Perdu

Publication Instance Details #1800

Publication Overview

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

Details

Human Rights Issues	Torture Indigenous Rights (incl. culture & language) War
War / Genocide Referenced	Genocide: Genocide of indigenous people in USA (pre 20th century)
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The poem's title, with its nod towards the French borrowing 'sentinelle perdue', hints specifically at its protagonists' hazardous position as exposed guardsmen, and, more broadly, at a great loss. Equipped with bow and arrow, the guardsmen turn out to be 'a Salish man' and his five-year-old son. The poem thus thematises the gruesome fate the indigenous peoples of the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest suffered due to the European colonisation of North America. The poem shows in both content and form how father and son - and, by extension, their entire community and people - are sentenced to an inescapable succession of torture, murder, and massacre, as one culture extinguishes another. Formally, this succession is enacted via the employment of anadiplosis: the last word of each line is repeated near or at the beginning of the following sentence, and the first and final couplet are the same, evoking a deadlock from which there is no escape. The poem also mentions "Quintus" (presumably Quintus Sertorius or Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus), perhaps because of their association with guerrilla warfare tactics.