“One Like Me”

In briefly sketching this terrain of relation schematized in breaking poems, Keith. P. Feldman has meant to signal the interpretive challenges posed by contemporary ethnic literature's engagement with transnational. The promotional poster for the event juxtaposes Merriam-Webster's Dictionary definition of Refugee with one from Suheir Hammad's Dictionary. This chapter mentions Refugee which states Noun, Verb, Ism, ONE LIKE ME. At the same time, Hammad's supplement in the promotional poster of official discourse surrounding the term "refugee" registers the rhetorical and imaginative force of poetic language to draw political connections and alternative modes of identification. It allows us to consider a poetics of relation that names both heterogeneous and multiplicitous set of localized forms, forces, ideas, cultures, and languages that emerge in a global history of dispersal, and the attempt to imagine that which converges around those localized experiences. Just as the concept of contrapuntalism operates at levels both methodological and ontological, so, too, does the relational poetics in Hammad's cycle.