BRING TO LIGHT

Statements such as ‘emerging like a demon,’ ‘disappearing in and out of view,’ or ‘approaching me like a mindless zombie’ were not taken from sixteenth century texts that saw some 50,000 people burned at the stake, but from officers describing Black people today.

In the wave of recent police violence in the US and around the world, Greg Pardlo began studying police depositions justifying the shootings of Black people. In his research, the visiting associate professor of practice in literature and creative writing noticed the language officers used in the documents was almost identical to the hysterical explanations behind medieval witch hunts hundreds of years ago.

In his research, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pardlo is looking into how the offenders behind these two disparate events — despite hundreds of years of social progress and technological development — seemingly explain their transgressions with similar fervor and rationale.

“What I started doing is writing poems through the lens of the medieval legal language around the prosecution of witches and using that as a kind of juxtaposition to the language of today and the prosecution of Black people,” he said.

In his latest work, titled Spectral Evidence, Pardlo is writing poems about the ongoing violence and the recent wave of public executions of black people  using the sensibility and language that people in the 15^th and 16^th century used, with absolute conviction, to demonize and accuse people of witchcraft.

During the inquisition, he studied  accounts, such as alleged witches turning into beetles in the middle of the night and attacking people  in their sleep, presented as legitimate evidence in court to burn someone at the stake.

Using that etymology, his poems take readers through the accounts of modern day shootings and medieval supernatural events in order to justify murder or lynching. 

As part of his Cullman Fellowship, Pardlo spent a year working with librarians from the New York Public Library reading texts from the inquisition to better understand this historical event. He would then use that language to help inform the text in his latest manuscript.  

“The idea is to highlight the absurdity of it, but also the similarity. The question is where, in the language, where can I find examples where the language of the time reveals something to me that it would not have revealed to them in the moment and can also say something about the legal structures that we are dealing with today,” he said.

With one eye monitoring current news and another delving 500 years in the past, Pardlo says using poetry backed by research allots him the ability to explore the topic in a unique way.

Nathalie Handal 

French-American writer, educator and scholar Nathalie Handal is born in Haiti to a Palestinian family from Bethlehem. She grew up in Latin America, Europe, New York, and the Middle East, and was educated in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Asia. Handal, Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature and Creative Writing, uses poetry and literary research as a means to explore connectivity. 

Her research focuses on places and spaces fueled by cross-cultural uniqueness and the creation of art in those confluences. Her seven prize-winning books have demonstrated a clear trajectory in a commitment to transnational awareness, community cultivation, and preservation of culture through innovative poetry projects. With every book, she says, “I’m crafting a republic of many geographies and peoples”

Her critically-acclaimed collection Poet in Andalucía recreates Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York in reverse. She explored Islamic Spain and convivencia, or coexistence. Despite debates surrounding notions of tolerance in al-Andalus during the Middle Ages, Handal points out that we cannot argue against  the thriving cultural and artistic output of that period, one these communities created together.

Building on that, she is now working on a collection set in Sicily, which like Andalucía is a place where racial, ethnic, and religious forces converge. She explains, “My project explores how Sicily’s power dwells in its capability to portray reality from its social and cultural complexities, and be a space to speak to the world, and conceivably be a mirror.”

As part of working on this project, Handal, who speaks six languages, is working on translating several of the Siculo-Arab works into English. She explains, “Translation is a viaduct. A trade route of minds — linking ideas, cultures, worlds, and creating new languages.”  Translation also enables her to have a deeper, more complex understanding of the poems she is writing. 

Additionally,  she says that scholars have predominantly separated Sicilian literature according to the language — Greek, Arabic, Latin and Romance dialects — of their literary oeuvres rather than studying them as a constellation, and that her goal is to reunite them in her project.

Although Handal finds it challenging to claim one language or place as her home, she has always been able to return to poetry as an all encompassing space. She says, “When I write a poem, I can be everywhere and with everyone who’s part of me.”