The poems in collection, Seam, are captivating and has weaved beauty with violence. The poems, in sequence, tell the story of how a speaker researched this atrocity, through the personal memories of family members and through interviews in Bangladesh. The harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores losses in her own society, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the brutalities these war heroines, birangonas- a term the Bangladeshi government applied to the women raped during the war in order to elevate their status, endured. Moving from West Texas to Dubai, to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator tries to give voice to the voiceless. Devastating and fierce but yet magical and loving at once, Seam is a …show more content…
The color of the eyes of the soldier who rapes the interviewee was also described to be green. The color the earth has been made by rain although it is unclear whether during the war or beforehand is also green. And the color of the water in which her grandmother bathes in more peaceful times is also green. Does this color represent something? We are not sure but the color of the Bangladeshi flag is also primarily green. Therefore it might be something related with their culture. It might also be saying that now that the women have gone through many acrostic incidence, they are indifferent to everything. The traumatizing silence of the room during the war and the eye of the soldier who raped her are same as watching beautiful, fresh green countryside after rain and the cool, refreshing water when her grandmother take a bath. This shows how the war has affected their ability to enjoy their life, especially the war torn women, they can even enjoy
The two poems best illustrate, through a reading put in a wider context of black suffering, Finney’s success in making the beautifully said thing intersect with the difficult-to-say-thing through her sharpened pencil (“Nikky Finney”), thus reshaping the present. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal concerns. The application of the (auto)biographical-historical approach necessitates the investigation of some points: the relevance of the poet’s personal life and his/her poems; the expression of certain beliefs of the poet and his personal experience in relation to public concerns and beliefs of the time; the representation of historical figures in the poems; adequate depiction of the time/context of the poems (“Literary Criticism”); the poems as a reflection, a product of the time; the reformulation of actual events for special purposes; the difference between fictional representation and reality; the difference the time; understanding past events mirrored in the poems; and the impact of historical events/movements and literary works in formulating the poems.
Poetry has been used for centuries as a means to explore emotions and complex ideas through language, though individuals express similar ideas in wholly different forms. One such idea that has been explored through poetry in numerous ways is that of war and the associated loss, grief, and suffering. Two noted Australian poets shown to have accomplished this are Kenneth Slessor with his work ‘Beach Burial’ and John Schumann’s ‘I Was Only Nineteen’. Both of these works examine the complexities of conflict, but with somewhat different attitudes.
War is cruel. The Vietnam War, which lasted for 21 years from 1954 to 1975, was a horrific and tragic event in human history. The Second World War was as frightening and tragic even though it lasted for only 6 years from 1939 to 1945 comparing with the longer-lasting war in Vietnam. During both wars, thousands of millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed. Especially during the Second World War, numerous innocent people were sent into concentration camps, or some places as internment camps for no specific reasons told. Some of these people came out sound after the war, but others were never heard of again. After both wars, people that were alive experienced not only the physical damages, but also the psychic trauma by seeing the deaths and injuries of family members, friends or even just strangers. In the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh about the Vietnam War, and the documentary film Barbed Wire and Mandolins directed by Nicola Zavaglia with a background of the Second World War, they both explore and convey the trauma of war. However, the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” is more effective in conveying the trauma of war than the film Barbed Wire and Mandolins because of its well-developed plot with well-illustrated details, and its ability to raise emotional responses from its readers.
This poem captures the immigrant experience between the two worlds, leaving the homeland and towards the new world. The poet has deliberately structured the poem in five sections each with a number of stanzas to divide the different stages of the physical voyage. Section one describes the refugees, two briefly deals with their reason for the exodus, three emphasises their former oppression, fourth section is about the healing effect of the voyage and the concluding section deals with the awakening of hope. This restructuring allows the poet to focus on the emotional and physical impact of the journey.
Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa is a collection of poems based on Komunyakaa’s personal experiences of the Vietnam War. He describes his experiences and observations in a way that isn’t as gritty and raw as some veterans, but still shows the horrors of war and the struggle to survive. What makes Komunyakaa’s work different is the emotion he uses when talking about the war. He tells it like it is and puts the reader in the soldiers’ shoes, allowing them to camouflage themselves and skulk around the jungles of Vietnam from the very first lines of “Camouflaging the Chimera.” Komunyakaa’s title Dien Cai Dau means “crazy” in Vietnamese and is an appropriate title based on the mind set of this veteran soldier. Two common themes I have found in Komunyakaa’s
The contrast Huong provides between the reality of Hang’s impoverished life and the beauty of the scenery that she experiences, emphasise the powerful effect the landscape has on her. When describing the first snowfall she ever observed, Hang noticed that the snowflakes “flood[ed] the earth with their icy whiteness,” this observation “pierc[ing her] soul like sorrow.” The scenery had such a moving effect on Hang, perhaps because she longed for the familiar sight of a Vietnamese landscape. Then recalling a time when her mother took her to a beach, the exquisiteness of the scene at dawn was equally emotionally poignant to Hang, not because she wished for a recognisable sight, but because it was such an extreme difference from the slum in Hanoi where she grew up. The sensory details of her childhood remain with Hang even years later, acting as a reminder of her humble beginnings even as she advances in life. The stench of “rancid urine” that permeated the walls of the slum and the hut where she and her mother lived, with its persistently leaky roof “patched together out of…rusty sheet metal” ; build a vivid picture of poverty. To then be exposed to the breathtaking vista of a natural landscape, having experienced the scarceness of beauty in the slums that is her home, causes distress in Hang.
Bruce Weigl’s work gives readers an accurate glimpse of what took place in Vietnam. His poetry reveals a harsher reality of the war that goes beyond the raw number of people who perished. The idea that real human beings are casualties in war is a burden Weigl and fellow Vietnam War poets share. To this day American’s simply see the fallen as just names and bodies, nothing further. Weigl serves as a forefront example of just how painful and disturbing the war was and his poetry is greatly influenced by it in nearly every facet. Moreover, it’s a reminder that the images he witnessed are unforgettable and are completely ingrained in his mind to the point where horror is the focus and projecting it as beautiful if his main goal.
‘Poetry can challenge the reader to think about the world in new ways.’ It provokes the readers to consider events, issues and people with revised understanding and perspectives. The poems Dulce Et Decorum Est (Wilfred Owen, 1917) and Suicide in the Trenches (Siegfried Sassoon, 1917), were composed during World War One and represented the poets’ point of views in regards to the glorification of war and encouraged readers to challenge their perspectives and reflect upon the real consequences behind the fabrications of the glory and pride of fighting for one’s nation.
Nesar,Uddin.(2013): “Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Komol in Saratchandra’s Shesh Proshno: A comparative study from feminist perspective,” in International Journal of English and Literature. Bangladesh, p.408-412.
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
The theme of death in the poems “War Photographer”, “Remember”, and “Mother in a Refugee Camp” were all portrayed in different forms to explore death and the suffering it brings. The variations of death in the three poems create a diverse image of death, which some people can relate to through the different situations of loss. “Remember” by Christina Rossetti fashions an image of death because the speaker wanted her husband to remember all the memories they had shared during her life. Rossetti found it necessary to portray death as a spiritual place rather than a physical state of decomposition so that she can finally escape to a place of silence to avoid all the darkness in her life. “War Photographer” by Carol Ann Duffy is about a man who takes photographs of death in vivid, dark and disturbing images of conflict, which Duffy conveys thoroughly throughout the poem to powerfully showcase his grief and disheartening on the situation. “A Mother in a Refugee camp” by Chinua Achebe, displays the struggles of a mother desperately trying to support and save her child while writhing in her caressing arms at death’s doors. These are the poems that represent the theme of death.
‘’War Photographer’’ is a thought-provoking and mind gripping poem by Carol Ann Duffy. The poem revolves around the life of the photographer as he juggles between his two personas as he try to develop his photos and reminisce about the war torn countries, all the innocent people and the horrific and gory things he has witnessed. As the poem progresses and the pictures begin to develop the memories of pain and suffering from his past starts to unravel and becomes clearer and clearer. The main message the writer is trying to convey is the fact that through modern times news about the war is being published by the media in a truthful way that people feel less sympathy towards the innocent lives of the people dying all around the world. The writer effectively raises questions about our feelings and emotions that we feel towards war and death.
In this chapter Mahasweta Devi’s anthology of short stories entitled Breast Stories to analyze representations of violence and oppression against women in name of gender. In her Breast Stories, Devi twice evokes female characters from ancient Hindu mythology, envisions them as subalterns in the imagined historical context and, creates a link with the female protagonists of her short stories. As the title suggests, Breast Stories is a trilogy of short stories; it has been translated and analyzed by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and, in Spivak’s view, the ‘breast’ of a woman in these stories becomes the instrument of a brutal condemnation of patriarchy. Indeed, breast can be construed as the motif for violence in the three short stories “Draupadi,” “Breast-Giver,” and “Behind the Bodice,”
People clinging to the sides of a train is a common sight in both Pakistan and India, and as one could imagine, they are clinging for their lives, for if they let go, they will fall off the train and quite likely be killed. She compares her desire to hold on to the henna, which represents the Indian aspect of her identity, and the Indian identity she discovered in the bazaar, to holding on desperately for your life on a fast train. This illustrates to the reader how desperately she wants to keep this experience and her newfound identity. Moniza Alvi employs a wide variety of techniques, from end-stopped lines and formatting in structure, to rhyme, tone, and even imagery and language to attempt to explore the vast concept of identity. She successfully manages to explore the concept of identity, and conveys to the reader the meaningful message that discovering your true identity is dearly valued and highly significant.
‘The Falling Soldier’ is one of many poems by Duffy which deals with the subject of human mortality. Duffy expresses what could have been over a harsh reality; this is characteristic of her as also seen in ‘Last Post’ and ‘Passing Bells’ which both seem to be largely influenced by poet peer Wilfred Owen’s personal experiences of war. In the ‘The Falling Soldier’ Duffy paradoxically captures the essence of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a man falling after being shot during the Spanish Civil War (1936). She employs the form of an impersonal narrative voice, using second person to question the possibilities, to explore the tragic and cyclical nature of war. The futile reality of war contrasts to her central theme in ‘The Bees’ anthology of bees symbolising the grace left in humanity.