Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Year of the Ram
In James Clifford's poem, the line "In a desert the tank is hit, explodes inside, sears the men's faces, and sends up a plume of black smoke," is repeated throughout the poem. The placement of this line creates a stark contrast between itself and the sentences before and after it. On page 134 of the reader, this line follows a stanza that describes "black football players" and "white art-museum directors" during a widely known football event that is taking place at the "Hilton Hawaiian Village." This stanza represents the result of Americanization/colonialism. The Hawaiian village is now owned by the Hilton family, foreigners are flocking to the location (football players, museum directors) and nothing that is part of native Hawaiian culture is included within this stanza. This is followed by the line about the desert tank, which is very different from the imagery of the previous stanza. The "village" stanza is what can come out of colonialism, and the "tank" stanza shows what must be sacrificed to obtain it.
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Brandon -
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, your attendance drawings have been cracking me up. You could do a comic strip. That said, I agree with the conclusions you've drawn in your reading of Clifford's poem. What other parallel readings are possible with that repeated imagery of the tank in the desert blowing up in terms of - historical context; America's imperial past and present; possible costs of indigenous resistance to hegemonic foreces; et al?
- Trey