Identity

Marian Haddad
First of all I like the forward stating about her poetry that it, “insists on the ‘connective instead of the divisive’ aspect of difference” (Inclined, 102). The range of her cultural experiences and knowledge of languages reminds me of a certain Professor I know.
Malfunctioning FLOWTRON
I love the two line rhythm and the dashes. I think this is a poem about her father dying of cancer But the relationship of identity comes out in his asking for Agua instead of water or the Arabic word for water. What I took away from this piece is that dying or being close to death reminds us that we are in the end the sum of all our experiences, homes, identities, and that being close to death makes the censor of our thoughts quite. So, the internal fight about identity is no longer an issue that shows itself in external thoughts or choices regarding what language we ask for our basic needs. His snoring mouth informs the reader that he is alive and that is music to the poets ears.
I Have No History Here
Again I like the two line rhythm. But this piece is broken also in space between words. The spaces really work to make the reader pause long enough to get the poets intention and not skip over how much weight two, three, words or a word can hold.
“out my window the sun
no longer the night nearing”
The spacing makes it feel different. I can imagine her seeing the sun out the window and being relived to have the darkness of night and fear distant at least for a moment. To be able to convey that with word spacing and order is really great. Order is important in achieving this as well. The line would be so different if it read, The night no longer out my window the sun nearing.
Because the night will in reality always be nearing, with the space and the order of the words it gives the feeling that somehow the sun out side of her window erases the possibility of night being an impending force. Pretty complicated for two lines.
The lines I liked the best were
“I have made a home
In a land I never knew”
“I am starting to write myself
down inscribe myself”
In this line again it is the spacing that is so significant.
I love the idea of writing yourself down. But with down being separate it can give the word many meanings. In one way I think of down as being depressed and writing about one self can certainly so that. Or it can be putting your self on to the page writing yourself into existence. But “inscribe myself” makes me think of tattooing or permanently carving a place into the world through words and your own body. In the context of identity I think that both creating a home and carving out a place where you exist in the world is the crux of what identity means. The way that identity express both the extremely private and public simultaneously makes identity an intensely complicated concept that people struggle with individually and collectively throughout their entire lives. Individually identity resides in the home or the soul and collectively identity resides with public perceptions or representations of issues like race, gender, culture, ect…