Who can identify where the following lines come from:
The fifth daughter on the twelfth night told the first father
that things weren’t right
my complexion she said, is much to white….
Pat yourself on the back if you said Bob Dylan. And take another bow if you said Highway 61 Revisited, written in 1965, when Dylan was 24. Just incredible. When I heard he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I was so pleased. It was as if my appreciation and partial understanding of the lyrics justified my time admiring his creativity and imagination. I suppose my imagination was enriched enough to encourage me to write. Perhaps that is why the study of Shakespeare is still a large part of secondary English in Australia. But we need to move on, both literally and figuratively
here’s a recent poem from my upcoming collection:
Identity
I was born here but not of here
my identity is lost in the past
history of a distant land, a northern hemisphere
a foreign culture half a planet away planted in this place
like a foreign tree, a camphor laurel pest
a cane toad of poison.
My family settled here, did they ever ask who came before?
refugees in a foreign land, did they fight your battles in jungles dark?
did they ever ask you why your skin was so white?
where your identity was a mystery out of plain sight
in history books minus the past 40,000 years omitted
our new identity—golf clubs, footy fields and casinos
and intoxication from a brown bottle of amnesia
In a sense, unless we are descended from indigenous people, we are all refugees searching for our identity. And there’s no way of sugar coating what happened in Australia when Europeans arrived. How is our identity bound to creativity and imagination?
I’ve been reading a story from an Iranian American woman, Azar Nafisi who fled the Islamic revolution to settle in USA. She wrote a book in 2014 called The Republic of Imagination. In she writes: “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and a comment about Ayatollah Khomeini: “(He) was so afraid of the power of literature that he condemned a writer to death, a writer whose only weapons were words!” So, in our world full of knowledge and information, for many at just a click away of a screen, imagination is so important especially in innovation and problem solving; for empathy and mental well-being; child development. Yes, knowledge is very important as background research for a story that then has to come from our imagination. Characters, themes, conflict, features that drive the plot forward.
And it’s always more than just a few words can summarise. Identity, tied to family, tied to culture which is tied to history. And I hope I’ve given the story enough imagination to be an enjoyable read. That was my purpose in writing The Formula of Memory – still available on Amazon and Kindle. I hope you enjoy the read.
HAPPY READING!
Leave a Reply