Dear Child Research Articles

"My Dear Children": Gender Variance, Parenthood, and Deborah Sampson's Post-Revolutionary Work

Abstract: Departing from the lively scholarly conversation around Deborah Sampson's gender and sexual nonconformity during the period of their enlistment, this article asks the reader to consider the important role that parenting played in Sampson's later life. Such a consideration reveals the complex gendered negotiations, especially regarding biological reproduction, that Sampson attempted both as the subject of Herman Mann's work and a chronicler of their own experience. Attending to later texts, such as an Addrss [sic] Delivered with Applause (1802) and Sampson's own diary of 1802–3 broadens the possibilities for how we can think about historical gender-nonconforming subjects and the difficulties they might have experienced in representing parenthood in public-facing documents in early America. The article argues that Sampson leveraged their gender nonconformity to provide financially for their family in ways typically foreclosed to gender-conforming middle-class women.

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

"돌봄의 관점에서 바라본 건강장애 자녀에 대한 부모의 인식 연구: 메타포 분석을 중심으로"

본 연구는 ‘돌봄의 관점에서 바라본 건강장애 자녀’에 대한 메타포 분석방법을 통하여 ‘건강장애를 지닌 자녀’에 대한 부모의 인식을 알아보고, 건강장애 자녀의 돌봄에 대한 의미 있는 기초자료로 사용하고자 하였다. 이를 위하여 원격교육기관을 통하여 건강장애 학생 부모에게 개방적 설문지를 구성하여 발송하였으며, 83명의 응답자 중 결손된 답변이나 무응답, 메타포가 아닌 답변은 제외하고 의미 있게 답변을 한 71명의 응답 내용을 메타포 분석 자료로 선정하였다. 본 연구에서는 ‘돌봄의 관점에서 바라본 건강장애 자녀’에 대해 부모가 인식하고 있는 메타포의 의미를 읽고 숙고하고 기록하고 범주화하고 주제를 선정하는 단계를 여러 번 반복하여 작업하였다. 최종적으로 6개의 의미로 범주화 되었으며, 이에 따른 주된 연구 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 방향의 전환(Change of direction), 둘째, 애지중지한 내 아이(My dear child), 셋째, 나의 보석(My Jewelry), 넷째, 온실 속 꽃나무(Flower tree in greenhouse), 다섯째, 질병의 구속(Restraint of disease), 여섯째, 너는 나(我)(You are me)의 주제로 범주화하여 볼 수 있었다. 본 연구를 통해 건강장애 자녀를 돌보는 부모의 여러 가지 인식을 알 수 있었으며, 이를 기초하여 건강장애 자녀를 돌보는 부모에 대한 지지와 지원에 대해 논의와 제언을 하였다.

Györgyike és Bella : Varsányi Irén femme fatale-szerepei

Irén Varsányi, as an actress of the Vígszínház, played leading and titular roles in Hungarian plays from 1902 on, including in plays by Sándor Bródy, Ferenc Molnár, Menyhért Lengyel, Dezső Szomory and Jenő Heltai. Irén Varsányi was a recipe for success because her performance, her unaffected, natural playing style always captivated the audience. In this paper, I examine how Irén Varsányi performs the femme fatale in two Dezső Szomory plays, Györgyike, Dear Child (1912) and Bella (1913).

From the Federalist Papers to Hans Kelsen’s “Dearest Child”: The Genesis of the Austrian Constitutional Court

This article sketches in broad strokes the genesis of Austrian constitutional jurisdiction in the 1920 Federal Constitutional Act. Beginning with the Constitution of the United States, it provides a review of the long 19^th century, during which legislative review was controversial. It then elaborates which circumstances were decisive for the fact that immediately after the disintegration of the Danube Monarchy, two of its successor states simultaneously introduced the review of constitutionality. Finally, it discusses the impact of Hans Kelsen shaping the Austrian Constitutional Court as an institution more through his judicial activities than through his constitutional drafts.

Фольклорные стилизации И. П. Сахарова в статье А. А. Блока «Поэзия заговоров и заклинаний»

Block’s essay «The Poetry of Charms and Spells» was written in the fall of 1906 for the first volume of the "History of Russian Literature", the one on folk literature. In his essay, Blok cites Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian spells and, in addition to the authentic folklore texts, offers some literary stylizations that go back to the "Tales of the Russian People on the Family Life" of their Ancestors by I. P. Sakharov. The analysis of three Sakharov texts quoted by Blok reveals their differences from the authentic spells, as well as their poetic structure. Blok’s impressions of the "Spell Against the Anguish of a Bereaved Mother Separated from Her Dear Child" from Sakharov’s collection found their way into his poem «Son and Mother».

Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity by Maria E. Doerfler

Reviewed by: Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity by Maria E. Doerfler Oana Maria Cojocaru Maria E. Doerfler Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity Oakland, CA: California University Press, 2020 Pp. 416. $ 29.95. The book focuses on how late antique people responded to the challenging issue of childhood mortality which was part and parcel of the everyday life of Christian communities. Parents who asked themselves why their children suffered and died so young or how they were to cope with this tragic event may have found their answers in liturgical narratives composed by various Christian authors of the fourth to the sixth centuries, in both the Latin West and the Greek and Syriac East. The overarching argument of Doerfler is that these narratives, crafted around a few well-known biblical characters who experienced tragic losses themselves, were intended to provide psychological, moral, and theological support to bereaved parents. After outlining in the Introduction the scope and structure of her study, in Chapter One Doerfler situates children’s deaths in their socio-historical and ritual contexts by discussing the burial practices and commemoration of departed children. Mindful of the meagerness of archaeological data concerning children’s funerary practices, the author skillfully combines material and textual evidence that give some insight into a range of practices surrounding the death, burial, and commemoration of children, which vary according to the geographical location, financial means, and family preferences. Chapter Two focuses on the liturgical narratives inspired by Genesis 4, which records the killing of Abel by Cain, an occasion for exegetes to portray Eve and Adam as epitomes of parental bereavement, and to teach their audience how to grieve their own dead children. Eve is featured as particularly shaken by Cain’s fratricide: she has not only lost Abel, but also Cain who was punished to wander the world. Doerfler argues that Eve’s suffering envisioned especially by the Syriac writers acted as a mirror through which bereaved parents could internalize their [End Page 665] experience of losing their dear children. One consolation for their loss was the idea preached in the patristic literature, according to which, the departed children would enjoy their afterlife in paradise. Chapter Three deals with the Akedah (Genesis 22)—another biblical story that inspired Christian exegetes to explore the theme of childhood mortality within the context of parental submission to the divine will and the sacrifice of children to God. Abraham’s composure when fulfilling the divine command to kill his own son provided the opportunity for late antique writers to envision various scenarios of what Sarah might have said or done when finding about her husband’s intention to sacrifice Isaac. She becomes “a compensatory figure” (96), “a vital voice for parental grief, lament, and recrimination in aspects of the late ancient exegetical tradition” (99). Chapter Four deals with the intertextual connection of the Akedah with two other biblical narratives that present parents sacrificing their children: Jephthah’s killing of his only daughter (Judges 11), and the mother of the Maccabean martyrs (2 Maccabees 7). In stark contrast with Abraham, whose stoic attitude and readiness to fulfill God’s command to kill his own child was praised by various homilists and commentators, Jephthah aroused heavy criticism for his emotional display at the prospect of killing his own daughter. Against this adverse view of Jephthah’s manifestation of grief, Jacob of Serugh saw him as “a model of balancing grief with duty” (116), “a fundamental human—but not, for that reason, a less admirable—response to moral conflict and especially bereavement” (117). If Jephthah’s character diverges from the masculine ideal of how grief should be expressed, the Maccabean mother, who completes the triad of biblical parents who sacrificed their children, represents the manly woman who displays resilience in the face of her sons’ deaths, a role model for family relationships and spiritual formation of children, as well as “an exemplar of both old and ‘new’ motherhood, of triumphant stoicism, and deep parental attachment and suffering” (142). Chapter Five examines how the story of Job was deployed by homilists and commentators for different strategic...

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Filíocht Nua:New Poetry Michael Longley This sprig of poems, selected by Michael Longley himself, comes from the poet's latest collection, The Candlelight Master (Wake Forest, 2020), which was reviewed by poet Francis O'Hare in the Autumn 2020 issue of NHR. This selection is representative of the main themes and preoccupations of The Candlelight Master. It reveals Longley as a poet concerned with memories, which he turns into moving memorials, for his father, who served in World War I, and for war poets such as Wilfred Owen, for example. But these memorials are rightly described by the publisher as "freshly fluid structures," as they are not merely monuments to the past but humane and insightful reflections that "speak to our own dark times," reminding us of the human propensity for violence, and warning us of the cost. Other poems celebrate love, friendship, and nature—made all the more precious in the shadow of our shared human mortality and our shared planet's fragility. See, for example, "Sedge-warblers," a lament for Seamus Heaney. On making this selection of poems, Longley wrote: "Years ago when I edited Twentieth Century Irish Poems for Faber, Paul Keegan asked me to include a couple of my own poems, but I said no, anthologists shouldn't include their own work. If I had said yes, I would probably have chosen 'Ceasefire' and 'The Linen Industry.' But … my favourite poem of my own is 'Harmonica.' You see what you've started! I don't normally go on so about myself. It's not good for the soul." You can read, and listen to, Longley's 'Harmonica' at poetryarchive.org/poem/harmonica. In a 1992 essay entitled "Blackthorn and Bonsai," Longley wrote that "poetry is a normal human activity, its proper concern all of the things that happen to people." In his latest collection (published after his eightieth birthday) and in the selection below, we see that he has kept true to his word, capturing some of "the music of what happens" with craft, elegance, and an eloquence that spans the classical and the colloquial. He wouldn't say it himself, but one can say it of him: his poems, if you let them, could be good for your soul. Frank Sewell [End Page 18] glossary I meet my father in the glossaryWho carried me on his shoulders, a legOver each, hockerty-cockerty, whoWould spend ages poking the kitchen fire,An old soldier remembering the trenchesAnd telling me what he saw in the embers,Battlefields, bomb craters, firelight visions:A widden-dremer, yes, that's my father. —. hockerty-cockerty, seated with one's legs astride another's shoulders —. widden-dremer, one who sees visions in the firelight [End Page 19] ors I I am standing on the canal bank at OrsWilling Wilfred Owen to make it acrossTo the other side where his parents wait.He and his men are constructing pontoons.The German sniper doesn't know his poetry. II My daughter Rebecca lives in twenty-fourSaint Bernard's Crescent opposite the homeWilfred visited for "perfect little dinners"And "extraordinary fellowship in all the arts."I can hear him on his way to Steinthals. III Last year I read my own poems at CraiglockhartAnd eavesdropped on Robert, Siegfried, WilfredWhispering about poetry down the corridors.If Wilfred can concentrate a little longer,He might just make it to the other bank. [End Page 20] war I Because he was his youngest,And dearest child, old PriamBegged Polydorus not to fight,But this champion athleteWanted to show off his speedAnd in a foolhardy displayRaced against the front-runners—Until he died, for AchillesWas just as fast and struck himWith his javelin full in the backWhere the golden belt-bucklesFastened his leather corselet,The spear-point penetratingRight through to his navelAnd he fell to his knees groaningAnd blacking out and claspingIn his hands his intestines. II When Hector saw his brotherPolydorus on the groundMortally wounded, blacking out,His intestines in his hands—His eyes misted over with tearsAnd he made straight for...

Transfers and transformations from music to theatre in Catherine Makhumula's Mwana Wanga

In this article, I discuss music to performance media transfers and transformations, a lesser-known form of media transposition that has been largely overlooked by scholars in intermedial studies. Through a performance analysis of my own work Mwana Wanga, a theatrical performance derived from a recorded song, I locate the creative process of the theatre project as a critical site for media transposition. I argue that there is a complex process of transfer and transformation of media from Dearest Child to Mwana Wanga and that a systematic reflection of the creative process uncovers the mechanisms of these transfers and transformations from music to theatrical performance. The article intends to situate music-to-performance transpositions in the intermedial discourse and also clarify the methodological design that enables the study of transfers and transformations in the creative process.

The Eucharist—Its Origins and Contexts: Sacred Meal, Communal Meal, Table Fellowship in Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity. Vol. 1: Old Testament, Early Judaism, New Testament. Vol. 2: Patristic Traditions and Iconography. Vol. 3: Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Traditions, Archaeology

<i>The Eucharist—Its Origins and Contexts: Sacred Meal, Communal Meal, Table Fellowship in Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity.</i> Vol. 1: <i>Old Testament, Early Judaism, New Testament</i>. Vol. 2: <i>Patristic Traditions and Iconography</i>. Vol. 3: <i>Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Traditions, Archaeology</i>

Revisions Revisited: A Narratological Reading of the Cornhill Version of R. L. Stevenson’s “The Pavilion on the Links”

Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Pavilion on the Links”, which was praised as a “masterpiece” by Arthur Conan Doyle, was first published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1880 before it appeared in the collection New Arabian Nights in 1882. The magazine version is very different from the book version. It contains an initial paragraph of about 350 words in which the first-person narrator addresses his “dear children” and discusses his motives in telling them the story. The book version omits this paragraph and also introduces other changes that reduce the prominence of the narrator in the interest of a more exclusive emphasis on plot and suspense. The present essay gives an overview of these revisions and suggests two explanations for them, one of which is biographical, while the other is narratological. It then focuses on the magazine version and analyses it as an early and tentative experiment in foregrounding the role of the narrator, a precursor of later works which feature fully-fledged unreliable narrators, such as The Master of Ballantrae.

Dr. Mohsen Ziai, the Internationally Renowned Professor of Universities in Iran and USA Passed Away

Copyright © 2013, Iranian Society of Pediatrics; Licensee Safnek Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Iranian Society of Pediatrics expresses its most sincere condolences on the occasion of this sad event to his kind wife, dear children, relatives and the esteemed family of the late professor Dr. Mohammad Garib, friends, and the venerable society of Iranian Medicine. On the event of this occasion a brief biography of Dr. Mohsen Ziai, his fruitful life and valuable services is presented here: Dr. Mohsen Ziai was born in Khorasan, the eighth generation of his family of doctors from Torbat-e-Heidarieh region. He was born in 1928 and passed away in April, 2013. He pursued his studies up to the end of high school in Torbat-e-Heidarieh, Mashhad and Tehran and went to Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) for General Medicine courses. Specialty and subspecialty education in infectious diseases: Harvard University Books: Four books in the field of pediatrics are his memorable works. These four books are: 1)Pediatrics Text Book 2)Bedside Pediatrics 3)Neonatal Medicine 4)The Joys of Pediatrics In addition he published frequent essays in the field of health and hygiene and pediatrics training in famous, international medical journals. Membership in global associations and awards/honors achieved during service in USA. Honoury member of American Pediatric Society. Member of Mother/Child Experts Committee in WHO. Member of Pediatric Infection Disease Specialists. Membership of Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. Honorary Fellow, American Academy of Pediatrics. Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award from Davis and Elkins College. Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award by the Pediatric House Staff University of Rochester, 1979. Third Year Outstanding Teacher Award, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, 1981. Keith Miner Ford Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Graduating Class of 1982, The University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Third Year Outstanding Teacher Award, The University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Class of 1983. Honored by Rochester General House-Staff 1982 Teacher of the Year Award by the Pediatric House Staff, Georgetown University, 1983. Honored by Shiraz University Medical School Alumni Association 1989. Golden Apple Award by the Georgetown University School of Medicine, presented in 1985, 1987, 1988, and 1994. Golden Apple Orchard, 1988 and in 1994 selected beyond the Orchard; all presented by Georgetown University Medical Students. Teacher of the Year, Presented by Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children House-Staff, 1998, 2000. Honored by Iranian American Medical Association, 1998. Lifetime Achievement Award, Virginia Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics, 2000. Samuel P. Asper Award in International Medical Education Presented by Johns Hopkins University, June 2001. Honorary Doctor of Science Degree/David & Elkins Collage, 31 March 2003. The late Dr. Mohsen Ziai, one of the genius figures of medicine in the world, provided exceptional and memorable services in Iran and USA. Among his substantial services in pediatrics are emphaArchive of SID

773 – ”Dear child has many names”

Telemedicine became a mutual part of daily work for colleagues within variety of medical specialties. However, mental health care professionals were a bit slower in acceptance and practice of care provision on distance. It seems that it is about time to define the terms that often are in use interchangeably, but in fact are not synonymous. It is necessary to operate with common accepted terminology in order to avoid misunderstandings that might lead to lack in potential collaboration which eventually may affect mental health care provision. That is why it is important to make an overview of various terms, such as i.e. Internet, world wide web, e-health, e-therapy, online counselling, Internet-based therapy, telemental health, e-mental health etc. A brief timeline highlighting some of the major occurrences over the past 50 years that have shaped the Internet of today, will be presented aside with challenges and limitations of the technology.

Katherine Philips and “Churching”

After the May 2, 1655, death of Katherine Philips's infant son, born on April 23 that same year, she wrote two poems: “On the death of my first and dearest child, Hector Philips” and “Epitaph. On H...

“Why Linger at the Yawning Tomb So Long?”: The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion

“Why Linger at the Yawning Tomb So Long?”: The Ethics of Negative Capability in Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion Katey Castellano There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our confrontation with the human condition. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis “Do I wake or sleep?” asks the speaker in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. The question famously exemplifies Keats’s aesthetically productive “negative capability,” a psychic state of lingering “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (I. 193). It has been suggested that Keats’s negative capability resonates with Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” as negative capability implies a capacious, liberal, “truly protean intellect — wisely passive, watchful, receptive, but also powerfully equal to all things” (Roe 236).1 Although negative capability undoubtedly fosters receptivity to a variety of ideas, for Keats it is also intrinsically associated with intense existential uncertainty, a dimension that is absent from Wordsworthian wise passiveness. “I have been half in love with easeful death” (l. 52), admits the speaker in the same poem, and this line reminds us that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, [End Page 23] Keats’s concept of negative capability suggests that an encounter with the tragic vicissitudes of existence, rather than being mere disaster, ushers the individual into a state of “posthumous existence”2 that forcibly empties the mind of personal, social, and historical certainty. This uncertain mind is then capable of restructuring or even reinventing socially and politically ossified meanings and values. Keats’s encounters with existential uncertainty were as painfully literal as they were consolingly allegorized in his poetic work. Keats’s poetry, according to Andrew Bennett, “cannot be read — has not been read — apart from a certain figuration of poetic biography, a life which hinges on prescient dissolution, on the corporeal disappearance, sickness or fading of the poet” (157). Bennett further associates Keats’s desire for an early death with his adoration of Chatterton, that “Dear child of sorrow — son of misery” (“To Chatterton”), who achieved fame through death. Keats’s prescience of death is inextricably tied to his creative work, yet this essay suggests that an exposure to the incomprehensible aspects of death overwhelms and unsettles the mind’s preconceived structuring ideas. This not only to say that Keats’s goal is more responsible and profound than the mere craving for posthumous fame — more significantly, we can place Keats’s tragic engagement with the contingencies of existence within a larger context of the ethics of being-towards-death, which opposes rational, calculating, utilitarian forms of ethics. Encountering the negativity of death and yet remaining alive generates the intense psychological uncertainty that Lacan in his seminar on ethics calls “the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray” (304). Lacan’s term “absolute disarray,” like the “negative” in negative capability, implies a being-towards-death, a psychical state that willingly engages a liminal space between the economy of the symbolic and the alterity of the Real. Neither happiness nor pleasure should be the goal of psychoanalysis, Lacan maintains; analysts have a moral responsibility to refuse their clients’ demands for bourgeois happiness and to reveal how the underlying structure of human desire “must remain in a fundamental relationship to death” (303). In a Lacanian reading of “To Autumn,” Mark Bracher perceptively suggests that Keats’s is a “positioning of death as an enactment or efflorescence of being” (650).3 If Keats’s [End Page 24] poetry repeatedly transposes the negativity of death with the capability of being, then Keats’s negative capability can indeed be better understood within the context of Lacan’s tragic being-towards-death. Beyond confounding being and death, moreover, Lacan and Keats share an insight into the potential within traumatic loss for fundamental ethical reorientation: although for Lacan the zone between life and death only serves as a model of authentic relation to desire, whereas Keats’s poetry moves beyond the...

We Know This Place

We Know This Place Sunni Patterson (bio) So we know this place, for we have glanced more times than we’d like to share into eyes that stare with nothing there behind them but an unfulfilled wish and an unconscious yearning for life though death rests comfortably beside us. At night their moans are louder. They come to visit the guards at the gate, and they stay until morning torturing their guilt-ridden insides. The silent cries of the keepers are louder than the booms that come from the guns they use to occupy the space. And we know this place, for we have seen more times than we’d like to imagine bloated cadavers floating through waters of a city gone savage, foraging the land for what can be salvaged. But what can be saved when all is lost? It happened in August, twenty-nine days in. We are now five days out of the only place we knew to call house and home. Few things are certain: one, we have no food; two, there are more bodies lying at the roadside than hot plates being distributed or first aid being administered or recognition as a citizen. Fourteenth Amendment, X, refugee, check. And we know this place. It’s ever-changing yet forever the same: Money and power and greed, the game. [End Page 719] They suck and devour the souls of the slain. What a feast for the beast at their table of shame with napkins ’round necks that catch the blood that drains from the flesh they chew, it’s hell to gain And we know this place, all too well, dank with the smell of death and doom. It hovers, it smothers, no growth, no room, no pretty, no please, just gray, just gloom, just borned me a hope, and it died too soon, just juckin’, just jiving, just living, we just fools. And we know this place. It’s decked in all its array and splendor, golden streets with good intentions capture our attention, gadgets and inventions pesticide the food supply, flu-like symptoms, diabetic condition, a cancer in the system held on hold, it’s a pistol to the temple. Go run to the churches, tell reverend it’s simple. Good works and good deeds is what equals redemption, but tell me, please, Jesus never mentioned, how do churchmen get extensions on freedom, while children are being fondled from the altar to the streets, then back to the sanctuaries? It’s kind of scary, ain’t it? to know that both the prophet and the priest practice deceit, then come to the people and claim peace, peace, they come to the people and they claim love, love. But where is the peace, huh? Where is the love? Where is that Balm in Gilead that can heal the wounded soul or make the half-man whole? I swear, we know this place, ’cuz we have vowed before never again to return, but here we are, back in the desert, dry mouth and thirsting for waters from Heaven. But come, come, children, rally ’round, and maybe together we can make a sound that will shake the trees or rattle the ground, make strong our knees, we’s-a freedom bound. And we know this place. Reclaim the crown. [End Page 720] Hold onto the prize, never put it down. Be firm in the stance, no break, no bow, got to forward on, Mama, make your move now. Forward on, Papa, okay. make your move now. Forward, dear children, ’cuz freedom is now. [End Page 721] Sunni Patterson Sunni Patterson is a poet, singer, and grassroots activist from New Orleans. She has been a featured performer at many of the nation’s premier spoken word venues, including HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She has also had the privilege of speaking at the Panafest in Ghana. She has worked with many well-known artists and performers, including Hannibal Lokumbe, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Sonia Sanchez, Wanda Coleman, Amiri Baraka, and the Laini Kuumba Afrikan Dance Company. Footnotes Printed with permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 The American Studies Association

Breech

Charity hoped for a quiet delivery with just her mother and sister beside her in her small African hut. She would hear the roosters crowing and the dogs barking in the distance just like always. The 18 year old tried to imagine what giving birth was like but that was difficult. People told her different things. Some women said that the discomfort was mild and the sense of fulfillment was wonderful. Others told her hair-raising tales that sent cold shudders racing down her back. Who should she believe? There was not much time to decide. She would soon be in The sun was setting the crickets were chirping and the fires around the little hut were shimmering with heat as she began to feel the early pains. No rest tonight; it would be a night of labor. Charity called for her mother who was overjoyed by the news. This would be her first grandchild. The generations were starting to multiply thanks be to God! Her mother quickly shooed away the men and then waited patiently for labor to start in earnest. She knelt beside her daughter and laid her hand on her abdomen. These are good tightenings my dear child she said. You must be strong and deliver this baby with courage. She kissed the perspiring brow of her young daughter. (excerpt)

Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy

AT THE BREAK OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THAT MOST ROMANTIC DEsire, the longing for produced one of the most romantic images, the innocent of nature. Emotion and image were manifestations of a yearning for the past which we have since called nostalgia. It, too, is a romantic phenomenon (although the word was not widely used until the twentieth century), appearing first in England in medical reports of 1787 about a Welsh soldier suffering from homesickness. (1) also think of as a romantic invention, if only because of historical coincidence; for by the last years of the eighteenth century, children were viewed as autonomous beings rather than mere extensions of a patriarchal family. This change may have been relatively recent, if one accepts the theories of Philippe Aries and Laurence Stone; or it may have been far more gradual, if one believes their opponents. (2) A more compelling or immediate reason for considering childhood an English romantic phenomenon is Wordsworth: in early poems like We are Seven, and Lucy Gray, he portrayed the essential autonomy of an innocent or mythic whose lineage stretched back to Pelagius. (3) Yet this of nature became in Wordsworth's translation a retrospective phenomenon, one from whom the subject felt sadly distant. Ode: Intimations of Immortality ... in which the poet speaks directly about longing for a lost and Lucy Gray, in which the figure of childhood disappears, both convey the wonder and desire adults invested in trying to remember their past, unsocialized selves. (4) During the nineteenth century, the concept of childhood was often the subjective product of individual narration, of a particular life history. Whether an infinitely recessive object of nostalgia, as it is in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss (1860), or a locus created for a discarded self, as it is in Mary and Charles Lamb's Mrs. Leicester's School (1809), childhood was a construction--immediate and temporary, an extension of present circumstances. For this reason, the image of the in texts about childhood was a memorative device often working in the absence of conscious remembering. Wordsworth, for instance, in The Pet-lamb (1800), channeled nostalgia through the prevailing view of the as a developing and imperfect being, one I shall call the imitative because in light-hearted visual and verbal representations drawing from this belief, he or she usually appeared in the act of rehearsing adult behavior. Unlike the of nature with which the poet is usually associated, this was primarily a social entity. If it returned the viewer to childhood (and I believe it could), it did so through emotional attachment. But so, indeed, does the elusive of nature in the famous Lucy Gray (1799). Indeed both Lucy Gray and The Pet-lamb employ a pre-romantic iconology of the for sentimental effects--a practice later writers like Tennyson and Dickens would adopt. Both poems dramatize, furthermore, a nostalgia involving dramatic forms of identification which have little to do with experienced interiority or private memory, with organic form or autonomy--all elements of the self so intertwined, in theory, with the new concept of childhood. Terms of Childhood In the nineteenth century, nostalgia for childhood usually referred to condition rather than duration; in doing so it rendered an already unstable concept even more fluid. By child or childhood, writers might have meant any period from infancy through young adulthood. Definitions tended to emerge from contexts, betraying confusion and creativity. John Ruskin, at 69 hoping to marry 21-year-old Kathleen Olander, was not quite clear, he complained to her, whether you are a ...--a pretty girl--or a clever--woman! Calling her my dearest child, he adds, anxiously, Do you really like me to call you that--though you won't answer for anything more? …

The Anniversary of Rerum Novarum

THE FEAST OF PENTECOST, that glorious birthday of the Church of Christ, is to Our mind, dear children of the whole world, a welcome and auspicious occasion and one full of high import, on which to address you, in the midst of the difficulties and strife of the present hour, a message of love, encouragement and comfort. We speak to you at a moment when every energy and force, physical and intellectual, [End Page 156] of an ever-increasing section of mankind is being strained, to a degree and intensity never before known, beneath the iron, inexorable law of war; and when from other radio aerials are going forth words full of passion, bitterness, division and strife.

Writing in the Odyssey: Eurykleia, Parry, Jousse, and the Opening of a Letter from Homer

Writing in the Odyssey:Eurykleia, Parry, Jousse, and the Opening of a Letter from Homer Haun Saussy 1. "A Letter Or Two" Jean-Jacques Rousseau once contended that Homer and writing were antithetical. "Not only are the traces of this art rare in the Iliad, but I dare to suggest that the whole Odyssey is a mere tissue of stupidities and ineptitudes that a letter or two would reduce to smoke, whereas the poem becomes reasonable and rather well-constructed if one supposes that its heroes were ignorant of writing" (Rousseau 1968.110-11). Homer was for Rousseau the poet of face-to-face archaic society, the society against which Rousseau measures all other societies and finds them wanting. In such a state of culture, writing is either useless or the herald of a catastrophic weakening of social bonds (ibid. 117, 122, 173-75). And if it is immediacy that writing necessarily subverts, then the Odyssey would seem to have much to lose. For the Odyssey is (among other things) the story of the wanderer's return to his home; of the restoration of the king and father to his position; of the affirmation of the hero's identity despite the dangers he has encountered and the years that have obscured his memory; of the son's confirmation as his father's adequate image; of the reunion, after twenty [End Page 299] years of separation, of name and reality; even of a personal solar myth.1 By intercutting absence with tokens of presence (for example, a hypothetical letter from Odysseus to Penelope), and conversely intermingling presence with its mere representations, writing would rob the Odyssey of the energy to be gained from its polar antitheses. In Rousseau's demonology, nothing is more apt than "a letter or two" to reduce the triumph of Odysseus to smoke.2 I shall try to show that the threat to the Odyssey and to immediacy is already effectively anticipated by the "oral" poetics of the work itself, indeed that the story the Odyssey tells may be taken as a parable on the relations of oral poetics and writing. My argument will require some reworking, faithfully intended, of the terms "writing" and "orality." Conscious of long-standing precedent, I call Homer as my first witness. The work of Alfred Heubeck, Jesper Svenbro, Barry Powell, and other students of the early history of the Greek alphabet makes it possible for me to identify one famous episode of the Odyssey as a scene of reading. Late in the epic, slightly before the story has come to its expected triumphant ending, an old serving-woman named Eurykleia is asked to wash the feet of a beggar who may, her mistress surmises, have reliable information about Odysseus (19.386-94, 467-75). [End Page 300] . . . The old woman took up the brightly-shining basinto wash his feet in and poured it full of water,first the cold, then the hot. And then Odysseus suddenlypushed his seat back and turned to face the dark:for he had begun to worry, lest in handling him she shouldattend to his scar and his whole enterprise be revealed.She approached and began to wash her master, when suddenlyshe knewthe scar that once a boar's white tusk had torn . . .Running her hands over this scar, the old womanknew it from the feel, and she let his foot slip so thathis leg fell into the basin, making the bronze clang,the basin totter, and water slosh onto the floor.Now joy and pain possessed her mind. Her eyesfilled with tears, and the voice grew thick in her throatas she touched Odysseus' chin and spoke to him thus:"Yes, you are Odysseus, dear child! Not even Iknew you, master, before I held you in my hands." In the Iliad, "writing," graphein, the word which should have been absent from the Odyssey, makes a few appearances, and always with the meaning "scratch, mark, incise": having one's skin "written on" is a fearsome but not immediately fatal accident. And now you boast proudly of having scratched the heel of my foot! (Iliad 11.388) [End Page...