Double Move

Non enim erat tunc.
There was no then.

—St. Augustine (epigraph to M. NourbeSe Philip's “Sal,” from Zong!)

In my earlier post (here), I began where I was, trying to ground—physically, epistemologically—some experimental work. I read here as a kind of vortex, overlaying conceptual and physical places, a past and a present, in the ongoing production of meaning. I thought about the ways experimental texts emerge from, and illuminate, communities into which they gather the reader and writer. And I used George Berkeley, whom I cited as a philosopher, to wonder how a community of observation (or literary production) might ensure and maintain a reality narrative.

Yet this city takes its name not from Berkeley’s metaphysics, but in recognition of his poem, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1726/1754), the popularity of which was as intense as the commonplaces it assembled. Under a banner of serene meliorism, the poem makes no effort to extricate “arts” or “learning” from the imperial control it praises throughout; its last stanza begins with the famous clarion, “Westward the course of Empire takes its way,” endlessly quoted to support the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It is a poem that grants agency chiefly to abstractions, and frames action in the future passive, “shall be sung”—an erasure of, and an alibi for, means and crimes at the end of history. In my ear its idealism echoes, strangely, a much more internally tensioned poem: Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773). Her poem, too, reads like an alibi, but like sugar its whitened, “refin’d” exterior seethes with erased Black pain. When Wheatley writes “Twas mercy brought me…,” I hear enslaved beneath “brought,” profit haunting “mercy.”

Wheatley’s concerns and century pulse sharp in ours. I’ve been reading Phillip B. Williams’s Mutiny, which remixes a brilliant variety of forms and bodies of theory as it examines histories that ripple out in the wake of the Middle Passage. One visual poem replaces the bodies of enslaved Black people that crowd the hold of the frequently reproduced, eighteenth-century “slave ship icon” with the word “ditto”—a complex gesture that points at the irrecoverable identities of those lost, the effort to animate the archive with affective force, and, I think, the conditions of legibility Black art is expected to meet in “liberal” institutional spaces. Throughout Mutiny, Williams creates a kind of temporal moiré effect, his lines dizzyingly refracting the wake of this haunted archive. His experimental techniques (“I slept in the Fifth House of Modernism…”) use the jump-cut surprises of collage to expose indemnifying continuities: slits cut in the twenty-first century reveal, dizzyingly, the eighteenth, the nineteenth.

Williams’s book knows, like Wheatley’s, like Essex Hemphill's, that to be here is already to be elsewhere, that the safest grounds are often the most fugitive: those Katherine McKittrick calls “demonic.” Listening to these books’ claims about the where of poetry, the community, and the self, I had to wrestle with my own place, how as a white writer my own articulations of “here” and “now” implicated me in the histories of violent clearance and colonization those words occlude. (What is “now” if not a refusal of “then”?) So the following observations are presented in the spirit they were written, humbly, and with curiosity. I write from the perspective of someone trying to learn about a tradition without pretending to inhabit it—someone, rather, whose life has been smoothed by the same forces these works indict. These observations fail when they fail to register that.

*

Natalie Cecire has argued, in Experimental, that the white avant-garde investment in a now of political change, and in language as an objective technology, was so intertwined with a developmental, first-world now that its ability to critique, for instance, U.S. imperialism was severely hamstrung—it depended, like Berkeley’s poem, on an implicit progress narrative and the ablation of subjectivity. Books like Williams’s, like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s Age of Phillis and Tyehimba Jess’s Olio contest both those terms. They recognize cannily that modernist and avant-garde techniques remain powerful (i.e., institutionally valorized and legible) tools, and that to use them is to reckon with what Cathy Park Hong identified in 2014 as the overtly “racist tradition” they emerge from, which heroizes a raceless idea of language and form and dismisses positionalities as incidental.

Zong! #19

 

 

                                     drowned the law

 

                                                                      their thirst &

                                                                      the evidence

 

                                                                      obliged the frenzy

 

                                     in themselves

                                     in the sea

 

                                                                     ground the justify

                                                                     in the necessity of

On some level, these poets show us that the master’s tools, used with entire self-consciousness, can dismantle the master’s house. Philip’s Zong! is a case in point. As she confronts the one-sided silence of the legal archive, which reproduces what it purports to adjudicate, the gradient of power, violence, and literacy that culminated in the Zong massacre, Philip deploys such tools to pry apart the chains of written logic. Hers is a deeply epistemic intervention: filling the page with space, challenging the reader to articulate broken vocables (“waa / wa wa / wwwa / ter”) she asks us to feel the terrible volume of that papery silence. Audibly at stake in a zeugma like “their thirst & / the evidence” is the distance between the abstracted reasoning a written language permits, and the bodily need from which it is always translating, from which it flees. We feel in our gut earthy Germanic roots undercutting the flexible Latinate constructions that outmaneuver them; slowing down time, Philip lets this central tension of the English language, this rehearsal of the history of conquest, break itself apart. So the fortress of racist logic is shaken into paratactic shards of voice, inhabitable by those illiterate victims as by the performers that continue to embody Philip’s text. (A Youtube search illuminates some of the ways it’s been rendered, many of which, incorporating dance and chant, affirm Evie Shockley’s 2013 reminder that while Zong! has been loudly claimed as “conceptual” it owes as much to “postcolonial Caribbean traditions.”) At the same time, the hollow, slithery legal language, rearranged, is allowed to self-indict: the mirror is Philip’s hammer.

Such loosening of the archive is an act with profound ontological stakes; as liberation-oriented thinkers like Sylvia Wynter remind us, that corpus continues to govern daily life, and controls which bodies register as people. Some of the recent books I love most complement that creation of space with acts of filling and texturing it, rejecting the “Cold War détente” (Hong) between valorized ‘cerebral’ experimental work and ‘soft’ or accessible lyric. In the poetry of Layli Long Soldier, Robin Coste Lewis, Solmaz Sharif, and Claire Meuschke, experience—emotional, sexual, conversational, physical—swells in to fill the quiet carved from the archive. (Sharif: “a wall cleared of nails / for the ghosts to walk through”). If the lyric “I” and “you” are notoriously porous, serially inhabitable, in such work those pronouns offer places of rest not only for future readers, but also for those whose lives were devalued or erased in their own time: invitations mailed to the dead.