“The Body that Crumbled”

Mizrahi Men and the Writing of Poetic Anatomy

Abstract

This article, the first of two, studies the multiple ways in which the human body participates in the wider political project called “ethnicity, ” as a locus of its invented and received cultural meaning. In particular, the poetry of Mizrahi writers such as Erez Bitton, Roni Somek, Eli Bachar, and Peretz-Dror Banai (Israelis of Middle Eastern, North African origin) makes a strong case for a quantitative analysis of body references, frequently evoked in the poems, alluding to a specific posture and bodily situation. Once I sketched a collective body of this poetic anatomy, I identified specific issues of fragmentation, particularization and dismemberment; exploring the ability of poetic language to articulate cultural differences, textual resistance, internalized violence, or selfidentification. The fact that male and female poets construct dramatically different bodily models demanded that I discuss each of them independently in two separate articles.