Abstract
In this article we provide a close reading of selected poems written during creative writing workshops at a drug rehabilitation centre. We argue that these poems expose some of the uncertainties and complexities that characterise the representation of identity in experiences of addiction and recovery. We show that the speakers in these poems attempt to imagine and represent their experiences in language through a number of structuring binaries. These binaries include those between the speaker’s experiences of active addiction and recovery, and the speaker’s personal experience versus societal expectations and perceptions. Our reading of these poems is informed by the clinical context in which they were written, and our analysis reflects the bifurcation that governs this liminal space. Individual agency in these different spheres is approached in a very tentative way, and the speakers in these poems are shown to have trouble envisioning the future at the same time as their pasts appear unsettled. We argue finally that while current discourses and vocabularies surrounding addiction seem incomplete and inadequate for the expression of some complex experiences, poetry provides a platform that accommodates ambivalence and a multiplicity of meanings.
Highlights
Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one
Through a subjective analysis of poems emanating from creative writing workshops presented at a rehabilitation centre, we argue that poetry, preoccupied as it is with the play of ambiguity and metaphor, acts as a mode of expression especially suited to expressing the contradictions posed by these discourses
The medical view tends to limit the addict’s agency, while the psychological view regards agency as instrumental to addiction in that addiction is a result of insufficient willpower
Summary
Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. The simultaneously constitutive and disruptive function of the societal gaze is a theme that appears in ‘Up, up and away!’ and ‘Armageddon chess’ and is suggestive of the broader complexities of negotiating narrative selfhood in the discursive formation of addiction and recovery It suggests an intrusion in the present of an imagined future self. Though a large part of the poem is typified by the constant reminder of what failure may entail, the use of seven lines reinforces the speaker’s desire to master the game and end up on the side of good, even though the poem suggests an overpowering sense of confusion resulting from the broad extremes in which he has been compelled to conceptualise the game, and through that, the construction of his identity within the discourses of addiction and recovery. This agency is marked by the speaker as truncated and she remains cynical about the possibilities of recovery
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