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My heart is lying where the seeds are blown
I am trying to examine my very hard recoil from Angela Leighton's "Phoenician." Much of it may boil down to the author's self-acknowledged appropriation of the grimacing terracotta mask for the purposes of modern metaphor, since there is little archaeological reason to believe these itemsβmass-produced in Carthage, often discovered in graves of Phoenician cities and colonies around the coastline of the Mediterraneanβwere employed in so grotesque a fashion as the poet depicts:
Hard to relate if they burned their children alive
all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who'd thus not see their terror or hear their cries
but accept the sacrifice: the life's soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.
The poem is devastatingly effective on its own terms, sardonic and brutal as its key icon. But isn't it painful enough to imagine the willingness to reduce one's own children, generation after generation, to a tophet of calcined bones? Does it have to be envisioned with a flamboyant cruelty out of Flaubert? Of course the poem wraps around to the recognition that we in the present day sanction the deaths of children by fire from no higher moral ground than the ancient civilization we comfortably disparage, masking the horror for ourselves with euphemisms instead of blood-kilned clay, but then it isn't our children burning in the poem, is it?
(Their alphabet is ours).
Collateral. (Think β a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.
I know it doesn't matter to the metaphor, the indictment of hypocrisy: that so long as something screens the eye from the truth of children dying in agony, we have no compunctions about stoking the fires. But it matters to the history. Without relitigating the evidence of the tophets, Carthage deployed as the metonym for human sacrifice twinges with me because it is so much a part of the Greek and Roman filter which we inherit just as surely as the transformations of the Phoenician alphabet, that ultimately Other city in the irresistible binaries of east/west female/male barbarity/civilization which mythologically exists for its own destruction by which the inevitability of empire may be upheld. As if we could have come by this propensity for blood-guilt through no other tradition, as if in reaching back from A to π€ we wouldn't stumble over the bodies of gladiators, offered just as urbanely to the di manes instead of π€π€π€ π€π€ π€π€π€ and π€π€π€ π€π€π€. Go back beyond aleph and you can sort through the smashed skulls of the retainers of Ur. In full disclosure, I have written more than one Carthaginian poem myself and most of them at least allude to this question. The author writes gorgeously about the ancient world and is no doubt aware of every relevant point about the prevalence of human sacrifice within it. I am just left agreeing with the poem that whatever we define as civilization has never precluded what we decry as uncivilized and still feeling it does itself no favors with the invented monstrosity of its comparison. Besides, while I recognize it misses what I interpret as the political impetus for the poem, we have never needed to look elsewhere for the licensed deaths of children. In this country, the cover-up is thoughts and prayers.
Hard to relate if they burned their children alive
all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who'd thus not see their terror or hear their cries
but accept the sacrifice: the life's soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.
The poem is devastatingly effective on its own terms, sardonic and brutal as its key icon. But isn't it painful enough to imagine the willingness to reduce one's own children, generation after generation, to a tophet of calcined bones? Does it have to be envisioned with a flamboyant cruelty out of Flaubert? Of course the poem wraps around to the recognition that we in the present day sanction the deaths of children by fire from no higher moral ground than the ancient civilization we comfortably disparage, masking the horror for ourselves with euphemisms instead of blood-kilned clay, but then it isn't our children burning in the poem, is it?
(Their alphabet is ours).
Collateral. (Think β a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.
I know it doesn't matter to the metaphor, the indictment of hypocrisy: that so long as something screens the eye from the truth of children dying in agony, we have no compunctions about stoking the fires. But it matters to the history. Without relitigating the evidence of the tophets, Carthage deployed as the metonym for human sacrifice twinges with me because it is so much a part of the Greek and Roman filter which we inherit just as surely as the transformations of the Phoenician alphabet, that ultimately Other city in the irresistible binaries of east/west female/male barbarity/civilization which mythologically exists for its own destruction by which the inevitability of empire may be upheld. As if we could have come by this propensity for blood-guilt through no other tradition, as if in reaching back from A to π€ we wouldn't stumble over the bodies of gladiators, offered just as urbanely to the di manes instead of π€π€π€ π€π€ π€π€π€ and π€π€π€ π€π€π€. Go back beyond aleph and you can sort through the smashed skulls of the retainers of Ur. In full disclosure, I have written more than one Carthaginian poem myself and most of them at least allude to this question. The author writes gorgeously about the ancient world and is no doubt aware of every relevant point about the prevalence of human sacrifice within it. I am just left agreeing with the poem that whatever we define as civilization has never precluded what we decry as uncivilized and still feeling it does itself no favors with the invented monstrosity of its comparison. Besides, while I recognize it misses what I interpret as the political impetus for the poem, we have never needed to look elsewhere for the licensed deaths of children. In this country, the cover-up is thoughts and prayers.
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YES.
Yes to all this.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, I totally see what you mean here.
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Thank you. It just kept bothering me.
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Thank you.
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If she needs people sacrificing their (own) children, school shootings are RIGHT THERE.
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I imagine it's a good poem if you can take it separate from the history it invokes; it's just that that's what I object to it doing.
If she needs people sacrificing their (own) children, school shootings are RIGHT THERE.
Yes. The poet is from the UK and so I grant she may not have instinctive associations with Moloch of the gun lobby, but if you are going to invoke the Carthaginians as child-killers, then you have to remember the children were not captives in war or any other kind of disposable out-group, the entire ritual point is that the inscriptions avow them as their dedicators' own. The sacrifice of other people's children hardly rates the name.
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*hugs*
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I am just left agreeing with the poem that whatever we define as civilization has never precluded what we decry as uncivilized and still feeling it does itself no favors with the invented monstrosity of its comparison.
--I agree with this. Some horrors need no metaphors, and straining to make one that is even more horrifying than the realities seems wrong. Almost sadistic. As if it's not enough for children to die and be killed in the many cruel ways they do, as if you've got to create some extra sauce of horror to put on top of it and then be upset at THAT.
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Yes. That is such an excellent way to put it. Like standing up a straw man when there's already a corpse.
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You're right! And there are some different styles of grimacing mask, but specifically it is that kind with the pierced ears and the dotted grin of teeth. The published script describes Benedick's mask as a "seedy Mr. Punch." I wonder when that changed. It fits the setting in Messina, but then it feels like such a hell of a throwback, especially with Benedick doing that outrageously foreign accent underneath it. Huh.
[edit] I tried to see if it had perhaps diffused into one of the Carnival traditions and found this object, which didn't answer my question but is pretty impressive.
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The way Carthage is written (about) sometimes strikes as quite reminiscent of blood libel, if that makes sense.
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Yes, it very much does.