Our oldest granddaughter has just completed her first semester at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She brought home one of her books which she thought I might enjoy. After spending some time with the book, I wrote her the following note:
Your book Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen, ends with an interesting phrase:
"We have to make sure, above all, that our mind is not halved by a horizon."
Whenever
you see an interesting phrase such as "halved by a horizon" -- if you
have not seen it before, or are not sure if you understand it -- google
it. You may be surprised.
From
Cultural Tensions and Hybrid Identities in Derek Walcott's
Poetry:
While
trading the beginning of the Caribbean race, [Derek] Walcott is
searching for a particular moment in history when "the mind was balved
by a hovizon" ("Names," 1.11).
By this phrase, Walcott means the introduction and the internalization of the binary opposition between the black and the white.
Your book by Sen was c. 2006. Derek Walcott wrote in the 40's through the 70's.
Many links on the internet to Derek Walcott, including this one:
This might be a better site, considering your classes in poetry:
From that site:
The black people may try to find their origins once again, but the poet ruefully admits that “the wind bends our natural inflections”. Walcott often repeats words and entire phrases to emphasize a search that seems to yield no results. When he repeats that “the mind was halved by horizon”,
he, as an intellectual, perceives that his world has indeed been
divided into white and black by colonial history, language, education,
and racial prejudice.
Thus, his search for a past previous to
colonial history is futile. The exotic cities of Benares, Canton, or
Benin that once held sway over the world are lost in the recesses of
time. Again the poet asks the soul-searching questions, “Have we melted into a mirror, / leaving our souls behind.”
Sen
attributes such ideas from Derek Walcott in the bibliography / writers
he cites at the end of the book, and references Walcott in three places
in this book.
So, there you go.
There was an interesting connection between your political science book by Sen and poetry which you also enjoy.
On
a separate note, there seems to be a whole "school" of writers and
thinkers writing about this issue, and Amartya Sen, part of the school,
was moving the discussion forward. Among that school, there are probably
a handful that were instrumental; it looks like Derek Walcott was one
of them.
This book made my day. I learned something completely new and now it gives me something to explore.
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