepting one's self. I think history is so alive it's impossible not to feel the living breathing people who created it.

Yes, TS Eliot described language that triggers a Jungian race consciousness as the auditory unconscious. He also said that language can communicate before it is understood.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Hang on, he actually said, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

FinsburyParkCarrots

charles wrote:

father without roots
child without destiny
Africa
- - - - - - - - - - - -

live consuming myths
and blood
the price for a flag
- - - - - -- - - - - -

Um, Edward Said distinguished two stages of anti imperialist struggle, the nationalist and the "psychological". In the first stage, the bourgeois elite clamours to replace the colonial Nation with a disjointed mirror of itself, the Independent Nation State with its flags and its inevitable bloodshed. The problem with nationalistic post-imperialism is that it has not tried to escape the ideological state apparatuses of the colonial model of a civilised state infrastructure that affects everything from education to art to the media. Thus, the new ruling classes are still exploitative and prone to corruption and dissent.
In the second stage, Said argues that the decolonised state will abandon nationalist myth building (though still using innovations of the lived ideology of the nation such as road and railway networks, and drainage systems).

FinsburyParkCarrots

Oh, and it will perceive the state psychologically outside of the model of the nation.

ISN

palimpsest is one of my favourite words.....

I just thought I might mention that 'the pale' has particular significance for the Irish as it referred to Dublin during the occupation.....by the English

grooveamatic

ISN wrote:

palimpsest is one of my favourite words.....

I just thought I might mention that 'the pale' has particular significance for the Irish as it referred to Dublin during the occupation.....by the English

I myself was unfamiliar with the word Palimpsest before Finssy's poems here...but I have absolutely fallen in love with the word now...phonentically it's amazing....

grooveamatic

....of course I mean 'poem'--singular.

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

palimpsest is one of my favourite words.....

I just thought I might mention that 'the pale' has particular significance for the Irish as it referred to Dublin during the occupation.....by the English

Yep. You caught the reference.

Ms. Haiku

charles wrote:

father without roots
child without destiny
Africa
- - - - - - - - - - - -

live consuming myths
and blood
the price for a flag
- - - - - -- - - - - -

Italians were picked on at the turn of the twentieth century in middle America. For this reason my grandparents did not speak Italian at home. They thought it would be easier to be accepted if they forgot where they came from. In fact, my dad was picked on because of his last name when he was growing up. I do not speak Italian and it's sad to me that I didn't learn it at home. My dad should have been fluent. His parents were born in Italy.

tabula rosa
with an official stamp
instead of a signature

Ali

Isn't it true that all immigrants were picked on during the turn of the century..especially by the..how do I say...street gangs withing the underworld..which was prevalent during that time period into the late 20's?
just wondering the stats...

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ali wrote:

Isn't it true that all immigrants were picked on during the turn of the century..especially by the..how do I say...street gangs withing the underworld..which was prevalent during that time period into the late 20's?
just wondering the stats...

Bibliobella will be able to tell you about the treatment of Italian immigrants in the US at the start of the 20th century.

Certainly here in the UK a lot of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe get dragged into drugs, prostitution, tax-fiddling (and sometimes fatally hazardous) cheap labour and organised crime, in order to survive outside of detention centres.

Ali

Very Interesting.Kinda like the same here.One can never tell,however, why a person turns to a life of crime.

dyaogirl

I feel the heavy weight of a pen
obliterating destinies yet unborn
calling ancestors silenced
to be heard once again.

Palimpsest begs us to question our own identity in relation to that of our current culture. How do we honor and discover the truths of our past while incorporating them into our current socio-political structures? We struggle with learning the language, customs, and traditions of our immigrant forefathers and having them accepted as cultural norms. Migrant traditions shouldn’t be hidden in a dark closet; we should never be ashamed of where we came from. It seems tragic that cultural roots are ridiculed and suppressed as the Other in order for people in power to further dominant ideologies. Tolerance is preached but its seeds fall on barren land. It is not only important for us to recognize otherness in ourselves and others but to embrace it, bring it out of the closet and celebrate it as it enriches all our lives.

How do we authentically pay tribute our cultural roots while incorporating them into our current national mindsets? Can we without reinforcing dominant, repressive constructions of our Otherness? I think so, but it takes all of our faculties; history, literature, art, science, education and a willingness to want to integrate these disciplines into a greater understand of our multi-dimensional cultural identity.

Thank you for your brilliance once again Finsbury and truly making us think.

FinsburyParkCarrots

You too.

Thanks everyone for responses to this thread.

Ms. Haiku

charles wrote:

thief
left nothing but
a blank slate

immigration officials
shortened the last name
generations