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- Title
'TO THE SCENTS OF THE CYPRESS AND MOIST THISTLE I SHALL EXTEND A HIDDEN WING': NATIVISM AND SELF-JOUISSANCE IN ESTHER RAAB'S EARLY POETRY.
- Authors
Kurman, Nirit
- Abstract
Esther Raab's first poetry book, Kimshonim (Thistles) was published in 1930 from a doubly marginal position: a woman-poet native to Israel in a literary field dominated by European male poets. Together with femininity and the relationship with the mother-land, the book deals with another theme -- Orientalism. In this essay I argue that the three different themes combine in a complex pattern which I call 'Self-Jouissance', a pattern which does not entail a (sexual) partner and which is not aimed at procreation or conquest. 'Self-Jouissance' functions in the national masculine field as a struggle for acknowledgement and acceptance as well as independence and differentiation. As a 'native', Raab seeks to place herself in a privileged position compared to that of the European immigrants who came to the country in the name of national ideology. On the other hand, her 'nativeness' puts her in an underprivileged stance, as an oriental noble savage. Raab copes by projecting the oriental identity onto another population, the Egyptian-Arabs, in a group of poems about Egypt. These poems portray an abject sexuality which contrasts with the sublime sexuality of the mother-land poems. Nevertheless, because of its inferiority, oriental sexuality raises an option for jouissance and reveals a surprising similarity to the mother-land poems, blurring the boundaries between abject and sublime. The native sexuality by its very nature entails a 'birth from the land', and the autoerotic sexuality in the mother-land poems disrupts hetero-normative sexuality, thus challenging and threatening the nationally-oriented sexual paradigm of procreation and conquest, challenging national ideology and threatening to annihilate it. In this essay I introduce the pattern of 'Self-Jouissance' as a model of nativism, and illuminate the links between femininity, nativism and Orientalism, links which have not been discussed before.
- Subjects
EGYPT; ISRAEL; NATIVISM; CYPRESS; REPRODUCTION; FEMININITY; BROTHERLINESS; ORIENTALISM; ODORS
- Publication
Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 2020, Vol 31, p381
- ISSN
0333-693X
- Publication type
Article