Steve_Bamlett_blog

I am currently reading Dean Atta’s memoir, Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body and will blog on it later, but surely Atta is on the ball about ‘patriotism’ in his poem I Come From (read it here: Atta, D. (2019) ‘I Come From’, Feminist Dissent, 4, pp. 158-159. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.31273/fd.n4.2019.410) . He says of that poem in an interview with S. Dhaliwal – also in Feminist Dissent:

“I Come From” is a poem I wrote during my MA at Goldsmiths; it was written to be used in schools to model a workshop I lead where I get students to write about where they come from. I do not say Britain, Cyprus, or Jamaica, but allude to these places with food: “I come from shepherd’s pie and Sunday roast, / jerk chicken and stuffed vine leaves.” I’ve found that food is a great starting point when asking young people to write about culture.

Rather than say I’m British I say, “I come from a British passport”. I mention the rainbow flag and the Union Jack to put sexuality on par with national identity, because being part of the LGBT community has been such a strong part of my identity and I have experienced solidarity with LGBT people around the world. The poem ends with these lines: “I come from my own pen but I see people torn apart like paper, / each a story or poem that never made it into a book.” I say this to acknowledge my privilege as someone able to freely tell their own story.

Atta, D. and Dhaliwal, S. (2019) An Interview with Dean Atta, Feminist Dissent, 4, pp. 279-282. Retrieved from:
https://doi.org/10.31273/fd.n4.2019.414

The embrace of labels that you take possession of (and if you don’t they might take possession of you) has become a feature of right-wing politics that have taken a populist hold on once beautiful movements towards liberation: class solidarity, feminism, even the LGB (without the very necessary T) ‘movement’. In large these are retrogressive movements that home in on authority rather than science, though often by colonising the name of science (biology being the favoured one – to these movements differences are biologically determined or they are nothing, even race and culture).

Patriotism, however it is glossed in collusive ideologies, has necessary conmection to the concept of coming from the Father, of bing identified with and by patriarchy. That was always the point of Wilfred Owen’ Dulce et decorum est. The ‘Old Lie’ being:

Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori

The very idea of the Fatherland demands its sons, but now its daughters for death being biological is given freedom to be non-binary, too, alI come under its Juggernaut assertion of power, provable only by the fact that you are prepared to die for it and Him, the seminal idea of abstract nationhood and top-down law, the Name of the Father. Owen makes it clear that you can only believe this lie to be true, if you haven’tseen that in fact death in war is like death⁸ from cancer, or from suicide, ‘his hanging face, like a devil’ssick of sin’, sin as nominated by societies that put the engendering of the Father’s duplicates over life as a principle in itself, and call the latter, queer boys like Owen anyway, ‘sin’.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

That Atta beautifully asserts that we are what we eat, and how are tastes are developed is a better principle of honouring ‘where we love’, for where we live is instinct with travelling, either in external or internal time and space. We love where we live because it inbuilds the security to travel away from itself and to see ‘where we live’ as merely that. Did I sense that in Tash Aw, too, in this blog (use the link).

 I come from travelling through my taste buds but loving where I live.

Indeed, Atta sees the Father as deeply unreliable for, after all, he is a person not a concept: ‘I come from waiting by the phone for him to call’, associated ever with coming from undone D.I.Y. Better in coming ‘from a home that some would call broken’, he comes from a ‘decent education and a marvellous mother’, where he too cooperates in the unweaving of past stories to weave one for himself as a writer, one that celebrates self and other simultaneously, rather than hating the other in order to meanly love oneself, or what you believe to be yourself but is always a pale imitation of an otherwise oppressive reality. Instead:

I come from stories, myths, legends and folk tales.
...
I come from my own pen but I see people torn apart like paper,
each a story or poem that never made it into a book.

Is there any point of a patriotism if its meaning is to love only the father’s sons, created in His own image, when we might learn to love stories of otherness we have not read because those others have been ‘torn apart’ because they are not like me and my Dad enough.And speaking of which this is the most low-key reference to Orpheus and the sparagmos (a legend from that part Atta’s family that is Greek Cypriot) but here not about the poet who has privileged but the marginalised unvoiced who have not.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxx