"Sketch", "What it takes to keep the mind going" and "Drag(a) de mama"

These poems address the manner in which white space lives in harmony with words or in the margins/ in between the lines of the poems. A good portion of meaning is found outside the written words; together with line breaks they teach the reader how to read the poems out loud and inside their minds. In these poems, white space plays several roles: it is a stylistic technique, it asks the reader to actively read the poem, and it visually creates an aesthetic.&nbsp

"The Invisible Woman" and "In the Rehab Waiting Room"

I have been ruminating lately on the notion of “white space,” “writer’s block,” and selfhood following a traumatic brain injury that caused word-finding problems during the acute phase of my recovery. I have coined the term, “neuropoetics” to denote the attempt to describe in poetry and flash fiction the experience of “drawing a blank” or being silenced by a medical condition. Attached you will find three poems for your consideration: “Memory Villanelle,” “The Invisible Woman,” and “In the Rehab Waiting Room.” I was inspired by Laurie Clements Lambeth’s statement regarding the use of formal structure in her poetry about her Multiple Sclerosis, the blurring of bodily boundaries: “I needed the cage of a villanelle—so restrictive, in that very few lines can truly further the poem along, and yet so obsessive a form—to house the poem” (171). I have tried the same technique to describe the connection between memory and identity. “The Invisible Woman” takes as much from the Marvel universe as H.G. Wells; in it, I use the figure of Sue Storm and her dubious gift of being ignored as representative of the experience of an “invisible disability,” or something neurological rather than physically identifiable. Finally, “In the Rehab Waiting Room” was accidentally inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, as per the epigraph. It was an early attempt to capture the feeling of being a “blank slate” or having that post-traumatic “blank stare” that avoids eye contact with other

Self-Fashioning and Ambiguities of Revolution in Austin Clarke's "Initiation"

This is a paper on Austin Clarke’s short story from his collection of short stories titled, In This City. The story can be seen as being a part of Diaspora Studies, Immigrant Literature and Black Studies. The paper critically scrutinizes the short story based on the text and the context to argue how there was an absence of sustainable structures in the public sphere for black immigrant masculinities to sufficiently express themselves in a white heteronormative culture. Sociological ideas of Toby Miller and Erving Goffman are used to understand how black immigrant identities could only sufficiently be expressed in alternate sub-structures that remained isolated from the dominant white and heteronormative status quo. The central subject of “white space” of the issue is highly relevant to the paper’s exploration of how the systems of self-fashioning and revolution that exist in the public imagination are “incomplete” in their lack of reliability and sufficiency for black immigrants in Canada. Hence, their position in relation to aspirations of self-fashioning and revolution is one of ambiguity as the title of the paper itself states.   The paper lays bare how these ambiguities are manufactured based on the chasm that exists between the ways in which the characters want to act and the ways of self-fashioning that society approves for them. It also explores how the systems of revolution are incomplete for them as there is an absence in terms of a revolutionary process that ensures stability and self-preservation.   &nbsp

Scars of a Colonial History: White Privilege, Race Relations and Anti-Apartheid Sensibilities in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”... and the Boys

Central to virtually any indictment of South African literature, its historiography, or otherwise culturally and politically influenced modes of representation persist themes of social, political, and racial inequality. That is not to say that all South African cultural productions revolve around a centrifuge of racially focused social commentary; rather, that when historicizing a work of South African aesthetics such themes inevitably arise because of the nation’s colonial history and the Eurocentrism that have pervaded its modern socio-political foundations. When examining South African aesthetic/cultural representations (in this case, a literary text) it is thus crucial to properly locate the work in as full a historical context as possible. My research therefore aims to link South Africa’s history of colonization with the damaged race relations that ensued in the twentieth century as represented in a prominent work of South African theater: Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … And the Boys. My essay traverses the history of British and Dutch colonization in South Africa and seeks therein to register foundations for the Eurocentric, whitewashed ideologies which would eventually translate into official state policy in 1948 and which precipitated the broken race relations that Fugard’s semi-autobiographical play interrogates. I discuss Fugard’s depiction of white privilege while systematically linking such representations back to their colonial foundations, and ultimately assess Fugard’s play as a condemnation of white supremacy and as a plea for the recalibration of prejudiced racial hierarchies

The Dissolved

The face is dissolved, into the mass grave that is White Space

Eyes Gone To Seed

Endometriosis and adenomyosis are chronic diseases which affect 1/10 people with uteruses and are drastically understudied and underserved in the Canadian healthcare system. Through experimentation with blank space on the page, this poem explores some aspects of what it means and how it feels to live with and seek treatment for these diseases

The Phone Call: A Short Story

"The Phone Call" is a short story about a woman, Nadia, dealing with grief and her deteriorating mental health

Dangerous or in Danger? Exploring Safety, Omission, and Beauty in Rebecca Hall's Passing (2021)

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing, establishes themes of safety in a visual context,  examining the Black bodily experience in both white and Black spaces. Hall's use of greyscale lighting, diegetic & non-diegetic sounds, and, most importantly, omission, spotlights what it means to be Black in white space. In the same way Larsen’s story rejects the possibility of ever being safe as a Black person, regardless of whether one can pass as white or not, Hall's cinematic methodology reveals the character of Clare as both dangerous and yet always in danger. Controlling what the viewer is allowed to see, Hall presents a newfound method of storytelling that confronts Black violence in a manner that rejects the glorification of Black trauma, while also presenting the dangers Black persons face from merely existing in their body.&nbsp

Poetic Space of Intimacy and Movement: Re-Imagining the White Space of the Page in the Erasure Poetry of Carolyn Thompson, Sonja Johanson, and Lisa Huffaker

This paper explores the transformation of poetic blank space in the work of three contemporary poets: Carolyn Thompson, Sonja Johanson, and Lisa Huffaker. Specifically, Thompson's Actions Speak Louder Than Words, and The Eaten Heart, Johnson's Untitled Erasure poem series, and Huffaker's 6 Images are compared and contrasted for their unique approaches to using the space of the page to add to the reading experience. The works discussed by each poet are erasure works that transform the page's white spaces surrounding the poem, using various additive or reductive methods to reimagine this space. If the white spaces surrounding a poem are often read as silences or voids, then using multi-modal techniques, these three poets transform these spaces in ways that signal intimacy and movement instead. This creation of intimacy and movement is explored through the intertextual jesters, an essential aspect of erasure poetry, along with the intersections between poetry and sculpture, bodily interactions with and implications within the texts, and poetry and avant-garde notions of cartography.  &nbsp