Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

Volume 28, Number 2 (2003)

“If only I were Isis”: Remembrance, Ritual, and Writing in Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches

Submitted
March 25, 2010
Published
2003-06-06

Abstract

Simultaneously a meditation on death and an enacted ritual towards renewal and consolation, the poems in Lola Lemire Tostevin's Cartouches are a tribute to the power of languages to provide a negotiation through grief and understanding, using the poet's Egyptian pilgrimage as the crucial point of journey and intuitive comprehension. Ruminating on the sacralization of death and renewal in another culture, Tostevin navigates grief and consolation through language and ritual. Hieroglyphs have "intuitive or emotional knowledge," and the Isis hieroglyph is invoked as part of the ritual of consolation, as a life-symbol rather than as a death-symbol. What evolves is a found site for interaction with the dead, and a renewal based on bodily inscription.