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Multiplicity of Systems in Tania Haberlund's Poetry
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The Body, Space, the Sacred, and Identity: Maps Distributed Across a Canvas Named Skin
This writing does not come from a distance, but from the body, from the scar, from the maze. Her poetry resembles touch: real, troubled, warm, and cold at once. In these worlds she weaves, cultures intersect, identities are laid bare, and mythology rises not as mere fable but as a dense emotional state inhabiting reality. Tania Haberlund, a water poet of triple nationality (German-South African-Mauritian), listens to the contradictions of the human experience, yet she uses language as both a tool for revelation and a means of survival. For her, poetry is the body as it transforms into identity, the sacred as it collapses, and identity as it disintegrates. In her world that rejects boundaries, poetry remains at the heart of personal, cultural, epistemological, and existential tensions, striving to provoke grand questions. Her voice intersects with postcolonial, feminist, and contemporary cultural critiques, making her poetry a living laboratory for understanding the self and the world, where poetry— as Paul Valéry puts it— becomes a necessity rather than a luxury.
Haberlund's poetry is characterized by its ability to dismantle cultural certainties and replace them through its deep engagement with the systems of the body, space, the sacred, and identity. She does not just write poetry; she dismantles certainty. Here, the tangible intersects with the metaphysical, and language becomes a body, transitioning between the islands where the poet grew up, the deserts that swallowed her alienation, and the languages that quarrel within her over meaning. Thus, her poetry does not seem like a voice, but echoes: of memory, exile, water, uncertainty, and transformations. Therefore, through reading Haberlund's poetry through the lens of cultural systems, we can unveil the deep structures that do not scream in the text but whisper within it, moving beneath it, shaping its emotional and symbolic architecture, which is not neutral, as it dictates, conceals, and fences meaning, acting as implicit molds that govern discourses. The system is not merely a context, but a entity that evades, hides in metaphor, and reveals moments of tension and fracture; thus, it is not merely a backdrop but a hidden agent— as Said Benkrad states— manifesting in metaphorical images, symbolic relationships, and profound conceptions, determining the ways of representing the body, identity, language, and power. Therefore, it enables us to understand poetry as a process of dissecting the complex human reality, deconstructing and rewriting it, and comprehending cultural differences.
In her collection "Hyphen – Dash,” most of which I have translated, an analytical critique of the discourse reveals a complex network of these structures through several central systems: the system of the body, the system of space, the system of the sacred, the system of identity, and the system of water. In each of these systems, the poet dismantles what is familiar to tell us: nothing is fixed—neither the body, nor the homeland, nor the sacred, nor even language. Everything is transition. And every transition is a poem.
**The System of the Body – Writing from the Eros to the Cosmic**
The body occupies a central place in Haberlund's poetry, not merely as a subject of discourse but as a means of perceiving the world. Here, the body operates not just as a biological organ but as memory and experience, maps distributed across skin. Haberlund writes as if language grows beneath her skin: "I hide the inscriptions with bold strokes of hope and memory / on a canvas that is my skin." Thus, the body, which is boundaries— traversed by tongue and nations, and the hands we do not choose— transforms into exile, a fragmented homeland, and maps written upon the skin, becoming a document engraved with the politics of identity, race, gender, and violence. It turns into a space for tensions, a structure charged with symbols and cultural concepts, a memory speaking from pores and history, not "the black books," as it becomes a field for the resistance of beauty and experience transcending time. In this context, we do not read just about the body; we pass through it, as we pass through burnt skin that speaks, remembers, groans, and screams within language.
Here, the female body is reclaimed as a field of resistance to cultural systems that seek to domesticate or subjugate it, and female mythological symbols like Persephone and Inanna emerge to offer poetry a mythical and political dimension, transforming femininity into more than just a body or social role. It is a rebellious cosmic force, a presence that transcends social expectations and prevailing cultural concepts. Thus, the woman in her texts is not merely a being in pain; she is an entity that revolts, is resurrected, and narrates the world from an unquenchable.
Nidaa Younis
