Seven Selfies from the Château d'If

Publication Instance Details #1390

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	No	No	Yes

Details

Human Rights Issues	Death Penalty/Unlawful Detention/Incarceration Torture
Languages	English
Genre	Lyric Sequence
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	In this poem, the modern speaker is recast in the guise of Edmond Dantès, the protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844). Dantès was held captive at the Château d'If island prison near Marseille for six years without ever facing trial, and the poem’s seven ‘selfies’ appear to chart these years up to Dantès’ escape (he posed as a corpse in a body bag). While the human rights connection of this poem is not very strong on the surface, it does examine the question of unlawful imprisonment and possibly references torture. The question arises whether the poem’s less obvious subject is not modern-day unlawful imprisonment and torture at black sites, e.g. Guantánamo Bay. This is suggested by the blackness and darkness in the first ‘selfie’, while the third ‘selfie’ could suggest that the speaker is Muslim (one of the literal meanings of the Quran is ‘to be recited’, and the poem mentions a further not specified ‘world book’ that ‘must be read aloud’).