Research seminar with Rebecca Appleton: "To inhabit the Uninhabitable: Poetry as Diasporic Homemaking in Amman, Jordan."

Abstract:

What possibilities does poetry offer for making home when the places and relationships through which home is constituted are dispersed, inaccessible or lost? Taking the double meaning of the Arabic word bayt (بيت) – both house and unit of poetry – as its starting point, this paper examines poetry as a practice of diasporic homemaking. It draws on twelve months of co-creative ethnographic research with Verse as Vision, a poetry collective I established and collaboratively facilitated in Amman, Jordan. Through workshops of writing, reading and collective discussion, participants explored experiences of displacement and multiple belonging, and developed poetic images in conversation with one another. The paper follows two interconnected strands of diasporic homemaking. First, I examine the particular significance of grandparents' houses as places through which relationships with ancestral homelands are forged and sustained across generations. Through stories, objects, food and domestic practices, these houses gather dispersed histories into everyday life. Second, I consider how poetry itself becomes a practice of diasporic homemaking, through which absent homes and unrealised lives are given form and imaginatively reconfigured. Drawing on the relationship between mimesis, the giving of form to experience, and poiesis, the bringing of something new into being, I argue that poems construct provisional dwellings in which otherwise separated people, places and times can coexist. These poetic houses allow dispersed attachments to be sustained and reassembled without resolving them into a singular or stable home. Finally, I consider how the collective practices of composing, sharing and responding to poetry participate in this ongoing work of diasporic homemaking.

Bio:

Rebecca Appleton is a PhD researcher in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral project, provisionally titled Verse as Vision: A Co-Creative Ethnographic Study of Poetic Imaginaries in Amman, explores the place of poetry in the lives of writers living in Amman whose identities, imaginaries, and senses of belonging have been formed through experiences of migration and displacement. Based on twelve months of co-creative ethnographic research, the project asks how places, people, pasts, and futures that are not physically present can nevertheless remain affectively and imaginatively active in everyday life, and how poetry gives form to these absences.