7/20/2023 0 Comments White blight definition![]() ![]() Standardized, the poem sounds surprisingly different, more fluid and less brittle. As an experiment, I typed out a few pages with the same spacing but using black text on an all-white background, and then recreated the same text with the white text on black bars alongside it. Which is not to say that they don’t alter the poem in valuable ways. When I compare these boxes to the similar black bars in Philip Metres’ Sand Opera, where I can feel and hear, as I read, the voices cutting off abruptly at the sharp edge of their erasure, the symbolism of those bars in White Blight seems more two dimensional, something not so much to be experienced as interpreted. Nor does it help me experience the kind of strain an Iranian immigrant would feel in Sweden or the U.S. The strain of reading white text on a black background doesn’t really upend my assumptions about my own whiteness. The mother says “All families have their stories/ but for them to emerge requires someone/ with the will to disfigure.” The uncle, who, like the father, seems to have been tortured for his political work before leaving Iran, says in his first line, as the book begins to enlarge its focus from the internals of the family drama,īut neither of these symbolic meanings feel especially resonant here. The statements feel didactic and aspire to aphorism, everyone competing for the right to define the world. All the family members talk brilliantly, but none show evidence of listening much, and only a few speeches seem to have been spoken consecutively. Though Farrokhzad-who was born in Iran and raised in Sweden (she wrote the book in Swedish it’s been translated into English by Jennifer Hayashida)-is a playwright as well as a poet, translator, editor, and critic, and though White Blight ( Vitsvit in Swedish) has been performed as a play in Sweden, it reads as a poem. ![]() The characters speak with different perspectives but in a similar style, and in fact I tend to hear all the voices filtered through one voice, the one that insists on introducing them in relationship to herself. ![]()
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