Hey guys, it’s me again,
This week in our ASTU class we have been starting a segment on poetry, specifically poetry that deals with post-9/11 political events. Juliana Spahr’s book starts with a poem written on the day of 9/11 continues with other poems from November 30th 2002 to March 27th 2003. She prefaces the latter texts with an introduction of her life at the time. In it, she notes that since she was living in Hawai’i she felt disconnected from the continent of North America and the political and geopolitical events surrounding the post 9/11 world. She says “I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex on a small island.” (Spahr, 13). I think that this note she makes in introducing these poems is key to understanding the poems themselves, as well as a view that we may all take to greater understand our lives as connected geographically.
In our sociology class, one of the key ideas which was introduced to us at the beginning of the year is C. Wright Mills idea of the Sociological Imagination. Mills says that the task of the sociologist is to look at their given milieu and apply the troubles that they encounter to a greater social structure in which theses milieu are contained and shaped. Spahr’s idea of understanding what you are connected with through your given geographical and political situation is much the same. Through her poetic language I would suggest that she moves us to look at our lives through our own “Geographical Imagination”. This imagination is tied to our Human Geography class, in the way that Spahr understands how the geography of Hawai’i with its military complex, its infrastructure and even down to the most basic of geographical items like a bed is inextricably linked with the different islands, militaries, even beds of people and countries across the world. Through this geographical imagination she asks us to question our boundaries and our connections with these other people who are at the most mortal, basic, level the same as ourselves.
To understand how she does this we have to look at how her language reflects this idea of connection. For example how she adapts the simplest of object pronouns to describe her experience as connected to the experiences of everyone else sharing the earth. “Beloveds, yours skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous.” She changes “You” to “Yous”, “Your” to “Yours”. To me, the effect of pluralizing the words we use to describe others is similar to the goals of Judith Butler. By making these object pronouns plural she could be suggesting that the label “you” groups too many people into the same category. By pluralizing it she recognizes the difference of everybody as a ‘you’ but also their connection in a global context. This is but one example of how Spahr uses this idea of the geographical imagination to break down the frames of “us” and “them” (Butler) and implies this paradoxical situation of being “so close but yet so far”. What I mean by this can be shown using her analogy of the bed. When we are in bed we are in the most intimate of circumstances with each other; skin, the shortest of boundaries separate us. Yet, as we sleep we are also disconnected and isolated from everyone as the world goes on without us. At the same time, by realizing this we are also understanding a connection we have with everyone in that we all must sleep, regardless of our political circumstances. It is this paradox which Spahr illuminates in her poetry, and which I think argues the need for all of us to apply this geographical imagination to our lives, and question what we are complicit with, what the boundaries are separating us, and ultimately the connections we have through our increasingly globally interdependent world.
Thanks for reading, I hope you all have an awesome break!