Essay Notes


"............................................It was not the song
That twittered from the veined mesh of Agamemnon,
but the low fingered O of an Aruac flute."

{ Derek Walcott, Omeros, FSG, 1990 }

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"Hechiza y oprime con una hoz la mujer. Tengo que vigilar día y noche para abolir mi grito. Pero desde lo incognoscible de la especie su fuerza viene hasta mí porque me enseña en el libro y en el tiempo. Tengo una grieta en su rostro y en el enigma de ser."

{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, "Legajos," Filiación oscura, 1966 }

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"The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial imitator, Macaulay's translator, Naipaul's colonial politician as play-actor, Decoud as the scene setter of the opéra bouffe of the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as 'inappropriate' colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority."

{ Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994 }

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The essay on Harris will be in seven sections. A numerology of dispersal: the number nightmare I had in San José de Río Chico in 1994. Unable to write the "vision" as she might appear, whose forms are misleading, should not be reduced to a book, or page.

Whose line takes from & after in waves.