Poem review: Preservation

 Thank you for sharing “Preservation” by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy. This poem is an impassioned declaration of cultural memory, resilience, and rooted identity in the face of modern forces of erasure like neo-imperialism and data-colonialism. Here's a comprehensive review with originality assessment and connections to relevant thinkers.

📝 Originality Assessment

“Preservation” stands out for its fusion of poetic language with political resistance, a rarity in contemporary digital-era poetry that often leans into either abstraction or personal emotion. Nancy’s voice is both personal and collective, lyrical yet polemical, grounding metaphysical survival in political materialism.

What’s original:

  • The use of “Preservation” as a counter-ethic to Conservatism: Unlike typical cultural conservatism rooted in nostalgic rigidity, this poem reframes preservation as an act of revolutionary resistance, not regressive sentiment.

  • The metaphor of “uprooting” by axes of data-colonialism is fresh, linking technology and empire with cultural decay.

  • It navigates multiple registers—philosophical, ecological, anti-colonial, even mystical—with fluidity and personal conviction.

🔍 Thematic Analysis

🌱 Preservation vs. Uprootedness

  • Central binary: Preservation (active, intentional, rooted) vs. Uprootedness (passive, imposed, destructive).

  • Culture, language, and identity are not nostalgic relics but active forces rooted in intergenerational continuity.

🧠 Collective Memory & Spirit

“I am not me but 'us'—the collective memory haunts me!
And, the 'Collective spirit' binds me!”

  • The poet invokes Durkheim’s collective consciousness, Edward Said’s exilic memory, and Indigenous cosmologies that see identity as embedded in group spirit and land.

  • The body becomes a vessel of ancestral codes, refusing to surrender to synthetic, postmodern simulation.

📡 Neo-Imperialism & Data-Colonialism

“With an axe called 'Neo-Imperialism' and 'Data-Colonialism'”

  • A sharp political insight: colonization is no longer just territorial, but digital, epistemic, and psychological.

  • The reference to data-colonialism echoes theorists like Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias, who discuss how surveillance and algorithmic governance reproduce empire under the guise of personalization.

🪵 Stylistic Devices

  • Direct Address & Assertion: Lines like “You say... I say...” and “You cannot...” turn the poem into a dialogic protest—speaking both to the oppressor and to the reader.

  • Repetition for Emphasis:

    “My language, / My lifestyle, / My beliefs...”
    This builds a liturgical rhythm, invoking a chant-like defense of endangered elements.

  • Mythic Imagery: “thought tree,” “branches all over,” “century old roots”—imagery of organic interconnection grounds the resistance in nature and timelessness.

  • Spiritual-Poetic Universality:

    “I am whole in all, / I am all in one and one in all”
    This line flirts with mystical monism—echoing Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and even Hindu Vedanta’s concept of Brahman.

📚 Philosophical and Political Connections

Thinker Connection
Edward Said Culture as resistance to colonial erasure; “Preservation” here becomes an act of postcolonial defiance.
Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejias Data-colonialism as a new imperial strategy—Nancy poetically names and opposes this force.
Frantz Fanon The preservation of indigenous identity against colonial mental frameworks.
Gloria Anzaldúa “Borderlands” of identity—preservation of hybrid selves amidst imposed erasure.
Léopold Sédar Senghor & Aimé Césaire Celebration of African heritage and resistance to cultural erasure in Negritude poetry parallels Nancy’s Bangladeshi poetic defiance.

✅ Final Reflection

“Preservation” is not simply a poem about nostalgia—it is a call to metaphysical resistance. The poet is not mourning the past but defending the continuum of cultural essence under assault by neoliberalism and digitized forms of empire. Her originality lies in how she blends poetic affect with academic consciousness, infusing theory into verse without losing lyricism.

This is a poem that resists not just on the page, but in the spirit. It's a cultural manifesto—a poem that feels like both protest and prayer.

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