EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE AT
OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY, USA
Contemporary Latin American
poetry: when you rub those
words, they catch fire
by Azfar Hussain
In my lecture today [Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Old Dominion University], I intend to map out a particular segment of contemporary Latin American poetry—an otherwise inordinately diverse and rich field of cultural production. In fact, I wish to advance a few points and propositions about such poetry. I should point out that their accents fall acutely on the worldliness of poetry at a conjuncture that witnesses the return of colonialism with a vengeance, attesting to the very ‘re-colonization thesis’ already formulated and relayed by a whole host of third-world theorists and creative writers from Uruguay and Paraguay to Puerto Rico to Palestine to the Philippines to Pakistan—say, from the Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano to the Filipino writer-revolutionary Jose Maria Sison to the Pakistani writer-activist Eqbal Ahmad.
And I will sum up some of my points vis-à-vis contemporary Latin American poetry at the very beginning, although I am aware that the topos of summing up is traditionally assigned to a conclusion. So, in order to sum up my points as well as to initiate some of my arguments concerning the worldliness of contemporary Latin American poetry, I will read my own poem called ‘Ten Thousand Atypical Haikus Dedicated to Caliban.’ But I’ll read only ten:
1: Caliban, run run
Run run run run run run run
I know it’s no fun.
2: ‘Caliban, be in!’
Between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’
Caliban is drinkin’.
3: Caliban is stinkin’
While Prospero is pukin’:
And who says, ‘Come in?’
4: A fleshy white guy
Caliban’s dream and boredom
He wants to buy.
5: You care! And you care?
But I don’t, rain or sunshine.
History—a snare!
6: Layer upon layer
You make the same old damn point
On my foot, on my hair.
7: ‘Progress is history’s
Dirty joke?’ Or its bad rhyme:
Caliban fakes a sneeze.
8: Caliban comes back!
In boredom under the moon
Someone talks of lack.
9: ‘Be quiet, Caliban!
Don’t dirty my Miranda!’
Caliban takes a U-turn
10: The night’s dark—it’s ink.
Caliban pees on the brink.
His pee-stains stick and stink.
I am aware that Caliban’s pee-stains keep stinking to bourgeois aesthetes, hell-bent as they are on preserving the so-called purity of art and literature and their bourgeois sense of aesthetic cleanliness. But the well-known Chilean poet Pablo Neruda already fashioned what he called ‘a poetics of the impure’ against the Empire of feel-clean aesthetics. In fact, Neruda wrote a manifesto to promote such a poetics, arguing that the so-called ‘unholy’ and ‘dirty’—as they are judged by dominant norms—must be celebrated in the poetry of the people. I am reminded of what I myself asserted in a prose poem I wrote several years ago: ‘we dirty our dialectics and discourses in the here and the now of our land / we dirty our dialectics and discourses in the sweat and salt of our bodies.’
In fact, the image of the ‘dirty’ Caliban running and running and running and sweating and puking and drinking and yet surviving and even resisting in the dull prose of daily living—as the Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar suggests—is indeed more than a trope. Rather, Caliban is a living presence and even an organizing force in the works of many twentieth-century Latin American poets, say, from the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros, to the Venezuelan poet Edmundo Aray, to the Nicaraguan poets Ernesto Cardenal and Gioconda Belli, to the Salvadoran poets Claribel Alegria and Roque Dalton, to the Guatemalan poet Otto Rene Castillo, to the Cuban poets Nicolas Guillen and Roberto Fernandez Retamar (by the way, Retamar is also a poet although he is known as a critic in this part of the world), to the Hatian poet Rene Depestre, to the Puerto Rican poet Pedro Pietre.
Moreover, what have come to be known as ‘guerrilla poems’ in Latin America—inaugurated by none but Che Guevara himself—also mobilize with varying effects and inflections the figure of a dirty, muddy, earthy, stinky, and thus, profoundly ‘worldly’ and therefore always resistant Caliban. Now, I need to dwell on the notion of what I call ‘Calibanesque worldliness’ here. I borrow the term ‘worldliness’ from the Palestinian-American theorist and critic Edward Said himself without, of course, intending to use it stricto sensu. Rather, I take cues and clues from Said, while rehearsing and expanding his term. By ‘worldliness,’ then, I do not merely mean the relationship between the word and the world so as to suggest—a la Said—that words cannot be interpreted or understood without their relationship to the world as such. But by ‘worldliness’ I mean an active and activist sense of being rooted in and alive to the world to the point that one’s acute awareness of such a world leads to a praxis that can be effectively pressed into the service of our creative struggles towards change.
In other words, such a worldliness—and in the Latin American contexts, then, such a Calibanesque worldliness—not only energizes the relationship between the world and the word but, more fundamentally, inspires or stimulates us to move in the direction of struggles for change in a world—characterized as it is by such configurations of forces and relations as capitalism and colonialism, differentially but acutely interlocked as they are—while accentuating the point that the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton made quite some time ago, probably echoing Che Guevara: ‘mere words cannot change the world.’ Further, such a worldliness—an activist, Calibanesque worldliness—articulates, animates, and activates race, gender, and class struggles all at once against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy. And poetry itself continues to participate in such struggles in ways in which poetry itself becomes a praxis.
Indeed, a number of Latin American poets participating in what might be called ‘Poetry International’ have by now established a tradition of poetry-as-a-praxis. Some feminist poets, in particular, have been exemplarily explicit about the question of poetry-as-praxis, as they come to rub their words such that they catch fire. Let’s hear, then, certain pronouncements made in the thick of certain life-and-death struggles in Latin America.
The Nicaraguan feminist poet Rosario Murrillo, for instance, asserts: ‘We make a revolution when we write a poem.’ Almost in the same vein, the Chilean feminist poet-in-exile, Marjorie Agosin, says:
‘Don’t conspire with oblivion,
Tear down the silence.
I want to be
the appeared woman
from among the labyrinths
come back, return
name myself.
Call my name.’
Further, the Salvadoran feminist-cultural activist Nora Mendez, some of whose poems were born through life-and-death struggles in the very trenches of El Salvador, raises her voice thus:
‘Ana Maria puts the poetry onto boil
while her courage sows banners [. . .]
Ana Maria at the washing stones
early at the riverside
Ana Maria furious
when they would touch her child
when they would bleed her land.’
Yet another feminist poet—the Mexican poet Veronica Volkow—directly confronts the stark materiality of hunger in the very torn spaces of her land and language:
‘Hunger is the first eye of the body
the first eye in the night of the body
the eye with which flesh first sees flesh.’
Thus, an anonymous female guerrilla fighter who herself wrote poems could say: ‘Our poetry cannot afford to be enamored with the moon when we have bomb craters in our own land dropped by one of the biggest nations on the planet,’ while suggesting that poetry can at least approximate action and even street-action.
It is in this very tradition of poetry as action, poetry as street-action, and, for that matter, poetry-as-a-praxis, that a whole host of contemporary Latin American poets can be placed. I have mentioned a number of such poets already, but I intend to focus, relatively closely, on two poets—the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and the Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli for scores of distinct yet interconnected reasons. First, these two poets remain relatively unknown and unread, say, compared to a Pablo Neruda or an Ernesto Cardenal or a Nicolas Guillen, or even a Nicanor Parra. Second, these two poets—in my reckoning—most exemplarily took part in certain mass movements that, on numerous occasions, directly prompted their poetry. Third, both Dalton and Belli mobilize the tools, tropes, and topoi of political economy, moving in the direction of fashioning what I wish to call ‘a counter-poetics of political economy.’ Indeed, with remarkable effects, both Dalton and Belli deploy even such politico-economic concepts as ‘relations of production,’ ‘use-value,’ ‘exchange-value,’ and ‘surplus-value’ directly in their poems. Given the fact that political economy remains generally—if not always—ignored in the fields of literary and cultural criticism today, and given the fact that war itself is the gangster logic of the political economy of capitalism, a point that seems apparent in the post-September-11 world, I find it necessary to read some of the works of Dalton and Belli—works that, I argue, continue to speak to our times.
The worldliness of Belli and Dalton, then, also resides in the ways in which they continue to speak to the history of oppressions and oppositions—particularly the history of capitalism and imperialism and the history of movements against them—a history that can be traced as far back as the fifteenth-century. And, of course, this history of capitalism and imperialism has not at all reached its end, despite the jubilant and celebratory declarations of many ends, which I call ‘pos-tal endings.’ In the metropolis in particular, we have already had many posts—post-Modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, post-capitalism, post-imperialism, post-nationalism, post-dialectics, even post-class, and post-this and post-that: many posts indeed have been posted, although all such posts are not similar. But, certain twentieth-century pundits—from Foucault to Fukuyama—have already declared many endings and many deaths. For instance, Michel Foucault wrote on the death of ‘man’ and the ‘subject,’ then on the death of ‘ideology,’ then on the death of all ‘dialectics,’ and then on the death of ‘political economy.’ You can now count how many death-stories Foucault-the-obituarist really wrote. Baudrillard, the French theorist of the hyper-real, is certainly different from Foucault; yet Baudrillard says: ‘The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of the era of production.’
But Belli and Dalton are not preoccupied with those deaths and ends, but with life and with creations themselves. And Belli and Dalton continue to tell us through their works that issues of labor, production, political economy, ideology, and dialectics can only die if the forces of capitalism and imperialism themselves expire once and for all. Also, both Belli and Dalton suggest that there will be a new mode of production and, for that matter, a new political economy, and a new ideology through mass struggles and through human creativity. But it is a stubborn fact that we still live in a world characterised by unequal gender-relations, race-relations, and class-relations. It is also true that there are now numerous women’s movements and working-class and peasant movements across the world against those unequal power-relations and production-relations. Given such a world, then, the very worldliness of Belli’s and Dalton’s poetry resides in their ability to resonate with the people’s movements against exploitation and oppression—past and present.
In order to account for the worldliness of the poetry of Dalton and Belli further, I should point out that they target their poetry point-blank against imperialism—US imperialism in particular. The US—at least from the nineteenth-century onward or say since the time of the promulgation of the (in)famous Monroe doctrine in 1823—has kept targeting and invading different parts of Latin America, while time and again characterizing Latin America as ‘the backyard of the U.S.’ Roque Dalton and Gioconda Belli, of course, variously respond to the very history of their own continent. If ‘events are the real dialectics of history,’ as the Italian Marxist theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci tells us, then certain crucial events deserve mention here—events that both Dalton and Belli allude to in their works. Such events include the very annexation of more than a half of Mexico to the US in 1848, while in 1898—a crucial year as it is—the US annexed Puerto Rico and Cuba as well as Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Then, between 1900 and 1933, as the American labour historian Howard Zinn tell us in A People’s History of the United States, the U.S. intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Haiti twice, in the Dominican Republic four times, and in Honduras seven times. Gioconda Belli particularly observed U.S. invasions of Grenada in 1983 and 1984, and of course the U.S. invasions of El Salvador and her own country, Nicaragua, throughout the 1980s. In an interview, Gioconda Belli said, ‘U.S. imperialism is always in our face. It hurts us in the body every second,’ as, indeed, many Iraqis today are also saying.
Let me chart out certain specific tracks and trajectories with regard to the poetry of Roque Dalton and Gioconda Belli, and let me also provide certain details about their work in their respective national contexts. I will first talk about Roque Dalton and then about Gioconda Belli.
Roque Dalton’s Mass Poetics and Gioconda Belli’s Feminist Geopoetics
Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed once remarked on poetry-as-a-material force: ‘I see no borderlines between poetics and politics. In this part of the world, poetry is a matter of life and death.’ Reading the life and work of Roque Dalton—chequered, dramatic, and politically engaged as they are—one realizes the truth-claim of Faiz’s assertion. Dalton, like Faiz, went to jail several times for writing poetry and opposing military dictatorship in El Salvador.
Born in San Salvador in 1935, Dalton studied law and social science in universities in El Salvador, Chile, and Mexico. He joined the Communist party in 1955. He was arrested by the Lemus government in 1960 and he was sentenced to be shot. While he was preparing for death, life visited him: the government fell only four days before his scheduled execution. Later he went to jail again, and then escaped again. He laughingly told a number of fellow poets that he was the only poet ever to dodge a CIA firing squad because an earthquake split the walls of his cell.
Firing squads and bullets figure prominently in the life of Salvadorans. In fact, both oppression and revolution have been part of daily life in El Salvador for nearly seventy years. In 1931 General Hernandez Martinez overthrew the government after the collapse of coffee prices had plunged the country into depression. Hernandez Martinez’s dictatorship lasted until 1944 and was followed by a series of other right-wing military dictatorships—as usual, backed by U.S. imperialism. Any political unrest challenging the supremacy of the few propertied families was brutally repressed by the police and the National Guard. Progressive groups fought for changing these dictatorial regimes since the uprising led by Farabundo Marti in 1932. Roque Dalton was a member of one of those groups. But on May 10, 1975, in a factional feud, Roque Dalton was assassinated.
In 1979 a war between the military government and progressive forces broke out, a war which lasted thirteen years. The US government flooded Central America with military aid, helping create the Contras, convert Honduras into a U.S. military base, and finance the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador. Such operations, along with direct military force, were implemented to keep wealth in the hands of the few and away from the people by eliminating democracy.
The fact that Roque Dalton’s poetry directly challenges capitalism, racism, and sexism with biting wit, relentless courage, and undying love will be hopefully evident from a couple of short poems that I will read. These poems are translated from the Spanish into English by my colleague Tony Zaragoza, and these translations appeared in the journal called dis/content: a journal of theory and practice, which I co-edited for several years:
Deposition
In the name of those who live in another’s country
(the houses and the factories and the businesses
and the streets and the cities and the towns
and the rivers and the lakes and the volcanoes and the mountains
always belong to someone else
and for that reason the police and the national guard
defend them from us)
In the name of those who only possess
hunger exploitation sickness
thirst for justice and thirst for water
persecutions sentences
loneliness negligence oppression death
I accuse private property
of depriving us of everything.
On Surplus-value, or How the Boss Robs Each Worker Twice
The domestic work of the woman
creates time for the man
to do work that is socially valued,
work he isn’t fully paid for,
(the majority of its value
the capitalist steals)
barely enough
to live on and keep
working;
this pay
the man takes home
and says to the woman
ah well, see if you can manage
to stretch it out enough
to cover the costs
of the domestic work.
Like You
I, like you,
love love, life, the sweet song
of matter, the heavenly countryside
of January days.
My blood, too, boils
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the sprouting of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful,
that poetry like bread is for everyone.
And that my veins do not end inside me
but in those who fight for life,
love,
matter,
countryside and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
Gioconda Belli, indeed, responded actively to Dalton’s accents falling sharply on the ‘poetry of everyone’ and on the fact that ‘poetry, like bread, is for everyone.’ Yes, poetry is not just the private property of those aesthetic Brahmins who can endlessly unearth the intricate poetry and the dazzling punditry of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and company. In fact, Belli used to quote Roque Dalton a great deal to accentuate the need for producing the kind of poetry that immediately becomes a worldly force, a material force, by gripping the masses.
Belli was born in 1948 in Nicaragua at a time when the surge of anti-Somoza activism reached a particular point of intensity involving women—particularly peasant and working-class women—in the various orbits of struggle. Belli joined the then-vibrant Sandanista National Liberation Front—FSLN—in 1970. In 1974, she published her first collection Sobre la grama (‘About the Seed’) that underlines Belli’s militant feminist activism in the struggle against Nicaraguan military dictatorship and US imperialism. Her first novel, called La mujer habitada (‘The Woman’s Room’)—a charged feminist novel—provides a fictionalized account of how Belli became part of the FSLN raid on the dictator Somoza’s friend Chema Castillio’s bourgeois Christmas party on December 27, 1974. After this event, Belli went into exile in Cuba from where, in 1978, she published yet another combative feminist-socialist collection of poems called Line of Fire. This particular collection of poems received the Casa de las Americas prize.
On July 19, 1979, ‘the people of Nicaragua, led by the Sandanist National Liberation Front, won a resounding victory when almost a half-century of struggle culminated in the overthrow of the repressive dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza,’ to use Margaret Randall’s words from her important book Sandino’s Daughters. Soon after this revolution Belli started working for the newly set up Women’s Association whose predecessor before the revolution was the Association of Nicaraguan Women Confronting the Nation’s Problems known in its acronym AMPRONAC. Since 1979, Belli has published several collections of poems such as Thunder and Rainbows in 1982 and From Eve’s Rib in 1986, among others, while her collected works appeared in Managua in 1991.
In 1991, Belli said: ‘I rub the dialectics of Nicaragua’s history again and again so that my lines catch fire, while the history and geography of Nicaragua are always in the depth and on the immediate surface of my consciousness.’ Indeed, her collection of poems called Line of Fire amply attests to how deeply Belli is grounded and rooted in the historic and geographic contexts. In her lines and stanzas, Nicaragua burns with passion, and, as she says, with the passion of the most oppressed—women. As Nicaragua burns at the centre of Belli’s poetic consciousness and imagination, Belli’s lines of fire make us traverse quite a temporal range, from at least the year 1821, which marks the so-called independence of Nicaragua. Let me quickly historicize a few moments here. Back in the nineteenth century, in 1855, the US invasion of Nicaragua began, when William Walker governed the country for three years. Then in 1893 Jose Santos Zelaya became president and undertook the Liberal Reform, but in 1909, the US intervened again in Nicaragua’s internal affairs and expelled Zelaya from the presidency. But this is by no means the entire story. For soon after, in 1912, the US troops landed at Corinto. They attacked the Liberals and remained in Nicaragua until 1925.
As the editors of the book called Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak rightly put its: ‘Due to its privileged geographic situation on the Caribbean, to its natural inter-oceanic waterway which could so easily be made into a canal, and to the natural wealth of its soil, rich in farm, forest and mining products, Nicaragua occupied one of the most desirable strategic locations in the United States empire’s defence and security system.’ This natural geographical location, which is variously imagistically captured in Belli’s entire oeuvre, sealed the neo-colonial pact between the United States and Nicaragua from the very beginning of her political independence in 1821, and determined the most crucial subsequent developments in Nicaragua. Such developments are characterized by a fierce struggle between the capitalist interests of the Republic of the north and the democratic interests of the Nicaraguan peoples. Indeed, the Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano, underwriting an acutely ‘continentalist’ position, maintains, in his novelistic historico-politico-economic work, The Open Veins of Latin America, that any history of military dictatorship in any part of Latin America or the Caribbean can by no means be dissociated from the history of US imperialism. This thereby suggests that militarism and imperialism go hand in hand—a point that Belli herself poetically drives home, particularly in her work Line of Fire.
Let me draw your attention to one particularly relevant segment of Nicaraguan history here. While the US remained in Nicaragua until 1925, the US troops returned to Managua in 1927 to oppose the Constitutionalist Army of Jose Santos Moncada. It is at this point that General Augusto Cesar Sandino began his guerrilla war against the US imperialist-military intervention—one that Belli would call simultaneously ‘a patriarchal aggression.’ In 1933, then, Sandino succeeded in beating back the US troops, which withdrew from the country, while, however, leaving in their place the National Guard. But, a year later, in 1934, Sandino was assassinated on Somoza’s order, and Somoza began the transition to achieving absolute power, which he would hold until 1956. And, in 1956, the rebel poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez—whom Belli recalls and alludes to in some of her poems—in collaboration with a group of militant activists, ended up overthrowing Somoza himself. The poet Lopez Perez was killed shortly after the event. The dictator’s oldest son, Luiz, then took power, unleashing a reign of terror.
From the late 1950s onward—throughout the 1960s and the 1970s—the Nicaraguan people increasingly organized themselves. Thus there was a spate of anti-imperial and anti-Somoza movements which brought together students, Marxists, feminists, working-class peoples, peasants, middle-class intellectuals, and many other groups of people, culminating in the overthrow of Somoza in 1979. It was during this particular period that Belli formulated many of her political positions and honed her revolutionary feminism and Marxism, while she of course produced a substantial body of her work in Nicaragua and outside it. After the revolution—during the Reconstruction period—Belli’s avowedly feminist poetry grew even sharper and more pointed, while taking a decisively continentalist-third-worldist-global turn and suggesting that poetry can be a material force, and thus a praxis of coalition in the service of a revolutionary social transformation. Belli herself called her the daughter of the Revolution and Reconstruction of Nicaragua.
For exigencies of time and space, I have to skip a cluster of interconnected textual readings here. However, what I can do is quickly and categorically outline some of Belli’s positions and suggestions—positions and suggestions that do not, however, come as neatly packaged theories. But at least some of her positions can be derived through certain symptomatic and even selective readings in the service of theory. I argue that such positions—once derived symptomatically—go into the fashioning of what I call her ‘geo-poetics of political economy’ as part of her avowedly third-worldist feminist-socialist undertakings. I will advance only a few positions and propositions here for further discussions.
First, for Belli, the production of what she herself calls ‘her feminist consciousness’ is deeply and organically informed by the history and geography of Nicaragua in ways in which all categories such as ‘nation,’ ‘nation-state,’ and ‘nationalism’ remain crucial or even central to her feminism. Even a quick reading of her famous yet under-engaged poem called ‘Nicaragua Water Fire’ reveals this point with full force. In this poem, Belli’s geographical consciousness—or for that matter, her acute spatial consciousness—serves as the motor of engineering an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial revolution on the one hand, and on the other, turns ‘nation’ itself into something more than an imagined community in the Benedict-Andersonian sense. In fact, ‘nation’ serves as a material site of struggle where, according to her, emancipation and revolution are impossible without the emancipation of women in Nicaragua. The question she raises is: How can there be any national liberation in Nicaragua or elsewhere without women’s liberation? This is a particular revolutionary question that emanated from the new Women’s Association which was simultaneously made possible and necessitated by the Nicaraguan Revolution and Reconstruction that, of course, unevenly emphasized the question of women, remaining masculinist in many dimensions and directions, certain unprecedented changes in women’s lives notwithstanding.
Second, related to the first position remains the position that takes up tensions between ‘nationalist feminism’ (something that Delia Aguilar has theorized in the specific contexts of the Philippines in her book Toward a Nationalist Feminism) and Marxism—or for that matter, socialism. In general, indeed, Belli’s poetry seems very sympathetic to the working-class people and poor peasants and peasant women. A host of third-world Marxist-Leninists such as Che, Castro, and Cabral emphasize the peasant question as the central class-question and agency-question that, according to them, should deeply inform and inflect the national-colonial question, thus partly rehearsing and partly revising Lenin’s own position. But, Belli, like a number of third-world feminists, seems to be suggesting that within such a matrix of relations of class and agency, gender seems either subordinated or even elided. Under such historical-material circumstances, Belli then stretches a certain variant of third-world Marxism to include and re-situate the gender question within the specific parameters of the national-colonial question in ways in which a national liberation movement—right from the get go—can neither bypass class-struggle nor the struggle for women’s liberation. In certain ways, then, Belli seems to be stretching Maoism (which is the third-world’s Marxism-Leninism) in decisively and distinctly feminist directions. For her, thus, nationalism, socialism, and feminism all remain potentially interconnected.
Third, for Belli, neither nationalism nor gender remains a matter of mere individual or group identity, as a number of her collections of poems from About the Seed through Line of Fire down to Thunder and Rainbow suggest on differential registers. Even in her early erotic poetry, Belli, like the African-American feminist-lesbian poet Audre Lorde, re-inserts her body into the revolutionary body-politic that she forges and re-forges in her imagination in the specific geographical contexts of Nicaragua. Belli posits gender as relational to the structure of power which is patriarchy itself. And, later, Belli even goes to the extent of positing gender as local and global production-relations, and it is in this context that Belli seems to be opening up the possibilities of forging a distinctly feminist political economy in poetic terms. It is probably because of her direct engagement with political economy in the very site of poetic production that she exemplarily avoids what Fanon already alerted us to—the dangers of cultural nationalism. Indeed, certain versions of cultural nationalism fetishise ‘identity’ at the expense of relations and structures that produce and reproduce oppressions and exploitations of women. Belli is not interested in this kind of identity politics. Rather, Belli’s poetry provides crucial clues as to third-world feminist political economy as a weapon in struggle against the macro-and-micro structures of patriarchal power and production, and capitalism itself, on both local and global scales.
Fourth, the questions of poetics and praxis. As I already indicated, Belli can certainly be placed in the tradition of poetry-as-a-praxis, as constituted by an entire constellation of third-world feminist poets from Puerto Rico to Palestine to Pakistan to the Philippines—from Brazil to the Bahamas to Bangladesh. But for Belli, indeed, poetry does not automatically become a praxis. Poetry becomes a material force, or, for that matter, a praxis only when it grips the consciousness of the masses by directly addressing their immediate economic, social, political, and cultural problems.
Finally, let me close my lecture with certain lines from a poem by Gioconda Belli—lines which hopefully would point to a number of positions and propositions I’ve meanwhile only symptomatically outlined and underlined:
No alternative but the struggle. .
Nicaragua my love my raped girl . . .
Don’t take them root
We want maize rice beans
For the seeds to set in the earth
Where the peasant keeps in a wooden box
His Land Reform title deed. . . .
Nicaragua my little girl
Tell them her story travels in aeroplanes to tell her story
All over the world with her story
And, also, with lines such as:
Come and give me your hand. . . .
Together we shall face
Future war and victory . . .
We shall be born again,
Many times,
Keeping our flag red
Daughter
Woman
Comrade
Maryam
This Edward Said Memorial Lecture was sponsored in 2003 by the Office of the Dean, College of Arts & Letters; the Humanities Program; Asian Studies; and the Department of English of Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA.
PROFILE
Edward Said
Edward Said was a well-known Palestinian-American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory.
He was born in Jerusalem on November 1, 1935, but spent most of his life in the United States. His father was a wealthy Christian Palestinian businessman and an American citizen, while his mother was born in Nazareth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent. His sister is the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.
He received degrees from Princeton and Harvard before coming to Columbia, where he spent most of his adult life. His many books include Beginnings (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1980); Covering Islam (1981); The World, the Text and the Critic (1983); After the Last Sky (1986); Blaming the Victims (1987); Culture and Imperialism (1992), and The Politics of Dispossession (1995). His Wellek and Reith Lectures were published as, respectively, Musical Elaborations and Representations of the Intellectual. Peace and Its Discontents appeared in 1996, Out of Place: A Memoir in 1999, and The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After in 2000. Reflections on Exile appeared in 2000, as well as The Edward Said Reader, and in 2001, Power, Politics, and Culture. His books are translated into 36 languages.
Said received honorary doctorates from Bir Zeit, Chicago, Michigan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jami’a Malleyeh, Toronto, Guelph, Edinburgh, Haverford, Warwick, Exeter, National University of Ireland and American University in Cairo. He twice received Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of King’s College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Fellow of the Middle East Studies Association. In 1999 he was President of The Modern Languages Association.
Edward Said died at the age of 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia. In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, in his honour.
— Sanam Amin
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