Broken Light on the Ground of Home: Non-Being and Diasporic Trauma in the Parmenidean Poem

Abstract:Beginning from the Herodotean narration of the evacuation of the Ionian city Phokaia and the subsequent diaspora and foundation of Hyele (Elea), “Broken Light on the Ground of Home” traces some movements of that traumatic history within the Parmenidean Song of Being. Xenophanean poetry opens a view onto trauma rendered by displacement under bellicose conditions and forms a link to the Parmenidean poem on the ground of Hyele. Two themes in the poem outline the diasporic movements and traumas of the Phokaian-Hyelean population: first, the dynamics of similarity and difference; second, the turnings between memory and forgetting. The interplay of memory and forgetting animates much of the poem and can be read as one way diasporic trauma tremors in the Parmenidean Song of Being.