They say that those who learn their own Λanguage can only negotiate. My terms are a magic trick from Old French taxer, from Latin taxare ‘to censure, charge, compute’, perhaps from Greek tassein, ‘fix’ what it is and what its limits are, what it is like, the opposite of who I am.
Electric Sarcasm
Dimitra Ioannou
December 2020
Electric Sarcasm is a book of urgent and intelligent address.
Vahni Capildeo
In Electric Sarcasm, language is linked to money and debt in a seemingly perpetual state of negotiations. Language is being colonized as much as it colonizes the subject. How negotiations are being carried? What the bearers of meaning do not say? What kinds of language negotiations can generate? Dimitra Ioannou explores language as a response to hegemonic things, and a need to articulate and concretize suppressed meanings.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.
About the Author
Dimitra Ioannou experiments with narrative or anti-narrative forms in various media (language, photography, publications). Her long poem, “How Poems-Cities,” was commissioned by the Onassis Cultural Centre (2018) for the Radio_ OCC series. She has had poems published in Stand, Splinter, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, ZARF, DATABLEED, Tears in the Fence, Litmus, and Blackbox Manifold among others. Her photos and (video)poems have been exhibited in group shows in Greece. She is author of the experimental novella Soy Sea (Futura, Athens) and editor of the poetry and art journal A) GLIMPSE) OF). She has translated contemporary radical poets from English into Greek. She is based in Athens.
Praise
Many writers are called 'relentless.' Dimitra Ioannou truly deserves this accolade. Electric Sarcasm is a book of urgent and intelligent address. This work is shaken by incredulity at the falsifying systems, and systematic falsifications, which immerse us no less in financial precarity than in weaponized plague. Yet it is shaken, and shakes, like an earthquake. With each prose piece, etymological transformation, or isolate ritual, you feel the foreshock of poem as event and anticipate the aftershock of poem as analysis even while you are in the shocking midst of poem as anger and lament. The plurilingualism and etymological wit by which English, French, and Greek flow into each other becomes a holding, if not a healing, for Ioannou is able to invoke the competing political and cultural freight and status of each language's worldview. Her text moves on with the devastating nimbleness of a being that knows what it is to live well and with a sense of continuity, yet which feels compelled to overwrite itself as a fragment, sometimes in order to make durational sense of this absurd moment of competing histories and precarious futures. This book is darkly enjoyable, abyssal, and clarifying. I am in awe of how it bodies forth our time.
Vahni Capildeo
In Electric Sarcasm, Dimitra Ioannou tells the story of 23 workers in Thessaloniki who, since 2013, have seized the means of production by taking over a 25,000 square foot factory—in the process, Ioannou offers insightful glimpses into the aftermath of post-bailout Greece. By hurling readers straight to the heart of economic chaos, myth, language, bodies, miracles, debt and poverty, she spells out the terms of our shared ruin. At times the book abounds in Steinian play; at others, it performs a clear-eyed analysis of the wreckage: “If the Troika’s ambition is to become speed, then the political establishment’s ambition is to exceed the social, thus becoming the seller of souls, and common land.” Fiercely capturing this new topos, which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, Ioannou’s poetry is intimately attuned to the failures and possibilities of the contemporary.
Sandra Simonds
In poetry that has its place alongside work from writers like Anne Boyer or Sean Bonney, Ioannou breaks open the weird and pulverizing play of scales that allows power to hide its violence in the shuffling of macro and micro, massive and singular.
Jeremy Allan Hawkins
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-51-0
Pamphlet
Staple-bound. 40 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: 2020 Pamphlet Series