Wasps In A Golden Dream Hum A Strange Music

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"In the age of increasing surveillance of borders, the border is where every thing significant occurs; map the border and you begin to understand the pulse of a nation," Asher Ghaffar writes in the introduction to Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music, his debut collection of poetry. In 2003, he was stopped at the Wagah border post, where hundreds gather to watch the spectacle of the aggressive flag-lowering ceremony on both the Indian and Pakistani side.Deploying the Wagah border literally and metaphorically, Ghaffar movingly describes the affective dimensions of "race" from the position of second-generation Canadian-born Muslim immigrant, deftly interrogating media depictions of the War on Terrorism. As Ghaffar writes: "I saw an ocean between two worlds / where flowers burst like paper rage."He also documents, in a series of cascading questions, the multiple ways that he came to understand the aftermath of the July 7th suicide bombings. At times the poetry is productively conflicted between narrative and verse, and the text opens up a fertile space where multiple genres flourish and jest.In the spirit of anticolonial poets like Aim? C?saire and Mahmoud Darwish and more recent experimental writers like the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nathalie Stephens, Asher Ghaffar documents a restless and often beautiful search for a rich and complex anti colonial poetics for our times, without falling into comfortable dogmas: "I sought a form for the body in crisis, the body in alliance with the flight of bees. I searched the archive for the voice which would break the density further. I sought the drive that was not the drive for death, but the drive for everlasting life in fervor."

E-Book Content

WA S P S I N A GOLDEN DREAM HUM A STRANGE MUSIC poetry by Asher Ghaffar WA S P S I N A GOLDEN DREAM HUM A STRANGE MUSIC Asher Ghaffar ECW PRESS Copyright © Asher Ghaffar, 2008 Published by ECW Press 2120 Queen St. East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, m4e 1e2 416•694•3348 / [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Ghaffar, Asher Wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music / Asher Ghaffar. Poems. isbn 978-1-55022-854-0 I. Title. ps8613.h34w37 2008 c811'.6 c2008-902417-6 Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book Text design: Tania Craan Cover design: David Gee Cover image: iStock Type: Mary Bowness Printing: Coach House Printing This book is set in Janson and Century Expanded The publication of Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp). printed and bound in canada We had no doubt . . . that the heart rocked with sorrow would at last reach its port. — Faiz Ahmed Faiz What is the future of this Word without place? — Edmond Jabès CONTENTS INDUCTION Genesis 3 The Master Bedroom 5 On the Question of a Borderless Body In Possible Departures Delirium 8 13 Deduction 15 DEDUCTION Introduction to a Home Vanishing Mot
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