The French postmodernist writer, Michel Foucault, wrote about ‘The Other’ as opposed to ‘The Self’. The Other are those on the margins of society – women, racial and religious and sexual minorities, the disabled and so on. They are precluded from The Self – the male, white, middle-class, Christian, bureaucratic – who in fact define them as this other grouping and as somehow inferior because of this. They are excluded from power/knowledge. Deliberately so. (Knowledge, as Foucault also noted, is Power.) Another way of describing these two groupings is Centre and Periphery.
One who is marginalized is alienated, all-too-often replete with ennui, anomie, the sickness-unto-death, fear and trembling, nausea. You name it. eh.
Editorial:
Thank you for your many, many poems from all around the World. Too many to include here.
Some were not ‘on’ Marginalization. Some reached me well after the deadline. Some were not up to a sufficiently high poetic standard per se. Some were good, deserved further exposure and were referred on to Doug for the next issue…
The poems here included are – generally speaking – grainy, gritty depictions of what it is like to be marginalized. It’s no fun process. It’s no academic exercise. It’s spartan, spare and sparse. Suffering is the stance, personal and pained.
Kia ora mo tenei kowhiringa taku hoa.*
Vaughan Rapatahana
Tin Shui Wai, Hong Kong; Santo Tomas, Pampanga, Philipinnes & Te Araroa, Aotearoa.
*Thank you for this opportunity, friends.
