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Tag: shakespeare

  • Bards without borders

    Hamdi Khalif: William Shakespeare is probably the most renowned writer of all time. Even if you’ve never read or studied his work, I’m sure you’ve heard of his name. I think that this genius marketing is in part due to his excellence and partly due to British national pride. With English being the first language of the world, it’s no surprise that English writers benefit from the same prestige.

    What I love about Shakespeare is that he placed raw emotion at the heart of his work, whether this was love or hate, jealousy or selflessness, greed or loss. What’s even lovelier is his verve for writing other cultures – and this is why so many of his plays and poems are set abroad. He has taught us that, regardless of our race, culture, language or class, we’ll still succumb to basic human desires and experiences.

    Recently, I’ve been part of a collective called Bards Without Borders, and we’re writing a response to the 400th
    anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, through a migrant – and often unapologetically honest – lens. For many of us, Shakespeare is great, but he’s only one of many. Every nation has its pride and glory, and while Britain gloats about Shakespeare, his likes can be found across the globe. As a Somali, where poetry is the fabric of our culture, we have a Shakespeare for every generation. And while Britain marks the 400th
    anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, other cultures are embracing living talent wholeheartedly – and perhaps that’s something we can learn from. Perhaps, Shakespeare has cast a shadow too long for far too long.

    The following poem was written for a Bards Without Borders performance and is titled ‘Shakespeare and me’. I explore how I first met Shakespeare at school in the UK.

    Shakespeare and me

    I found you
    hiding between the pages
    of my English paper
    your words
    familiar
    yet foreign
    appear like scribbles on the pages
    and I’m a toddler learning to speak for the first time

    I roll you into a ball
    and squash you into my already full mouth
    dribbling with my new found knowledge

    this is what you do
    strip us to our basics
    and we are new born babies
    standing naked in front of gawping eyes
    strangers who coo and exclaim
    who touch and prod

    you make us vulnerable

    you punch holes into hearts which have never been whole
    you poke wounds which have not yet healed
    you are a cold mother teaching her children to be warm
    to love
    despite the cruel circumstances

    you are a harsh lesson to learn

    you make us uncomfortable

    Edin Suljic: Last year I visited my old homeland of former Yugoslavia for six weeks, which was the longest time I’d spent there since I left before the war in 1991.

    My stay there coincided with the height of unprecedented mass migration of people through Europe. And the bulk of them passed through the territories of former Yugoslavia. Day after day there was news about thousands of people in a never ending human chain going through Macedonia then Serbia then Croatia and finally Slovenia, as their last exit gate before entering into the promised land of Affluent Europe. Various barriers started appearing on the borders of that promised land as well as various responses towards those people.

    The absurdity of the whole situation affected me profoundly.

    Only 20 years ago, the very same people of those newly formed countries of the former Yugoslavian republics were affected by war: it was people from Bosnia and Croatia who were on the run with their belongings bundled up in plastic bags or suitcases. And now they themselves were watching other unfortunate humans running away from the wars or just walking along with an aim to get a better life somewhere else (which is everybody’s right anyhow, in my opinion).

    I didn’t experience the Yugoslavian war directly. I went away just in time. My closest family and friends remained. We, who are fortunate to live away from such disasters, can’t comprehend the experiences of those who are personally affected. Even the news we get is filtered, polished, manipulated, trickled to us, so it doesn’t disturb us too much as we go about our daily business. That’s how the news about the war in Yugoslavia came through to us 25 years ago, and that’s the way the news about any other war is presented now. But the relentless presence of misery, tragedy, suffering on one’s doorstep is a completely different experience.

    On my return to London I began working with a group of poets with refugee and migrant origins. The project, called Bards Without Borders, marks 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. I work on the idea of portraying Shakespeare, who was able to write about any amount of gore and guts being spilled, murders committed and eyes gauged, as someone who has been broken by the real tragedies of our times. I relate to Shakespeare as My Mate, as someone whose work and legacy is inspiration for generations of writers, whose writing in turn helps to bring awareness about the consequences of one part of the world’s actions towards another – the relationship between the weak and the strong.

    In ‘Tell Me’, I recognize that Shakespeare’s words show humanity’s frailties, weaknesses, and cruelty; the suffering we inflict on each other. His works are particularly relevant today and I lament that he is no longer here.

    Tell Me

    Tell me, oh, why, why did you have to die,
    Now, when everyone wants to celebrate your life?
    You coward. You were my mate.
    Yes, I know, there were times when even I too forgot about you as joys and sorrows took over my life.

    But, soon the smell of wild garlic will fill up our woodlands and St George’s name will be on everyone’s lips.
    I guess you don’t care about wild garlic anymore.
    You’ve been smelling it each spring for four hundred years. You’d care for mandrake, right?
    There is no more mandrake since they stopped hanging. There are no more real men either.

    You were looking the world square in the eye and getting responses, just as your words, played out on the stage, would have sounded as a waterfall, as church bells, as a battle cry, as a lover’s whisper…

    But, I guess, no man is the master of his life, yet alone of his death.

    So, when you arrive, give me a gentle tap on the shoulder. I might be dancing tango or putting on a new costume, but grab a pint of that ale and don’t get into any fights before I join you.

    BWB Hamdi KhalifHamdi Khalif is a poet originally from Somalia. While new on the poetry scene, she recently joined the Bards Without Borders collective, London poets from migrant and refugee backgrounds who are creating a response to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Hamdi’s poems are a fusion of English and Somali, not only in language but also in ideas and identity, covering a range of themes from loss to womanhood.

    BWB Edin SuljicEdin Suljic grew up in the multicultural, multinational society of former Yugoslavia, before moving to the UK at the onset of the tragic Yugoslavian war in 1991. Being of a diverse background, he has a personal inclination to making different parts of society understand each other to find common values. He likes a good story; telling and making stories about people in all their diversities is the best way of bringing people closer together. Edin lives and works in London.

    Bards Without Borders is a collective formed of ten poets from all around the world, and coordinated by Laila Sumpton, Two Gents Productions and Counterpoint Arts.

    Follow Bards Without Borders on twitter using #BardsWithoutBorders and learn more about the group here.

    On Saturday 23 April, Bards Without Borders present: Shakespeare’s dead, get over it! at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green. Tickets and more info here.

  • Hamlet and the Disappeared

    If ever there were children that had to grow up in the shadow of phantom parents, it is the sons and daughters of Argentina’s disappeared. Dead men and women who are nowhere and consequently everywhere; murdered, if they are dead – but then, maybe they aren’t dead: there’s always the hope they’ll reappear and, as we all know, hope is the most terrible of sentences. So it’s no accident that the literature of many of these young people, burdened as they are with the explicit or unstated imperative to avenge their ghost parents and bring hidden crimes to light, has been written in the shadow of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

    The eternal question ‘Why does Hamlet doubt? Why doesn’t he wreak his revenge without further ado?’ is, of necessity, begged in today’s Argentina by another one: why, when there were thirty thousand disappeared in our country and no shortage of murdered bodies on display, when justice was kept waiting in the wings for nearly twenty years until people thought it would never come, why was not a single act of personal revenge perpetrated against those directly or indirectly responsible, who, unlike King Claudius, made no bones whatever about their crimes, and that without a trace of remorse?

    A first, rushed response was that this demonstrated how absolute the victory of the military had been: they had taken away our will to fight and broken us as they had the kidnapped in the torture and extermination camps – a response that Shakespeare’s work anticipates, and questions, in the unfair self-accusations and self-flagellations that Hamlet inflicts upon himself.

    Another, less pessimistic, possibility would be to suppose that we learned something from it all, as individuals and as a people: not so much from the dictatorship itself but from the time leading up to it, when the logic of revenge dominated much of political life, in an escalation of violence that, if it did not lead directly to the military regime, nevertheless armed it with an argument and an excuse, and helped to breed in broad swathes of society acquiescence or indifference to the systematic murders of its members. If the logic of revenge had paved the way to dictatorship, it could hardly be deployed again in order to unpave it once a line under that period had been drawn.

    Like Antigone, Orestes and Electra, Hamlet is a recurrent figure in the writings of the children of murdered or disappeared Argentine militants. In his ‘Letter to My Parents’ – an allusion to Franz Kafka’s famous ‘Letter to His Father’ – Nicolás Prividera[1] refers to the Generation of ’90, which ‘grew up literally in the shadow of its (symbolically or literally) defeated parents, unable to live down a tragedy that had already been played out in an earlier scene. […] A symmetrical gulf thus opened up between those who (without critical distance) took up the father’s godforsaken voice and those who (with post-modern frivolity) avoided his martyrological history. And so they both confronted their unalterable Hamletian fate: how to be or not to be without falling under the ubiquitous shadow of the (dis)appeared?’

    The ubiquitous Prince of Denmark also crops up in the title of an anthology of ‘poets born on the near side of the ’70s’: If Hamlet Doubts, We’ll Kill Him. In the foreword – ‘To Be or Not To Be (Hamlet)’, signed by Julián Axat and Juan Aiub[2] – the extreme Jacobinism of the anonymous banner (‘we don’t know where it came from or who delivers it’) takes on overtones of provocation or even impugnment: ‘That was how our parents thought. What do we think?’ Emiliano Bustos[3], in another text from the same anthology, entitled ‘Confetti, Kerouac and Hamlet’, feels obliged to construct a more positive image of the prince’s doubt: ‘The story of Hamlet is a tough one, as we all know. […] His father was murdered. The murderers and traitors and all those concealing the truth are walking about, free of guilt, as functioning members of the kingdom, yet Hamlet doubts. Any great power system can, as we know, function with both murderers and victims, yet, as part of that system – as a potential part of it – Hamlet doubts. He constructs – justice, truth, revenge – by doubting. And his memory is always, relentlessly, at work.’

    In the anthology’s afterword, entitled ‘The Anti-Hamlet’, Nicolás Prividera writes: ‘Hamlet bodies forth the contradiction: he feeds revenge and, at the same time, the deliberation that inhibits it […] If, by doubting, he becomes an accessory to the status quo, by acting he merely embodies a dead conscience. And, trapped between the ghost’s imperative and the acceptance of reality, between past and present, between memory and forgetting, Hamlet loses every time – whether he acts on the imperative or rebels against it. Which is why all he is left with is doubt.’

    [1] Nicolás Prividera is the director of M, a documentary on the forced disappearance of his mother Marta Sierra on 30 March 1976.

    [2] Julián Axat’s parents, Rodolfo Jorge Axat and Ana Inés della Croce, were kidnapped by the dictatorship on 12th May 1977 and remain disappeared; Carlos Aiub, Juan Aiub’s father, was disappeared on 10 June 1977.

    [3] Emiliano Bustos is the son of the poet Miguel Ángel Bustos, kidnapped and disappeared by the dictatorship on 30 April 1976.