Local anatomy

Abstract

This collection of poems concerns itself with place, with space, with our interactions with and our constructions of them. It also explores the effects of cultural and geographic inheritance. These poems reimagine place and selfhood through memories and landscapes. They root themselves in fragmentation, taking on a mosaic-like approach to structure, voice, even language. As the poems code- switch between Arabic and English, fragmentation becomes a structural and conceptual given.

The poems share and follow an ‘I’ speaker as they move throughout the country of Jordan, starting out in its capital, Amman, and then onwards towards the southern border. The ‘staircase’ series dissects the city according to district or area, establishing a viewpoint through which to view the city from within. Each area triggers a different memory as place becomes inseparable from its recollection and the speaker moves from one staircase to another. These poems, along with ‘fairouz is searching for a pair of eyes,’ explore questions of belonging, locality, agency, and artifice.

As the speaker leaves the city, in ‘landscapes of the southernmost extreme,’ they explore the desert and the sea as landscapes onto which they project inherited legacies of history, religion, and culture. These fragments, or ‘landscapes,’ interrogate the effect of such inheritances on the body and the self, as well as further interrogating memory and place. These fragments dismember and re-member the past in an attempt to move through and beyond it. As such, a portion of them responds to other texts - works written by Etel Adnan, Frank O'Hara, and others, as well as the Holy Quran as interrogations of literary and cultural legacy. These works become the springboard from which the speaker jumps into the poem, into their navigation through shame, desire, statehood, and transience.

Citations, translations, and cultural context notes are available in the appendix.

Date of Award	28 Jul 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Emma Jones (Supervisor) & Oliver Hazzard (Supervisor)