E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
Authors White Teeth, Red Blood
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-265-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Selected Vampiric Verses
E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-265-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Various
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
When I was asked to introduce this book, I thought that I was perhaps the worst person to do so. I didn’t grow up reading vampire fiction, or horror, and I wouldn’t consider myself a vampire fan, even though I have written a novel whose main character is a vampire.
I think, however, that very few of the authors represented in these pages wrote about vampires because they were vampire fans. Byron likely wasn’t obsessed with vampires (though one of the earliest literary vampires is based on him). Neither was Emily Dickinson, and probably neither was Kipling (though he, of everyone included in this book, is to my mind the most likely to have actually been a vampire; at least, with the colonialist, exoticizing and fetishizing under(over) tones of his work, he is one of the most vampiric). All the writers in this book, rather, were drawn to the vampire as a metaphor or device.
The vampire, for a writer, is an alluring figure. It straddles life and death, is often nocturnal, or at least inhabits shadows or the dark, and must drain living things of blood in order to survive. It is a creature that looks like us humans but has a different diet; it is a slightly different species, but one that can exist amongst humans undetected. In essence, it is different, other. Loneliness, alienation, morality, mortality, humanity, inhumanity: all can be explored through the vampire, plus any form of difference: neurodivergence, foreignness, disability, illness, gender and sexuality, for instance. Vampires are also full of contradictions. Alive, but dead; often beautiful, but abhorrent; sometimes sexy, despite having been dead for centuries; self-flagellating and hungry; powerful, superhuman, yet sometimes vulnerable and fragile. Very old vampires are anachronisms: they are living history, bringing the past right into the present, with all the traumas of the past. Every one of us who has written about a vampire knows our own vampire very well, because each reflects something of what we thought of humanity at the time we wrote them. But perhaps none of us could do justice to introducing this book.
A vampire is defined differently depending on who you speak to. Many cultures have blood-sucking creatures in their mythologies. The Balinese léyak, for instance, appears human during the day, but after dark, its head and internal organs break away from their body and fly through the night looking for newborn babies to drain of blood. The langsuyar of Malaysia is a woman who becomes a flying vampire-like creature after the stillbirth of her child; while the pontianak is a woman who has died during childbirth and feasts on the blood of men. The sasabonsam of Ghana hangs upside down from trees like a bat, then swoops down and eats its victims, thumbs first. Then there is the yara-ma-yha-who, a creature from Australian Aboriginal folklore that resembles a small frog-like man who drains its victims’ blood using suckers on its hands and feet. The vampire in this collection is the Western vampire: the bloodsucker who bites victims’ necks, drains blood to survive, is human in appearance, immortal, and whose lineage includes figures such as Dracula and Nosferatu.
However, all these creatures are related. Often colonialism creates new vampires, such as the soucouyant of the Caribbean; myths from different cultures combine to create new monsters; and often their bloodsucking stands for the real-life draining of a country’s and a people’s culture and resources. Vampire-like myths have also travelled back to the West and come to represent in the Western mind fear of the other, of difference, immigration, the foreigner, and of revenge by colonial and/or enslaved subjects. Bloodsuckers are in this way often cousins.
You can read this collection in any order. However, it is divided into three sections. “Chilling Tales” contains unsettling poems that you can imagine reading by candlelight, including many long narrative poems from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an under-read and overlooked form. “Dire Warnings” sees the wrath of a vampire often imagined as punishment for war-mongering, sexual promiscuity, or for a woman rejecting a man, the latter in Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s violent poem The Vampire from 1748, in which the male protagonist imagines himself as a vampire sneaking into a woman’s room after she has rejected him, and taking “her life’s blood”. In “The Vampire Within”, the vampire is less definable. In the often more interior and insular poems here, it acts as a metaphor for many things, from pregnancy and art to racism and colonialism.
These sections are chronological, charting the evolution of the Western vampire from its early origins to its most recent incarnations. I began at the end and worked backwards, starting with the vampire closest to my own, in time and in origin—a 2022 vampire in Chinese-American poet, art critic and curator John Yau’s Charles Baudelaire and I Meet in the Oval Garden. The dual identities of the vampire intrigue me: dead/ alive, inhuman/human, other/familiar; and Yau’s writing often explores the dualities of East and West, of visual art and writing. Here, Yau writes a Malaysian verse form called a pantoum, popular with nineteenth-century French poets, in which the second and fourth lines become the first and third lines in the next stanza, giving the poem a woven quality. One line reads: “They say that the latest strain hiding in the shadows is a yellow vampire”—an allusion, perhaps, to the Covid-19 pandemic during which people of Asian descent were subjected to hate and blamed for the virus; the monstrousness of the vampire represents the virus itself and the dehumanization of Asians at the time. Further back, in Ishmael Reed’s singingly musical 1972 poem, I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra, the vampire is Set (god of, among much else, violence and foreigners), and he symbolizes the suppression of native religions by foreign powers, an “imposter” and “usurper”, a “party pooper O hater of dance”. The protagonist goes out after him, “to unseat Set”, “to Set down Set”. Neither Reed’s nor Yau’s poem is of the horror genre; but the inclusion of the vampire highlights the horrors of humanity.
Walter Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa isn’t strictly a poem but rather a paragraph lifted from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in his 1873 book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry; though W.B. Yeats described it as “the first modern poem” and published a sentence from it (beginning “She is older than…”), broken up into lines to more closely resemble poetry, in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936. In this original version, the Mona Lisa is a “vampire”: timeless, immortal, containing “all the thoughts and experience of the world… the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome…”, “older than the rocks among which she sits”. The Mona Lisa as vampire is a comment on art, not just this portrait—but the mysterious vitality at the centre of all works of art that, as if by magic, connect us to and preserve the past, while continuing to comment on the present.
The boundaries between life and death (and life again) are blurry for vampires. Emily Dickinson’s 1866 poem A Death blow is a Life blow to Some can read on the surface like a vampire poem where the life–death boundary is blurred, but also uses the idea of returning to life after a “death blow” to deliver a message: don’t wait until death comes to truly start living. Anna Lætitia Barbauld’s To a Little Invisible Being focuses on the divide between life and death too, but addresses an unborn child, still in the womb, waiting to arrive: “Haste,” she writes, “through life’s mysterious gate”. And then, in American poet and physician Rafael Campo’s 1994 poem The Distant Moon, a doctor takes care of a dying patient; the vampire is only a brief metaphor in passing—the doctor drawing blood, “You’ll make me live forever!” says the patient. “The darkened halls” here are not of a vampire’s manor but of a hospital, but just as occupied by both life and death; “he was so near / Death” reads one line break which can be read in many ways: the patient physically close to the doctor, Death metaphorically close to the patient, the patient nearly gone and, so, in fact, getting more distant from the doctor.
The vampire is often a woman—a sinful temptress or witch – who preys on men. Conrad Aiken’s The Vampire,...
