The Refugee Blues And Inside Dachau Essay - 1500 Words

Submission: Ethical Witnessing through Poetic Expressions in the â€Å"Refugee Blues† Experiences, emotional events, and imaginations are often condensed into poetic forms of expression. In Refugee Blues and Inside Dachau, W.H. Auden and Sherman Alexie brought to the fore the struggles and conflicts that characterize humanity through the dynamics of political plots and human biases. A refugee is a psychologically or physically displaced person from their conceived home or country either by reason of tribe, war, religion or politics. Thus, being a refugee means that one has to be displaced and Displacement occurs not just in the physical world, but in the head, in the very language one has to learn again† (Smith 190). The use of the word â€Å"Blues† in the poem is suggestive of resignment and sadness. It is characteristic of the African American musical notes enslaved in the Southern part of America’s plantations. The traumatic events of the European Holocaust and th e American Indian genocides infused in the poems are meant to invoke ethical responses from readers. Ethical witnessing in literature requires three actions from the reader; empathy, consideration of the traumatic portrayal, and a view of the world around the reader (Peterson 76). The speakers in both poems are outsiders who seek to elicit empathy in the readers. The melancholic rendition makes it a plain ballad. This paper looks at the formal analysis and ethical witnessing in Refugee Blues by W.H. Auden alongside