Homes: A Quartet

Introduction

In this article, I reflect on diverse ideas of home, as outlined by four US poets belonging to different historical periods and socio-cultural backgrounds. At first, the poetic compositions I will discuss may startle readers in ways similar to what happened to Ludwig van Beethoven’s contemporaries as they first listened to his late quartets. As Edward Said states in his famous critical work on music and literature:

Beethoven’s late works remain unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis: they do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. Beethoven’s late compositions are in fact about ‘lost totality’ and are therefore catastrophic. (Said 2006, p. 12–3)

Like Beethoven, the poets discussed in this essay—Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Richard Wright, and Agha Shahid Ali—play with irreconcilable differences. They populate their homes with volcanoes, lice, faces hidden in gingerbread tins, and half-inch Himalayas. Let me ask provocatively: How is the relation between movement and homemaking staged in these poems? To what extent do these poetic compositions bear the marks of homelessness and of imaginary homes? And finally, what should we make out of this non-harmonious wholeness? I argue in this article that the poetic imagination of the four writers is essential to conjure up perhaps fragmentary and ephemeral yet liberating ideas of homes, particularly when homes have become unreachable, vanishing, or confining places.

In her recent exploration of transnational reconfigurations of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Arab-American literature, Carol Fadda-Conrey notes the following: “Arab-Americans live in, negotiate, and subsequently change the landscapes of US citizenship and belonging by superimposing the reimagined Arab terrain onto these landscapes. This simultaneity of visions and belongings, rather than perpetuating the ideological or cultural split between the two terrains, brings them into direct conversation in ways that reconfigure strict definitions of home, homelands, and national belonging” (Fadda-Conrey 2014, p. 10). I suggest that a similar “simultaneity of visions and belonging” but also a very distinctive and “unsynthesized fragmentariness,” to quote Said (Said 2006, p. 12), are present in the selected poems. As we will see, each of the poets discussed destabilizes conventional ideas of home, traditionally conceptualized as a place where one lives peacefully and comfortably. As they reverse this conventional picture, my reading too will be marked by reversals and antitheses. This is why, in my analysis, I will move alternately between macroscopic and microscopic dimensions, namely from the cliffs and steepness of the Himalayas mountain range to the small scale of a white parasite, from the imposing size of the terrific Mount Vesuvius to a little pile of mysterious faces stacked in a gingerbread tin and stored in the closet.

One—Agha Shahid Ali’s “Postcard from Kashmir”

Ali’s “Postcard from Kashmir” (Ali 2010) reflects the poet’s simultaneously syncretic and masterful combination of Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritage elements in his poetic compositions. Born in Delhi in 1949, Ali grew up in Srinagar, Kashmir, before moving to the US where he earned an MA and PhD degree and pursued an active career both as a scholar and as an internationally recognized poet.

The poem “Postcard from Kashmir” opens with two thematically and emotionally complete couplets, a move reminiscent of the Persian and Arabic ghazal tradition, which Ali helped popularize in the US through his edited collection Ravishing DisUnities (Ali 2000). Highlighting the temporally long and geographically widespread circulation of this very peculiar poetic form, Aamir R. Mufti notes the following:

The ghazal has historically been practiced from Spain to Bengal, at the very least, making it one of the most widely practiced poetic forms of the Old World. And from Goethe and Federico García Lorca to W. S. Merwyn and Adrienne Rich, poets in the modern West over the past two centuries have engaged in writing practices that they themselves have conceived of as the composition of ghazals. (Mufti 2016, p. 72)

In the first couplet, the speaker announces apparently unperturbed that his home has shrunk into his mailbox and measures now “a neat four by six inches” (“Postcard from Kashmir,” l. 2). Immediately following is a second couplet in which he expresses his appreciation for precision and tidiness, a confession that contrasts with the unsettled status of his turbulent homeland. The accurate, graceful, and orderly representation of Kashmir on the postcard, which the speaker is now holding in his hands, has indeed nothing to do with the disorders and violent conflicts that have characterized the history of this unstable buffer zone disputed for centuries by rival superpowers (China, India, Pakistan).^[1]

A surprising turn of phrase, halfway across the poem, hints at the catastrophe awaiting the speaker once he returns home:

When I return,

the colors won’t be so brilliant,

the Jhelum’s waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love

so overexposed.

(“Postcard from Kashmir,” ll. 6–10)

The negation (“won’t be”), which introduces a list of repeated expressions with slight variations, confirms the depth of the speaker’s loss. The subsequent image comparing the speaker’s memory to a blurred negative conveys with clarity the sense of deception, insecurity, and disorientation that he expects to experience paradoxically not when he is away from home but once he will return home.

Writing about his practice as a photographer during the Lebanese Civil War, in La Sagesse du Photographe (Elkoury 2004), Fouad Elkoury suggests that in extreme situations, such as in the case of a war, or as in the case of Ali’s always precarious and never definitive return home here, what the viewer sees may only be a broken sequence of black and white impressions, rarely colored and often out of focus. This is also what the speaker expects to find once he imagines his return home.

Incongruity, loss, and emotional ambiguity mark this poem indelibly and so does Ali’s very rich and extremely mixed cultural inheritance, where Muslim, Kashmiri, and American cultural components and nuances are inextricably and artistically entangled so that their singularity and uniqueness is preserved. This is particularly evident in the complex affective atmosphere that characterizes the poem and that rests on an alluring tension between concrete objects (the postcard and the mailbox) and ephemeral recollection, strong affective desire and melancholic lamentation, vivid and detailed visual representation and an uncertain fate, a tension that renovates in rather unconventional ways the ghazal’s traditionally tense affective atmosphere. Indeed, as Mufti explains: “At the center of the ghazal, thematically speaking, is the problematic of love or, perhaps more accurately, of desire and devotion, which gets within the form a somewhat conventionalized but at the same time highly complex treatment” (Mufti 2016, p. 72; original emphasis). In this specific case, the poet treats the speaker’s personal infatuation in rather subtle and intricate ways: it is indeed the home(land) that has taken the place of the beloved and the speaker now longs for a reunion that is in fact indefinitely delayed.

In Ali’s poem, elegant diction and carefully controlled emotions coexist on the same page, with grief reaching a high peak yet never precipitating into uncontrolled despair. The poet skillfully moves not only between geographical spaces that may seem at the antipodes—the so-called West and East primarily—but also between rocky pinnacles and hollow depressions, expanding the form of the lyric to include the massive Himalayas. A displaced, cosmopolitan, and extremely sensitive poet, Ali binds the unconstrained US poetic tradition of free verse to the intensified desire channeled in a binding form typical of the ghazal tradition. Through this intertwined and peculiar aesthetic strategy, he indirectly points to the constraints and loss of freedom produced by the military occupation of Kashmir, while simultaneously making a strong call for self-determination, land rights, and ultimately independence. Home, in Ali’s case, is at the same time extremely insecure and neatly recomposed, miniaturized and gigantic, surprisingly proximate but also continually out of reach. It is affectively charged with both personal and collective losses and for this reason the object of a very palpable yet in the end constantly fleeting desire.

Two—Richard Wright’s Poem “#459”

Concrete presence rather than absence and material hardship rather than evanescence characterize Richard Wright’s poem “#459.” An iconic African-American novelist and essayist of the twentieth century, who depicts in his two classics Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) the destitution and exclusions suffered by African-Americans in inner cities across the US and in the segregated rural South, Wright, toward the end of his life, turned his back to prose and devoted himself entirely to poetry. In particular, he experimented with a minimalist and foreign poetic form: the Japanese haiku. As Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener explain in the “Afterword” to the collection Haiku: This Other World, the haiku is a Japanese “seventeen-syllable verse form” that “was preserved by noblemen, courters, and high-ranked samurai” (Hakutani and Tener 1998, p. 247). Travelling from the Far East to Europe and the US, this rather elitist poetic form was later retrieved by avant-garde modernist poets such as, among others, Ezra Pound, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz, who contributed to its world fame (Johnson 2011). The haiku, as Richard Eugene Smith clarifies, relies on a sophisticated tension between two contrasting yet interlinked images. To quote Smith: “the microcosm must appear to evoke the macrocosm in order to arouse deep thought and feeling in the reader or auditor” (Smith 1965, pp. 523–4).

This strange combination of opposite images also characterizes Wright’s poem “#459.” In this particular case, the microcosm is outlined as a cold, infested room, a poetic move that disturbs the reader and awakens her/him to the inequalities and injustices suffered by African-Americans when it comes to land and property issues. Considering the problematic topic of homes in connection to African-American life, one should note that, since his childhood, Wright frequently changed houses. When he was five years old, his father abandoned his family and, as a consequence of this, Wright spent some time in an orphanage; he then went to live with his mother in his grandparents’ house in Jackson, Mississippi, and in 1927, he moved first to Chicago and later to New York, before taking a permanent residence in France in 1947. This sense of restlessness and precarity is also to be found in poem “#459.” The rather basic and austere poetic form, in particular, expresses the speaker’s contingent and harsh condition of economic precarity. This is why, rather than engaging with the noble haiku, Wright composes here a seventeen-syllables unrhymed senryu, which was popular among the lower strata of the population and the common people and usually treated human nature, rather than nature itself, in a dark and satirical way. As Hakusani and Tener note, by putting two incompatible images side by side, the senryu “express[ed] the ‘incongruity of things’ more than their oneness, dealing more with distortions and failures, not just with the harmonious beauty of nature” (Hakutani and Tener 1998, p. 255). Accordingly, poem “#459” relies on a strange mismatch and an essential imbalance between two worlds—the human and animal ones—that appear to be at the same time interlinked and antagonistic. As the following lines demonstrate, the poet focuses attention on the miserable condition of the Black speaker, who is forced to share his room with a hoard of despicable white creatures:

I am paying rent

For the lice in my cold room

And the moonlight too.

(“#459”)

Physical and natural dimensions, the mundane and the celestial collide in this poem through the contrasting images of the lice and the moon. The house in this case is nothing more than a desolate, inhospitable room. One wonders if the speaker feels any kind of solidarity with the white, minuscule creatures that pester his room. Is there any implied correlation, I ask, between the lice in his room and the white-supremacist, racist propaganda that would construct Blacks in the US as ‘parasites’ and less than human? As the United States Holocaust Museum clarifies, US neo-Nazis and white supremacists directly borrow these images from Nazi Germany and Holocaust-era fascist movements, which “characterized ‘the Jew’ as a carrier of lice and typhus” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum n.d., “Propaganda Poster”).

Wright mobilizes here a terrible image, which elicits in the reader the memory of past racial discriminations and abuses, while at the same time pointing to the inequities and crimes suffered by Blacks and more generally non-whites and social outcasts in the present. It is no wonder that the speaker in this poem looks at the natural/animal world that surrounds him rather skeptically and distrustfully. This reluctance mixed with suspicion should however not surprise the reader. Indeed, as Camille T. Dungy explains in the anthology black nature: “The traditional context of the nature poem in the Western intellectual canon, spawned by the likes of Virgil and Theocritus and solidified by the Romantics and Transcendentalists, informs the prevailing views of the natural world as a place of positive collaboration, refuge, idyllic rural life, or wilderness. The poetry of African Americans only conforms to these traditions in limited ways” (Dungy 2009, p. xxi). Wright’s poem “#459” is an exemplary case of this rather atypical poetics emerging from a long and painful history of oppression, cruelty, and annihilation tightly intertwined with nature. As Dungy explains, for African-Americans nature has historically been “an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death” (Dungy 2009, p. xxi). As an inheritor of this traumatic history, the speaker in this poem cannot but connect with the neighboring animal and natural world hesitantly and suspiciously. The white creatures, in particular, remind the speaker of his destitution, contributing to revitalize the memory of the denial and privation that Wright himself had experienced as a child in the rural South. As Wright’s daughter Julia recalls in the “Introduction” to the collection: “Back in the forties, he had written in his journal how much he disliked the countryside because it reminded him of the physical hunger he had experienced as a poor black child in one of the most fertile landscapes” (Wright 1998, p. xi).

Wright’s social critique in this poem is sharp yet expressed in rather latent ways, compressed as it is in an image of tremendous power and vast geographical and temporal resonance—the lice. The reference to the moonlight, which closes the poem, restores a sense of intense beauty and peaceful serenity yet may also allude to a troubled midnight repose, as a result of the speaker’s insecure economic condition.

The senryu, and the haiku more in general, are new forms of expression for Wright, which offer him novel creative tools to describe and decry the often brutal and unbalanced relationship between Blacks and Whites in US society as well as between the human and the surrounding natural/animal worlds. In poem “#459,” the reader contemplates an unwelcoming microcosm, which indirectly brings out the disparities and inequities of the macrocosm. Still, the closing image of the white moonlight illuminating the room may point to the possibility of a healing gesture capable of repairing an apparently unbridgeable rift.

Three—Emily Dickinson’s “Volcanoes Be in Sicily”

An utterly different room—“white-curtained, high-ceilinged”—and an excited Adrienne Rich “hovering like an insect against the screens” of her fast-moving car and of Dickinson’s carefully protected and publicly displayed home represent the fulcrum of Rich’s famous 1973 essay “Vesuvius at Home” (Charlesworth Gelpi and Gelpi 1993). The essay opens with Rich driving to Amherst to visit Dickinson’s home with the precise aim to “identify images, codes, metaphors, strategies, points of stress, unrevealed by conventional criticism which works from a male/mainstream perspective” (Rich 1993, p. 177). Noting that home, in Dickinson’s own words, is not “where the heart is … but the house and the adjacent buildings,” Rich imaginatively departs from the poet’s very pragmatic and down-to-earth perspective on homes in order to show that those buildings, and particularly Dickinson’s room, were, for a nineteenth-century Puritan unmarried woman like her, not a place of confinement and reclusion, as we may have expected, but one of freedom. As Rich notes: “Here, in this white-curtained, high-ceilinged room, a red-haired woman with hazel eyes and a contralto voice wrote poems about volcanoes, deserts, eternity, suicide, physical passion, wild beasts, rape, power, madness, separation, the daemon, the grave” (Rich 1993, p. 180).

Poem “#1705,” in which Dickinson sketches an image of her home that is far-reaching and therefore liberating, is a good case in point of the abundance, heterogeneity, and unconformity that one finds in her poetry:

#1705

Volcanoes be in Sicily

And South America

I judge from my Geography

Volcano nearer here

A Lava step at any time

Am I inclined to climb

A Crater I may contemplate

Vesuvius at Home

(“Volcanoes Be in Sicily”)

Through poetic inversions, line breaks, and wild oxymorons, Dickinson crafts here an unusual representation of her home, one that is highly imaginative, boundless, and therefore extremely original. In eight brief and condensed lines, the speaker reconstructs a whole universe, by congregating in her home the volcanoes of Sicily, those of South America, and the notoriously devastating Vesuvius. One should note that it is precisely at home, usually represented as a safe and gendered place of household chores that frequently reveals itself to be monotonous and repressive, that the speaker follows her risky inclinations (Cavarero 2016) and climbs up the Vesuvius’s lava steps in order to reach its peak. This is clearly behavior that would be forbidden to a woman of Dickinson’s social rank and time, and the slow cadence on which the poem is based confirms that the ascension to the volcano is in fact an arduous enterprise.

Dickinson’s bizarre representation of the Vesuvius at home changes not only preconceived ideas about what makes a home but also conventional representations of Dickinson as a repressed and frustrated spinster who voluntarily condemned herself to a life of confinement and self-seclusion. As I see it, the actual dimension of the Vesuvius aggrandizes not only Dickinson’s room but potentially also her poetic and real persona. Moreover, the image of the awe-inspiring Vesuvius, as Rich rightly notes, evokes its energy and potency but also its destructive force. Yet, the speaker in this poem appears to be totally in control of the risks she is taking and faces the climb to the crater with excitement rather than fear. Inspired by Rich’s experimental essay, I claim that the ascension to the Mount Vesuvius imagined by Dickinson represents for the speaker an escape from the social restrictions a woman like her would experience not only in the domestic space but also in the community at Amherst. Let’s not forget that Dickinson herself had confessed to her niece Martha, who was paying a visit: “Matty: here’s freedom” (Rich 1993, p. 182). The home as a place of unrestraint and self-liberation is what renders Dickinson’s poem “#1705” particularly fascinating. It is precisely the domineering presence of the Vesuvius that increases the poem’s powerful allure. While the volcanoes of Sicily and South America remain abstract, the Vesuvius is designated with its proper name and carefully described, thus immediately gaining material substance. It becomes a tangible mountain that can be ascended, as a professional volcanologist would do. Becoming a volcanologist was a remote possibility for a woman of Dickinson’s time; it was a possibility, however, that she could realize on the written page.

As we know, Dickinson had been trained in the sciences at Amherst College, and geology had been among the main scientific subjects taught there. Still, in this poem and in open contrast to the religious interpretation of the natural world promoted in the schools of New England at the time, Dickinson’s attraction towards the Vesuvius is not expressed as a means to celebrate indirectly the grandeur of God or the blissful connection between the human self and the divinity, as it was often the case among the poets of her time, particularly among the Transcendentalists. By evoking the Vesuvius’s undeniable magnetism, Dickinson glorifies the startling power of her imagination and the strong appeal of her poetic word. The images she activates are indeed all secular and deeply earthly.

As Rich discloses in her essay, when the guide of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary—Mary Lyon—asked during one of her classes all those who believed and wanted to be good Christians to rise, only Dickinson remained firmly seated. In this poem, by contrast, Dickinson’s speaker is ascending as a solitary rebel the Vesuvius at home. This time she is not anchored on her seat but extremely movable, as she is walking upwards to reach the summit of the volcano.

Far from setting aside her love for the natural world and for foreign lands in order to devote herself entirely to the domestic chores and social visits that were the center around which an unmarried woman’s life in the nineteenth century would gravitate, Dickinson follows in this poem her personal inclinations and with ruthless honesty admits to have found deep excitement in their pursuit. Dickinson abandons here the conventional tropes used in the Puritan and sentimental lyrics of her time to describe the home. In her expert hands, the home ceases to be “the proper place for daughters, wives, and mothers” (Van Engen 2011, p. 51) and is converted into an inopportune and imprudent place, the fascinating universe of a bold and ante litteram volcanologist.

Four—Jennifer Elise Foerster’s “Leaving Tulsa”

A similarly sturdy and resolute woman occupies central stage in Foerster’s poem “Leaving Tulsa” (Foerster 2020). A member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and a poet of Mvskoke, German, and Dutch descent, Foerster has contributed to unearth through the magical power of her visionary lyrics a long and most of the time forgotten history of land dispossession, forced removal, genocide, and ecological devastation that has involved her tribe and more in general the indigenous people of North America. “Leaving Tulsa” revives these troubled and violent times in which Native tribes were exterminated or removed from their lands by the white settler colonists. This violent history is embodied in the poem by the mythical figure of Foerster’s grandmother Cosetta, an indigenous Creek woman who fought tirelessly against the occupation, dispossession, and exploitation of indigenous land, and to which the poem is dedicated. This is how the speaker sketches an unforgettable portrait of her simultaneously belligerent and loving ancestor:

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,

grew watermelons by the pond

on our Indian allotment,

took us fishing for dragonflies.

When the bulldozers came

with their documents from the city

and a truckload of pipelines,

her shot gun was already loaded.

(“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 18–25)

Deserted by her lover and threatened by the bulldozers that menace to flatten her house, Cosetta sees her familial home and ancestral land vanishing in front of her very eyes. If Cosetta’s home is haunted by ghostly presences about which she never uttered a word and which the speaker swiftly mentions as “faces in gingerbread tins/stacked in the closet” (“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 9–10), Cosetta’s land appears to be inhabited by a crowd of spectral beings, namely “the vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, /peach trees choked by palms” (“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 13–4), whose slow disappearance the speaker also carefully names and acknowledges. The following couplet, coldly registering the presence of the last surviving buffalo, grazing behind the house, is particularly telling in this sense and functions as a premonition of the catastrophe waiting ahead: “On the grassy plain behind the house /one buffalo remains” (“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 41–2).

“Leaving Tulsa” poetically exposes a violence that most of the time remains unnoticed. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon coins the term “slow violence” to indicate “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, p. 2). As they arduously make their way out of this wasteland, both the buffalo and Cosetta emerge as strenuous survivors whose very existence is threatened by extinction. The closing stanza, with its loaded images of wreckage and waste, reinforces ideas of death, imbalance, and loss, leaving little space for hope:

Up here, parallel to the median

with a vista of mesas’ weavings,

the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork,

I see our hundred and sixty acres

stamped on God’s forsaken country,

a roof blown off a shed,

beams bent like matchsticks,

a drove of white cows

making their home

in a derailed train car.

(“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 58–67)

Razed homes, derelict lands, and extinct animals abound in this poem pointing to the violent appropriation of Native land by white expropriators and the slow disappearance not only of indigenous land but also of a Native way of life which relied on a harmonious coexistence of the human with the natural and animal worlds. This ecological system, based on stability and a fine equilibrium in which all living creatures appear to affect each other in fundamental ways, is menaced by the greed of the white expropriators and of oil and gas developers (Boxell 2021). The accusation of Cosetta is directly expressed in very audible terms: “When they see open land/they only know to take it” (“Leaving Tulsa,” ll. 48–9; original emphasis).^[2]

The fate of coyotes, cardinals, and vanishing toads in this poem is tightly entangled with that of Cosetta, her tribe, and also the speaker. They all are “companions in conflict,” to use an expression coined by Penny Johnson with regard to the fractured land of Israel/Palestine, where the lives of the indigenous human and animal populations are at risk and deeply entwined. As she states: “The current threats to their lives and well-being differ, but all are […] companions in conflict” (Johnson 2011, p. ix). Here too, I suggest, the tragic fates of native creatures are tightly interconnected.

By and large, “Leaving Tulsa” represents a composed although desperate last call for ending the “slow violence” that is condemning the entire planet to extinction. By documenting the imperceptible yet highly insidious threats posed by this kind of violence or, in Nixon’s own words, those “disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world” (Nixon 2011, p. 3), Foerster helps readers recognize the calamity that is ahead, encouraging them to take immediate action. Foerster’s poem, I would like to add, has another merit: it teaches readers that solidarity toward unprotected communities, animal species that risk extinction, and the fragile environment more generally is essential for the survival of us all. Indeed, as Wai Chee Dimock reminds us in her recent anthology Weak Planet (Dimock 2020), our frail, common home is a vulnerable ecosystem, deeply entangled yet also extremely at risk. Literature, as exemplified by Foerster’s poem, can contribute to raise awareness and intervene to avoid the worst.

Homes: A History and Geography of Violence and Loss

By addressing the topic of homes, all the poets discussed in this article outline a history and geography of violence and loss, one that is tightly interrelated yet also very specific. Whereas Ali’s speaker laments the occupation of his far-away home(land) by military forces and his strenuous attempts to preserve his beloved Kashmir at least in his memory, Wright poetically alludes to the heinous policies in US housing and racist discriminations that since the early twentieth century have secured white privilege, created race-based zoned areas, and excluded Black residents from having access to loans and consequently to homeownership.^[3] While Dickinson finds solace and comfort in a home that follows her own rules and is open to the world despite the violent pressures exerted by patriarchal power, Foerster engages in strenuous attempts to keep the memory of her grandmother alive and bolster her efforts to save her home as well as her indigenous land from brutal acts of grabbing.

Never in these poems is home reduced to the privileged place where one conducts a sheltered and thoughtless life. Home itself becomes a threatened living organism—a volcano menaced today by illegal urbanization and uncontrolled urban expansion in the case of Dickinson or a spectral creature bulldozed by oil developers in Foerster’s case—included in a complex web of relations which extends from the human to include worlds beyond the human. This delicate, interrelated system must be carefully preserved for the benefit of all. Foerster, in particular, poetically demonstrates how the violent act of dispossessing indigenous people of their ancestral lands and ways of life means condemning us all—including the descendants of the white colonists—to (self)destruction. In her poem, the lurking violence of settler colonialism and neoliberal exploitation comes under scrutiny, as both appear to put in place the same mechanisms of dispossession and violent destruction.

Shifting our attention from the US context to that of Israel/Palestine, in The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef takes the Israeli/Palestinian environment as her case study to look at homes “that were formed in and through violence” (Kotef 2020, p. 3) and to examine carefully “settler colonies, wherein the construction of one’s home, and ultimately one’s ‘national’ identity, is the destruction of another’s” (Kotef 2020, p. 2). This is why the home in Kotef’s scholarly work but also in Foester’s mournful poetic composition becomes a milieu of struggle, a tense spot, a wasteland marked by violence. This is also what Wright demonstrates with his senryu, re-creating an empty and impoverished room, in which humans and animals struggle to survive competing one against the other.

At least initially, the four homes described in this article seemed to have little in common; after a more careful analysis, however, each single home emerges gradually as an occupied land imbued with, to quote Kotef again, “a history and actuality of violence” that takes different forms: military occupation, racist discrimination and abuse, patriarchal oppression, settler colonial and neo-capitalist exploitation and destruction. This is why in the end all these poetic compositions, to go back to Said, are fragmentary, dissonant, and in ultimate analysis catastrophic.