Oltreoceano - Rivista sulle migrazioni

Giorgina Levi in Bolivia (1939-1946). Mediations, Interactions and Emotions of en Exile

2024-12-30T20:05:16+00:00

This contribution aims to address the exile experience and practices developed by Giorgina Levi during the seven years (1939 - 1946) of her stay in Bolivia. Her experience was recounted in the accurate volume edited by Marcella Filippa (Avrei capovolto le montagne, Giunti, Florence 1990), in which an organic palimpsest of letters and interviews with Giorgina allows us to listen to the first-person voice of the protagonist and observe her strategies of self-representation. Little studied, the text outlines the specific features of the transexilic topography traced by Georgina Levi: a topography whose lines are articulated in both the inter-American (Bolivia and Argentina) and trans-American (Bolivia and Italy) horizons. The intention is to traverse the stratified world of interactions, mediations and emotions constructed by the exile from the apparent solitude of the high Bolivian peaks. «If I had not been in Bolivia, I would not be the same», Giorgina wrote several times: a new relational identity proliferated from exile, which would remain a distinctive feature of Levi’s personality and political action after her return to Italy. An identity transformed or enriched by the variety of contacts she made with multiple social actors: from Bolivian miners to leading figures of the Latin American left or Jewish exiles she met along the way, with whom she built networks of friendship and social and political collaboration. Exile, from an experience of loss, is transformed into a «trump card» (Philippa 246), that is, into a productive and transformative experience.

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, a case of linguistic self-exile in two stages

2024-12-31T14:31:57+00:00

This paper focuses on the case study of J.R. Wilcock, a multilingual Italian-Argentine writer who changed the language of literary expression, going from the native language (River Plate Spanish) to the acquired language (Italian). Wilcock's is an example of voluntary territorial and linguistic exile, brought about by his differences with Peronism and by the desire to return to his Italian (biological family) and Latin (linguistic family) roots. This transition from one language to the other, a way of territorial and symbolic uprooting at the same time, was progressive. We identify two phases: the consecutive self-translation from Spanish to Italian practiced in Poesie spagnole, a book published in 1963 with a poetic selection from the 40s and 50s, and the adoption of the second language from Luoghi comuni (1961). Then, he will no longer write in Spanish or self-translate from L2 to L1. Hypotheses are presented about the reasons for code switching linked to the principle of linguistic complementarity, the rejection of transcreation and distrust in the functional adherence of any translation. Wilcock’s decision to translate himself was a way of exercising control over the fidelity of the Spanish originals that he wanted to present to the Italian public without losing the opportunity to disseminate a representative sample of his Argentine poetic prehistory and to pay tribute to him, still with nostalgia. Later, his voluntary exile would be fulfilled in the language, with the definitive change to Italian of his ancestors on the maternal side. In these compositions he will renounce vernacular, popular and regional brands (both Italian and Spanish) in a diachronic travel back to the common ideal of a lost Latinity. Wilcock’s linguistic exile questions the idea of “border” understood as a defining space of a subject's identity, revealing the capacity of language to construct new personal and literary identities throughout life.

Pragmatic analysis of Invisibles. Voces de un trozo invisible de este mundo by Juan Diego Botto

2024-12-31T14:42:38+00:00

The aim of this article is to carry out a pragmatic analysis of Juan Diego Botto's play Invisibles. Voces de un trozo invisible de este mundo, in which the author confronts two themes that many people must face for different reasons: exile (which he himself suffered) and emigration. In our case, we will focus more on the former and comment on the types of exile that exist, as well as some related words such as deportation, expatriation, expulsion, or estrangement, etc. In fact, although in dictionaries they appear as synonyms, but they are not exactly the same because exile is the separation from the land where one lives, while banishment is the result of a penalty imposed, usually by the State, and whose purpose is the expulsion of a person from a place or territory for having committed a crime, it can be temporary or sine die (there is also talk of expulsion and there are well-known cases in Chile –they chose the place to go –and Argentina– expulsion of foreigners convicted of a crime in that country, provided that they had served half of their sentence and without open legal proceedings–). Another type of separation was caused by Italian fascism whereby many intellectuals were confined or forced to live in southern areas or on Mediterranean islands. Today, two writers live under escort outside their respective countries: Salman Rushdie and Roberto Saviano. On the other hand, one people that has experienced expulsion, exodus and diaspora is the Jewish people. The expulsion, during the reign of the Reyes Católicos (with Felipe III, the expulsion of the moriscos or descendants of Muslims), the exodus, after the Second World War and the diaspora when this people voluntarily disintegrated outside the borders of Palestine. Methodologically, with a Pragmatic approach, we will examine the illocutionary force of some fragments, paying special attention to the satisfactory respect of Grice's maxims or other of his lines of research such as Austin's speech acts, etc.

El viejo soldado by Héctor Tizón. Otherness as a way of finding identity.

2024-12-31T14:50:40+00:00

The Argentine writer Héctor Tizón (1929-2012) wrote the novel El viejo soldado in 1981, during his exile in Madrid. It is a text with strong autobiographical overtones, which remained unpublished until 2002 at the author's own wish. The novel, as Ana Príncipi maintains, raises the problem of the preservation of a subjectivity in a situation of exile. Raúl is a young Argentine who, after the military coup in his country, goes into exile in Spain. To survive and support his family, he works as a writer in the pay of an old Francoist determined to publish his memoirs. To the experience of exile, already traumatic, Raúl will have to add the humiliation of lending his pen to someone who represents the same values that have led him to that situation. But it is, above all, his coexistence with his antagonist that causes deep fissures in the story that he has constructed of his own life. According to Paul Ricoeur (2006), man, to understand himself, must narrate his own story. Only this account of oneself grants identity to the subject. Now, this «narrative identity» (Ricoeur 997) is a dynamic process in which, from the present, the subject chooses the events, experiences and interactions with others that nourish and give meaning to the plot of his story and that help him to understand himself and be understood. It is an eternal process of resignification of one's own self over time.
From his present in exile and the confrontation with the old soldier, for Raúl his present and past life acquires another reading. This resignification of his own identity will lead him to an extreme decision: that of murdering the old man because his existence reminds him of his failure, but, above all, to end at the part of “the other” that he discovered in himself.

Losses and Abandonments in Clara Obligado’s Una casa lejos de casa. La escritura extranjera

2024-12-31T14:58:12+00:00

This article studies the theme of exile in the book of the Argentine writer based in Spain, Clara Obligado, Una casa lejos de casa. La escritura extranjera (2020). The written reflects on life in transit, without a precise location. Argentina and Spain are two countries that share the same language that can be, at the same time, very different. Learning to use two similar and, at the same time, dissimilar languages is the challenge faced by the author whose existence takes place in a kind of non-place, in a precarious condition. The essay recounts this problematic space, in a clear challenge to political positions that are nourished by discrimination. Spain was the country chosen by many Argentinians who left their land during the last 45 years. There were several reasons; the common language, the ease of access, the Spanish ancestors of the young people stalked by their political ideas. Among the many difficulties involved in settling in another land, we must highlight the work involved in the desire to avoid contamination of the language or, as often happens, accepting a mixed result that ends up being neither Spanish nor Argentine or being the two at a time. This new literature that has emerged in Spain for decades, the result of the exile and diaspora of many non-Spanish artists by birth, is defined in different ways; For some critics, it presents hybrid characteristics (Canclini 1990), transcultural (González Dopazo 2009), extraterritorial (Noguerol 2008), or it is a deterritorialized literature (Guerrero 2012), or of the border (Noguerol 2019). Various labels that indicate diverse characteristics that point to a literary panorama in motion that destabilizes classic categories.

Exile and Migration in the APCLAI Archive

2024-12-31T15:04:32+00:00

This work presents the film material from the “Centro Audiovisivo Latino Americano” (CALA) Archive of the “Associazione per la Promozione della Cultura Latino Americana in Italia” (APCLAI) that focuses on exile and other forms of migration, with the aim of offering an overview of the wide variety of migratory routes affecting the Latin American region: the Great Italian migration to the Americas that began in the last decades of the 19th century and continued until the First World War; the flight of Jews from the pogroms during the forty years between 1881 and 1921; the displacements as a result of political persecution by authoritarian regimes that spread across Europe after the First World War; the destierro of thousands of Spaniards during the Civil War and after the establishment of the Franco regime; the flight of Jewish victims of Nazism; the European migration between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s; the exile of Latin Americans to the United States or Europe, driven by the different regimes that followed in the second half of the 20th century; and the crossing of the “Grande Frontera Norte” between Mexico and the United States and, for those from Central America, the equally cruel southern border of the Mexican State. The aim, starting from this general framework, is to understand the view that Latin American cinematography gives us on the theme of migration and, specifically, on that form of forced migration that constitutes exile, while giving visibility to this extremely valuable artistic medium that has yet to receive due recognition, on a par with Latin American literature.

“Dépaysé”: the linguistic exile of “italic” writers. Antonio D’Alfonso converses with Alessandra Ferraro

2024-12-30T18:18:08+00:00

In 1978, Antonio D’Alfonso founded the publishing house Guernica in Montreal, which published in three languages; with Filippo Salvatore and Fulvio Caccia, he then participated in the birth of Italian-Canadian literature and, with works in English and French, he became a major figure in this artistic movement. In 2021, he inaugurated a more intimate, autobiographical vein (Outside Looking In, Dépaysé) and published an essay, notably “Federazione per il futuro”, where he explores the evolution of the “italic”culture produced in the context of Italian emigration. The conversation is about this culture of which the Italian-Canadian intellectual is the spokesman. Ferraro’s exchanges with D’Alfonso, born within the activities organized by the Centro di Cultura Canadese in Udine, enriched over the years by correspondence and meetings in Montreal, have made it possible to deepen and define the key aspects of his thought and work. His condition as an exile, from a geographical, cultural and linguistic point of view, pushed Antonio D’Alfonso to reflect on his composite identity, to create multilingual and transmedial works and to forge the notion of “italics” to bring out, by trying to define it, the invisible production of Italian writers abroad, children of this emigration that emptied Italy for decades. The loss of their country and their culture of origin intimately marked the emigrants and their children, giving the works born in this context characteristics that derive from this deterritorialization.

Going from Exile to Exile. The "Great Wandering" in La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

2024-12-30T18:50:53+00:00

This study analyzes the theme of exile in the novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, dedicated to Yambo Ouologuem, a great Malian author who won the Renaudot Prize in 1968 for Le devoir de violence. This work, now recognized as a masterpiece, was withdrawn from the market and removed from the Seuil publishing house's catalog upon its release. The writer, after experiencing success, was accused of plagiarism, attacked, and insulted by the press. Deeply shaken, he retired to his native village, where he lived in total isolation until his death in 2017. Yambo Ouologuem is undoubtedly the model for the Senegalese writer T. C. Elimane, (also accused of plagiarism), who haunts the main narrator, the young writer Diégane Latyr Faye, determined at all costs to uncover his story and fate. Several narrators, including real writers like Gombrowicz and other fictional ones, in an extraordinary interlocking manner, strive to reconstruct the life and destiny of Elimane, the true protagonist of the novel, even though he is absent since he mysteriously disappeared a long time ago. Several characters have lived or still live in this state of exile, and each reflects on their own experience. As we discover their testimonies, we realize that exile is fundamentally only an especially intense, extreme trial of what constitutes the state of unease and solitude of every human being in the world, up to the fatal outcome of death. However, this harsh initiation can lead to a harmonious fulfillment if one understands and accepts a life illuminated by the indissoluble link between the past and the future.

Émile Ollivier’s Exiles

2024-12-30T19:00:23+00:00

Migrant literature represents an important stage in the dynamics of Quebec literature, both scripturally and theoretically. The article first summarizes the structuring axiological elements of the Quebec literary field that, from the 1960s onwards, paved the way for the entry and integration of migrant authors into the Quebec canon. These include identity and cultural territorialization, felt to be incomplete by both Quebec authors (Jacques Ferron) and critics (Laurent Mailhot), and which Pierre Nepveu likens to migrant authors, emphasizing the similarities. The complimentary component of the process belongs to the Italo-Québécois and Haitians who, in the 1990s, thematized and theorized the exilic situation, transforming the perception of cultural and ethnic otherness into an existential, ethical and scriptural problematic translated by the concepts of nomadism and enracinerrance. Unlike his fellow exiles - Robert Berrouët-Oriol, Jean Claude Charles, Joël Des Rosiers - Émile Ollivier treats the exilic condition on two complementary levels. The first considers the nomadic-sedentary relationship from a historical perspective, noting the axiological overturn in favor of nomadism as the dominant human status in the postmodern world. The second deduces the philosophical consequences associated with writing. The discussion is illustrated by three works - the theoretical reflection Repérages (2001) and the two novels from the latest period Passages (1994) and La Brûlerie (2004). The analysis reveals the link between the exilic theme and the consequences Émile Ollivier draws from it for the structuring of spatiality, narration and the status of writing as a manifestation of the dynamics of the void. As an example of an integrating process, Émile Ollivier's poetics anticipates certain post-2000 trends in Quebec literature.

Ryoko Sekiguchi: Exile Between Simultaneity and Superimposition

2024-12-30T19:13:07+00:00

In an interview, Ryoko Sekiguchi remarked about her experience of exile: "exiled people always live two seasons simultaneously" (2021). This means, for example, that in winter she can live with the sky of Tokyo, Beirut or Granada, while being in Paris. This imaginative ubiquity of presence is not only at the center of her condition as a foreigner in France, but also at the heart of her poetic work, involving space-times characterized by a principle of simultaneity and by the constant attempt to superimpose several texts or several voices on the same sensitive surface. In this study, we analyze the role played by simultaneity and superimposition as poetic and heuristic tools in the poet's work. Among the works that make up his vast corpus, we have chosen to focus on Heliotropes. This book seems particularly significant to us, since it bases the simultaneity of all its constituent elements on the superposition between the poetic world and the world of plants. After briefly presenting the text, we explore the superposition between textual forms and plant forms in order to identify the principles of spatialization that allow Sekiguchi to neutralize time: we first look at the isomorphy between metric block and botanical block, because the measure chosen by the author is based on a principle of crystallization that leaves no room for random proliferation and reminds us, on the one hand, the geometric principles governing the formation of the regular and symmetrical structures of plants, and on the other, the desire for order that allows nature to be landscaped as a garden. Then, we examine the analogy between the forms of textual grafting and the so-called plant grafts. We thus wish to reconstruct the movements and space-times of this writing of exile which is configured as the simultaneous listening of multiple sounds.

Gabriel Mwènè Okoundji and the Tégué Memory (Okondo-Ewo). The poetry word in the face of «vents de l’exil»

2024-12-30T19:22:12+00:00

Gabriel Okoundji is a poet born in Congo-Brazaville who has chosen to live in the south-west of France : his status as Mwènè, as a spiritual guide, roots him in his culture of origin, but his writing is without borders and draws from its primary source, the cultural heritage of his land of Africa : symbols, proverbs, metaphorizations, animism, the dialogue with the ancestors, the orality of the storytellers.
His collaboration with Philippe Bono and his personal reinvention of Arte Povera, and Sylvie Basteau with the abstract reworking of his travels, are exemplary testimonies of the dialogue with contemporary art. This contribution questions the possibilities of preserving the memory of traditions in a context of migration and of transmitting it as a current and unavoidable message.

Exile, a "Second Chance" According to Felicia Mihali?

2024-12-30T19:34:46+00:00

In 2000, disillusioned with Romania's economic situation, Felicia Mihali moved to Montreal, Quebec. There, in the "belle province", by translating into French books she had published in Romania before leaving, she joined a group of migrant writers that included Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, Naïm Kattan, Ying Chen, Abla Farhoud, Marco Micone, Sergio Kokis and others. Initially, she gave her books a second chance through self-translation, and later adopted French and English as her writing languages. Limiting my contribution to the analysis of three of her novels written in French (La reine et le soldat, Dina and La Bigame), the titles of which explicitly refer to women, I propose to examine how the experience of exile is captured in the journey of characters who cross borders and seek to become accustomed to the habits and customs of their host country. Felicia Mihali's writings often conjure up the image of an exile corresponding to what Janet Paterson (2009: 15-16) calls a "transnational subject", i.e. "an emigrant who has either chosen or been forced to leave his or her country of origin. But [...] s/he rejects the notion of an identity formed on the criteria of race or place of origin, in favour of a complex, shifting identity that is often multicultural and outside the confines of memories". Consequently, by modelling the title of my article on the title of her novel, A Second Chance for Adam, I aim to show that in her novels, exile, experienced in a positive way, represents a second chance, given that the protagonists are characterized by a desire for openness and integration into another geographical, linguistic and cultural space.

Forms of Exile

2024-12-29T18:30:01+00:00

This number of Oltreoceano is dedicated to exile and considers its causes following the establishment of authoritarian and despotic regimes in Europe and in the Americas, where the outcasts arrived from both parts of the Atlantic and from within the same continent. All these elements can be seen in the literatures in English, French, Italian and Spanish analyzed herein. Exile is indeed an essential condition of literature and corresponds to a state of mind in which emotions derive from its intrinsic conditions, that is, from separation and breakage. After analyzing its different etymological nuances (which, according to the Treccani Encyclopedia, derive from political, economic and cultural reasons), the articles focus on the figure of the outcast and his / her relationship with XX- and XXI-century literature and writing mainly from a distance. If the politics of terror and coercion instigate its testimonial urge to witness the facts (the new outcast thus connects with the ancient form of exile of the Latin-American tradition), marginalization also produces its contrary, with the development of a literature of counter-exile. According to Claudio Guillén who coined the term in 1995, exilios and insilios converge in this literature since a different type of writing focused on exploring the new geographical setting allows exiled artists to find refuge in a world of fantasy where they are stimulated by the search for expressive freedom and the possibility to live without subduing to extreme influences. This inner exile does not necessarily require displacement from the homeland: rather than mere social and cultural categories, separation and reintegration are values to reject or adopt spontaneously. There are thus similarities between territorial exile and marginalization within one’s homeland.

A Chat Among Friends: In Conversation with Siegfried Gerhardt

2024-12-29T18:48:47+00:00

We can become exiles for a number of diverse reasons; among them, there is the need to find work or flee from a totalitarian regime where freedom of thought is considered a crime. Siegfried Gerhardt’s experience as an expatriate for the latter reason bears witness to the deep bitterness that exiles feel when they end up in hostile places and with people who do not interact with them thus making them feel as intruders and hindering their integration and re-appropriation of identity. This feeling is even more painful in Gerhardt’s case since he considers himself as “an exile from his homeland” ‒ a statement which echoes a famous phrase by the well-known poet and writer Adelbert von Chamisso who spent his whole life painfully wandering as an exiled person: I am always out of place; I never feel in the right place. It is thus necessary to “exile oneself from exile”, to find strength and consolation in the beauty (and goodness) of art ‒ Dostoevskij’s eternal idea that saves us from the hostilities of life. This is what Siegfried Gerhardt has done.

Virtual Exiles

2024-12-29T18:57:45+00:00

In a way not dissimilar to the birds of Boscoverde, which feel a more impellent urge to migrate after the storm Vaia and to engage in a sort of exile as they await to return to their woods, violent and evil men, overcome by the desire for death in youth and by the horrors of global wars, feel obliged to engage in a sort of mental exile into alternative places of thought to survive. Like the birds, they, too, long to return to themselves, to their mental habitat‒ in other words, to their daily serenity; and just like the birds that have faith in the species, in future nests and in the choral harmony of their collective chant, so too do the men, reawakened in their spirits, feel the passion for life and the urge to make free choices that reactivate their dreams. They thus search for bright spaces where they can spread the meaning of existence with words and gestures that transmit goodness and beauty. Together they await the coming of a Homo Viator, capable of giving voice to a new type of humanism, which instills a constructive sense of humanity into positive global projects.

Louis Bromfield, Age Anxiety, and the End of the American Expatriate

2024-12-29T19:04:21+00:00

This article examines two early works by Louis Bromfield, a notable member of the American literary community in Paris in the first half of the 20^th century. In the essay “Expatriate—Vintage 1927” Bromfield argues that notions such as “American expatriate” and “young American girl abroad” have become superseded, as they reflect an obsolete kind of internationalism. The same argument is fictionalized in the short story “The Apothecary”, where Bromfield reworks characters and plots of the transatlantic realist tradition to represent the intersection of an obsolete kind of internationalism with (gendered) age anxiety and creative exhaustion.

«The Mockery of Citizenship». Great War and authoritarian involution of states in the writings and public speeches of Emma Goldman

2024-12-29T19:12:34+00:00

The purpose of the essay is to highlight Emma Goldman's reflection on the changes brought about by the Great War to the very idea of nation and citizenship. From then, citizenship was no longer defined by membership to a social and political organization, but rather to a blood community, and in any case subject to the arbitrariness of governments. As Emma Goldman wrote in 1933, citizenship had become a “sheer mockery”. The first part of the article briefly outlines Emma Goldman’s anarchist vision and questions the judgment that until recently has prevailed in biographies and essays describing her as an activist, a synthesizer, not as an original thinker. Then the essay addresses her contribution to feminist theory and the influence the authors of radical American tradition of resistance to authority had on her idea of anarchy. The central part is dedicated to the Lithuanian anarchist’s reflection on citizenship starting from 1909, when her naturalization was revoked, to 1919 when, after two years in prison, she was deported to Russia, and finally to the early years of exile. Painfully affected by denaturalization and expulsion, Emma Goldman understood not only that her life would be changed forever, but so would social coexistence, ways of thinking, and political structures. The analysis of Goldman’s writings and speeches on war legislation and ideological mobilization against the enemy aliens and minorities is intertwined with the reconstruction of the context of intolerance and psychosis brought about by the conflict. Emma Goldman was among the first to grasp the seriousness of the persecution of enemy nationals, the anomalous status of women in relation to citizenship and African Americans, and to denounce abuse and violence. Indeed, the process of redefining the nation enacted during the war years led to the marginalization or violent exclusion of large sections of society along class, gender and race lines.

“Every time he comes in he robs me”: The Parasitic Chains of Israel Potter’s Exile

2024-12-30T17:04:46+00:00

Along with recent Melvillian scholarship (Irigoyen 2018, Lazo 2022), the present essay analyzes the representation of the exile in Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: or, His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), by focusing on the ways in which the geographical dislocation of American citizens abroad transforms their position within the body politic and the social contract established after the end of the American Revolution. In particular, the present analysis argues that the experience of exile is crucial in generating an imbalance between state and people, turning the mutually beneficial relationship that ties them together into a form of exploitation of the former over the latter. In other words, while the social compact (represented in the body politic) is theoretically configured as a relation of symbiosis between the two entities, the exile experience transforms such a reciprocity into a parasitical tie.

The narrative function of the parasite theorized by scholars such as Michel Serres (1980) and Cynthia Damon (1997) has been applied to Melville’s work by Anders M. Gullestad (2022), who focuses on the parasitical chains related to food. Here, the notion is applied to the dynamics of power and it is used to describe the relationship between the state and the persons in exile, configuring the political institutions as parasite, and the people as host. The essay subverts the relationship between parasite and host, identifying Israel Potter as the host during his life in exile, and the United States and British governments as parasites, thus suggesting Melville’s distrust towards the structures of power of his age. In other words, the present analysis grounds on Melville’s disillusionment towards the political scenario of the time and argues that Israel epitomizes the exploitation performed by the political institutions towards the body politic of the time. Two episodes will be examined: first, Israel’s stay in Paris and his relationship with Benjamin Franklin and, second, Israel’s exile in England.

A Fool’s Crusade. Exile and Memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “War Years”

2024-12-30T17:29:07+00:00

The aim of this essay is to reconstruct in detail the historical events underlying Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story “War Years” from the collection The Refugees (2017) and his debut novel The Sympathizer (2015). “War Years” gives a fictionalized version of the Homeland Restoration movement (Y.T Nguyen 2018), a wide array of anticommunist fronts born out of the ashes of the South Vietnamese military in the wake of the 1975 defeat. These fronts were responsible for various unsuccessful attempts to infiltrate the motherland with the aim of overthrowing Hanoi’s rule during the eighties. Throughout the essay, the emphasis will be on the dual narrative strategy (realism vs. satire) via which the author fictionalizes the story of the Homeland Restoration movement across the two texts. While The Sympathizer reframes this little-known story as a quasi-surreal narrative, “War Years” investigates the impact of the Homeland Restoration movement on the daily life of Vietnamese refugees in Reagan-era San José thus giving agency to characters and actors who have been traditionally excluded from canonical Vietnam War narratives.

An Interview with the Poet V. Penelope Pelizzon about Her Recent Book A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye

2024-12-30T17:37:56+00:00

This interview with the poet Penelope Pelizzon about her most recent volume of poetry, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye, focuses particularly on the theme of exile, in all senses of the word.
The conversation ranged over a number of topics. The poet reflected on the question of cultural inheritance and the problems a female writer may face, who feels deeply attached to certain literary traditions, which are at heart deeply misogynistic.
She pointed to the need for maintaining a certain alienation when a guest in another culture, and how that sense of distance can become a space for reflection and writing; this constant alienation can be “the barbarian’s luxury”.
While discussing poems in the book that deal with the effects of climate change, Pelizzon touched on the sense of exile that derives from the fact that we are the first generation no longer able to take comfort in the notion that nature will outlive us.
With reference to the poems in the books about animals – particularly dogs – Pelizzon speculated that perhaps animals do not feel exiled from emotion in the same way that humans do, and suggested that observing them may allow us to access our own emotion.
The conversation concluded with her thoughts on the connections between music and poetry; while music is the fastest way to be brought up short by our emotions, poetry is perhaps the next thing to that, offering the realisation that one is not always exiled from what one is and what one feels.