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TONIGHT at 6pm
Thomson House
3650 McTavish Street
Map
Join us this evening for a celebration of the writing of John Asfour, in conversation with Rawi Hage, at McGill University’s Thomson House.
Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce’s words, “For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them.” Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotional complexity, and social pressures.
Blindfolded
eyelids fixed as in still-life,
the dust collects on the inside of my glasses
hiding the lines,
covering the watering of my eyes,
splitting the world of light
and I
aware of the restrictions
try to circumvent the world,
redefine its shapes and locations,
reduce it to an image
or to something I can touch,
something
within the reach of my hands.
I let my fingers crawl
along the sides of objects to gauge their nature
careful
not to tip them or spill their contents.
The quantum mechanics of sight,
there were other classical signs
all inside my head, of course,
beds unmade and sheets like wrinkled skin,
signs
easily explained
with some vision;
all the music, my words, my lyrical demonstration of what is
_possible
and the time I was touched on the arm
at the water fountain,
a silly game of “Who am I?”
I am filled with touch
and voice and sound
_voices and sounds
and seeing this mask
_their eyes make them deaf
_seeing only this mask
splitting my world
_for them what is away from my face
leaving what is inside my head
reduced to nothing, nothing but
images or the absence of images.
Is this just a veil before my face,
just a closing of the eyelids?
And will the light return once the eyelids are opened again?
Or
is it a momentary carelessness of some God
_distracted,
_biting his fingers, regretting an absence of mind,
leaving others to recreate me
_equating the man and the appearance, drawing
_associations between sight and mind,
their peripheral vision a blindfold.
To learn more about Blindfold, or to order online, click here.
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