oppression
Buried letter press May june
OPPRESSION
BURIED MAY JUNE LETTER 2014 PRESSŠ Inside Cover : the body was left there by walter savage Issue design by Matthew C. Mackey
Akron, OHIO
Disentangling the Nets A Vision of Self in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Case for Irish Identity ( continued
soft EROSION FINANCIAL AID EXIT INTERVIEW THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION DRIFTLESS EDITION
abandonment Fiscal responsibility Dirge for a troubled land
Tire arrested
The Gentrification Archive of the Ole Timer in the Tear Down Original Artwork By
oppression
The difference Selective truths
Buried Letter Press May june 2014
There Was No Town On The M ap by Wal t er S avag e
The Gentrification Archive of the Old Timer in the Tear-Down I tell them to call me the Old Timer because I’ve lived in the neighborhood for years. When I first moved in, it was mostly Irish-Catholic, God bless ‘em. Nobody spoke to anybody. Some of them glowered at you when they were in good moods and would sooner spit on you than nod if you weren’t one-hundredpercent like them. Sure as Dublin is a pisspot, they’d be rolling over in their cold, neglected graves if they saw what’s happened since they left. They’d be wailing about too much freedom and demanding that the zoning be tightened. The noise would be deafening. There’s been wave after wave of change, and I hung in there through all of it. Why would I move? Forty years ago you couldn’t give away the shack I live in on Fir. Now everybody’s kissing up to me thinking I’ll be carted off to a home soon and that I’ll remember they were kind to me and I’ll sign it over to them. Well, I may talk to all of them, but that doesn’t make me gaga. Don’t get me wrong, I like to talk to them. All my life, I’ve liked that. Give me variety, I say, or give me a lot of different things. And I’ve had variety. I’ve done it all. Fifteen years in insurance, five years selling cars, branding cattle for a summer, change, change, change. I know about change, even if it didn’t happen as fast or as often back then as it does these days. The youngsters think they’re the first to flip from one extreme to another overnight, the first to try something really different. You’re 10 or you’re 40, everybody has a first time for a cappuccino, right? After the Irish-Catholics pulled up stakes, in came the hippies with all that incense. But they organized. They spoke to each other. Dope does that to you, I’ve been told. They were the ones who got some of the street names changed. They claimed it would add cachet. They spoke French. Or at least enough to wow City
Hall. Sure, they couldn’t get Elm Street renamed Ganja Way even if they argued till they were blue in the face that the elms were gone and ganja was here to stay. Whatever else you say about them, sooner or later, they got so many of those hippy-dippy names up on the street signs that the city had to rewrite the map. And then one day they either woke up, moved on or OD’d, or whatever they did, and the place started to be invaded by the gays. That was when things started to get really interesting. All of a sudden, everything was stylish and people winked at you and pieces of property were bought and sold lickety-split and put together as parcels, and you’d have high-rises flung up next door to ramshackle cottages. Not five months after the old hospital closed, it was reborn as a multiplex and floor after floor of boutiques. So, we became a “fun” neighborhood. And I was in the middle of it. Everybody in every direction had stories to tell that were nothing like the old ones about Aunt Nelly and the potato famine. These were stories you’d never in a million years have predicted somebody would tell you on the street. Like I said, I’m out in the yard or I’m on my way to the store, or walking Old Dickens, and I talk to everybody. I tell them my stories, and they’ll rattle off theirs, or sometimes ones about their friends, or even the real howlers they’ve heard through the grapevine. I may not be wearing a wire, but I got a memory like nobody’s business. After I’ve heard a good one, I head straight to my desk and write it down before I forget any juicy details. I think of these stories as snapshots of the neighborhood right now. And even though some people tell me these in confidence or to entertain the old coot they think I am, I know that in their weird way they’re courting me. I’m not complaining. It doesn’t cost me a dime. Meanwhile, I hear stories from everybody, even the kids. Remember when kids had nothing to say, except to go on and on about what toy they wanted next and who had been ugly to them at school? Not now! These days, even the kids have stories, and some of them would curl my hair if I had any left. Hair gone, kids with wild stories, streets with weird new names, but a few things remain the same, thank God, the way cows
wandering from one clover patch to the next laid out the streets in this neighborhood. The cows didn’t care. They were cows. Cows are famous for not caring. Streets begin and end in a block and are never heard from again. If you don’t follow directions exactly around here, you’re lost. Literally. Some people like that about the place. But for those who want streets lined up all neat and predictable like in some low-rent subdivision, this place is bad news. They might run into a dead end and take it as an evil omen. For those of us who stay, though, it’s lovely. We dream about it. What I like is that the streets are alive. I think that’s because it’s easier to walk around than drive. Others swear convenience has nothing to do with it: that it’s all the cruising. Like it or not, one thing you can say about gays: they’re always on the lookout. Wise guys may say they never miss a trick, but I’m convinced they’re in search of something more, and it’s not real estate, either. The first time I heard the word “ineffable” used in a sentence it was from this guy two blocks over on Relais who’s always in full leather. The word just spilled out of his mouth along with all the other bullshit details we live for. It was beautiful. It had the power to snap your head around. Talent scouts must live for moments like that -- they go out night after night and only once in great while do they find whatever they’re looking for, and even then sometimes the inkling they get turns out to be wrong. But what about the ones who thought they were discovered only to find out later they were mistaken for somebody else? You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The one in leather from over on Relais wrote a story about this that was published in one of his books. When he gave a reading of it downtown he invited me. I sat in the audience laughing with everybody else, but I wondered if I was the only one who thought he might be serious. I mean, look at his leathers, he’s serious about them. As our Hipness Quotient goes up in unexpected new ways , we’re getting more and more sophisticated types, too. A month or so ago, a tall, elegant man moved into one of the overpriced bungalows on Eleventh. Word got out before he even arrived that he’s a theater critic and that the city’s daily newspaper paid a
fortune to lure him away from the Bay Area. One day when I was out in the front yard rearranging pots he strolled by. He glanced over at me. I said hello. He said hello back, but I could tell it wasn’t a word that came to him naturally. I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, I figured he was one of those guys that can only talk about work. “Seen anything good lately?” I asked, to keep it going. He said no and walked away. So, a week goes by and I’m at the fence chewing the fat with this kid who had an incredible story about Flag Day of all things when the theater critic strolls by. Everyone nods and smiles in that neighborly way, and that was that. About a half-hour later, the critic strolls by again. He stops and asks how I’m doing. After I say that I was doing fine on such a beautiful day, he says, trying to seem casual, “Who was that you were talking to?” “Oh, just some kid from the neighborhood,” I say. “I think he might be gay, though.” I give him one of the hard stares I learned during the Irish-Catholic years. “No!” he says, pretending this is news to him, “These times!” Did he think that just because I wear bifocals that I wouldn’t spot him for what he was? My bifocals might throw off my eye-hand coordination a tad, but I can see perfectly clearly. If I were a juggler, now, I’d be dead, or worse. And if I were a butcher, I’d probably have to hang up my knives and move to the customer service counter. But I haven’t had to make those choices, have I, and, plus, getting older for me has had the extra bonus that more and more phrases have acquired two meanings, like: trick; give yourself a helping hand; and, take it from the top. It doubles the fun, and that doesn’t count all the new combination-words people here invent and spread around every day. Take “charitzpah,” a mashing together of charisma and chutzpah that means the colossal nerve demonstrated by somebody you still can’t resist. If somebody happens to mention charitzpah, I
immediately think of that daredevil David from over on Chignon who always promises people he won’t tell a soul, and then he goes and tells me. And I’m telling you. For your future reference: Rule No. 1: Don’t believe David. Rule No. 2: Don’t tell me. But even if I warn them up front, they can‘t seem to help themselves. They go right ahead and tell me everything. Sometimes, it’s something I’d never have thought of. This fellow who lives over on Lacroix next to the forest-green Victorian had to do a voice audition to land his job as a customer service representative at a car battery retailer. They claimed the test was to gauge phone skills but the real story is you don’t get hired unless you’re a bass. He’s 5’7” in heels but his voice is strictly Goliath. He tells me that the deep voice cuts two ways, though. Yes, customers consider him the voice of authority, but then others make it into a fetish. He has the evidence, for sure. Whenever the battery store advertises during the local ads section of the Today show with the customer service number flashed on the screen, he hears from more than his share of earlymorning phone freaks. And once they hear his voice, then usual requests like, “I need to be recharged,” shift into iffy areas about rods, nodes and popping the hood. He plays it dumb initially, but if they go over the line, he warns them that his phone is equipped with Caller ID. Some of them are ready for that and shoot back, “I bet you can’t guess what I have in my hand,” or “Then you know where to reach me, big boy.” The amazing thing is that it’s always men. He’s never had a single woman call and talk dirty, not even as a prank. Now, that’s surprising, isn’t it? But there are always surprises, right? You look at somebody and you think you know a lot about them. You talk to them, you figure you know that much more. Even if they lie to you, at least you know they’re liars. But Monty who lives over on Chignon in a courtyard building near David plays the piano in a hotel bar downtown a couple of night a
week and he swears the acid test of who a person really is comes with what they request when they’re bombed. Forget looks, he says, go with the favorite tunes. He thinks cops should get rid of their lie detectors and adopt this method. He uses it himself. He told me that one night he had the hots for one customer and was giving him lots of significant eye contact. Then the guy reeled over and asked for “Moon River.” That ended that! Up ‘til that moment, Monty’d been certain the guy was “Sympathy for the Devil,” or maybe “L.A. Woman,” but it turned out he was sheer chiffon, teary eyes and wadded-up Kleenex. He claims this is all you need to know about basic character, like who’s honest, who’s steady, who’s so silly it hurts. I asked Monty what he requests when he’s bombed and he just smiled. He wouldn’t tell me. Yet.
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Financial Aid Exit Interview Sculpt the beard to trim. White cement block walls, rubber rooms. No TV, wear ties. Bittersweet broken hearted saviors. See Vegas for what it is underneath the show and pretty lights. Own a dictionary. A one in three chance of success and Asian women will always be smarter than you.
Alvarado, Cohn, Carson, Solis, Betik, De La Cruz, Barry. Alter the terms of tenure. Promote an agenda you believe in even when all others say you are wrong. It’s called being ‘unintimidated’ and ‘making hard choices’. It’s also called ‘being a dick’. Fix your hair. Close caption what I say for the hearing impaired and the monkeys. White, Steinberg, Chen, Serrano, Augustine, Kaplan, Wynne. Sign your documents with multiple pens. Leave yourself an exit strategy and get that golden parachute. Get paid like the Drake for typing. Enjoy the six figure paycheck for jackassery. Scratch your head, throw up your hands, then look at just one cod example. Sesei, Barajas, Washington, Mitchell, Cabrera, Horizaka, Morin. Regulate the state but let them conceal and carry and shoot drunk women in the face in Dearborn Heights because an old white man is afraid of losing his version of America. Dark assumptions. The #13, 666, 777, 1126. Waiting lists for all. Paige, Fatimata, Saphine, Parker, Laborio, Elasquez, Adams. 1947 sound barrier, planes break apart. Pilots on the ground. Glamorous Glynnis. See through instead of look at. Re-tweak troubled neighborhoods. General call-out for more rapping teachers. Hook
‘em horns. Hook ‘em on phonics. Learn by melodies and harmony, disposable crutches. Skeptics let the dogs out. Catchy works but it don’t mean nothing. Power knowledge with increased class time. Focused incisions and dissections. Collage a college with collision and collagen. Team always beats individual. Want the molds to be filled. Diallo, Jefferson, Calderon, Miller, Fregosi, Anthony, McQueary.
Rub your hands together when you talk, it implies you’re thinking hard or have some type of wisdom. C is for cookie. C is for Crips. Comb your hair properly. Leave out for a farm. Winslow Homer rolling hills and alien trees. Pull the files for XYZ, perhaps they’ll get done tomorrow.
The Chronicle of Higher Education Driftless Edition I am the way I am because I can. Try to keep resolutions, think of blue skies with wispy tendril clouds like lit cigarettes. Put a smiling face on work, tacky grease paint grin. Words in all caps signifying then dropping out like a string of X-mas lights missing bulbs. High country, driftless, never touched or pulled or pressed down upon by glaciers. Days like this at 5:58 pm in a windowless basement room feeling my flat heart vibrate with but slight reverb. There’s a blond one in the back with permanent waves and a long board. Her friend from FFA that’s smarter, but not nearly as smooth or likely to laugh at my jokes, sits at attention. On the other side is a guy named after a beer and three dudes that go by ‘Nick’. In this room, they all hold a quiet, ersatz stoicism. Sisyphus has yet to visit them. In an hour we’ll shuffle and move out into the cold, still evening of Monday Night Football, grilled burgers and fries. Rest and hold quiet contemplation. Or if luck has it, delectable sex under covers of stars and heavy breath. The cycle moves within without. If I do not participate, there is no one to mind. We find adverts for rides to share home, find our way half-blind. Everyone just makes it up as they go along. We will do it over and over, in some slight variation with similar results that end up with someone being slightly smarter. So they say.
Soft Erosion Blood on the streets up to my ankles. Folks carry burdens unseen while shooters rise up, fire away in towns, school districts, airports and another TSA agent making ten bucks an hour dies over shoes and belts while standing in for The Man. Those that claim a shiny radiance, a business, a better-ness, a nose so turned up all it can smell is new car. Cadillacs signify you are better and would like me to know. US has a crack down the middle, a fissure in the ice caps dropping off into the sea to return to water. I want to have hope. A streak of resolve as wide as a city block. The cars will drive past while we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and step on the dead. Watch-words and vitriol, oil in the aquifer, our water becoming decayed and not at all like General Ripper’s ‘precious bodily fluids’. Grandmas die of breast cancer medically (or not) aided by Cobras, lumps on lumps. The lump in my throat makes it hard to speak to you. No one really hates anymore, but dips into the reservoir of disdain leeching in and filling us with brackish blood. Empathy melts away like dirty snow in April. Entrepreneurs have lots of acquaintances (they call them customers) but no true friends. Survival of the feckless. Today, another class on job skills will end and money will change hands but there is no one left to disrupt the money handlers in the name of the father, son, and holy smoke. Speak softly, the big sticks are all bought and paid for. Blood on the streets will soon reach the knees.
William Yazbec can be found hard at work as an editor for the Driftless Review and can be contacted at www.driftlessreview.org.
Disentangling the Nets A Vision of Self in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Case for Irish Identity ( continued Religion is by and far the greatest identifier of Irishness that Joyce encounters. As a young Catholic, Stephen is confronted with yet another net. Catholicism to Joyce/ Stephen was a far greater and older oppressor than that of nationalist racism. No doubt remembering the severity of the Jesuit schoolmasters at Clongowes and his history lesson of Catholicism at Christmas dinner, Stephen decidedly positions himself opposite of such tyranny. G. J. Watson explores this idea in his book, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: […] it is important to see that Joyce attacks the Roman Catholic Church in his writings less on theological grounds or from a purely personal standpoint than for what he designates as its social and historical role in Ireland. He consistently presents it as another imperial power, another mighty source for the inculcation of servility. Ireland’s loyalty to Rome is the worse since Rome sold Ireland to the English in the time of Henry II. (Watson 154) Stephen is aware of the role church plays in furthering their stronghold in Irish identity, and he rebels against it as another form of servility. Contemplating the idea of Davin’s archaic nationalism, he compares it to the drug-like effect of the church: He stood towards this myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dull-witted loyal serf. (Joyce 195) A Portrait gives us a clear understanding of Joyce/ Stephen’s relationship with the church. A scene in chapter four helps to ascertain a better perspective on Stephen circumventing the net of religion. While at Belvedere, Stephen is exposed to many “sins,” and while he is concerned for his soul, he is also indifferent toward the idea of eternal damnation. During the feast of St. Francis Xavier, Stephen has a sort of spiritual awakening, which leads him towards a life of
piety. In chapter four, Stephen is encountered by the director of the school. The priest asks Stephen if he has ever considered a life in the vocation of the priesthood. Stephen, at this point seriously contemplates the life of a priest. As he leaves the director’s office, Stephen reflects on the priests at Clongowes and the “troubling odour of the long corridors” (Joyce 174). Here, he smells the stagnation of a priestly life. He says earlier that this sort of life “was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him” (Joyce 174). Stephen knows that this life can never be his, not because he is unworthy, but because it contradicts his soul. He begins to define himself by what he knows he is not. His “instinct” is opposed to this life as he realizes that his destiny is to be free from social or religious orders. As he continues, he passes a statue of the Blessed Virgin and still a little further smells rotting cabbages and muses that it is “this disorder, the misrule and confusion […] that is to win the day in his soul” rather than the neat, stale life of priesthood (Joyce 176). Stephen is beginning to form his identity separate from the religion that is so central to his life and Irish identity, leading to the idea of his desire to be unassociated with social or religious orders. This denial of the religious world puts Stephen on the path of intellectual enlightenment. Later, he tells his friend Cranly that he will not serve the church. When Cranly pursues the idea of Eucharist, Stephen replies, “I fear more the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration” (Joyce 265). Again, Stephen hints of the oppression the church has plagued Ireland with for centuries. Watson reprints a quote from Joyce found in Ibid, a newspaper the author frequently wrote in, saying, “I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while
the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul” (qtd. in Watson 155). It’s interesting to note that Joyce understands the hypocrisy of the Irish when they claim they do not want any oppressor, yet succumb to the servility of the church. Of course, he rails not only against the Roman Catholic Church, but of religion as a whole as long as it stunts the formation of a true identity. O’Neil comments on the atmosphere of change in early nineteenth century Ireland by examining the relationship between Joyce, the Irish Literary Revival, and religion. Stephen/Joyce recognizes immediately something that Hyde and Yeats discovered only gradually: that for many Catholics, […] the Celtic Revival was a movement to overthrow the Protestant ascendancy, which had governed Ireland for two hundred years and replace it with a Catholic one. (O’Neil 382) Stephen, realizing the subjugation of his person to the church meant giving up his ability to think for himself and, therefore, giving up his true identity, repels the notion of enslavement to the order and piety of religion. “He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world” (Joyce 175). The last net that Stephen evades is one of language. This is likely his most difficult task, for he is caught in a linguistic limbo. He has no native language to speak out of. Gaelic has been forgotten, surviving in remote areas of Ireland, and English is the tongue of the oppressor, yet Stephen wants to be a writer. Similarly, Joyce forges his identity as a writer. Stephen and Joyce ultimately reject Gaelic, but never wholeheartedly embrace English. Joyce sees Gaelic, and therefore, the revival of the language as a basis for identity, as archaic and yet another means of subjugation. Joyce’s idea of identity evidenced by Stephen’s exile to Europe is to find a place in the modern world, without reverting to an ancient past. In Irish Literature: A Social History, Norman Vance states, “The nets of nationality and language threatening to ensnare the free spirit of the aspiring artist were both Irish and English, which is why in language as in life Joyce aspired to the cosmopolitan so disdained by the patriots of
the Irish Literary Revival” (Vance 193). Joyce also identified the inundation of Gaelic language as another form of oppression, considering the vast majority of Irish spoke English. Language, in this sense, was not for the purpose of expression or cultural manifestation, but a furtherance of political agenda. Language was used to propel the idea of Irish racism in as much as it delineated Irish superiority over English. Joyce sees this as yet another threat to achieving an identity free from another governing institution. Bruce Stewart says of Joyce’s denial of language as a defining force “refers to the way in which conventional ideas imprison the growing mind but also, more specifically, to the Irish-language movement, increasingly gaining ground among young Dublin intellectuals of the day” (Stewart 138). Joyce employs a number of techniques in A Portrait to demonstrate his repudiation of Gaelic and English as a controlling force. The novel itself is written in English, which would suggest his refusal to write in Gaelic. Furthering the idea of Joyce’s Gaelic denial is Stephen himself. Stephen will not learn the Irish language. Davin asks Stephen, “Are you Irish at all?” Stephen replies that he can prove his heritage in the office of arms where genealogies are held. Davin’s immediate response is “Then be one of us. Why don’t you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?” (Joyce 219). Here Stephen also realizes that language is seen as a nationalist’s means to define the culture. One is not Irish if one does not know Gaelic. Language is often the major distinctive quality of identity for a nation. O’Brien propagates, perhaps the most reified index of nationality and nationhood is language. Most countries in the world identify their singularity through language, and indeed, much of the educational apparatuses in different societies have as a seminal aim the teaching of the national language and culture. (O’Brien 87) Stephen is against this sort of definition based on the idea that Ire-
land (linguistically defined) had not been “Ireland” for some time, and therefore, has no right to impede his identity. He is suspicious of Davin’s intentions for the studying and speaking of Gaelic. He tells Davin that “I wonder about you: Is he as innocent as his speech?” (Joyce 219). Of a Gaelic tradition, Stephen exclaims, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?” (220). Stephen is aware that the new idealism concerning language would make subjects once again of the Irish people who abandoned their language in the first place. Joyce may appear to prefer English over Gaelic, and to some extent he does; however, he still rejects submitting his will to the limitations of English. He does engage writing from the standpoint of English because it is at least a modern language, recognized in a modern world outside the physical limitations of English and Irish borders. In his article “Joyce and Nationalism,” Seamus Deane claims that “Joyce was always to be the Irish writer who refused the limitations of being Irish; the writer of English who refused the limitations of being an English writer” (Deane 176). Joyce recognizes that English literature provides no models to the Irish for comprising a literary work and triumphantly subverts this limitation of English through the careful construct of his own narrative style. Another subtle technique is the use of Latin and reference to literary works. Joyce employs Latin in his novel as a means to demonstrate a connection to European roots as opposed to English ones. As well as Latin, Stephen reads a number of works, including Alexander Dumas, Henrik Ibsen, Gustave Flaubert as well as Aristotle, Augustine, and many others. He begins to associate himself in an intellectual, modern, and literary tradition outside of English influence. Furthermore, Stephen is aware of the limbo in which he exists without a language of his own. Contemplating his recent linguistic encounter with the dean of studies, Stephen thinks,
The language in which we are speaking [English] is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce 205) He can neither fully accept nor reject English as his language. Norman Vance quotes Joyce, speaking to a friend, as saying, “I’d Like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition” (qtd. in Vance 193). Succumbing to neither Irish nor English, Joyce would go on to create his own language in such works as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This is not to say that Joyce is unsympathetic or unpatriotic, but rather he becomes a new sort of nationalist, alone, forging the, as of yet, uncreated consciousness of his race. He does not seek to portray a reality that is outside or unattainable for the people of Ireland as his romantic contemporaries were apt to do. Instead, he chooses to present an identity found not in the banal experience of nobility, but in the noble experience of the banal. Joyce’s interest in identity is his primary purpose for A Portrait. He becomes himself amidst chaos and disillusionment. He moves forward to embrace not the long forgotten beauty that has faded from the world, but to embrace that which has not yet come into the world. This is only a possibility when one becomes free to forge a true identity of self. Joyce “flies” by the net of nationalism and racial ideology by leaving his home, his fatherland. He avoids the entrapment of religion by becoming “a priest of eternal imagination.” And lastly, he disentangles the net of language by rising above both Irish and English. He famously employs “silence, exile, and cunning” to surpass the passionless life subjugation of spirit to any institution would most surely accrue. Joyce’s hope for himself is the realization of self as an artist; for Ireland his hope is in national identity. His petition for both is to “discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” ***
Works Cited Cheng, Vincent J. Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Deane, Seamus. “Joyce and Nationalism.” James Joyce: New Perspectives. Ed. Colin MacCabe. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. New York: Penguin Classic, 1992. Print. O’Brien, Eugene. The Question of Identity in the Writings of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. Lewiston, UK: Edwin Mellon Press. 1998. Print. O’Neil, William. “Myth and Identity in Joyce’s Fiction: Disentangling the Image.” Twentieth Century Literature. 40.3 (1994): 379 -91. Print. Shwarze, Tracey Teets. “Silencing Stephen: Colonial Pathologies in Victorian Dublin.” Twentieth Century Literature. 43.3 (1997): 243-63. Print. Stewart, Bruce. “James Joyce.” The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999. Print. Vance, Norman. Irish Literature: A Social History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Print. Watson, G. J. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Print.
It lives in my memory by Walt er Savag e
The rain that day by Wa lter Savag e
Tire There are holes in the atmosphere gaps in the landscape a puncture in the bald tire that’s me
My flight is cancelled I sleep on the cold airport floor on simulated carpet
It takes two days for them to get me a flight The flight attendant looks like she’s just come from singing in a gospel choir We don’t have gospel in my country If we try to vaccinate our children madmen come to kill us
From the airplane window I see gaps in the atmosphere holes in the landscape The flight attendant fluffs my pillow
Arrested I’m a member of the Arrestable Class Therefore I am often arrested put on a road gang forced to march in broiling sun to destroy mosques with my bare hands to throw valued antiquities to the mosaic floors break them into shards
The Unarrestable Class
hired the actor William Macy to be its spokesperson
The Arrestable Class has no spokesperson Even my court-appointed public defender refuses to be my spokesperson
He has a defect that occurred when he was cloned He knows he has it but can’t figure out what it is
Abandonment Love of one's country should certainly mean
love of fellow citizens, concern for their welfare since the people are the nation, leaving me to conclude that patriotism is dead, otherwise we could not endure
homelessness, loss of jobs, more and more foreclosures leaving families adrift in an uncomforting land indifferent to the suffering of those denied prosperity.
Dirge For a Troubled Land Hopes and dreams of many have been cruelly shattered by war, crime, drugs, madness, economic decay reducing expectations to enduring day to day, dining with despair on meager fare, while the wealthy feast, forgetting the needy numbered in millions, jobless, losing homes, desperate cries for help falling on deaf ears
of elected officials, trained by their masters to retain their comforts, despite the suffering afflicting our nation.
Some politicians claim the wealthy make jobs by spending their money,
but economists studied the issue and quickly concluded when extravagant buyers purchased Picassos at auction the only contribution to the depressed economy was a little overtime for painting handlers.
Discover more Gary Beck at garycbeck.com
Fiscal Integrity
The Difference You’re trying to find a word and I’m trying to knock myself unconscious. You rummage, pinkies lifted, through kitchen drawers lacquered with melted lemon cough-drops and I stumble from room to room slamming myself into anything with a grudge.
Selective Truths She strikes words together to please other people. She infuses them with the shine off her car’s top every morning and the tangled smell of wet grass. The words are like matches, running out, always running out, an instant of scorching meaning before burning away.
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b y W a lte r S a va ge
For more information on Walter Savage and his work visit www wjacksavage com
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people -martin luther king jr . When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to . know, the end result is tyranny . and oppression no matter how holy the motives.. He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even -Robert A. Heinlein Oppression does his enemy from oppression; for not make for if he violates this duty, he esAll oppression hearts as big as all tablishes a precedent that will outdoors. Opcreates a state of reach to himself. pression makes war. -Thomas Paine us big and small. -Simone de Expressive and Beauvoir silenced. Deep Artists and celebrities are and dead. citizens, and as such you OUR INVISIBILITY IS THE -Cherrie Moraga have a responsibility to ESSENCE OF OUR OPPRESkeep fighting for justice SION. AND UNTIL WE ELIMbecause there are mono- INATE THAT INVISIBILITY, TRUTH IS PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE ON THE SIDE lithic power structures ABLE TO PERPETUATE THE OF THE and systemic oppression LIES AND MYTHS ABOUT GAY OPPRESSED out there. PEOPLE. -MALCOM X -Emily Saliers
-JEAN O LEARY
You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the Hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates. -ariel dorfman
While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself. -Kathleen hanna
He who allows oppression shares the crime. -Desiderius Erasmus
While women across the globe have many differences language, culture, environment our similarities are undeniable, and the impact of abuse and oppression affects us all. -Carrie Otis
Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's busiUniversities are no ness to longer educational in interfere when any sense of the word they see it. that Rousseau would have recognised. Inanna sewell stead, they have become The political prisoner in his cell, unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted the hungry children, the homeless with this squalid berefugees — not to respond to their trayal, one imagines he plight, not to relieve their soliwould have felt sick tude by offering them a spark of and oppressed. hope is to exile them from human -Terry Eagleton memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own. – Ellie Wiesel
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