A Woman cannot be Her Mother: Resisting the Inherited-violence in the Poetry of Selected Modern Women Poems

Shaymaa Z. Al-Wattar; Mashail F. Saleh

doi:10.61704/pr.690

المؤلفون

Shaymaa Z. Al-Wattar College of Arts, University of Mosul, Nineveh, Iraq. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4903-1476
Mashail F. Saleh College of Arts, University of Mosul, Nineveh, Iraq.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61704/pr.690

الكلمات المفتاحية:

Resisting، Inherited-Violence، Women Poetry، Syliva Plath، Carol Ann Duffy

الملخص

The paper deals with modern women poet’s resistance of the inherited violence that had been suppressing them for years and from a very early age, emphasizing on the silencing of women as it is one of universal and the most damaging type of violence. Like other type of violence, silencing of women is passed from one generation to the other, but unlike the other types of violence the silencing in many cases is imposed by mothers on their daughters for many reasons. As this legacy was passed down through generations, women poets had to find their voices resisting this inherited silencing to find their voices and tell their own stories out loud. The resisting of silencing is tackled seriously as it is not only a problem that faces the poets themselves but all the coming generations. The paper focuses on the women poets’ resistance of the systematically enforced intergenerational silencing and how they use poetry to break this silencing and reclaiming their narrative authority. Then two poems of the outstanding poets Syliva Plath and Carol Ann Duffy will be discussed.

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