The question that continued to arise for me throughout my reading of this poem was “what would it be like to remember your birth?” In this work we see how traumatic this experience is. Marriott writes “Her knees bleeding on the path of snow / Beneath a calamitous dream of creation.” Bloody, out in the cold, and creation, birth, becomes a catastrophic imagining. I ask myself where is the hope, the “calamitous dream” was still once a dream, something desired.
There is so very much happening in that first section, things are becoming undone. The words unworldly, unmade, unmanned, unsewn are all used inside those two stanzas and near the end the phrase “This experience has made me unnatural” appears. Who is becoming unnatural through this experience? What makes “me” unnatural — is it the violence, the pain, the loss? There is a strangeness in the way the body contorts itself in this poem, the body is unmade, unworldly, it becomes unnatural through this experience.
At the end a year has passed, the sun has risen and we are left with scars that never heal.
Raihana,
ReplyDeleteReading your post made me think about what is lost when we are "added" into the world, when we are born. I agree with you that Marriott seems to focus on the undoing, the "unmaking," the deconstruction of self. I also get a lot of yolk imagery from this work, and the yolk is only visible when the egg has been cracked open and not developed into a chick. So, what does it mean to be born, but be broken? Or feel broken?
Man, I know it's not the topic at hand, but I just realized how the form of the poem is functioning here as well. Couplets in the second stanza feel so tender and bare... what is present in birth is mother and child... when lovers come and go, the true other is the space between forefinger and thumb. There is an inherent duality in this poem between creation and destruction and violence... it makes sense that the couplets are in the very heart's center of the poem.
HJ
I asked the same question when reading this: "what would it be like to remember the trauma of being born?" Your focus on the 'un' words (unworldy, unmanned, unsewn...) made me think about how the act of being created is also an act of destruction. The female body in this poem is described in pieces: a wracked spine, a pair of breasts, bloody knees... fragments of a person being torn apart. The cyclical return at the end of the poem, back to the place where the narrator was born, is a reminder that when we arrive at a place of violence or destruction, we are arriving at a place we've been before.
ReplyDeleteRai,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your insights on this complex piece. I appreciate your honesty- "misreading"is something I find myself doing often as well, but I love the way you put it as personal desire "I wanted to read..". This made me think of my own personal "misreading" in a deeper way, as a way of unconscious filtering, as a layer of protection. For this poem in particular, I found myself also misreading throughout the piece, yearning to think of the main character as a thing, simply because it was easier to think of a "thing" or something inhuman, something unlike me, creating and experiencing such dark violence. In this moment, my subconscious filter protecting myself from my own truths.
In my interpretation of the poem, throughout, the author shows that he too has grappled with such truths and yet he can filter no longer- thus we have a poem of truth.
Thanks again,
Jesi
Raihana,
ReplyDeleteYour first sentence really grabbed me, "An amalgamation of human body and water body. Much like being in the womb — you are flesh encased by liquid." What a beautifully poetic description. Asking what it would be like to remember your own birth gave me a new context in which to read the poem. I see much more of the birthing process through that lens and the poem became less eerie, even while it retained its violence. The use of the "un" words is a great observation in this poem I hadn't noticed, and rereading it with that in mind I focused on more of the "undoing" and destruction in the birth process. I also like that you think about the underlying meaning when you misread something. I wonder about that in myself too.
The visceral feeling of birth is the immediate immersion and you point that out clearly as your open your entry. The following questions are a legit way to look at the poem. What it? As the discussion continues. i would love too, the insight your might have on technique since you are so killer on it yourself,
ReplyDeleteE