8/30/2023 0 Comments Sara rosenfeld ne moves![]() ![]() Yet El Mahdy’s interprelation of the ‘political’ and ‘freedom’ is not germane nor is it as seamless as the West makes it seem, contrary to Sweden’s asylum standards which do not include Syrians or Iraqi fleeing the region. El Mahdy’s body becomes an articulation of how this freedom is imbricated with the West’s own contradictions when it comes to balancing rhetoric of openness and the question of Arab refugees. In that instance a racialized other that lacks ‘freedom’ and ‘political’ awareness is performed. In this liberation the West is rendered as the guardian of ‘freedom’. Both instances are part of the continued fascination of Western feminism’s desire to liberate individuals of a lower racial hierarchy as an act that defines both the ‘political’ and as a corollary ‘freedom’. ![]() This latest expose was part of El Mahdy’s work with Femen, the Ukranian based feminist group. In the comfort of Sweden in 2014, Alia El Mahdy posted pictures of her nude body once again, bleeding on the flag of the Islamic State. This bellow for ‘freedom’, and the subsequent outcry against it, allowed her to put forward an application for ‘political’ asylum in Sweden which was swiftly granted. In 2011, in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, an Egyptian self-styled feminist by the name of Alia El Mahdy decided to post pictures of herself nude on her Facebook page in an act of ‘freedom’. ![]() Please contact me for the list of sources.) (This paper was delivered at the University of East Anglia, UK. By exploring connections like the ones between the movement from “Image-Nation 4”s attempt to accept an ill-fitting inheritance to “Image-Nation 5”s translation of invisibility into a haunting by and embrace of the Other, and Blaser’s movement through Spicer’s death, the Nerval translation debacle with Duncan, and leaving Berkeley for the final time, I highlight the moments of poetic and ethical convergence between the poet’s journey to his eventual home and the serial poem’s journey to its eventual language. ![]() In an interview with Miriam Nichols, Blaser says that in his “own way of doing it, the serial poem lent itself to a travel poem, trying to find your way home” (Even on Sunday 384). Blaser has described this narrative as one “which refuses to adopt an imposed story line,” and “is often like a series of rooms where lights go on and off” as one moves through the rooms (The Fire 5, 119). From the beginning, the serial poem developed by Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser has been concerned with a special kind of narrative. Read as a serial poem, I present Blaser’s first 12 Image-Nations as a narrative of the poet coming to, creating, and discovering his “home” in poetic language in concert with the lived narrative that led him to his geographical home. Blaser wrote it between 19, a span of years that includes the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Berkeley Poetry Conference, Jack Spicer’s death, Blaser’s falling out with Robert Duncan, and his move to Vancouver BC in 1966, which became his home until his death in 2009. This paper reads Robin Blaser’s Image-Nations 1-12 and The Stadium of the Mirror alongside the events of his life during the time he composed the work. ![]()
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