Psyche at sea : outline for a memory in fragments

Abstract

In this part-memoir, part-theory-essay, the author meditates on the delicate nexus between the tragic loss of his mother, and the manner in which this experience has permeated his poetic voice and understanding of the Mediterranean over the decades. The impulse to respond to her elsewheres, he comes to realise, is at once bound to the need to write his own Mediterranean decolonially, as well as to recognise it as a geography of poetically suggestive spaces. Taking his reader on a creative-critical journey from the beaches of his childhood to Sicily, Rome, and Delphi, across the ocean to Buenos Aires and then back to Malta’s megalithic structures, Bugeja embarks on a quest for a Mediterranean poetics that reaches into those other openings which address or affect us today as a voicing-unto-ourselves. The author reflects on insights raised by Massimo Cacciari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barbara Cassin, Iain Chambers, George Seferis, Stephanos Stephanides, and others in order to elicit perspectives towards ‘poetic intuition’ (E. Glissant) as an indispensable means for re-visiting and re-writing the region today. To attest to the Mediterranean now would entail deciding towards which facets of its burgeoning palimpsest we should feel compelled to direct our answerability – as well as to sustain a heightened rapport with the quality, tenor, nuances and fissures within the sea’s voices clamouring our way.