XCP

XCP relocates to Manhattanville College

coalmountain — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:25:02 +0000

Our new mailing address:

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics
c/o Mark Nowak, Director
Graduate Program in Creative Writing
Manhattanville College
2900 Purchase St.
Purchase, NY 10577

email: Mark.Nowak@mville.edu

CFP — China: Literature and Social Movements

coalmountain — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:06:39 +0000

CFP — China: Literature and Social Movements (originally posted at UPENN CFP, 8/10)

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics seeks scholarly essays, translators, and book reviewers for a special double issue on “China: Literature and Social Movements” that we will publish in 2011. Prospective contributors are asked to examine our special 2009 double issue (no. 21/22), “South Africa: Literature and Social Movements,” to learn more about the journal and the type of work we typically publish.

Sample essays from that issue include Priya Narismulu’s “‘All have joined in the struggle’: The Literature of the United Democratic Front in South Africa,” Zine Magubane’s “‘Can We As Mothers Not Take Our Fight to the Enemy?’: The Politics of Motherhood in South African Autobiography,” Pumla Dineo Gqola’s “‘Pushing out from the centre’: (Black) feminist imagination, redefined politics and emergent trends in South African Poetry,” and Kelwyn Sole’s “‘I have learned to hear more acutely’: Aesthetics, Agency and the Reader in Contemporary South African Poetry.”

Paper copies of submissions should be mailed to Mark Nowak, ed., XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, c/o Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College, 300 Washington Avenue, Chestertown, MD., 21620. Submissions must be received by 1 March 2011. Papers can also be emailed to the editor at mnowak2@washcoll.edu.

Potential book reviewers should contact us at mnowak2@washcoll.edu.

For more information, please visit us at http://xcpcrossculturalpoetics.wordpress.com/about/

Mark Nowak, Director
Rose O’Neill Literary House
Washington College
300 Washington Avenue
Chestertown, MD 21620

vamoose music:

coalmountain — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 19:55:42 +0000

In a requiem for a house—affluence and immigrants get hidden in welfare states. Things can keep cool before cooking. Store in basements. Up in a bedroom : spit and lip skin dry on harmonica metal. A boy sings along about bodies and bottles of beer, smokes, some blond girl, about volume and righteousness. The lamp left on all night. There are enough eggs for fine and genuine bread puddings but there is no flour. No bread. All the reds burn thresholds down so much like the colors of hungry stomachs.

Soham Patel, originally published in XCP 23 (2010)

The Poetics of Islam

coalmountain — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:50:36 +0000

I was raised a Shia’ Muslim. Depending on who you listen to, the essential difference between Sunni and Shia’ Islam is that upon the prophet’s death, Shia’ followed what they believe to be the oral transmission of the prophet regarding succession by following Ali, his son-in-law, while Sunnis followed the more dominant group at the time (and since then) when the collective of chieftains deemed Ali too young to rule and elected Abu Bakr, one of the prophet’s companions to succeed him.

The lineage of Sunnis remained political rulers of the empire, while on the margins the Shia’ followed a lineage descended from Fatima, the prophet’s daughter. That’s why the term “muslim fundamentalist” is a supreme irony. Because almost as soon as breath left the body of the prophet, the Body of Islam fractured and within a single generation there were countless factions and factions within factions.

To be sure there existed in the rough center of this matrix an outline of a figure—to this day in paintings and images his face remains blank, mere outline—called “Mohammed,” but one Mohammed has very little to do with another.

The classical Islamic arts eschew, in fact, representation. They are calligraphy, geometry, and architecture. As Lilian Karnouk writes, “Islamic art is an adventure in non-figuration dictated by a rejection of the Pythagorean idea of man as “the measure of all things.” The Islamic artist opts for an aesthetic process rooted in religious transcendence: an art based on harmonies of the formal elements of line, surface, and color arranged to a mathematical perception of time and space. His intention is to attain the visualization of a thought which does not represent man or nature but life understood as energy and motion.”

Islam as a system of belief, like poetry itself, incorporates doubt and questioning into its “fundamental” fiber, because at the “foundation” of organized belief—the end of prophethood and the beginning of lineages of authority, you had to make a choice.

One significant verse of the Qura’an appears near its beginning “This is the book. In it there is no doubt.” Growing up under the shadow of such an authoritarian dictum I continually wondered at my own doubts, engagements with faith, forays away, through, and within dogmatic teachings. Only last year, in a new and wonderfully acclaimed translation I read a new rendering of the same verse: “There is no doubt this book is a guide for the faithful.”

I have a feeling I had better learn Arabic because those two renderings do not read the same.

My father told me once about the story of “one hundred and four” books revealed by God to prophets through the ages to all the various peoples of the world. Four of these books are mentioned by name in the Qura’an, but a Muslim would believe there a hundred others out there whose names we do not know—that perhaps the Bhagavad-Gita is one, or the Lotus Sutra, who can say.

The hundred books or course call to mind the “hundred names of God,” of which ninety-nine are named in tradition, the last one being secret. Always this dark place, the place of unknown, the place you cannot go. A place where you are not sure what is what.

This sense of unsurety is built into the very way we celebrate the revelation of this Qura’an. During the month of fasting—Ramadhan—we celebrate Lail-util-Qadr, the Night of Majesty, on which the scripture was said to be first revealed. But scholars do not agree on the actual historical date, saying only it is an odd-numbered evening in the last third of the month. So traditionally we celebrate the occasion on three separate evenings—the nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. It sounds manic and amazing and it is. It’s a miracle of unknowing and allowing the mystery of that subsume the centralization or systemizing of a single day.

The beginning and ending of the lunar months of the Islamic calendar are similarly fraught with disagreements. Many people believe the month itself has not started unless the very first sliver of the moon is officially sited. For those of us who live in the west, we more often than not depend upon of the visions living far away, on the other side of the world. In the final days of the fasting month I can still remember my father on the phone with Iran or Pakistan, waiting to hear if the moon had been sited there. Had it been it would signal the end of our fast, thousands of miles away.

The tricky moon was also the site of one of the prophet’s major miracles. While Jesus fed the masses and Moses parted the sea, Prophet Mohammed’s miracle was, appropriately, centered upon the night sky—he pointed to the moon once and it broke into half.

The written scripture itself was revealed to a man said to be illiterate. He was commanded to read by the Angel and protested that he could not read, and so came the first revealed verse of the Qura’an: “Read: in the name of Your Lord Who created you.”

The chronology of the Qura’an is similarly disguised in its written form. The prophet came down from the mountain and dictated it to scribes; eventually these verses were organized into chapters, and the chapters themselves were given a canonical order. This order, unlike the long deliberative process surrounding the compiling of the Bible as we now know it, did not change from the first arrangement and is the one thing that all of the sundry sects of Islam do share in common and mainly agree upon.

It’s the word and not the man or his flesh or even the definitive understanding of the word itself that reigns supreme in the Islamic consciousness. There hasn’t seemed to have been the same kind of lively tradition of commentary and cross-commentary on Qura’anic scripture as there as been in Judaism. The real heart of the controversy around Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was not after all on the caricature of the prophet, but rather on the triggering plot device—that Satan had managed to corrupt the scribe taking dictation of the Qura’an inducing him to introduce false verses into the scripture.

In such a fundamentally decentralized religion where even the satellite in the sky could break into pieces, when the one thing that everyone could hold onto was called into question, even fictionally, all hell broke loose. Literally. The great shame is that the novel remained widely unread in the Muslim world, when it is the one book that comes so close to describe the fever and fervor of Islamic thought, the “art based on harmonies of the formal elements of line, surface, and color arranged to a mathematical perception of time and space” of which Karnouk spoke.

It remains the province of poetry, an art made for the doubting and the doubtful, to create structures for meaning, to privilege and plumb the notions of bewilderment, doubt, and interrogative spirituality. Though Islam requires five daily prayers and an obligatory pilgrimage, the Prophet also said, “one hour of work towards attaining knowledge is worth sixty years of worship.”

And what is that worship towards? The famous hajj, obligatory on every adult Muslim, is towards the Kaaba, the House of God, a black square structure at the heart of the Mecca Masjid. The house itself—like every mosque—is empty inside.

Kazim Ali, originally published in XCP 20 (2008)

Citizen

coalmountain — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:28:36 +0000

citizen, vb. as in to citizen, -zening, -zened, -zens. To mix, to cross, to cast, to struggle, to represent, to justify, to place, to breathe, to own, to migrate, to alienate, to rescale, to trans-, translate, transcreate, transnationalize, to transgress, and so forth, to inflect, to inflict, to touch, to share, to experience, to tell the truth (the way the words lie), to domesticate, to inhabit, to escape, to dislocate, to image the nation, to imagine relation, to fragment, to serve the self, to fake, to gesture, to multiply, to name, to choose, to politicize, to cultivate, to read/write, to deterritorialize, to believe, to improvise, to consume, to torque, to screw, to unfix, to loosen, to listen, to practice, to see through, to appear or perform, to articulate, to equivocate, to shop, to co-opt, to know, to inform, to demand, to strip, to separate, to reclaim, to constitute, to hybridize or disappear.

Fred Wah, originally published in XCP 15/16 (2001)

Red

coalmountain — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:31:49 +0000

Beginning in 2000, this color, once associated with leftist movements, was subjected by media operatives to a complete reversal of its erstwhile subversive coding. “Red” designated states whose voting patterns and alleged “cultural values” marked them as right-wing, in contrast to “blue” states, identified as “liberal.” Exemplifying the power of media-fueled Newspeak, this semantic makeover quickly gained currency and acceptance. Historically, however, reclaiming “red” for radicalism is no simple matter. There are the red cockade of the sans-culottes, the red flag brandished as an insurgent symbol of the blood of the working class, and the red card of IWW militants, but also the Red bureaucracy of which Bakunin warned: a dictatorship over the proletariat. Such was the Russian Revolution’s outcome: red became the color of the terror carried out initially against the revolution’s enemies and subsequently against revolutionaries. Stalinism, terror triumphant, was characterized as Red Fascism by disillusioned leftists. Post-revolutionary China claimed the entire East was red, yet red also became a floating signifier of government orthodoxy; dissenters were accused of waving the red flag to oppose the red flag. For capitalists, Red scares, Red squads, and Red-baiting were used to contain and repress all forms of radicalism. And following the collapse of bureaucratic Communism, wars in Yugoslavia saw the emergence of red-brown coalitions of fascists and Communists perpetrating massacres and concentration camps. Paul Robeson’s gibe at the U.S. government’s inability to tolerate his being both Black and Red provides further dimension. Conspicuously absent from the red-blue bifurcation of the U.S. polity is that other color of the national flag: white, a sign of a continuing racial domination meant to be ignored or accepted, never challenged. Here, Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ victorious action upon Haiti’s independence stands out: slashing the white stripe from the French tricolor, he united red and blue under a new social and symbolic order.
Christopher Winks, originally published in XCP 15/16 (2005)

from The Latehomecomer

coalmountain — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:12:32 +0000

Chapter VI: Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to America

The rice paddies stretched away on both sides of the orange bus, fields of green met the blue sky, thin lines of eucalyptus trees divided the paddies, thatched roofed field houses stood on stilts in the far distance. The entire journey felt like I was looking at a television screen (I had seen them at the one-baht movie houses: a big room with a dirt floor and a TV propped up in the front). There was distance. The scenes outside did not look real to me: the houses looked like little doll houses waiting for little doll farmers; the grass looked like plastic grass waiting for plastic gray buffalos, and the children looked like little toy children walking behind toy adults. I held up my index finger and I could block out a whole human being. This bus ride is my first memory of not belonging to Thailand. I had heard the Hmong adults say that we had no country and that Thailand was not our country. In Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, I did not know what this meant. But on the bus I saw that there was a whole life that was different from the one I knew in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.

I looked out of the window, and I noticed that in the hot sun there was a breeze. I could see it in the waving of the young rice stalks, whole fields shimmering in synchronized motions. The people in the bus were talking in whispers or else sitting silently looking out the windows. Some of the people were sick because they had never been in a car before. I had never been in a car before but I was not sick because I was trying to remember the feeling of being in a car. The road was getting eaten by the tires and we were sitting but I thought it was like flying fast to a place I did not know. My right hand, without my realizing, waved to the stalks of green rice. I was waving and waving. My father’s hand stopped its motion…

Kao Kalia Yang, originally published in XCP 18 (2007)

The Latehomecomer:A Hmong Family Memoir was published by Coffee House Press in 2008.

Social Practice

coalmountain — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:59:30 +0000

Poetry is neither an end in itself, nor a means to some external end. It’s a human activity enmeshed with human existence; as James Scully names it, a social practice. Written where, when, how, by, for and to whomever, poetry dwells in a web of other social practices historically weighted with enormous imbalances of social power. To say this is not to deny the necessity for poetry as an art whose tangible medium is language.

It’s a commonplace to say that in a society fraught with official lying, hyperbolic urgings to consume, contrived obsolescence of words (along with things and the people who produce them) poets must “recover” or “subvert” or “re-invent” language. Poetic language may thus get implicitly defined as autonomous terrain apart from the ripped-off or colonized languages of daily life.

Yet the imagination—the capacity to feel, see, what we aren’t supposed to feel and see, find expressive forms where we’re supposed to shut up–has meant survival and resistance, for poets and numberless others: incarcerated, under military or colonial occupation, in concentration camps, at grinding labor, suffering bleak and traumatic circumstances of many kinds. We may view the imagination as a kind of gated, landscaped neighborhood–or as a river, sometimes clogged and polluted, carrying many kinds of traffic including pollen and contraband, but in movement: the always-regenerating impulse toward an always-beginning future.

Adrienne Rich, originally published in XCP 15/16 (2005)

Diaspora

coalmountain — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:27:15 +0000

Diaspora describes the heterogeneous articulations and diverse experiences of populations that have been displaced from their homelands and dispersed throughout the world. It is concerned with questions of identity, difference, memory, and survival. The subjects of diaspora have lived through conquest, colonization, the Middle Passage, racial slavery, genocide, famine, wars, dispossession from their land, and labor exploitation. They have moved through the realms of loss, hurt, unspeakable violence, suffering, sorrow, and creativity—straddling through multiple dimensions of space and time; striving to reverse the irreversible directions of their long journeys; traveling and returning; and struggling to reconcile the nearness of a homeland and the sense of incompleteness. Such a mnemonic exercise involves recognition that the past is flitting and that the attainment of a unitary identity is impossible. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), one of the most important Black revolutionaries of the second half of the twentieth century, explained in Ready for Revolution that the subjects of diaspora are peoples of dispersal, but “dispersal only begins the process, it does not end it.” It begins the process of survival and sets in motion ceaseless struggles toward freedom. To think, to dream, to theorize, and to live with and through diaspora is to do the most difficult double task of explanatory construction. That is to discursively explore the roots of identity and routes of identity formation and, as Carmichael noted, “stay ready” (rather than get ready) to revolutionalize existing ontological categories governed by liberal individualism and capitalism to live and struggle for a committed human life.

Yuichiro Onishi, originally published in XCP no 15/16 (2005)

Micropoetries

coalmountain — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:28:27 +0000

Ephemera, doggerel, fragments, “weird English” (props to Evelyn Ch’ien), graffiti, community and individual survival — écriture brute, folk letters, textile patterns; naive lettrism (as well as belletrisme and lettrisme brute); wise oraliture, gnomic thought-bytes and lyrical bullets, clairaudient visitations with a hermeneutic spin — the marriage of esotericism and exotericism, banality and exoticism. Embedded in contextual specificity but deracinated — the historic exile, the monadic nomad, the centrifugal community that lets fly its auratic verbal detritus. These are poetries that fly beneath the radar of accepted poetic practice, that is not practice but object — these are processes rather than object/products. I’ve explained the term elsewhere as originating in Mark Slobin’s term “micromusics” (in Tenement Songs: Micromusics of the West) by which he means fragments, lullabies, tunes, extremely localized bits of expressive culture carried from the Eastern Europe pale of settlement to New York in the great migrations 1880-1940; individual shtetlach (villages), families, locales had unique musics that made the journey and morphed, somehow surviving. This is also the resonance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s anecdote in “Of the Sorrow Songs,” wherein he tells of his grandfather’s grandmother bringing a song with her which traveled not only spatially across the Middle Passage but temporally down the generations to have been sung to him when he was a small child. He prints the music, the transliteration of the syllables he doesn’t understand, and from that archaeological fragment constructs a theory of cultural transmission. The presence of fire in resonant landscapes — resonant for those bigeared ones.

Maria Damon, originally published in XCP no 15/16 (2005)