This article discusses some of the themes and implications of Lilith’s story. After setting the figure of Lilith in an historical context of Sumerian demonology and first millennium CE Babylonian midrash, we reflect on the current critical, feminist, postcolonial, and poetic up-take of this curious tale of Adam’s first wife. We consider how Lilith’s story appears in these readings, woven through migrated narratives of loss and trauma drawn from widely different communities, as a thread of ghostly witness to suffering and resilience within the everyday lives of women and others who have been bound by heteropatriarchal and colonial tropes and traditions, to the materiality of the body in birth, vulnerability to violence and death. Briefly illustrating Lilith as expressed in George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), we draw on the work of Gayatri Spivak and Mayra Rivera to explore contemporary traces of Lilith’s presence in the writings ofAlicia Ostriker and, especially, Trinidadian poet, Shivanee Ramlochan. In reference to Ramlochan’s debut collection, Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (2017) we consider how Lilith is used to challenge these limiting tropes and traditions, giving value to complex identities and material existences that resist efforts to impose silence or contest memories that trouble and unsettle.

中文翻译：

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莉莉丝的幽灵：令人难忘的见证故事和希瓦尼·拉姆洛坎的后殖民诗歌

本文讨论了莉莉丝故事的一些主题和含义。在将莉莉丝的形象置于苏美尔恶魔学和公元第一个千年巴比伦米德拉什的历史背景中之后，我们反思了当前对亚当第一任妻子的这个奇怪故事的批判性、女权主义、后殖民主义和诗意的接受。我们考虑莉莉丝的故事如何出现在这些阅读材料中，通过来自广泛不同社区的关于失去和创伤的迁移叙述交织在一起，作为对受异父权制和殖民主义束缚的女性和其他人日常生活中苦难和复原力的幽灵般的见证比喻和传统，出生时身体的物质性，易受暴力和死亡的影响。简要说明乔治麦克唐纳的莉莉丝（1895）中表达的莉莉丝，我们借鉴 Gayatri Spivak 和 Mayra Rivera 的作品来探索莉莉丝在艾丽西亚·奥斯特里克（Alicia Ostriker），尤其是特立尼达诗人希瓦尼·拉姆洛坎（Shivanee Ramlochan）的著作中的当代踪迹。参考 Ramlochan 的首个系列，《人人都知道我是一个鬼魂》（2017 年），我们考虑了莉莉丝如何被用来挑战这些限制性的比喻和传统，赋予复杂的身份和物质存在以价值，这些身份和物质存在抵制强加沉默的努力或争夺困扰和困扰的记忆不安。