3. Somalia-My Homeland
By Halima Ahmad
Somalia
Oh, Somalis!
How long will you exploit, mistreat and abuse my land?
How long will you fight and decorate my earth with the blood of my people!
Will I ever become unaccustomed to the echoes and the unpleasant sounds of
guns?
Would I ever see a brighter a day, a day, where Somalis can ever come
together and embrace one another!
Will there ever be a leader like Aden Abdulle Osman, the first president?
Do you ever hear the plea of this land? Do you ever feel the plight of my
children!
Where are your conscience
Somalis?
4. My Homeland
By IbrahimTukan
Palestine
The youth will not get tired
Their goal is your independence
Or they die
We will drink from death
But we will not be slaves to our enemies
We do not want
An eternal humiliation
Nor a miserable life
We do not want
But we will return
Our great glory
My homeland
My homeland
5. Homeland is Everything
By Matthias Pantaleon
Nigeria
Home is where squirrels knew every farmer
And the owl every hunter
Home is where respect is earn
And labour is dignity
Home is the heart of the people
Where trust is not rust & truth untold
Home is where the heart lays
Homeland is brotherhood
6. Can I Have A HomelandTo Call My Own?
ByTaslima Nasrin
Bangladesh
Once I had exhausted the world, I touched the shores
Of my homeland to exhaust my span of life,
Only to have the sense of security of an utterly exhausted thirsty soul
Brutally uprooted, and you throw away the little water cupped in my hand,
And sentence me to death, what name can I have for you, land?
You stand on my chest like an enormous mountain,
You stamp on my throat with your legs in boots,
You have gouged out my eyes,
You have drawn my tongue out and snapped it into pieces,
You have lashed and bloodied my body, broken both my legs,
You have pulverized my toes, prized open my skull to squash my brain,
You have arrested me, so that I die,
Yet I call you my homeland, call you with infinite love
7. Where is your Homeland?
By CatherineYen
Taiwan
Where is your homeland?
Prior the coming of Dutch
We have been here for a long time
We brought three gifts
Bringing song and dance
On a piece of land without the melody
Singing love and pain
Desire and despair
We brought sweat and muscles
Pioneering in the primitive and vast land of thousand years
Look up the wasteland and goshawk
Grievance and joy
We brought courage
The four hundred years of history
In addition to the national spirit and will
We are almost destroyed
8. “Inwokacja”
by Adam Mickiewicz
HolyVirgin, defender of the Shrine
at Czestochowa, who illuminates
the Ostra Gate inVilno, whose sign
revealed as one of her protectorates
the walled Novogrodek--who saved me once
with her miraculous glow. My tearful mother
entrusted me (it was her only chance,
I was near death) so when there was no other
cure, she helped to open up my eyes,
and once my lids were raised, though weak, I made
a pilgrimage to offer thanks and praise.
This memory of resurrection has stayed
alive in me since childhood; it makes
me hope a homesick exile might return
to wooded hills, green meadows, and the lakes
spread round the River Nieman--that I'd be borne
back to that womb of gilded wheat and rye
turned silver, to the amber mustard row,
buckwheat snow, and clover, burning like a shy
girl's blush--to strips of turf, ribbons that show
boundaries with green. All this I see
so clearly, down to each blossoming pear tree.
Lithuania, my country! You are as good as health:
How much one should prize you, he only can tell
Who has lost you.Your beauty and splendor I view
And describe here today, for I long after you.
9. Thesis:
The poems “Requiem” by Anna
Akhmatova and “Inwokacja” by Adam
Mickiewicz illustrates the beloved and
longed homeland as defined by identity,
political history, religion, and cultural
values.
12. Adam Mickiewicz
• 1798- Born on December 24, near Nowogrodek, Belarus.
• 1812- Mickiewicz saw Napolean Bonaparte’s troops marching through
Lithuania.
• 1819-23-Taught in Kovno
• 1824- Arrested inVilna as a revolutionary. Moved freely to St. Petersburg
then Odessia
• 1825-Was teacher in lyceum
• 1829- He was allowed to travel abroad.
• 1832- Settled in Paris
• 1840-44- First professor of Slavic literatures, College de France, Paris
• 1848-Attempted to organize military unit in Italian revolution
• 1849- Edited radical newspaper LaTribune des peuples
• Regarded as greatest of Polish poets; wrotePoezye I (1822), Poezye
II(1823), Dziady (1823-32), Sonety Krymskie (1826), Konrad
Wallenrod (1828), epic PanTadeusz (1834);
14. WhoWas Akhmatova?
• Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was
a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the
Russian canon.
• Akhmatova was born at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Black Sea port of Odessa. Her
father, Andrey Antonovich Gorenko, a civil servant, and her mother, Inna
Erazmovna Stogova, were both descended from the Russian nobility.
• Her family moved north toTsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg when she was
eleven months old.The family lived in a house on the corner of Shirokaya Street
and Bezymyanny Lane; (the building is no longer there today), spending summers
from age 7 to 13 in a dacha near Sevastopol. She studied at the Mariinskaya High
School, moving to Kiev (1906–1910) and finished her schooling there, after her
parents separated in 1905. She went on to study law at Kiev University, leaving a
year later to study literature in St Petersburg.
15. WhoWas Akhmatova?
• From a very young age, Akhmatova started writing poetry and stories. As
her writing ability and experience grew, she then had published in her late
teens, inspired by the poets Nikolay Nekrasov, Racine, Pushkin, Baratynsky
and the Symbolists however none of her juvenilia survives. Her sister Inna
also wrote poetry though she did not pursue the practice and married
shortly after high school. Akhmatova's father did not want to see any verses
printed under his "respectable" name, so she chose to adopt her
grandmother's distinctly Tatar surname 'Akhmatova' as a pen name.
• Akhmatova was extremely popular and also got around very often. She had
many lovers, majority into the arts like her, such as poets, writers, painters,
musicians, and others. Not only was she having her fun with all of these
men, but, she was also expanding her knowledge and horizon with the
writing world, especially her poetry.
( timeline on next slide )
16. 1889: Born Anna Gorenko to father Andrei, a maritime engineer, and to mother Inna Stogova, a former member of the
revolutionary group the People's Will.
1903: Meets Gumilev, her future husband
1907: Graduates from Fundukleevskaya Gimnazia in Kiev, after having attended Tsarskoe Selo for a number of years.
Her first poem appears in Sirius, Gumilev's journal, and begins to participate in the Guild of Poets, the group that would
spawn the Acmeist movement
1910: Marries Gumilev and they travel to Paris where they meet the then unknown Modigliani, who painted a drew
Akhmatova a number of times
1912: First collection Evening appears under the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova, a name she takes from herTatar
grandmother. This collection highlighted the intimate, colloquial, romantic voice that would characterize much of her
early poetry. Her son Lev is born.
17. 1914: Second collection Rosary appears Gumilev leaves her to join the Cavalry
1915:Writes "By theVery Sea" and MarriesVladimir Shileiko, who tries to stop her writing by burning her
poems
1917: PublishesThe White Flock, in which her use of fire thematics come to the fore, and her tone becomes
more severe
1921: Gumilev executed for involvement in counterrevolutionary plot
1922: PublishesAnno Domini, in which her use of religious themes increase and she becomes unable to
publish, as a forced silence begins because her apolitical work was thought incompatible with the new regime
1926-1940: Lives with art critic Nikolai Punin and works on cycle Reed, poems dedicated to Mandelstam
Pasternak, and Dante
1928: Officially divorces Shileiko
18. 1935-40: Writes Requiem, her tribute to human suffering, inspired by the arrest of her son and the purges of the 1930's
1940: A reprint and new cycle of poems Six Books appears, but is quickly recalled then begins writing "Poem without a Hero"
on which she works until her death.This would be her most dense, complex and layered poem.
1943: Evacuated toTashkent form Leningrad, volume Selected Verses appears there
1955: Son released from prison and rehabilitated
1958: Edition with new workThe Course ofTime appears under her supervision; Seventh Book, including "Poem without a
Hero" also included
1964: Italy awards herTaormina Prize for poetry
1965: Awarded honorary degree by Oxford University
1966: Dies in Domodedovo, as the grande dame of Russian verse, a patron to young poets such as Brodsky andVoznesensky.
22. Soviet Union
• “No foreign sky protected me, no strangers wings shielded my face”
• “Such grief might make the mountains stoop, reverse the waters where they
flow”-
• “TheYenisei swirls, the north star shines as it will shine forever”
• “And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained
boots, under the wheels of black Marias”
24. Akhmatova
• “And if my country should ever assent to casting in my name a monument, I
should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be
placed not near the seas on which my eyes first opened, my last link with
the sea has long been broken, but here, here I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars, because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias” -
• A monument placed by the gates of prison so Russia will never forget the
suffering of the people during that era.
25. Akhmatova
• “One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind
me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of
course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started
out of the torpor common to us all and asked in a whisper
• “Can you describe this?” I said “I can”
• “I woven them a garment that’s prepared out of poor words,
those that I overheard”
27. Identifies as a Pole by expressing
Longing for his Invaded Land
28. Poland
• “Lithuania, my country!You are as good as health:
How much one should prize you, he only can tell
Who has lost you.Your beauty and splendor I view
And describe here today, for I long after you.”
29. Mickiewicz
• “Mickiewicz must be considered in a twofold aspect. In one view, as an
apostle and martyr of that fervent patriotism which impels with irresistible
power his countrymen to struggle to preserve the national existence; in the
other, as the deliverer of national genius from school trammels, directing its
course in the independent track of Homer and Shakespeare.”
32. PanTadeusz
“The blow struck with such skill, with such force unsurpassed,
That the strings rang out boldly, like trumpets of brass,
And from them to the heavens that song wafted, cherished,
That triumphal march: Poland has never yet perished!”
33. Political History
Topic Sentence: Both Russians and Poles experienced significant and similar
changes in their homeland and their experience created political issues which
added dark pages to their history.
34. Unbearable Burden on people
• Russia
• Prologue By Akhmatova
• “That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house;
and the regiments of the condemned,
herded in the railroad-yards,
shrank from the engine's whistle-song
whose burden went, "Away, pariahs!"
The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.”
35. Poland
• Acton pointed out:
• The fact that the Polish state, as an elective monarchy with republican institutions,
was not fully legitimate from the point of view of dynastic absolutism.
• Poland had always been a recognized member of the European family of nations
and that its partition was therefore "an act of wanton violence, committed in open
defiance not only of popular feeling but of public law".
• Based on "law of nations" which tried to protect the rights of political nations, i.e.
nations having their own states, but not the rights of ethnic nationalities which,
unlike Poland, could not ground their aspirations in political legitimism.( qdt,
Walicki, Andrzej. "Traditions of Polish Nationalism in Comparative Perspective.“)
36. Fighting for getting freedom back
• Roman Szporluk, a distinguished American historian of Ukrainian
background. In his bookCommunism and Nationalism said:
"The Poles were able to awaken the theory of nationality in Europe precisely
because they had been deprived of their independent statehood, which they
had enjoyed for centuries, at exactly that moment when they were becoming
a modem nation, a contemporary of the new age of sovereignty of the people.
For this reason, the Polish case deserves to be placed alongside the French
Revolution as a major historical event that had a direct ideological significance
in the history of nationalism.....“( qdt, Walicki, Andrzej. "Traditions of Polish
Nationalism in Comparative Perspective.“)
37. Religion
• Creates a strong bond
• Gives a sense of belonging
• Preserves culture
• Makes homeland sacred
• Remains in the hearts
38. Biblical magnitude of suffering
Crucifixion
"Do not weep for me, Mother, when I am in my
grave."
A choir of angels glorified the hour,
the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire.
"Father, why hastThou forsaken me?
Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me. . . ."
Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed,
His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared.
His mother stood apart. No other looked
into her secret eyes. No one dared.
39. Unity of the Russians under God
“Pray for me. Pray.”
“And I pray not for myself alone . .
for all who stood outside the jail”
“my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million
people shout,
then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them”
40. “One of the main unifying symbols in the Russian state
was Orthodoxy.The image of the state as an external
form of the realization and spreading of the true faith
inherited from the Byzantine imperial concept entered
organically into the Russian imperial model. As Svetlana
Lur’e notes.The identity of the citizens of the empire was
built not on ethnicity, but along religious lines; national
diversity was ignored by the state” (Nikonova, 6-7).
41. Patronage over Poland
HolyVirgin, defender of the Shrine
at Czestochowa (…) who saved me once
with her miraculous glow. My tearful mother
entrusted me (it was her only chance,
I was near death) so when there was no other
cure, she helped to open up my eyes,
and once my lids were raised, though weak, I made
a pilgrimage to offer thanks and praise.
This memory of resurrection has stayed
alive in me since childhood; it makes
me hope a homesick exile might return
44. Patriotism
• “Lithuania, my fatherland!You are like health; How much you must be valued, will only discover.
The one who has lost you.”
• For Russia, patriotism is the “consolidation of society and the strength of the state.”
• In Russia it is not the ethnicity that builds the identity of the citizens, but religion, specifically
orthodox.
• “Service to the fatherland” was seen as one of the highest good-deed one could give, along with
loyalty, to the state.
• The author, Olga Nikonava, says “Patriotism here, in the Soviet Union, is the natural feeling of
millions of citizens who ardently love our native country, our government, our great party which
has given them a happy, prosperous life.”
45. Mother-son relationship
For seventeen months I have cried aloud,
calling you back to your lair.
I hurled myself at the hangman's foot.
You are my son, changed into nightmare.
46. •“Mothers have an obligation to protect the interest of their
sons, and that consequently, they have the right to a
political voice’. Mothers, in this view, have instincts that
make them act against state-sponsored patriotism, at least
when it endangers their children” (Sperling, 12).
•“Real mother is a woman who went to pull their sons out of
military camps and out of prison.Where conditions
demanded the ethos of the maternal instinct, and mothers
had to bring order and security” (Sperling, 12).
47. Social environment
They should have shown you–mocker,
delight of your friends, hearts' thief,
naughtiest girl of Pushkin's town–
this picture of your fated years,
as under the glowering wall you stand,
shabby, three hundredth in the line,
clutching a parcel in your hand,
and the NewYear's ice scorched by your
tears.
49. “to wooded hills, green meadows, and the lakes
spread round the River Nieman--that I'd be borne
back to that womb of gilded wheat and rye
turned silver, to the amber mustard row,
buckwheat snow, and clover, burning like a shy
girl's blush--to strips of turf, ribbons that show
boundaries with green. All this I see
so clearly, down to each blossoming pear tree.”
50. Conclusion
• Nothing is more painful and damaging than having your own homeland taken from you and having your life
devastated from the cruelty and fears of the leadership keeping you in control. During Stalin’s reign of power,
there was a Great Purge, that took many countless lives from Russia at the time. Anna Akhmatova wrote the
poem “Requiem” describing her pain, the fears she held, and how painful it was for her to live on in such a
horrible environment and situation in Russia during such a difficult time. We need to see and understand how
important it is to love oneself, your own home, and also bear witness to the changes and the effects of
revolution, politics, and powerful control.The land itself, the people in themselves, and the entire environment
was to be held and seen within the poem and the messages behind it. Freedom, life, love, family, and
happiness is all that matters. Hopefully the message and ideas are clearly seen and taken from all of this.
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