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What’s Missing: What’s Missing

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What’s Missing?

 

You will find a commonality amongst these ekphrastic poems, in that they were all written by white men of European descent. One might rightly think that I am remiss not to include works written by Black women, Indigenous elders, LGBTQIA+ writers, and Asian authors: a small sampling of the people who I have left out.

 

The answer to why these voices are absent is simple: I chose to include only works that were in the public domain for this project, and the truth of the matter is that the literary canon, up until fairly recently, was the almost exclusive domain of the white, cisgender, heterosexual male. Other voices were excluded not by mistake but by design. Many of the groups we refer to today as marginalized were kept illiterate and uneducated, disenfranchised, and either unable to or discouraged from voting – often on pain of death.

 

The first wave of feminism and women’s liberation, the one which enshrined the right to vote for all women, gave a voice to an entire half of the population that had been considered little more than the property of their father or their husband in the past.

 

Subsequent waves of feminism included intersectional feminism, which acknowledges that there is a nexus of identities with which one moves through the world. A Black woman will experience the same situation differently than a white woman, and a trans woman will have yet another set of fears and interactions that are fraught with danger in the same scenario.

 

These voices were silenced, and continue to be. Their books are banned. Their books are burned. Their words are turned against them, and they face threats against their lives and those of their families. Their poems cause school boards to question whether works that address Critical Race Theory should be taught, and all too often, those school boards fall on the wrong side of history.

 

In some nations around the world, writers can and do face persecution for speaking out against the government – from imprisonment to torture to state-sanctioned execution.

 

Around the world, writers and authors of marginalized identities are silenced, whether that is through the banning of their books or the ending of their lives at the hands of their government. It is our duty to acknowledge this.

 

I wanted to draw your attention to these works because of their prestige, and their firmly cemented place in the English literary canon. That I have chosen them is in no way meant to condone or excuse the marginalization and silencing of other groups of people, members of whom have written beautiful, moving, exquisite ekphrastics of their own.

 

I also wanted to draw your attention to the absence of other voices – female voices, Black voices, indigenous voices, queer voices, trans voices – because I would be remiss to present this OER without this note explaining my choices and lamenting the lack of ekphrastic poetry that has survived to the present day, as written by other groups of people who do not identify as white men, nor do they enjoy the privilege that is bestowed upon white baby boys the moment they enter this world, by mere virtue of the lightness of their skin and the sex they were assigned at birth.

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“What’s Missing” by Caitlin Cacciatore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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