Pealing back the meaning
Sitting alone in my bedroom, suffering with COVID-19, I was pleased to receive a knock on my door from a neighbour. He was delivering a marginally belated birthday gift to ease the isolation of isolation. The gift in question was a collection of translated poems by Yehuda Amichai, a man I'd not heard of before. I like a lot of the poems: they're witty, down-to-earth, sometimes almost prosaic in their bluntness; many strongly objectivise women, however, in a sickeningly explicit way. Reading one poem, The Figure of a Jewish Father , I was struck by this line: '...And at evening // he hears church bells rejoicing the plight of Jews.' (p. 97) The idea of church bells as an instrument of Christian hegemony is not something I had considered before. This may seem odd from someone who has lived for the past couple of years in central Oxford, a city where every 15 minutes one is reminded where the nearest church is. But the pealing of bells is most often a call to prayer, not