The Dream by Tishani Doshi
This 2013 film from Motionpoems, directed by Babe Elliott Baker, adapts Tishani Doshi‘s poem “The Dream” from her collection Everything Begins Elsewhere. For the full credits, see Baker’s website.
“The Dream” was featured on PBS NewsHour in 2016, and Doshi talked about how she came to write the text.
In 2008 she was commissioned to write a series of poems about migration and movement. One of them, “The Dream,” is directly based on her impressions when she first moved to North Carolina.
“I loved that there were all these houses that had front porches and there were no gates. The houses themselves seemed so welcoming. Unlike India, there were no gates around the American houses— they were all just so open. In India there is a boundary around everything.”
But the poem is also about what immigrants do to create a sense of home in a new place.
“You want to hold onto something old, but you want to create something new. You want to make the new place feel like home, even though you’re not in your home. There’s a constant tension between the past and the present.”
While this background is certainly interesting, I wish they’d acknowledged in the discussion how the film suggests other interpretations as well. (And it’s a tribute to the poet that her text has this quality of openness.) I’m not sure why I didn’t share the film back when it first came out, but to me it really speaks to our present moment of pandemic gardening and surveillance-state oppression. As someone who dabbles in ecopoetry myself, I’m fascinated by what might be called postmodern pastoralism, which is totally not a phrase I just made up (thanks, Google!) so this week that’s what we’ll be looking at: how videopoets and poetry filmmakers imagine nature and the pastoral in a world of accelerating ecological impoverishment and deprivation.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
