Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry
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Michele E. Rozga
Abstract
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) are poets of place who chronicle the dual experience of living with the obliteration of major world political and economic systems and the concomitant reshaping of the spaces of their cultures. Though these two poets occupy different geographic spheres, both meet in the center of a Venn diagram with the shared purpose of mounting a fierce defense and creative resurrection of the world citizen, driven out of his or her homeland under thinly derived, monstrous rationales of racial or ethnic inferiority. Miłosz, a Roman Catholic from Polish Lithuania, lived in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation and subsequent liberation by the Soviet Army, and later became a permanent exile from his native land. Ali escaped the destruction of his birthplace, Saffuriyya, by the Israeli Army during the Arab- Israeli War of 1948, then returned to live in nearby Nazareth. Each of these writers, then, as Joel J. Janicki has said of Miłosz, creates out of “his experience of the human condition [… as] refracted through his personal geography and history, the specific times and places of his sojourn on this earth” (2012: 2). Each poet speaks as an architect, building via the material of the language of “the lonely / forgotten by the world” (Miłosz 1998: 35). Out of their own forgottenworlds, these poets build structures to hold world memory and culture.
Abstract
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) are poets of place who chronicle the dual experience of living with the obliteration of major world political and economic systems and the concomitant reshaping of the spaces of their cultures. Though these two poets occupy different geographic spheres, both meet in the center of a Venn diagram with the shared purpose of mounting a fierce defense and creative resurrection of the world citizen, driven out of his or her homeland under thinly derived, monstrous rationales of racial or ethnic inferiority. Miłosz, a Roman Catholic from Polish Lithuania, lived in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation and subsequent liberation by the Soviet Army, and later became a permanent exile from his native land. Ali escaped the destruction of his birthplace, Saffuriyya, by the Israeli Army during the Arab- Israeli War of 1948, then returned to live in nearby Nazareth. Each of these writers, then, as Joel J. Janicki has said of Miłosz, creates out of “his experience of the human condition [… as] refracted through his personal geography and history, the specific times and places of his sojourn on this earth” (2012: 2). Each poet speaks as an architect, building via the material of the language of “the lonely / forgotten by the world” (Miłosz 1998: 35). Out of their own forgottenworlds, these poets build structures to hold world memory and culture.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
- The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor 1
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Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass
- Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ 21
- “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel 45
- The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century 67
- Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema 85
- Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump 113
-
Disease: Pathologizing the Other
- Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism 135
- De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation 161
- Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction 187
- Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels 209
- African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 233
-
Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse
- Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts 255
- Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean 277
- Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece 293
- Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia 315
- Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry 337
- Notes on Contributors 351
- Index 355
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
- The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor 1
-
Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass
- Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ 21
- “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel 45
- The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century 67
- Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema 85
- Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump 113
-
Disease: Pathologizing the Other
- Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism 135
- De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation 161
- Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction 187
- Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels 209
- African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 233
-
Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse
- Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts 255
- Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean 277
- Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece 293
- Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia 315
- Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry 337
- Notes on Contributors 351
- Index 355
