by Ren Powell
I have always found it difficult to locate a comfortable place to position myself between respect and reverence when it comes to the “other.”
Surely it is a flaw in my character that I am not capable of honest reverence for anything created by human culture. But maybe it is a flaw in the character of all poets, the ability to empathize so often stretched to “identifying” with all the things we will never be: a horse, a tree, a cheese-grater … a Chinese miner. I doubt I am speaking only for myself when I talk of the poet’s (necessarily) narcissistic nature: We take on the voice that fascinates us, we work hard to find and express the “truth” we perceive within that voice, and we do the best we can.
I generally have no problem with this conceit. Which is not to say that it hasn’t caused problems for me.
This spring I attended a conference on “the other” in literature and spoke about my work with the Arab qasida, a pre-literate, pre-Islamic poetry form. I prefaced the talk by admitting I found the Arab language difficult to understand — even on the level of recognizing and reproducing “simple” sounds. My research was based on translations, the most responsible scholarship in the English language that I could find, and on interviews with Arab writers I know and respect.
The talk itself was about the narrative structure of the poem, the various literary devices that characterize it, why I was drawn to it, and what I (as a contemporary woman poet) felt was necessary to adapt when using the form as a model to express my own experience. When I finished and opened the floor for questions, one woman raised her hand and described my attitude as Orientalism*, which is one of the worst things anyone has ever said to me.
I didn’t handle the accusation gracefully. Reaching for a defense, I rattled and ranted about everything from theories regarding brain development in 2 year olds to toothpaste commercials. But there is no defense. I do not read Arabic and therefore have no primary sources. I have been inspired by the qasida through a degree (or two) of separation. And there is no denying that I speak from a position of social privilege in that I am a living and breathing white American graduate student.
So what does this mean? Must I spend the next decade studying classical Arabic well enough to read the 6th century poems before I can attempt to write a poem with the same formal structure and call it an American qasida? I have spent 17 years learning Norwegian and can tell you now with certainty that I could study Arabic for 30 years and would still not be able to completely appreciate the musicality or symbolism in the texts. Besides, when it comes to artistic appreciation, I believe that were I to thoroughly understand the “other” on his own terms — well, there would be no “intercultural” dialogue because I would have had to surrender the aesthetics governed by my own culture (and gender) in favor of the other. That isn’t artistic dialogue; it is a contribution to a series of monologues.
I had done my best to demonstrate the respect I had for the qasida and admit to my limited knowledge of the subject. However, I do not revere the qasida. I did not treat is as a sacred artifact from a foreign culture. I approached it with the same attitude that I would have had I chosen haiku or the pantoum. (I do not speak Japanese or Malayan either.) It is not that I am insensitive to the frustration of cultural stereotypes. (After all, I have been a “privileged white American in Europe” for many years.) On the contrary, I approached the research with an acute awareness of my own prejudices and narrow aesthetic and ethical viewpoints.
Still, no matter how I feel about my motives and intentions, my work with the Arab form is politically suspect. Two years of research has been relegated to a bullet point in a chapter heading in my dissertation. From an academic standpoint, this makes sense to me (considering the lack of primary sources), but as a poet I am feeling a bit disappointed. I thought I was doing something exciting, and now find I have been doing something I should perhaps feel ashamed of.
So, again: What does this mean? Is it really possible in today’s political climate to carry on intercultural dialogues through our poetry? Should everyone who writes and publishes haiku be expected to learn Japanese?
Do we seek out the influence of poets from other cultures? Allow ourselves to be influenced? Allow it and admit it and risk being accused of cultural stereotyping or colonialist tendencies? Allow it but keep it a secret and risk being accused of trying to pass off the ideas of another culture as one’s own?
Sometimes I feel the bigger my world gets, the more difficult it is to negotiate comfortably within it.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter …
* Orientalism has been described by one scholar as a combination of racism and sophistry in an attempt to make oneself appear to be an expert in a field, relying upon the ignorance of others in order to maintain an illusion of knowledge. Edward Said wrote Orientalism, an entire book about Eurocentric prejudice.
Ren Powell has published three poetry collections and eleven books of translations. She is a graduate adviser with Prescott College’s master of arts program and is pursuing a doctorate in creative writing at Lancaster University. Learn more at her website.
Well, it kind of depends on what you’re trying to do. No academic Arabist is ever going to take you seriously if you’re not a scholar of Arabic. Just won’t happen. (Look, for example, at the way most Old English scholars talk about Seamus Heaney.) So if you want to publish in scholarly journals and give talks at academic conferences, you’d better invest the years in classical Arabic. On the plus side, you don’t need a sensitive knowledge of the language. You just need a degree in it.
If, on the other hand, you want to write poems, then I don’t think there’s any problem. Poets and poetry readers will respect your project, if they like the poems that come out of it. They will be all too willing to take your word for it that you’re working from an authentic knowledge of the Arabic tradition. Which is sort of frustrating in the other direction.
Basically, if you’re going to do anything in between academic scholarship and mere plundering, you’re on your own: no one’s going to respect what you’re doing or understand its value.
Thanks for your thoughts, Dale. I really am not looking for advice on my particular situation, but rather on the possibilities for intercultural literary dialogue in general.
Oh! Then I think the more the better. I probably was not clear that I think the kind of deep cultural interaction you’re describing is basically what’s missing from our poetry today — and that applies to our own native traditions as much as to any other, some of which are as culturally distant from us as qasida.
I haven’t read Said’s book, so I can’t speak to his arguments: but if the upshot of them is that only fully trained scholars get to engage with cultural others then they seem like a reinforcement of insular prejudice, not a challenge to it.
I think being uncomfortable is a good sign.
The fact that you did not treat the qasida as a “sacred artifact” seems to run contrary to the charge of orientalism, which if I’m remembering Said’s argument correctly, is the West’s construct of the East as an imaginary and exotic other.
People like to toss Orientalism out there as a weapon to derail people from exploring what truly fascinates them. Whether they’re doing it because they’re jerks that like to deflate people, or whether they have validly bitter memories of what European exploration entails, don’t take such comments seriously. There’s a difference between exoticizing and fetishizing the Other, and being genuinely curious about it, and it’s such a pain in the neck when people adamantly refuse to believe that white people aren’t capable of genuine curiosity. Most Europeans aren’t responsible for colonialism, and it’s just as racist to suggest that as it is to turn cultural artifacts into ornaments.
So, as for the qasida (which is daring, I haven’t tried one yet): I think your heart’s in the right place if your attitude is more along the lines of “here is this interesting form I’d like to try” rather than “look, look, I can write a qasida too!” Nathan’s right about Said’s definition.
The problem is that people are so caught up in their mindset that they hate to consider any alternative. Academics hate to think that someone besides themselves might have valid and informed input on something outside their field. Arabic scholars hate to think that someone who hasn’t devoted his or her life to studying Arabic poetry can truly understand the forms (the same is true of haiku, or any cultural form). Always, of course, there are exceptions, and that, in my opinion, is the key to intercultural dialogue through poetry or any form.
I dig what Dale said: “the more the better”. As long as people are being up-front honest and respectful. The definition of colonialism is that it wasn’t either of these things, so communication must be defined by them; if people still shut that out, then they can go and close off their country and have their own monolithic isolated culture until the end of time. (Lots of luck, in today’s world.) Sharing your culture requires a willingness for emulation (NOT appropriation or assimilation), and the poet has almost unparalleled rights to do that. Art is art. Adapt and change it, but never forget or cease to respect where it came from. The same goes for lots of stuff.
I’m rambling like whoa, so I’m going to stop.
I am guessing your critic is more of an orientalist than you would ever, in a million years, be.
Argh. When I hear of situations like this, it makes me think of how academia manages to shut off far too much creative exploration. It literally causes a pain in my gut.
I love exploring poetic forms of a variety of cultures. I would rather keep my naive experiences of the forms intact through sharing them in other forums than in academic ones.
I am thinking of Coleman Barks and his (dare I call them translations of) Rumi… whose work has opened Rumi for so many who wouldn’t have accessed him otherwise. The same person who called you by that horrid name probably has similar thoughts of Barks…
Your sentence here says all I need to know: “We take on the voice that fascinates us, we work hard to find and express the “truth” we perceive within that voice, and we do the best we can.”
I wonder how many poems Madame Orientalist has written lately? I wonder how much joy she has had, how much fascination she has followed?
I will continue to write pantoum or haiku or whatever fascination I encounter… and let the Madame Orientalists of this world destroy one another. There is plenty of room for poets like me who are engaged with the world and the words fully… without giving my pencil’s power over to the likes of.. you know whom.
I assume your enlightened questioner was intending insult. Perhaps you should treat the remark as such.
You are not, I believe, pretending to the creation of an Arabic poetry, but creating an interpretation.
There is a sort of academic provincialism at work here, the same sort of attitude which proclaims that no man should write about women, no white about black, young/old, and on. As if direct experience were the only validation. In which case, we would all be in trouble, given the limitations of our perception. All knowledge is suspect, when you come right down to it. What we know of ourselves as well as those outside us is filtered by faulty equipment. What we know of history is altered by what makes a good story, and that goes for personal, family, and national tale-telling.
Your studies have taught you about the culture, and presumably given you an instrument for looking at your own in a less restricted manner, and you can give that in turn to your reader.
Perhaps you should have suggested (politely, of course) that the lady stuff it.
[...] http://readwritepoem.org/blog/2009/10/21/considering-the-other-longing-for-post-post-colonialism/?u... a few seconds ago from web [...]
I think Dale made an interesting point about us being unaware and connected to our own traditonal forms.Almost everyone knows what a haiku is but how many of us know the poetry prose of the King James Bible, a pantoum,villenelle,sestina or sonnet let alone attempting to write one.This prejudice also exists and applies to our own culture and poetry.I’m sure the qasida is a fascinating form
but I’m on a misson to promote our own forms first.I will be most upset if ‘qasida’ enters the vernacular before ‘pantoum’.
As for being accused of being an orientalist,I can only say that your academic experience has been blessed if that is the worst insult you’ve encountered.Parry and thrust is part of the game as you must know.
I’ve never understood guilt or shame about colour, gender or social standing per se.IMO guilt is for wrong doing and causing pain.
Thankyou for another insightful and thought provoking article.
Americans and Europeans and everybody else on the planet write haiku-esque poems they call haiku and who has anything bad to say about the effort? …even if the opinions are not all positive about every individual product of such effort.
You name a form, and chances are it originated in a culture you are not a member of. Does that mean you can’t use it? Absolutely not.
But if you are the first to adapt a form from a different culture, it might be safer in our current climate not to label the source of your form. And when someone recognizes it, just say that that was one of your inspirations. (Most poems really shouldn’t be annotated on first publication, IMO.) If you’re not trying to pass yourself off as an Arab or as an Arabist when you’re not, then anyone who objects IS the problem.
Exactly, Paul: “the current climate”. My concern is that being culturally “sensitive” will stifle us completely.
But I am a little confused, Rallentanda: “I’m on a misson to promote our own forms first.I will be most upset if ‘qasida’ enters the vernacular before ‘pantoum’.”
What ARE our “own forms”? For that matter, in an forum like this who are “we” or who are “we” made up of? I am from the US and the pantoum is certainly not from the US or even Europe. It is Malay and would run up against issues of both Orientalism and the appropriation of threatened cultures, I would think. Then again, the pantoum is very popular right now and I haven’t heard charges of either yet.
Though the villanelle is arguably American (I have read an interesting dissertation on that)…
And does it work in the reverse? Why is it perfectly acceptable for Arab poets to write free verse consciously in the vein of Whitman, which in my opinion is uniquely American if there ever is such a thing. I have lived as an ex pat for 17 years and am constantly being told what is “typical” American culture – things typical of an America I have never known… I like what Babara-y said about all knowledge being suspect.
Thank you all for the examples from an Irishman digging into Old English and Barks “channeling” Rumi! Nice to be reminded that people are out there (braver than I) to take the hits on the chin for sticking it out there and by doing so opening doors for everyone else to follow (even if they are cartoon filmmakers and greeting card producers
okay- I was going to write an arena and changed it to forum without deleting the n. I do that sort of thing
(And here is Amanda French’s article on the “legitimacy” of the villanelle: http://amandafrench.net/FirstVillanelle.pdf)
So it’s only a problem if it’s an appropriation
from ‘threatened’ cultures.What’s a threatened culture? Poetry is not history.Most is written through the distorted lens otherwise it would be all terribly bland and boring.My philosophy
of poetry is concerned with beauty,the spiritual,human feelings and not politics.
The most important thing is to love the culture you are writing about.It will show and hopefully be appreciated.If not,as everyone said the problem is not yours.If you have prejudices against that particular culture however,you must expect resistance.It always shows.
My classification is politically incorrect.I do not support the BBC changing nursery rhyme endings of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Little Miss Muffet’. I also love the English Language.If this makes me xenophobic..so be it!
Hi Rallentanda, I am still not really understanding you. Using elements of a form of poetry isn’t necessarily writing *about* a culture. That is sort of my point.
I respect your position on poetry, but there are many people, myself included, who believe that human feelings and politics are inseparable. I think that poetry is one of the most effective ways to communicate the meaning of the beauty and the ugly that is human nature – physical and spiritual.
rallentanda replied:
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:27 am
I would say that most people share your view that feelings and politics are inseparable.On my planet they can be separated.I like the idea of communicating beauty and if I do a slight ugly..it has to be couched in humour.If I want full on ugly I don’t need to read poetry,I just need to open the front door and walk outside.
Most of the ills of the world can be attributed to the lack of beautiful thoughts.Simplistic..
definitely but my views about most things have never been popular and only understood by a few.
ren powell replied:
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
ren powell replied:
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:46 am
Not in direct response to your comment (I think), but I have found that if I make a single critical comment about a single element present at any point in time or space specific, though not representative, of another culture then the assumption is that all my criticism is prejudice rather than informed disagreement. I think that is a dangerous aspect of political correctness.
rallentanda replied:
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:11 am
I think all political correctness is a sham and dangerous.There was a thing called good manners once which worked very well instead but I suppose that is a patronizing,elitist,post colonialist attitude.Growing cactus,writing poetry and eating oysters is looking pretty good
compared to academic life.I definitely will not be doing a PHD unless it is in something obscure
like making oboe reeds taking care that the cane doesn’t have middle eastern origins.Enjoyed our chat …got to sleep now.
I have to admit that I am biased. Just because I am human. Some of my biases are rooted in my religious background, some in my cultural one, some are specific to my social class, some to my political history. And even the meaning I attribute to some words is rooted in my biases.
But then aren’t we all biased, even when our own cultures are concerned?
So, should we just stop any discussion –since our languages are slightly different anyways, even if we all speak English? Is dialogue impossible just because I cannot live in the skin of another?
I don’t think so. Unless one claims that it is possible to walk in the other’s shoes, you just didn’t try it. Or if one considers that the only way one can express “reverence” is to stay silent…
Or, maybe , only the ones that had the chance to express themselves in the past ( and sometimes did it so badly) should now keep quiet? If so, I’m afraid that yes, there are some political outlooks nowadays make the intercultural dialogue through poetry (or otherwise) impossible…
That being said I have to ask myself now :if I write bad American poetry shall I feel more guilty than an American writing bad poetry in its own maternal language? Or shall I dismiss all guilt for they had a better chance to it than some minor Eastern European culture had? Or…but this questions somehow started to sound unnatural and quasi-absurd to me.