Pip and Magwitch

Publication Instance Details #1396

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	Terrorism/War on Terror HR & Weapons of Mass Destruction (incl. nuclear) State Violence Assassination
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	This poem is a split or torn-apart sonnet that uses Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations as an intertext to evoke the question of what rights are owed to known criminals. It names Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemeni scholar, imam, and jihadist-recruiter. Al-Awlaki was already involved in the September 11 attacks and later became AQAP’s major English-language propagandist. The poem specifically mentions a printer cartridge bomb plot al-Awlaki is held responsible for, into which had been slipped a copy of Great Expectations (which al-Awlaki reportedly read when in prison). By casting Anwar al-Awlaki as Pip, who had brought a small care package and file to the escaped convict Abel Magwitch (Pip’s would-be benefactor), the poem raises the question of whether U.S. citizen al-Awlaki was subject of an extrajudicial killing and denied the right to due process of law when he was targeted in a U.S. drone strike on 30 September 2011. By ending with the word ‘inheritance’, the poem seems to also evoke the fate suffered by al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, also a U.S. citizen, who died two weeks later in the targeted killing of another AQAP-leader.