John Asfour in Conversation with Rawi Hage

Macdonald Harrington Building, McGill University, 815 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2
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Please join us for a celebration of the writing of John Asfour, in conversation with Rawi Hage, at McGill University's Thomson House on February 10th, 2014.

More info about Blindfold:

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.

A sense of exile and belonging dominates the poems, following the journey of a blind man whose life in his new land has been hampered by prejudice and barriers to communication. Exposing the rich and surprising possibilities of a life that has undergone a frightening transformation, Blindfold relates feelings of loss, displacement, and disorientation experienced not only by the disabled but by everyone who finds themselves separated from the norm.