National Poetry Day - 2014

After a long hiatus while I finished my masters dissertation (Memory and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda, for anyone interested) and spent six weeks in Nepal (lovely country, amazing experience), I decided to recommence blogging with a completely different style of post.

Today being National Poetry Day, I thought I would share a selection of my favourite poems. They are not necessarily chosen as examples of great poetry (though many of them are), they are simply poems that have resonated with me, and stayed with me over the years. As some of them are rather long, I will provide links to them for you to read elsewhere, should you so desire. They are presented at random, I found it hard enough to pick only 10 poems, let along actually rank them.

1. The Lady of Shallot

This is the first poem I remember reading or hearing (though it probably wasn't the actual first), and almost certainly has a lot to do with my life-long fascination with all things Arthurian.

2. Song

Rossetti I first discovered at A-level, and went on to study her again during my degree, proving that studying literature doesn't ruin it for everyone!

3. The Highwayman

Noyes I credit, at least in part, with my first education in poetic metre. This is another poem I remember from an age almost certainly far too young to fully appreciate it.

4. The Dream of The Rood

Presented here in the same form that I first truly read it (the page also offers translation options), this is the poem through which I fell in love with Old English as an eager young Oxford student. My first real encounter with the model of 'Christus Victor', it is a poem I re-read every Easter, it is a beautiful example of Old English dream visions.

5. Because I could not stop for Death

This, I think, has stayed with me purely because it was on my Oxford entrance paper, though I cannot remember the other poem I wrote on.

6. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Proving that I don't only like English poetry pre-1900, this one I love because of a class in sixth form where someone suggested it is about Father Christmas. A lovely poem in its own right, it was this reminder of the sheer multiplicity of meanings that poetry allows that really made me fall in love with it.

7. Despised and Rejected

The first free verse poem I ever actually liked, Rossetti demonstrates in poetry what Picasso did with art - that to break the rules well you first need to understand the rules you are breaking. The poem might be in free verse, but it is a masterpiece of rhythm and rhyme.

8. The Jabberwocky

Because this list would be incomplete without some nonsense poetry, and this poem is everything that was silly in my childhood.

9. The Charge of the Light Brigade

Celebrating and castigating an act of utter stupidity, this is the third of the poems that shaped my young and impressionable mind.

10. Warning

This has been recited to my parents too many times to count, though I am pleased to say that neither wears a red hat yet.

Bonus: Message Clear

Just for sheer brilliance, this poem I have discovered too recently for it to be one of my ten that have stayed with me, but still deserves a mention. (For an easy to read version, go here)

I hope you have enjoyed this brief voyage through my psyche, there are many poems I left out, and many far more wonderful examples of the form, but these are my ten, and I hope you enjoy them.

Cultural Confusions

'You can't SAY that!'

Again, this is somewhat cheating, but I'm getting to the end of my master's and am reflecting on the year and my experience. I picked Bradford to study partly because of the international nature of the course. The Peace Studies Department attracts students from all over the world, and having experienced the relatively homogeneous academic settings of Cambridge and Oxford, I wanted to meet people who had grown up in cultures different from my own.

I was not disappointed, I am one of two (full-time) Brits on the course, and we are also vastly in the minority overall, which is great. It has been a huge addition to learn not only from my teachers but from my course-mates who have experience of conflict firsthand.

I came expecting to meet people who were different from me, and grow through the experience. What has surprised me though has been the level of cultural difference between myself and people from a culture I view as relatively similar to my own*. I have several very good friends from my course who are American, and we have spent a lot of time this year at linguistic loggerheads. Most of the time, this is simply for amusement, I insist that all desserts may be called 'pudding' while they, rather confusingly, keep referring to my tea-towel as a dishcloth. These do not betray anything more different than the use of different dialects (inevitable when your countries are 4,000 miles apart). 

Yet occasionally, these linguistic clashes seem to betray actual differences. One of my favourite memories, is an evening earlier this year when we were talking about where to go for dinner and I rather casually suggested 'going out for an indian'. One of my friends leant forward in consternation and exclaimed 'You can't say that'. To her, my perfectly innocent dinner suggestion had the potential to be deeply offensive. The inference to her was that it sounded like going out with the intent to attack someone.

Similarly, at one point, she casually referred to a homeless person as a hobo, eliciting a somewhat similar response from me. Here using the slang term is derogatory and offensive, for her it was simply a shorter synonym.

I don't want to go into hypothesising why we have different associations for these terms and phrases, partly because I really don't have time to do the necessary research, and partly because I am more interested in what this has made me consider. 

I want to work in the field of conflict resolution, a field where cultural distinctions and differences play a huge role in every aspect from perpetuating conflicts to attempting to resolve them. What this year has taught me (among other things) is how important it is not to assume that because I think someone is 'like me' that removes the chance for offence or miscommunication. My friends and I are able to laugh off confusions like those I illustrated above, because we are not in a conflicting situation, we trust each other and discussion is easy and free-flowing. In a situation where relationships are more fraught, assuming that we know how someone else is going to interpret what we say or do because we think they are like us is fraught with danger, and small cultural differences can be the most catastrophic.

*I should note that even within one country there are many different cultures, and thus I am being slightly over simplistic for the sake of easy reflection. 

Quote of the Day - 20.03.2013

'Bossy Boots' and 'Man-Up'


Ok... I cheated, today I dont really have a quote, just something I want to talk about after watching videos like these - http://www.upworthy.com/calling-girls-this-word-may-seem-harmless-but-why-are-boys-never-called-it

and this one

http://www.upworthy.com/theres-something-absolutely-wrong-with-what-we-do-to-boys-before-they-grow-into-men

WATCH THESE BEFORE READING ON
_______________________________________________________________________________
Such campaigns aren't saying anything I haven't heard before, there are all sorts of phrases we use in everyday language without thinking of the consequences they might have. Now, as I have mentioned before, I am lucky. I grew up in a household where I never even considered that my being female would ever be anything more than a simple fact of nature, and certainly that it might stop me from doing whatever it is I want to do. After all, even if the woman thing counts against me, I'm white, British, and (by the standards of most of the global population) very wealthy. I come from a developed nation which won't stop me from going to university because of my gender, and if I do experience some level of discrimination in the job market (which I have yet to enter) I am fairly confident that the university I happened to go to might just about make up for that in most instances.

But, nevertheless, language matters. I can never quite shake the feeling that I am slightly too loud, that I speak up too much in class. And sometimes this is true (I concede that it might just be possible that someone else might have a better idea on a subject than me), but equally, there is the fear of being seen as brash, as domineering (and not in the fun way). Being fairly outspoken I often take charge in situations, and often with the agreement of those I am working with, but beneath this there is always the deep-seated fear of being thought of as 'bossy' (as I often was as a child), the fear that this will put people off me, the deep seated knowledge that being seen as 'bossy' is a bad thing.

The problem is, though, that being bossy is something that is overwhelmingly associated with women and girls. If we look at the Google ngrams on 'bossy women' vs 'bossy men' and 'bossy boy' vs 'bossy girl' we see that it is a word that overwhelmingly collocates with the feminine:
Bossy Woman vs Bossy Man

Bossy Boy vs Bossy Girl

Two out of the three examples of the use of 'bossy' provided in the OED entry refer to women. And if we google bossy we are offered this:

Notice the 'tyrannical', 'oppresive' and 'undemocratic'. Bossy is something then that not only is pretty much only something a woman can be, but also something that contradicts some of the fundamental principles on which I base my political identity.

Yet is giving orders and instructions necessarily a bad thing? The ability to give orders, isn't that one of the fundamental characteristics of a good leader? We don't call our boys bossy, why do we call girls it?

The collocation of 'bossy' with 'girl' is fundamentally damaging, it makes us afraid ever to take control, to tell people what to do, even when that might be the best thing for us to do. We train women out of leadership and men into it, while at the same time fostering the other essential skills of leadership in our women and stifling it in men.

Moving on from bossy lets go to the phrase 'man up' often used when boys are being 'overly emotional'. We teach them that emotions make them weak, and expressing them is 'unmanly'. We train them in the skills of leadership (at least the speaking out part) but not to understand and harness their emotions, an essential component of empathy.

Yet, empathy is an essential skill of leadership, without empathy leadership becomes dictatorial, privileging those we can relate to, not to those of whom we have no emotional understanding (Insert jab against the conservatives here).

Words matter because they display attitudes that children internalise and that inhibit them as adults. If we teach girls not to lead but to feel, and boys not to feel but to lead, where are the next great leaders of the world going to come from?

Quote of the Day - 09.03.2014

'She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat'
Genesis 3:6, King James Version

Our church lent group started today; in a series called 'Growing through Lent' we will be re-examining the various stories which feature in the readings throughout Lent and attempting to bring new and different understandings to them.

Today we (as might be obvious) were looking at the story commonly known in Christian theology as 'The Fall'. We were asked to listen again to the story of the Garden of Eden from the perspective of a particular character in the story (Adam, Eve, Serpent, God), and afterwards we discussed whether this gave us a different view of the story.

What emerged from discussion was a teleological understanding of the Genesis narrative as an explanation for things being the way they are rather than an exposition of original sin (an interpretation I have always preferred... probably the English Lit student coming through, metaphors make everything better).

This got me to thinking of the Garden narrative as a metaphor for the transition of childhood to adulthood. As children we are innocent, as Adam and Eve were in the Garden, carefree and unashamed (come on, we all have those pictures our parents took of us running around the garden in a state of dishabille). As we grow older we learn more, our curiosity drives us to learn more, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we learn to be ashamed of our bodies and seek to cover them up, we no longer follow God with the purity of a child's faith. Our knowledge of the world around us, our curiosity leads us away from God* as much as towards God. Women go through puberty at which the pains of childbirth start in our periods, and men have to go out and work (well, we all do now, but when this story was written men went out to work, women ran the home).

Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden, an idyllic, childhood utopia where everything they need is provided for them, and must instead struggle to provide for themselves. We leave the protection of our parent's house, to make our own way in the world.

The First Letter to the Corinthians states: 'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things' (1 Corinthians 13:11), but this so often includes our childlike faith, our unstinting trust in the love and will of God, and it is this we must (as Jesus pointed out) always be seeking to reclaim, despite all the pain and hardships that come with being human.




*SIDE NOTE: A case in the argument for a gender neutral English pronoun... they/them works in most situations but would have confused this one, yet I dislike gendering God as either feminine or masculine.

Quote of the Day - 03.03.2014

'Organised hypocrisy functions as [a] safety valve by which conflicts can be mitigated'
Robert Egnell, 'The organised hypocrisy of international state-building', 2010

Egnell in this article writes about the disconnect in the international aid system between rhetoric, decisions and action. As he points out, in the international community the maintenance of order is more key to success than the success of an operation, and thus it is the appearance of competence rather than the actuality of it that is important.

We see this in things like the focus placed on 'local ownership' within the rhetoric of intervention, coupled with the nature of interventions which often focus on the same aims of democratisation and the introduction of free-market economics. Such changes tend to come with the blithe assumption that local ownership must in part stem first from proper education of the locals.

In suggesting that hypocrisy is not merely an accident of the international system but a tactic of it (whether a conscious or unconscious one) Egnell makes me more nervous about how I want to proceed than I already am. I fervently want to be involved in international development, yet at the same time, wholeheartedly believe in the idea of local ownership as not just an ideal but as a necessity for successful development. This leaves me wondering whether the process I engaged in as an intern in Hackney in 2011 (implemented properly) might be possible on a wider scale if only there was the acceptance from donor countries of a certain lack of control of the process.

Whilst in Hackney I was working for the Contextual Theology Centre as a Jellicoe Intern, engaged in community organising in the local community. The theory was that rather than going in with a specific project, we were to speak to as many local people as possible with the only intention of finding out what they wanted. Looking back now, the process was hijacked somewhat as the vicar of the church I was based in was very keen on pedestrianisation of an area, a highly devisive issue for the shopkeepers of the area who felt it would detract from their sales if buses no longer went past the shops. The key issue in fact was one which neither the church nor the local council really cared about, the problem of Christmas lights. The street had at one point had beautiful Christmas lights, but these went missing one year and the ones that replaced them, the shopkeepers felt, made them the laughing stock of the Borough.

What this process showed me ultimately, was the inherent difficultly of implementing local ownership, those with the power don't want the same things as their constituents. However, had the power-brokers of the area implemented the change the shopkeepers wanted, I cannot help but wonder what difference that would have made to their cooperation on other issues.

I went in without preconceptions as to what would help (or at least as far as possible without an agenda) and listened to what people wanted. This is a time consuming process, and doesn't necessarily lead where you want it to go (the local politicians wanted a smarter, more upmarket high street, not pretty Christmas lights for an area focused on pound shops and betting shops), but arguably, surely, could result in more change in the long term. After all, people are more likely to do what you want them to if you show them you care first.

Quote of the Day - 18.01.2013

'Peace then is the result of a balanced action between doing good and fighting evil' 

Mohammad Abu Nimer, Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam

First of all, apologies for how sporadic updates are at present, I have an essay deadline on Tuesday and am working flat out on those, leaving little time for extraneous musings.

If my studies this year have made one thing clear, its that peace is a far from simple concept. Varying in definition from the absence of war to a Utopian idyll in which all injustices have been defeated and all that is left is harmony, peace appears to mean many things to many people.

For me, however, I like this idea of peace as somewhat precarious, a balancing act between both acting right in yourself and standing up to those who are not. It is a state that requires maintaining, not a point at which one can rest, but a position from which one can always be striving to do better. 

Here on earth, constrained by the competitiveness of human nature it seems unlikely that we will ever reach a state of perfect idyllic peace without injustice in perpetuity, something will change it, bring a new imbalance. Indeed, what we understand as just changes so often that that in itself seems to threaten such an idea. (It has been less than half a century since being gay was illegal in this country, and in two months time the first marriages take place). 

Such a definition of peace removes an option of complacency, one must always be balancing, precariously, on a knife-edge maintaining the peace without being subsumed by either complacency (good deeds alone) or war (fighting does not entail violence).

Quote of the Day - 11.01.2014

'Whatever the order inherent in the world, it is an order mediated by human perception'
Kevin Avruch and Peter Black, 'The Culture Question and Conflict Resolution'

As may have become apparent by my earlier posts, I find the question of perception fascinating. Avruch and Black write about the idea of 'culture-as-consciousness', your culture determines how you derive meaning from the world around you and from your own actions and feelings. This suggests that the world around us, or indeed the world as we understand it is a construction, the rules of behaviour and the rules of morality are determined not according to some greater order but by cultural ideals which then alter how we perceive actions and events.

This intrigues me as I then attempt to unravel my own cultural understandings that thus create my perceptions. Becoming aware of one own prejudices and the lenses through which one looks is an uncomfortable, difficult and often nigh-on impossible process. But to be aware of such things, to attempt to take into account at all times that how I am understanding something is not due to any greater order, but to my own individual cultural foundation, is at the same time thrilling and exciting.

To me the world has a set of rules that may be followed or broken, and following them or breaking them elicits further sets of rules. Yet this ordering is placed there by my cultural perceptions, as English, as Christian, as Female, as Young, from Cambridge, Oxford Graduate, all these different cultural groups play a part in making sense of my world. What makes sense of yours?