#wearedaphne – Retelling the Assassination of Malta’s Foremost Investigative Journalist through Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The Sing in Me, Muse series 2022-23

The CCL is delighted to announce the first event in its new series Sing in Me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative, a series of talks, workshops, readings, discussions on the social, political and cultural relevance of the classics to our times.

3 November 2022, 5.30pm GMT (online)

A reading and talk by Abigail Ardelle Zammit, co-hosted with the Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre

The poet Abigail Ardelle Zammit will discuss how she has adopted hybridity and erasure as a vehicle for dissent. Her dialogue with Ovid’s Metamorphoses employs the violence of the blackout technique as literary tool and political commentary, selecting and obscuring words from Ovid’s tales – most noticeably from Daphne’s transformation into a tree – to retell the events leading to and following the assassination of the controversial Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The actual reading of the #wearedaphne erasures will be followed by a talk which will seek to investigate how a fictional text from antiquity can illuminate a contemporary context, and how the primary thematic violence of the process of metamorphosis can unearth the injustices of a contemporary Maltese context through the process of redaction.

Another aspect of the discussion will involve gender politics, re-voicing, and the distancing effect that can be obtained by looking at the already-written, especially vis à vis texts separated by time, space, translation, as well as dual transmutation into prose and poetry.

Attendance is free but booking is required to receive a link to attend. BOOKING IS NOW CLOSED

Watch the video of the seminar:

 

 

Abigail Ardelle Zammit is from Malta and has had poetry published in a variety of international journals including Boulevard, The Tupelo Quarterly, Gutter, MyslexiaThe SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Freefall, Ink, Sweat and TearsHigh WindowThe Ekphrastic Review.  Abigail’s two collections of poetry are Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, 2007), and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (SPM, 2015), which won second prize in the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition. Abigail is a senior lecturer in English language and literature at the GF Abela Junior College, University of Malta.  She holds a PhD in Creative Writing (Lancaster), and is currently working on a collection of poems exploring the connections between place, body, and the female experience.