Foreword to Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History

 

My suspicions about ‘History’ began at an early age with two interlinked events. The first was witnessing my father recite the names of British monarchs (‘Charles II, James II, William of Orange, William III…’) in chronological order, a ‘skill’ he’d learnt as a boy in the one room tin-roof school he’d attended in rural Jamaica. This was the 1930s when the island was under British colonial rule. My father and his classmates wrote essays on British history and learnt English poetry by heart, but weren’t taught anything about Jamaican history or their own ancestry – the painful lineage of slavery or of their African origins. They absorbed that underlying hierarchy – not that British history was more important than other histories, but that British history was their own history. Everything else had been written out.

 

Then in the first year of my very traditional secondary school, my history teacher set the class an assignment – to write an essay based on our own family research. ‘Ask your grandparents about their relationship to historical events,’ he said. I expect he wanted us to read about the Second World War, but I asked my dad – who was old enough to be my grandfather – who told me about his involvement in the Jamaican Independence movement of the 1940s, when he’d begun to reject the Anglocentric imposition in Jamaica. But when I got my essay back, ‘Anglocentric’ (a term I was so proud of using - I was only 11!) was circled in red and ‘NO SUCH WORD’ penned beside it. My father’s take on his own history seemed to be in dispute, and even then I could see that those in the centre might have no need for a word to describe their power and privilege.

 

So, history with a capital H needs to be challenged and interrogated – hierarchies like these need dismantling so that hidden histories can be unveiled and unheard voices speak. And in case we think that history no longer excludes or marginalises, the poem which opens this anthology, Martín Espada’s ‘Alabanza’, praises the forty three restaurant staff who died in the Twin Towers – the ‘immigrants from the kitchen’, and reminds us of how the very contemporary historicising of 9/11 has privileged the stories of some victims over others.

 

I initially misread this book’s title as ‘Rewriting History’ – an act which didn’t seem radical enough to me – seemed somehow to echo and repeat the same falsehoods about the construction of history – that its authorship is impartial, objective and singular. But ‘Rewiring History’ seems full of the possibility of giving history a new charge, acknowledging that history can be dynamic and dialogic, a current which can run back and forth along wires, be redirected and forge new connections across an indeterminate matrix.

 

Thus the poems in this new anthology are all connected in some way – at the very least through their compelling, ongoing fascination with events and figures of the past. In History and the Media (2004), David Cannadine suggests that the last twenty years in Britain and elsewhere have seen ‘a history boom’, ‘an unprecedented interest in history’ in literature, film, radio and television, and from the general public, the ‘consumers’ of history. He claims this flourishing is in part accounted for by our need for orientation in a rapidly changing world, but also because of the sheer amount of history now available through the revolution in information technologies such as the internet. We can access history in ways we never could before, and this in turn invites us to become involved with history in ways we couldn’t before as well.

 

Reading the poems in this anthology, I turned to the internet to contextualise them, and I wonder how many of the poems were sparked off and/or researched in cyber-space. Certainly my own poem ‘Ormonde’, has its genesis in the digitalised ship passenger lists available through the National Archives website. That kind of access is a thing of wonder to me. That the internet’s democracy raises questions about the reliability of some of its information, does not, in my mind, undermine its direct challenge to the hegemonic authorship and dissemination of history.

 

Some of the poems collected here narrate little known historical events, such as the ‘Dancing Mania’ of Strasbourg 1518 or the persecution of the Roma community in European ghettoes. Others speak in the voices of forgotten or unknown figures from history – John McCullough’s wartime drag queens, Ross Cogan’s women murdered and brutalised at the Battle of Naseby. I’ve wondered about the politics of assuming others’ voices in my own work, particularly those from marginalised or under-represented groups, but what I see most in these poems is a close identification and empathy that instantly alleviates these concerns.

 

Other poems respond to works of art or literature, exploring alternative viewpoints – a feminist reconceptualising of the vandalism of the Rokeby Venus, a ‘feminine’ response to Baudelaire. Some poems reach back in time to address historical figures such as Joan of Arc, the pick-pocket Moll Frith or Ida Chagall, who saved her father’s paintings when the family fled Nazi-occupied France. The connection of history to the physical world is strongly present. The landscape of lead-miners, Scottish gravestones, Hounslow Heath, the great dual cranes of Belfast, are all evoked in new ways of looking back, and remind us of the potent link of place to past. Sarah Hesketh’s ‘The Elephant in the Map’ speaks an earlier subversive act and reminds us of the often little-known histories of resistance to domination.

 

Family is a way into history. In Rose Lemberg’s ‘A Mikveh of Past Meanings’ the narrator’s ancestors are active and compelling - a people ‘who follow me into the past’. I’m reminded of Philip Levine’s ‘Ask For Nothing’, where a walk on the outskirts of town brings visions of the narrator’s ancestors demanding his attention:

 

…in the distance you see

beyond the first ridge of low hills

where nothing ever grows, men and women,

astride mules, some on horse back, some even

on foot, all the lost family you

never prayed to see, praying to see you

 

This dialogue between the past and present is compellingly realised in many of the poems, and emphasises the amorphous and complex nature of history in the hands of poets. Indeed Jeffrey Thomson describes the ‘murky layerings / of history’, Michael McKimm acknowledges it’s ‘hard to keep one history from another’ and Lou Sarabadzic simultaneously declares that ‘you have to be naked to make history’ and history is ‘full of hair!’ The most self-conscious of these poems on the subject of history is Linn Hansén’s ‘It is hard to count all the events of history but it is easy to begin’ which interrogates the terms on which history has been constructed and returns me to my first suspicions about history as a linear narrative to be memorised:

 

History is encyclopaedic and alphabetic first come the apes Big bang the Black Death the Bronze Age Cicero D-Day the Evolution the Finnish Winter War Fordism the French Revolution gold standard Hastings indulgences et cetera.

 

In wonderful contrast, the poems of this anthology drop back into the past unsystematically to offer original and re-charged perspectives.

 

 

Hannah Lowe
August 2014