Book 2.0 - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2018

In tracing the colonial odyssey of Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) from Great Britain to Upper Canada, I show her as an immigration success. From her literary life in London as the author of Secresy (1795) and several innovative children’s books, she transformed herself, as a single working mother, and later grandmother, into a school owner, a businesswoman. At the heart of my essay is her search for social and financial security, a place to call home. Her extant – mostly unpublished – letters demonstrate that it was in the welcoming space of Upper Canada that she established a future for her descendants. Lissa Paul’s biography of Eliza Fenwick, Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840): A Life Rewritten, will be published by the University of Delaware Press in their Early Modern Feminisms Series, in early 2019.

Behind the redoubtable self-confidence of a poet who Randall Jarrell famously declared, ‘could explain anything’, and characterized bad poetry as ‘yours, when I do not like it or understand it’, Robert Graves was profoundly divided. One can trace that division in his self-exile from England in 1929 and the manner in which he thereafter arranged his life between Mallorca and England. His memoir, Good-Bye to All That, features only one side of his nature – the desire to turn his back on modernity and all it symbolized, and to immerse himself in the ahistorical world of the Goddess – but there was another side as well: deterministically modern, civilized, historical, ironic, English. In ‘Like Snow in a Dark Night’, I discuss this fundamental yet understudied split in Graves’s character in terms of its metaphorical presence in his poetry, in which images of exile, displacement, liminality, indeterminacy and elusiveness appear to evoke and celebrate a condition of being both here and there, and neither here nor there, as the essential condition for inspiration.

Ezra Pound became a leading anglophone propagandist for fascist Italy – a kind of Romanesque Lord Haw-Haw – which subsequently coloured both his politics and his poetry. Between summer 1940 and spring 1945, and already building several dozen gratis propaganda texts lauding Italy’s imperial conquest of Abyssinia, supporting an ‘international fascism’ that embraced both Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Hitler’s Germany, Pound wrote or broadcast thousands of radio items, first for Italy’s state-run EIAR, and then for the Salò Republic. In doing so, he never ceased his well-paid propaganda activities, using at least a dozen pseudonymous ‘personae’ in order to continue his radio transmissions throughout the war. This article examines the influence of Ernst Kantorowicz’s Frederick II, 1194–1250 ([1927] 1931) – a text described only 25 years ago as a ‘fascist classic’ – may have had on Pound’s embrace of Italian Fascism and later sacralization of Mussolini’s dictatorship. This article also includes new research into Pound’s handwritten annotations in his personal copy of Kantorowicz’s book, now in the Ezra Pound Collection of The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin.

Come Yew In! was a collaboration between Norfolk writers, artists and amateur researchers, actors and crew who helped create a free, inclusive outdoor variety show that was staged in a number of open spaces Norwich in the Summer of 2017. Its main aim was to help the people of Norwich to appreciate and celebrate the long history of the contribution that incomers have made to our city. Drawing inspiration from an extensive programme of research conducted by a team of volunteers working with Anglia Ruskin University, Come Yew In! proved to be a high-paced historical and contemporary pastiche combining original dance, song, comedy, audience participation and personal testimony. Participants came from a local theatre company the Common Lot and ta Norwich-based charity New Routes, who support the integration of modern-day migrants to the city. The project was fully funded and supported by contributions from the Norwich Freemen’s Charity, Norwich City Council, Norwich Arts Centre, The Common Lot and Anglia Ruskin University.

In April 2018, 7 Husbands for Hurmuz (7 Kocalı Hürmüz), a popular musical comedy farce from Turkey, was staged by Arcola Alaturka, a Turkish-speaking theatre group based in East London. This production was performed by migrant actors and musicians with a predominantly migrant audience in mind. A production of 7 Kocalı Hürmüz was included in the Ankara State Theatre’s 2017–18 season, and another large scale production directed and produced by established comedian Müjdat Gezen has, at the time of writing, been selling out in Istanbul.

Set in a time when a man was permitted more than one wife, the plot of 7 Husbands for Hurmuz is a reversal of this situation: the central character is a woman (Hurmuz) who has married six husbands – none of whom knows about the others – as a way of solving her money problems. She sees each husband on a different day of the week, but mayhem ensues when Hurmuz falls in love with a seventh man, and then all seven turn up to see her on the same day. Farce, slapstick and absurdity combine in a satire, which is also an extension of folk theatre forms relating to specific Asian performance styles – drawing on both ortaoyunu and meddah traditions in Turkey. It can be argued that 7 Husbands for Hurmuz has caused controversy because although the play features an array of strong female characters, it has been perceived as both feminist and anti-feminist.

The following piece is a conversation between Naz Yeni, the director of the Arcola production, and Alejandro Postigo, author and performer of The Copla Musical, a tribute to the anti-Franco Spanish drag artist La Gitana. The Copla Musical explores an intercultural adaptation of the early twentieth-century Spanish folkloric song-form of copla, merged with elements found in Anglo-American musical theatre structures such as book musicals, revues and jukebox shows. Copla ceased to develop during Franco’s regime (1939–1975). Forty years later, The Copla Musical aims to rejuvenate copla interculturally. The show is supported by academic research that questions how to share the Spanish experience of copla with an international audience of diverse cultural backgrounds, and how to introduce copla’s background as a storytelling form, a folkloric genre and a subversive tool beyond the Spanish twentieth-century zeitgeist. The conversation explores the many challenges of translating songs and theatre works from one language to another for a multicultural and multilingual audience.

This article aims to capture certain emotive consequences of migration, after its geographical and physical occurrence. It deals especially with the selection of the English language, by myself and other writers, to try to integrate the challenge of transposition of references across cultures, that could get lost in translation. The context for the bi-lobial nature of migration here is British colonial history in south India or the Madras Presidency 1857–1916, and ancient or undated myths of oral and literary texts as illustrated in my novel The Sari of Surya Vilas (Naidu 2017). While acknowledging the medicinal and other benefits, I also propose the history of colonial plant hunting, and especially the trade in chocolate and tea, as an appropriate paradigm for the forgotten account of migration.

This article explores the writing of Vietnamese-American refugee writers Thuy Le and Viet Nguyen. How do their works reflect upon war trauma and loss of home, and on the lives people live afterwards? The article looks at how families share traumatic memories (or not), and at belated understanding of experience.

Migrant Steps is a theatre project that engages migrant women living in the UK and Europe. Starting from the figure of a travelling tortoise and combining methodologies such as psycho-geography, performance art, physical theatre and autobiographical writing, the project explores the participants’ relationship with the cities where they live.

Iconoclast Artists is a non-profit poetry and performance arts programme founded in Houston, Texas in 2014 by Marlon Lizama and Matthew Russell, and expanded this year to include Galveston. The programme is a growing community of young artists that provides unique support and encouragement for hundreds of underserved students within high schools, middle schools and Juvenile Detention centres. With classroom instruction in creative writing and expression, Iconoclast meets with classes every week to provide academic, artistic and social/emotional support.

When We Were Alone, David A. Robertson and Julie Flett (2016) Winnipeg, Manitoba: Highwater Press, 24 pp., ISBN: 978-1-55379-673-2, h/bk, £14.25.

Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus: The 200th Anniversary Edition, Mary Shelley (author) and David Plunkert (illus.) (2018) Beverly: Rockport Publishers-The Quarto Group, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-63159-397-0, h/bk, $25.00

Party Pieces: Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett, Alan W. Friedman (2007) New York: Syracuse University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-0-81563-123-1, h/bk, £43.95

Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present, Tony Kushner (2016) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 360 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78694-062-9, h/bk, £85.00, p/bk, £24.95, ebook £24.95