Blog Post #9

Question: Working from your assigned sections from The Displaced, and Ada Limon’s poems, compare and contrast the ways in which the experiences of the displaced were portrayed by these authors. What differences emerge in the treatment of forms of displacement and why do these emerge?

My assigned section from The Displaced was The Road by Chris Abani. It told the story of his family being displaced by the Nigerian Biafran Civil War that took place from 1967-1970. The story begins with Chris seeing a picture like the one above and it sends him reeling. He imagines that those people above are his family members. His family were members of the Igbo, the "rebel ethnicity" during the war. Chris wrote that they were refugees in their own land. His mother was pregnant at the time and still trying to get her four other children to safety. Chris was only 8 months old at the time, so I doubt he remembers much of the actual journey but rather the feelings that it instilled within his kin. Chris goes on to say that "being a refugee is neither a noun or a verb but a stutter in time and space" (Abani 25). He felt like a foster child the way he bounced from place to place, feeling like a displaced burden. Something he wrote about that I found the most interesting was the way he described the fragility of nationhood and stability. One moment you feel a connection to those in the shared land you inhabit but then something snaps and someone is being pushed out. You're no longer in your country, no longer considered a countrymen, you have no home and no connections. It's like being branded as someone who doesn't belong anywhere. 

Ada Limón was born in the U.S. though she is Mexican-American due to her parents heritage. There's not much on something trivial like her Wikipedia page but her poetry tells us so much about her. Her displacement doesn't feel all that connected to country (though she does have one about being Mexican), as opposed to the sense of self. There are times in her writing when you can feel her sense of disconnection from the place she is and even from her own body. I imagine that after going through all of the trauma that she's gone through, a sense of disassociation makes it easier to cope sometimes. One poem that spoke to me of displacement and finding a sense of belonging was the poem on page 51 Of Roots and Roamers. It talks about how she knows she in certain areas based on the trees. That the trees take up so much of this land so it's comforting to know that no matter your beliefs, opinions, or anything that the trees will stay the same. It reminds me of the phrase "put down your roots". For those who feel like they don't belong this isn't an easy task. However, throughout the poem we catch glimpses of comfort and acceptance in Love Poem with Apologies for my Appearance and Sparrow, What Did You Say? The last one comes at the very end of the book and to me, it feels like perfect ending. Acceptance. 

While the two show very different sides of displacement, I think the common thread is the sense of feeling as though one doesn't belong anywhere. For Chris it was any country, and for Ada it was not belonging in her own mind. Branding yourself as someone who doesn't belong anywhere is awfully sad, but there's not really a way to fix it besides coming to terms with who you are deep down.