Five Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Past

I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree. The past is pulped, palpable; it is large and too-huge to choke down. When I live in the present, I feel newly cleaned and scrubbed by sun. When I face the day brightly, I see the world through baby-eyes; I see freckles of color and rainbowed-light. So what to do?

What I shall do: I shall defy hauntings. I digest the past, in all its spikes; then I will forget it. I will know the past; it has kissed me blithely and squatted in my house; I will feel the wild grip of past and know it still struggles under my skin but I will not see it. It will be in me, but I will not love it. The past: that ghosted hunger; look, I’m going to ignore my appetite.

Oh present, I open my mouth to consume you in full.

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023.

A post by Catherine Nesci

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp. 

This book offers fascinating insights into the return of ghosts and memorial passages across generations in contemporary French-speaking narratives about the Shoah, the Algerian War of Independence, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and mass crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. Starting with an expected and yet fresh discussion on haunting and spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and continuing with a most innovative review of recent texts by Hélène Cixous, whose writing opens and weaves lines of communication with the disappeared, Sonja Stojanovic highlights the key notion of double suffering (double souffrance or double douleur in Cixous), which allows empathy and listening to the cry of others, without appropriating the latter’s suffering.