Tag: history
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Ghosts on the Shore
Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…
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Hic fuerunt dracones
Scary Monsters I: mapping the landscape of monstrosity When early map-makers depicted the world, they filled in the familiar regions with exquisite detail – names, places and things thought to exist there, rich layers of imagery and knowledge that resonated with those viewing and using the charts. The unknown regions were an informational blank, a…
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The monstrous body
Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent the things we might not want to face in ourselves, as individuals or as communities. Different monsters have represented different fears or anxieties in different…
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The chimaera
Scary Monsters III: collapsing space If you had walked into one of the princely Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosity of seventeenth-century Europe, you would have been assailed by the wealth of objects covering walls, ceilings, shelves and probably floors; naturalia, exotica and artificialia arranged in strange juxtapositions, decorative arrays and obscure taxonomies. The visual impression…
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Wolf yollez
‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’ Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…
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Blood Ties
There was a girl who met up with a wolf, back in Distant Time, when wolves were human. The wolf wanted her for his wife, even though he had two wives already. When he took her home, his two wives smelled her and knew she was human. After a while she had a child –…
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Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children
Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a pack’. Each is linked to other in a lineage of imagination, creation, or birth. There is a shared marginality. Each was believed somehow to have…
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Borders
On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…
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Rooting
. . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…
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How to Make a Map for Ethnic Cleansing
. . . . . . . . . .an elegy Demark colored lines fluid as the Red sea and place names for distance.. . . . . . . . . .Cherokee–– We are a region where herds wait, swallowing grass like fire. . . . . . . . . .Seminole––…
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The Light Comes in the Name of the Voice
“The light comes in the name of the voice.” – Jeanne d’Arc, as quoted by Anne Carson in Variations on the Right to Remain Silent And in the end, only this moment. First the ash-pile, white, fine wood-ash, grimy ice, a grey noon. The pigs. Frost lacing the leaves. The girl with itchy…