Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Plagiarism or intertextuality

Plagiarism or intertextuality? 

Black bodies swing in the southern breeze
Children cut from stomachs hanging
Blood on the roots, blood on the leaves
Protests walk through tired cities
No justice no peace for the world seeing
Black bodies swing in the southern breeze
From their twisted mouth, I heard them plead
“My hands are up, stop shooting”
Blood on his hands blood on his sleeves
Scent of magnolias fresh and sweet
From the sun rotting, from trees dropping
Black bodies sing in the southern breeze
Strange bodied fruit on strange bloody trees
No more weeping, no more wailing
Blood on the roots blood on the leaves
A time to be born, a time for dying
A time to plant, a time to be freed
Black bodies swing in the southern breeze
Blood on the roots blood on the leaves

The original poem is this: 

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I guess the Billie Holiday song is so well known that I would call it an overt homage. But on the other hand, not having at least an overt indication of the source of the most powerful lines is bad, since someone could read the poem without knowing anything at all about the original and never be the wiser. And the updating of a poem about lynching to a poem about BLM has to do something more, transform the text a little more. The parts not found in the original poem are very badly written in comparison with the power of the original text.  




2 comments:

Jonathan said...

Even the parts of the poem not derived from the earlier texts are echoes of other texts: Ecclesiastes and the "no justice no peace" aphorism attributed to some Pope or someone like that.

Leslie B. said...

I took it for collage / direct homage, just badly done. Perhaps I am too kind.