The Politics of Memory single work   poetry   "Yet who would have thought the old man"
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 The Politics of Memory
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review No Theme IX no. 96 May 2020 19248762 2020 periodical issue

    '‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and then he was acquitted. Australia burned and did not stop burning and in the middle of that national crisis the Australian Prime Minister flew his family to Hawaii. He was an Australian being an Australian, and if we, like him, keep on being Australians, we will, as Australians, get through this. (This not being the national crisis of the past but the international crisis of the present.) Unprecedented rain flooded the North of England at the same time as new-normal rain emptied biblically into East Africa, quickly followed by a plague of hundreds of billions of locusts, forcing Somalia to declare its own national emergency. The Indian Prime Minister revoked the articles in the Indian Constitution that protected the safety and autonomy of the Muslim state of Kashmir, and, in Delhi, mobs burnt Muslim homes and lynched the people who lived in them, while the government and the police stood by and watched, and, in some cases, participated. The United Kingdom was paralysed by the extended death throes of Brexit, then Megxit – following one on the other like a fever dream of Empire’s end. And then came the collapse of our global health care system, a cataclysmic failure that held capitalism to the light like a soiled white cloth.' (Mindy Gill, Jeet Thayil, Editorial introduction)

    2020
Last amended 11 May 2020 13:44:17
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