#educational events) but STILL. The image it conjures is Totally Wrong.

[ratcandy]

hang on I talked about these guys once ages ago but I was reminded of them this morning and feel a need to share them. Now that there's suddenly more eyes here. Need everyone to know one of my favorite insects

(Photo credit)

look at this thing. Appreciate how it looks like a cross between a stick bug (with a slender, elongate body) and a mantis (those sick raptorial claws). Look at and appreciate how silly they look, all weirdly positioned and wonky.

(Photo credit)

On first glance you'd probably think this thing is a mantis that just lies flat. Or perhaps a stick bug that evolved in a weird way. But no actually. It's neither of those things.

It's in the order Hemiptera, which is the order inhabited by stink bugs, assassin bugs, leafhoppers, and cicadas. Because it's got a rostrum. Which is essentially a fucked up and evil beak.

(Photo credit, which is actually just electronically published images from the book "Guide to Aquatic Invertebrates of the Upper Midwest")

And they are positioned like that because they're an aquatic species. They're little swimmy bitches.

So that's fucked up, right. Because it looks so much like a stick or mantis, only to juke you with being a True Bug. Well what's even MORE fucked up?

what do you think we Called these things. What did we as a human species decide to name them.

that's right

WATER SCORPIONS

that's not even the same CLASS !! Those are ARACHNIDS!! These are INSECTS!!!

At least for the other half of the family (Nepidae) it makes SOME amount of SENSE,

(Photo credit)

LIKE I GET THAT, even if it's still an Insect at least I get it SUPERFICIALLY...

but when you off-handedly refer to these thangs as a water scorpion, people are probably thinking one of those guys with the long barbed-tails and big snippy snippy claws and are all horrified when you're like "oh I just pick up that little twig in my hands hehe" NO!!!! They'rE NOT scorpion .

It's a silly little stick cosplaying as a mantis when in reality it's a stink bug. and it's name is Wet Scorpion.

Appreciate. Appreciate it with me

[stretchjournalemerson]

Experience Examined In Between Lines of Poetry

By Jacqueline Thom

Experience is a difficult concept to bring to life on paper. It requires the act of being able to sit with oneself and consider all the elements that make an encounter so vivid that it stays in the mind, transforming an event into memory into experience, that which is so powerful, it alters how one feels, in the moment and afterwards. Bringing that emotion to life in an authentic way was important for Tarfia Faizullah in writing her poetry collection, Seam. She chose not to go the same route many of her contemporaries might follow — heavily researching an experience before attempting to conjure the mindset that can accurately replicate it; instead, she traveled to Bangladesh where she spoke with birangona, female survivors of the 1971 Liberation War, which saw many women and girls raped, tortured, and traumatized by the Pakistani Army that captured them. Faizullah adds a valuable addition to the New Historicism school with her attention to truth and validating the ordeals of women long shunned by their own communities, and changes how experience is renewed and reexamined on paper in her book.

Faizullah’s ties to her culture is evident in how devoted to its exploration she is in her work. As a Bangladeshi American, she is privy to two cultures, but strives to stay away from the western narrative, instead choosing to come to terms with the duality of being a person of color in America, and then just another Bangladeshi in her ancestral country. Her poem, Self-Portrait as Mango, angrily retorts to “How long have you been in our country?” with “Suck on a mango, bitch, that’s all you think I eat anyway…This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango / that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months / per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds.” (Faizullah 23). Faizullah ironically calls herself a mango and articulates that what is a simple object to one person holds generations of history for another. While the mango ripens, it is witness to war and violence, but still grows until the day it is properly eaten (sucked open with teeth), or analogously, truly appreciated for the history it holds. Self-Portrait as Mango represents Faizullah’s tone as a poet; she is confused at her status as an other in America, she is angry when her validity is questioned, and yet she is indignant with the knowledge that her heritage has a rich history that rises far above any of these challenges to her identity.

This style is evident in Faizullah’s notes to herself in Seam. While she takes on an appropriately modest tone when addressing the birangona and emulating them, there is still that reverence for a past yet undiscovered by her. Such is true of Interview with a Birangona as she takes time to self-reflect in third person on her findings of the women’s experiences: “You listen to the percussion / of monsoon season’s wet / wail, write in your notebook / bhalo-me, karap-me / chotto-sundori— / badgirl, goodgirl, littlebeauty—in Bangla / there are words / for every kind of woman / but a raped one” (29). Not only is Faizullah questioning her culture’s inability to accommodate raped women, but she does so in a melancholic rather than accusing tone. She asks readers to consider why there is no infrastructure in place to support the birangona, or at least educate the communities about the long-term damage sexual assault has on victims. Her thoughts are expanded further in other poems where Faizullah suddenly becomes mournful and almost separated from what she is talking about as she emulates the birangona’s distanced retellings of their own traumatized encounters in the camps they were brought to. She tells readers, “my body became an eddy, / a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time / came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango, / overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.” (34) Faizullah becomes much more metaphorical and perhaps even more poetic when she takes on the birangona perspective, a way of speaking that is common for victims of trauma to distance themselves from what happened. In turn, Faizullah’s dialogue and that of the birangona is distinguished from the much harsher, violent language of the rapists. All this works to create an eerie conglomeration of memories retold into an experience that shocks readers into the women’s awful realities as slaves to a traumatic past and their scapegoated present. What is presented in Seam becomes another experience on its own, for readers who have not had to witness the same kind of violence that is described, for Faizullah, as the child of parents scarred by the liberation war, and for the women who had to put their trauma into words for us to understand even an inkling of what they felt. Seam then reconfigures how we think about the representation of experience for all involved in its depiction, for without the multiplicity of historical perspectives, and then Faizullah’s own influences as a person of color in two very distinct worlds that perceive her identity differently, we would not have the same ability to experience so deeply as we did with this book, where no aspect of the memories and thoughts we read about feels unexamined and unfelt.

The way in which Faizullah truthfully pursues the telling of experiences in her poetry is a valuable contribution to the New Historicism literary theory. She does not merely try to grasp on her own what it is like to be a birangona, but seeks inspiration from the very women who know what it is like. Writer Kristina Marie Darling of Tupelo Quarterly puts Faizullah’s writing as “tragedy turn[ed] to narrative and set[ting] other pains into motion, be it grief or a desire for some form of justice. Faizullah also documents the stories in compact ways, choosing the most potent images and details to render heartbreaking devastation, and then moves to a larger, almost prophetic, question that forces readers to confront the senselessness of such a death” (2015). In other words, Faizullah’s cultural connection to the events she speaks about, and her willingness to strengthen that connection, is what allows her to translate words said by women likely desensitized to their own trauma if only to be able to bear it, in a way that resonates with readers and forces them to consider the needless violence of the war. New Historicism itself is a cultural study that strives to reconnect a work with the time period it is produced in or influenced by. It is not just a matter of what happened, but a matter of interpretation of the historical events themselves. With this examination of historical literacy in mind, Faizullah casts a telling light on how exactly birangona have been treated since they survived the war. She laments on their being shunned by communities for their ‘dirtiness,’ despite the total lack of control these women had in their circumstances. She asks readers to consider the women’s self-inflicted guilt over the futility of their situation and the guilt added on by their families and neighbors, and how that increases birangonas’ trauma. There are words for every kind of woman but a raped one. By asking these questions, Faizullah attempts to further enhance the contextual analytical methods of New Historicism by juxtaposing the circumstantial with the emotional.

In showing readers the lack of respect for these survivors, Faizullah ultimately addresses how we need to interpret events — as experiences that affect our own and should be treated as such. Seam does not just ask what happened, but it confronts violent experiences with a forwardness that shocks readers into sympathizing with victims and considering what can be done to right the wrongs of history and prevent another mass traumatic event from occurring. We are stirred into thought and action by the poetry’s historic validity, and Faizullah’s own willingness to be meta. While traveling to Bangladesh to interview the birangona, she notes, “I take my place among / this damp, dark horde of men / and women who look like me— / because I look like them— / because I am ashamed / of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body— / because I am / an American, a star / of the blood on the surface of muscle” (12). She is different, a misdiagnosed ‘other’ in America, but as soon as she is in her country of origin, Faizullah emphasizes feeling strangely more American than before despite mingling with those who look like her…startlingly too much like her. That familiarity and lack of it at the same time is another influence in the way she is able to convey her sincerity and truthfulness as a narrator for the birangona in her poems. There is an acknowledgement of disconnect, but a drive to bridge that gap by finding the truth buried underneath cultural stigma and old historicism’s failure to interpret experience according to person and place in time.

Through Seam, Tarfia Faizullah contributes an entirely new way of recording the human experience for those who witnessed it in the past and alternately those who learn about it in the future. What is produced is a vivid re-narration of experience that is able to explore both the feelings felt by those involved in such encounters, while also questioning the supposed objectivity of previous historical interpretation methods. Faizullah posits that it is impossible to approach history without a subjective lens, and we are all the better for it, for only then can we truly understand the emotions that drive human action. Faizullah takes New Historicism head on with Seam, and fearlessly confronts the context from which her subjects’ stories were violently created so that readers may understand how their own experiences are subconsciously affected by the past.

Works Cited

Darling, Kristina Marie. “Seam by Tarfia Faizullah.” Tupelo Quarterly, 2015, https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/seam-by-tarfia-faizullah/.

Edwards, Trista. Review of Seam, written by Tarfia Faizullah. American Literary Review. University of North Texas. 2014.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems. Graywolf Press, 2018.

Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

“New Historicism, Cultural Studies (1980s-Present).” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University,

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/new_historicism_cultural_studies.html.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Caitlin McGill for her profound patience and support when I wrote this during a time of much personal unrest and dissatisfaction. I learned so much in the few short weeks we had together.