Voice as Altitude: A Feminist-Metaphysical Reflection on “Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!” A poem by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy
Voice as Altitude: A Feminist-Metaphysical Reflection on “Ring bell or Mount Everest?!” A poem by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy
Abstract
This hybrid reflection explores “Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!” as a poetic meditation on feminine resilience, metaphysical opacity, and the politics of visibility. Drawing upon feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and postcolonial theory, the poem is analyzed as a symbolic reclamation of identity through paradox, elevation, and negation. The speaker—constructed through linguistic recursion and metaphor—emerges as an enduring force beyond reduction, echoing thinkers such as Irigaray, Heidegger, Bergson, and Spivak.
Introduction
Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy’s "Ring bell or Mount Everest?!” is a poetic chant that both resists and transcends linguistic and epistemic reduction. Through recursive syntax and contradictory binaries, the poem enacts a spiritual and existential resistance to objectification, erasure, and dispossession. This essay reads the poem as a feminist metaphysical intervention—an attempt to articulate a feminine presence that cannot be consumed or forgotten.
Phenomenology of Hidden Presence
The poem’s structure of recursive negations—“Buried but not be hidden, / Hidden but not to be unknown, / Unknown but not to be unseen”—resonates with Heidegger’s notion of aletheia, or unconcealment. Heidegger (1977) argues that truth emerges not through full transparency, but through a dynamic process of revealing and concealing. Nancy’s speaker exists in this liminal zone—not fully seen, yet unerasable.
Such formulations also echo Irigaray’s (1985) feminist critique of ontology, where the feminine is often cast as the negative space within masculine symbolic orders. Nancy subverts this by asserting the feminine as enduring and unpossessable—"Priced but not to be owned." Her being is not defined through absence but through recursive resistance to containment.
Mount Everest as Feminine Sublime
Mount Everest becomes a central metaphor—not for conquest, but for majesty beyond visibility. “Though not always crystal clear... it stays,” the poem states, suggesting that presence does not require constant acknowledgment. The mountain is enduring, shrouded, yet sovereign in its obscurity.
This imagery evokes Edmund Burke’s (1757/1990) and Immanuel Kant’s (1790/2000) theories of the sublime, wherein something is so vast or powerful it eludes conceptual capture. However, Nancy refigures the sublime in feminine terms—not terrifying, but dignified in distance. Like Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949/2010) challenge to the "eternal feminine" myth, this Everest is not a symbol of fixity but of persistent becoming.
Subaltern Memory and Postcolonial Echoes
The later stanzas shift from transcendence to grounded decay:
“Murmuring sounds of dried leaves moving backwards in the backyards—
As if those watershed can wash away their sins—”
Here, the speaker channels postcolonial memory, where landscape becomes archive. Spivak (1988) warns that the subaltern often "cannot speak" within dominant epistemes. Yet Nancy's speaker remembers all—her murmurings defy historical amnesia. The backyard becomes a site of moral sediment and repressed history, invoking a voice that has long been silenced yet retains the right to accuse, remember, and endure.
Temporality and Feminine Becoming
Lines such as “Transient but not to be transparent” and “Felt but not be chosen” suggest an ethic of opacity, resisting both commodification and reduction. Édouard Glissant (1997) defends the right to opacity as a postcolonial and ethical stance—Nancy’s speaker embodies this principle.
Furthermore, the poem’s non-linear, circular structure reflects Bergson’s (1889/2001) durée, where identity is not fixed but flows through lived time. Her rising and falling mirrors the rhythm of becoming, not simply being.
Conclusion: Altitude as Attitude
The poem concludes with an image of dignity not derived from being “chosen,” but from enduring despite erasure. The speaker is “not to be forgotten,” not because she was loud, but because she was unfolded through resistance. “The altitude speak[s] volumes of its attitude,” Nancy writes, collapsing geography into ethics. This attitude—resolute, sovereign, and silent—is a metaphysical claim to being on her own terms.
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (2010). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1949)
Bergson, H. (2001). Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (F. L. Pogson, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1889)
Burke, E. (1990). A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1757)
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman (G. C. Gill, Trans.). Cornell University Press.
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790)
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.
Read my original poem:
https://farheenancy.blogspot.com/2025/07/feel-numb-my-eyes-get-wet-i-feel.html
Comments