Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
“Vigílias do Tempo Ausente: Ensaios sobre o Luto na Literatura e nas Artes: 3º Seminário Internacional Literatura e Emoções”, Lisbon, Portekiz, 6 - 07 Ekim 2025, ss.39-40, (Özet Bildiri)
“Our lovebird died, leaving behind a blue autumn with its scattered feathers/ You know, death is sometimes a blue empty cage/ Whatever language we translate pain into, it would be a lie now, Pollyanna.” These are the words with which Didem Madak’s poem “The Last Letter to Pollyanna” opens its doors to a forlorn poetic persona suffering from an unnamable sense of pain. Introduced through the macabre image of an empty cage and the scattered feathers of a deceased bird, the reason behind the mourning of the thirty-year-old poetic persona is never explicitly expressed in the poem. However, it is implied that resembling the empty cage, she is emptied of her lively desire or divorced from her songs of joy after the death of her bird on both material and metaphorical levels. Cut off from her blissful moments or love-objects with which she would establish narcissistic identification, thus, she can no longer achieve a meaningful touch with the outside world. Being left alone with unactualized hopes, unanswered prayers, loss, and death, she is lost amidst a heap of sleepless days shaped by utter darkness, emptiness, and senselessness. Furthermore, as evidenced in her reproachful address to Pollyanna, she gives up all her hopes for a romantic love or for an answer to her prayers. This study discusses the extra/non-linguistic pain of a female poetic persona in Madak’s “The Last Letter to Pollyanna” with the aim of reflecting how the loss of an idealized, beloved object creates blockages in the chain of desire when it is not replaced with a new one that will act as a substitute, thereby leading in some sense to the metaphorical death of the mourning subject, as well, given that an active desire lies at the core of a meaningful existence.