Category: Australian Literature

ENGL202 Blog 5 – Creative: Language’s Liberation and Enslavement

TASK: Write a poem or a short prose passage that illustrates the ways in which language can be both a prison and a release from prison.

Exile in English…

Words will be cruel. Cold and clean and quiet as they confirm your illness after months of blood tests and bone density scans. Words will be awfully kind. ‘I do,’ she whispers with tears shiny as the diamond on her pale, manicured hand.

Words will wind around you–a trickster crawling up your sibilant spine–a bilingual zephyr to seal your oaths and read your palms. The words of her or him or them or you…oh, words will play hopscotch with your hope and are the cement and soul in your thoughts. These letters–these hieroglyphs–these keys to the kingdom.

These syllables–this syllabus–these syntactic prison sentences.  

I remember my father’s ancient language; it was fast and harsh and loud. Truly musical, it sent me to sleep at night. A sad discussion with a village on the other side of the other world was my white noise machine.

Hausa is what they called it. “Sunana…English?” My name is: English.

Do you speak English?

Now I am small, I see the language in my mind: it bears a shape and a voice and a smell. The light of the garage is on, and the cup of tea is steaming, and my father’s realm is teeming with rasping gibberish. He sounds as if he is casting spells, he circles the worktable like chanting ’round the bad juju magic cauldron. Never have I ever felt so helpless and so fascinated. It is a secret power I have no access to. It is the cotton candy grass on the other side the fence. How their mouths move with the crackle of lightening…with whispered, misty promises.

And I remember knowing I was in exile inside these words of my own, for I had no notion of the cosmos my father spoke to back home.

Works Cited

Malami Buba. “Paul Newman: A Hausa–English Dictionary.” Lexikos 18 (2011): Lexikos, 01 October 2011, Vol.18. Web.

ENGL202 Blog 1 – Creative: “Dance at le Moulin de la Galette” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Ekphrastic Poem)

4/ An ekphrastic poem is a poem that vividly describes a painting, such as X.J. Kennedy’s poem “Nude Descending a Staircase”. Try to write your own ekphrastic poem with reference to any one of the paintings shown to you during lectures in the first two weeks. Include an image of the painting in your blog.

The Man from Montmartre

Lily-pad lads and rosewater-coloured ladies.
Lips shifting around the velveteen tongue of the pipe.
Flesh of cream and peach and strawberry.
Timid embraces and demure smiles.
Temptation carved with arched brows and downcast eyes.

“Oh, what a lovely day for a dance!”
Touching her cheek and taking her hand,
wrapping lace gloves in your coat.
Henri stumbled to the table, stealing his chance;
mon bon monsieur’s fille…
the noise and the nerves as he spoke.

But I know you, with your back to our sights,
a weekend dappled with straw hats and Parisian sunlight.
They know so much when they are young and in love.
Leather shoes and parasols strewn upon cobblestone.
The billow of their skirts are the wings of a dove.

Chandeliers draped from the clouds,
and, as their gaze moved about
this bacchanalian shroud,
they glimpsed a man with his day in the crowd.
“What a day to put on display!
Oh, what a day too splendorous and gay.”

With your feet on the edge of the frame,
I’ll wish you had asked me to the dance.
Pummel me back a few decades with paint.
Your fractured shadow when I go home on the train;
you follow me still as I sit alone in the coach.
Your stillness shivers through the brush strokes.

Works Cited

Renoir, Pierre Auguste. Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette.
Rivière, Georges. Renoir et ses amis. 1921.

TASK: Virginia Woolf believes in the power of the imagination to liberate human beings from the shackles of their enslavement. Do you have a comment on this statement?

Woolf is an extraordinary author; her way of writing is profound and searching, ever seeking to make sense of the mosaic of human experience, both beauteous and frightening. I believe that Woolf felt the human imagination was a powerful instrument for spiritual liberation because she understood how reality can indeed be a hideous, agonising realm. Her own experiences as a child and adolescent attest to this belief in the wall that can be created between reality and imagination–between the painful and the hopeful. Woolf had a difficult childhood: losing her parents at a young age and subjected to abuse, Woolf would have quickly learned of the escapism that literature provides for the suffering soul.

With this passion for modernist experimentalism, Woolf abandoned linear narratives in novels such as Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s writings are crafted to capture layers of her character’s consciousness. For example, the description of Septimus’ character illustrates the possibility of his madness. However, as readers, we delve into his interiority and it is clear this character leads with a visionary imagination that is deeply involved with the natural and spiritual world around him. This kaleidoscopic glimpse into Septimus’ musings are balanced against the ordinary realism of Clarissa’s mind. Mrs Dalloway favours interior monologues, exploring problems of personal identity and relationships, as well as the significance of time, memory, change and loss. 

Because of this liberating imagination, Woolf was ahead of her time, supporting the androgynous persona and maintaining romantic relationships with women. However, Woolf was deeply sensitive to the destructive things that were happening around her: World War II, for example. Like Septimus, she was also afraid of losing her mind and becoming a burden to her loved ones. Woolf expresses an escape from emotional and psychological enslavement through her carefully modulated flow of prose, which is like reading a long poem–each image has a resonance that carries into the next movement of narrative.

Woolf rebelled against the materialism of authors, such as H. G. Wells, who depicted social injustice through gritty realism. Woolf rather captures the shackles of societal enslavement through the profound exploration of the tormented mind, such as Septimus’. In many ways, Woolf’s literary processes of evoking such a world of injustice engenders more empathy, as the reader aligns themselves with every fibre of thought the drives the pained protagonist. Ultimately, Woolf’s writings attest to the freedom of the imaginative mind.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. “Mrs. dalloway.” Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1992. 33-176.

Rhys Weller: https://blgblogblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/29/shakespeare-blog-3/

This is a fantastic script, Rhys! I really enjoyed this reimagining of jealousy and its impact on characters in The Winter’s Tale. Your use of vocabulary is wonderfully poetic; it evokes for readers the dichotomous emotions of fury toward Leontes and tender sympathy for Paulina. My favourite line of dialogue in this piece would have to be: “he is the snake seeking the fairest fruits”. It perfectly encapsulates the darkness and envy that is spiralling around Leontes’ psyche. The only section I personally found a little confusing was the reason for Paulina’s collapse. Was this to parallel Hermione’s fainting in the play? Was it meant to convey something else? Nonetheless, this is a terrific blog entry. Awesome work! – Mariama

Blog 3L / Write a short script that depicts a man collapsing in a rage of jealousy.

Author’s Note: Reading Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’, my mind conflates the two notions of Hamlet’s deep-seated inaction and Leontes’ destructive jealousy. Something tangled and warped is born in my imagination.

A monologue riddled with envy by middle-aged Claudius set before the events of ‘Hamlet’.

Claudius: long in the shadow of a great king and long in love with his brother’s wife. After decades of meditative inaction, Claudius is struck with the decision to take what is rightfully his. Claudius will kill his brother: King Hamlet.  

• 

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Act 1: A Rage of Regal Envy

CLAUDIUS

CLAUDIUS holds up a sharp dagger, inspects it, prods it, and places it down

I was the quiet son, then. He was loud and happy. But my brother knew me. Hamlet–he knew me.

We were fond of each other: each other’s puppeteers, contorting our boyhoods into farcical Falstaffs and playful Pucks. We gave the other the strings to pull, for we trusted no harm would come from our brother’s plying hands.

But know this, old friend, I had not strings tied to him for years.
It was the Cupid’s arrow struck that turned on us as shears.
And snapped each line to him I had one by one.
It was from her hands mine own strings now hung.
O, my fair Gertrude.

Eyes close and he smiles in dreamlike reverence. Eyes snap open, clouded by scorn

And from there led the agony in watching them wed!
Seeing them were thorns no less pricking than the needles inside my head.
O, those thousands of unopened letters to God explaining why I am dead.

Picks up the dagger, paces, distracted by memory

She laid the boy in his arms, and I did weep watching my brother cradle this newborn son. Hamlet: likeness in name, compress the division of time, and they art one. Mine eyes did drift to the sleepy smiles of that sweet, good queen…for she was looking at me.

              

Sighing dreamily, he sways

She drew me to her in the meadow the following moon.
Strayed from the yoke of her throne, past the pallid piers at Elsinore,
she crept whilst the babe at her bosom slept.
Wilder she grew, swifter she moved, nearer the moorland windswept.
At last, she turned to me at the meadow’s edge,
holding babe Hamlet to her breast.

She peered up at me with the demure eyes of a wise doe
and, in dulcet tones and with moonlit flesh, she spoke:

[off-stage, voice of GERTRUDE]

Come hither, my dear Claudius, sit by me.

• 

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• 

• 

               CLAUDIUS wrestles with his anguish; he bursts with furious laughter

CLAUDIUS

O, I am no Lancelot, wretched Murder. Gertrude no tepid Guinevere! And wretched thou art, Murder, for thou art bound by crime and crime by blame and blame by guilt and guilt by suffering. And if I do not suffer guilt, it is no blameful crime. I would not waste away in want of a woman I shall never call my wife. And so, thou–Murder Most Foul–becomes my most secret friend…

My brother would oft ask me in those days of piteous bitterness:

[off-stage, voice of KING HAMLET]

How is it that the clouds still hang on thou?

CLAUDIUS

If only I hath unveiled my plan to him; if only I hath forewarned that a centurion’s twenty footsteps stood to run with me the length of time we waited. Would thee reproach me with those simple, stately ways of thine? Nay, congratulate me, Hamlet! I hath hung these clouds ‘round my neck as both noose and collar, binding me to thou. But this day, brother? This day those pillows of heaven shall make thy deathbed. Thou hath thy reign. Thou hath thy wife.

It is my turn now, brother. For all the strings I let thee ponder to pull on my limbs, for the eons thou make merry of my woe, for all the happy children thou hath denied her and I for one…simpering…son!

Lights up to KING HAMLET, who slumbers in his grotto, inebriated. CLAUDIUS places down the dagger and pulls a vial of poison from his pocket. CLAUDIUS looks to his brother, gasping. With a sinster smile, he shakes with passion.

And when I do it, I shall be that quiet son once more. Thou shall die loud and happy, in my blood-red hands, with the tincture of sin on thy tongue. And when thee raise thine eyes to me, thy gaze shall be clouded and ears full of death-song. But thou shall know it is me, brother.

Hark, Hamlet! Mark mine oath. Thou. Shall. Know. Me.

CLAUDIUS strides toward the grotto, a fisted hand with the poison enclosed

Lights down.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Clarendon Press, 1912.

Task – Write a short poem in tribute to one of your favourite singers/ actors/ creative artists – in which you compare your “hero” to one of the constellations. 

Author’s Note: Each of Hayao Miyazaki’s images is followed by a stanza of my poem in tribute to him. There are five images. Enjoy!

Link for more information about this fabulous Japanese animator and storyteller: Hayao Miyazaki

Works Cited

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Gake no Ue no Ponyo/Ponyo. Studio
Ghibli, 2008.

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Hauru No Ugoku Shiro/Howl’s Moving
Castle. Studio Ghibli, 2004.

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Majo no Takkyūbin/Kiki’s Delivery
Service. Studio Ghibli, 1989.

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi/Spirited
Away. Studio Ghibli, 2001.

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Tonari no Totoro/My Neighbour Totoro.
Studio Ghibli, 1988.

Link to Abanoub’s Blog Entry: https://abanoubkal.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/example-post/

This is a beautiful piece, Abanoub! You clearly have a crafted control over the English language and you’re able to guide the reader through both colourful imagery and crushing allusions. The only thing I would point out is that, whilst this poem is indeed wonderfully written, the task asked for a ‘prose’ soliloquy. Nevertheless, this demonstrates brilliant use of renaissance vocabulary and metaphor. My favourite line would have to be: “I have found myself in some calamity between god and man”, it truly illustrates a disastrous, almost prophetic point of imbalance in this contemporary world. Keep up the awesome work! – Mariama