Cesaire, Hilst's Open Window, & 'pooping back and forth, forever'
[note: moving back and forth between the 1939 edition, Wesleyan 2013, & the revised edition, Wesleyan 2001, but using the latter's pagination]
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“The position of each part within this whole: that is, the acknowledged validity of each specific Plantation yet at the same time the urgent need to understand the hidden order of the whole—so as to wander there without getting lost.”
Glissant, from Poetics of Relation pg. 131
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I have a lot to say, here, but maybe not all of it can or should be communicated in this space.
Obviously feculence, for me, is important to my understanding of Cesaire's text & language. But before I go there, I think I want to make a kind of false-start, and begin with a reading I must depart from.
I have little experience with the Martinique and the Antille islands, Cesaire's return feels recognizable to me, and might be contiguous with my return to, and repulsion by Detroit - where I was born.
Historically, personally, there's been a lot of shame there for me.
& I think shame plays a very specific role in this text (which is different, but maybe not wholly discontinuous from lyric shame). It's also in close proximity, if not caused by, the speaker's sense of abjection. Here, not just the feeling of abjection caused by being confronted with one’s own death, but of being confronted by the death apparatus of colonialism itself.
Self-disassociation and estrangement is unavoidably a part of that apparatus. Just one example:
"the rue Paille, this disgrace,
an appendage repulsive as the private parts of the village which
extends right and left, along the colonial highway...//...it's there that
the sea pours forth its garbage, its dead cats and croaked dogs...the street opens
onto the beach...A blight...its piles of rotting muck, its furtive rumps
relieving themselves, and the sand is black, funereal...
the scum glides over it yelping..." (10-11)
A filth similar to what we've read in Artuad's text, but here the speaker looks on, detached, as if their very disassociation isn't complicit in the apparatus that creates this fetid space. Not just geographically, but literally in the way the speaker utters this textual space into being.
A space both the sea and the speaker utter onto the shore of this poem. This collective textual body: “the vomit of slave ships" -- a fluidic body "of no nationality recognized by the chancelleries." A body that "[defies] the craniometer...", and which "was written in the shape of their pelvis."
(28)
I'm interested in this fluidic body whose violence moves back and forth between colonizer and colonized, between an occult occupation and its occult host.
How do we describe this fluid?
I'm reminded of a quote by Toi Derricotte:
"Perhaps 'race' isn't something that locks us into separate groups but flows back and forth between us, equally solid and unreal..."
How does this relate to a scene in Nathelie Djarburg's "The Parade", where a clay clergyman takes a rolling-bin and, maybe comically, beats a series of clay clansman who are strangling a troupe of misshapen black circus workers? What about when they're strangling each other? What about when the clergyman takes his little rolling-pin and rolls-out the dying bodies of these clay black men until they ooze from their hands, legs, and eyes?
What is that non-descript-blue-green-ooze? How do we make meaning of it?
I'm also reminded of something in a film by Miranda July, called "Me and You and Everyone We Know" (2005). There's a scene with a little black boy, maybe 6 or 7, who finds his way into an online sex chatroom on a library computer, and starts a conversation with someone. They don't know what we know. I think most of it goes over the boy's head (or not), but at some point he types that he wants to "poop back and forth forever" with her. The host is confused: Huh?
The boy thinks for a moment, and then reiterates with an emoticon:
))<>((
(By which the host, a white woman it later turns out, is profoundly moved)
I'm interested in this moment, this affect, and the way the fecal, the erotic, and the emotionally intimate converge here, fluidly and, in the film, without anyone trying to rationalize or explain it away.
Maybe this pooping "back and forth" is another model for Genet's wound.
That is, the recognition of the self in the other through a mutual, if asymetric, pain. Cathy Caruth (on Fraud, Tancrid, and trauma's recursive utterance) remarks that trauma arrives as "a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound" (Unclaimed Experience). For Cesaire, this wound can be at once spectral, distended, repeatedly re-entered -- "once and only once, but please let it be once" -- as "first light", as "small hours", or as "daybreak". A porous life, a multitudinous life, each 'measured' by the speaker's "sooty finger span": each 'inert town', each 'plantation', each self, reduced to a "little ellipsoidal nothing..." (14)
Each section of this Cahier, this Notebook, espetially in the numbered 1939 edition, arrive, as they themselves claim, as "non-closure" islands. As with much of South America, whose history is Haroldo de Campos has remarked, "composed of rupture", the Carribean islands are defined by disjuncture, noise, heterogeny, flux, and discontinuity.
This text, like this history, reminds me of another.
In Ronaldo Wilson's Poems of the Black Object (2009), he writes:
To write between something else I recall, or after what is triggered from memory is a place where my narrative disrupts itself, again. To identify with the fractured self, the process of the 'it' forced apart by language, again, is where the self explodes out of the text not by narrative as story...[but] as found photo...[Becoming] by reaching lazily under a bed to find something valuable, or...digging under one object and stumbling on meaning asks: Does this narrative begin in a black hole? Does it create another diasporic space? Is this space black? Is it 'a' black?
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To return to the fecal, Hilda Hilst in her text, The Obscene Madame D, has perhaps one of the most memorable literary rants on the anus I've ever read:
ReplyDelete"Oh Lord, do you have like we do the same fetid hole? Hidden back there,
but recalling itself to you how many times a day...compressed, humble
...but draining all vanity, impossible for man with that luxury in his
back to believe himself to be a sneeze emaneted from the Divine...Oh hole,
are you also there in your Lord? ...Who knows whether you have been dethroned, Lord,
in favor of that hole? Do you hear me? Alters, tapers, lights, lilies, and
all the way on top, an immense giant ring, a cup of granite, some folds sculpted
into marble, an onyx of great beauty, imitations...of ass works of
lyric sculptors. And the specialists say that's where Your most
perfect Presence is, the summum, the samadhi, the big ham,
the dish."
As with Cesaire's beach along the rue Paille, Hilst then 'opens the window', to innumerate the feculence of her poverty:
"...let's see now which sentences are appropriate to speak when I open
the window to [the neighborhood]:
your rotten asses
your unimaginable pestilence
mouths stinking of phlegm and stupidity
enormous behinds waiting their turn. for what? to shit into saucepans
[...]
wormhole in the hollow teeth
the pig's woody
the cow's cunt
your kids paw kneading snot [...]
the piss of squalid tramps splashing the wall
the pee of the peepee of the pipits, the droppings, the livers, listen to
it croon, look at the viper's backside, look at death eating its eyes, look
at the misfortunate one, look at the skeleton licking its digit
[...] I see man. listen listen, I want to tell you this story [...]:
while she was dying the man was fornicating
with whom?
with the maid who was taking care of her. rattles of pleasure and
agony, duettos, scherzos, moderatos, sounds of zithers and saber"
I'm interested in the way the visual arrival of feculence, here, corresponds both to violence, and to a sound scape, and a baroque one. A baroque, interlingual 'carnivalization,' which Haroldo de Campos describes as "a Bahktinian phenomenon par excellence: the ludibrious space of polyphony and of language in convulsion.
(de Campos, 50)
Mirroring Hilst's image-matter arriving through the open window, Cesaire's text employs a similar admittance:
[39-40]
"I accept...I accept...
[...]
my race pitted with blemishes
my race ripe grapes for drunken feet
my queen of spittle and leprocy
my queen of whips and scrofula
my queen of squamae and chloasma
[...]
and the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip
and the four foot high cell
and the spiked carcan
and the hamstring of my runaway audacity
and the fleur de lys (a French emblem) flowing from the red iron into
the fat of my shoulder
[...]
and Monsieur Vaultier Mayencourt's kennel where I barked six poodle months
[...]
and the yaws
the mastiff
the suicide
the promiscuity
the bootkin
the shackles
..."
Obviously this is a turning point in the book, but what I love about this admittance is that it's not just a rupture of language signaling an emotional climax, or a necropastoral paroxysm, but an artistic statement that, like Whitman, Ginsberg, Kim Hyesoon, or Hilda Hilst, opens the window to the fetid/fecal/refuse, admitting "what sentences are appropriate to speak"; admitting the fecal into the ecstatic.
Here, the ecstatic becomes distension, a prolapse, and a radical vulnerability.
ReplyDeletee.g.:
"So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death's-heads. They are not covered with water lilies" -- and yet their photonegative remains -- "My memory has a belt of corpses!" (25)
When opened-up to something as wide as (what Ken Chen has called) "the absolute terror of colonialism...too gargantuan to be represented" this opening, this wound, becomes a site of "sublime trauma", an ecstatic utterance "whose monument deforms our mouths as we speak [it]".
There are even moments of textual distortion where the language arrives still partially-digested or -decomposing, erased and therefore parenthetical, ellipsoidal & wet; still in its goo:
(niggers-are-all-alike, I-tell-you
vices-all-the-vices, believe-you-me
l'odeur-du-negre, ca-fait-pousser-la-canne
rappelez-vous-le-vieux-dicton:
battre-un-negre, and that is nourishment enough.)
[my-fetid-translation-clipping]
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To speak in this mode, feels like a double refusal, one de Campos articulates:
"Literature, in the Colonies as in the Metropolis, was made from literature. Except that in the Colonies, it had the chance to articulate itself as a double difference. The difference of the different." (47)
I'm interested in this in so far as that feels somehow recognizable to me in our current literary climate. More plainly: this sort of feels like an accurate way to describe my involvement with experimental black writing.
Anyway, there's obviously more here, especially this text's relationship to "Artaud Le Momo", but I'll turn over the floor to all of you.
Warm regards,
M
Great job, Madison. Love this. One thing: it's always good to include translators (invisibility/visibility)... The Hilst was, I believe, translated by Nathanael.
ReplyDeleteYes, and thanks Johannes.
ReplyDelete(as an added plug, John Keene's translation of Hilst's collection Letters from a Seducer has a similar, if not more controlled energy)
Also, just wanted to bring in some ideas from previous posts to help charge discussion:
When speaking of Nduka, Trish invoked Derek Walcott, and her comment might also apply here:
..."The Sea is History" reverberates in this lucid space...Nduka incarnates the 'cry' and allows it (and word-sound) to echo through the dimensions, here hovering within an intimate as it reflects aside the unstill waters, a medium of both spiritual buoyancy and inherited scar/holocaust...
--thinking of the abject-racially-charged-violence-fluid I brought up earlier, but also maybe some of the valences water ("pummeling the [island] like a boxer", or where "a woman seems to float belly up in the Capot River", and where "she is only a bundle of sonorous water") takes on in this series.
& what role do bodies play in this textual landscape? How is this poem-body similar or dissimilar to the landscape of Area X?
Wondering how the vagabond plays in the voice of this poem. Back to Daniel Tiffany: “The Sirens’ call opens up a space of unmappable promiscuities, which exemplify a poetics of nonrelational relations, of solipsistic communicability.” Is Cesaire's method of communication solipsistic? Is it, as Artaud declaims, a series of "personal poems, benefitting those who create them much more than those who read them." Is it "closed, egoistic, and personal art"?
How does a "poetics of nonrelational relations" position itself in relation to disjuncture, here?
Other roles of voice? abjection? the secret?
With warmth,
-M
Thanks for instigating, Madison: You’ve established the concepts I was having difficulty pinning down in any articulate way.
ReplyDeleteSomething I wanted to pick up on in your post was your paragraph on shame and how “Here, not just the feeling of abjection caused by being confronted with one’s own death, but of being confronted by the death apparatus of colonialism itself.” That relationship among shame, abjection, and colonialism was manifest most clearly for me in Cesaire’s encounter on the street car, the majority of which I include here (in two sections):
“He was trying to leave behind, on this grimy bench, his gigantic legs and his trembling famished boxer hands. And everything had left him, was leaving him. His nose which looked like a drifting peninsula and even his negritude discolored as a result of untiring tawing. And the tawer was Poverty. A big unexpected lop-eared bat whose claw marks in his face had scabbed over into crusty islands. Or rather, Poverty was, like a tireless worker, laboring on some hideous cartouche. One could easily see how that industrious and malevolent thumb had kneaded bumps into his brow, bored two bizarre parallel tunnels in his nose, overexaggerated his lips, and in a masterpiece of caricature, planed, polished and varnished the tiniest cutest little ear in all creation” (29)
“Poverty, without any question, had knocked itself out to finish him off.
It had dug the socket, had painted it with a rouge of dust mixed with rheum.
It had stretched an empty space between the solid hinge of the jaw and bone of an old tarnished cheek. Had planted over it the small shiny stakes of a two- or three-day beard. Had panicked his heart, bent his back.
And the whole thing added up perfectly to a hideous nigger, a grouchy nigger, a melancholy nigger, a slouched nigger, his hands joined in prayer on a knobby stick. A nigger shrouded in an old threadbare coat. A comical and ugly nigger, with some women behind me sneering at him.” (30)
Such an encounter naturally reminded me of Genet’s encounter with the train passenger in a number of ways, though the crucial difference between the two is how Genet’s observations are one of recognition and self-awareness, whereas Cesaire views this man as a culminating symptom of colonialism, poverty, and delusional bourgeois rationalization. Further, it’s the intense “zoom” onto the man’s face in Cesaire’s text that results in the surrealist-inflected grotesqueness that illustrates Cesaire’s position, which Madison’s spot on in labeling “self-disassociation and estrangement” elsewhere in his post.
A stray thought:
Madison covers the degradation at work in the text and bringing in Me and You and Everyone We Know was awesome and unexpected. The ))<>(( emoticon and its affect is so strikingly different from the smiling poop emoji we know now: whereas the latter almost exclusively acts as a ploy for easy laughs or as a technique of self-censorship, ))<>(( operates, as suggested, out of a complex array of profound abjection, the erotic, and intimacy. To that dynamic, I’d also like to add another detail from that movie: how the white woman in the film, while cybering with the kid, also writes in response to the emoticon (I think?) that she is fingering her asshole and how “It feels so good.” I’m not sure what to make of that additional tidbit in terms of what you’ve laid out for us, but if you and/or anyone else can fit it into this developing schema, I’d be fascinated to hear it.
Yeah! I remember that. The woman actually ends up wanting to meet him afterwards, which is totally bizarre and wonderful. Here's the whole scene/arc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQoJo81lujk
Delete(I mixed-up some details, but the gist is the same.)
Cesaire’s poetry leads readers through the “morne” to resist the colonial and touristic view of his “native land” by revealing the human condition of the “morne”. The “morne” is personified as a diseased figure in this passage (p.4):
ReplyDelete“At the end of daybreak, the morne crouching before bulimia on the outlook for tuns and mills, slowly vomiting out its human fatigue, the morne solitary and its shed blood, the morne bandaged in shade, the morne and ditches of fear, the morne and its great hands of wind.”
The morne abjects itself via not only shedding blood and exuding the physical substances from its body, but also vomiting out its “human fatigue”, which is its emotional state. Despite its “solitary” presence with “ditches of fear” and its appearance of desolation, the morne is capable of revival, and empowerment. Its wounds recover in shade that reduce the damage of “a cursed venereal sun”. Its “great hands of wind” undermines the heat of sun and circulate to bring itself out of isolation. This passage in p.6 describes a concrete scene in the morne:
“And this joy of former times making me aware of my present poverty, a bumpy road plunging into a hollow where it scatters a few shacks; an indefatigable road charging at full speed a morne at the top of which it brutally quicksands into a pool of clumsy houses, a road foolishly climbing, recklessly descending, and the carcass of wood, which I call "our house," comically perched on minute cement paws, its coiffure of corrugated iron in the sun like a skin laid out to dry, the dining room, the rough floor where nail heads gleam, the beams of pine and shadow across the ceiling, the spectral straw chairs, the gray lamp light, the glossy flash of cockroaches in a maddening buzz…”
The immediate focus to “a pool of clumsy houses” as “an indefatigable road charges at full speed” deconstructs the “morne” as a term for white colonizers to associate with certain attitudes of volcanoes + beautiful mountains, and uncovers the poverty that colonialism disregards. Despite the traces of negative impact of colonial conquest visible in their living conditions (“our house” resembling “carcass of wood”), gleaming nail heads and “the beams of pine and shadow across the ceiling” impart a sense of hope and serenity that coexists with the anxiety which poverty brought to the morne (“cockroaches in a maddening buzz”).
I am most familiar with Cesaire's theory, mainly his discourse on colonialism, and so it was interesting to read his poetry as an enactment of those postcolonial concerns ("aged poverty", occupation, stunted growth of economy and culture, all the effects of a morally diseased conqueror). This collection reminds me, in its opening sweep, of his rewriting of Shakespeare's Tempest re-set in the Caribbean and engaging with similar statements on African diaspora. The first pages of "Notebook of a Return to a Native Land" paint a scenescape framed with anticipation, with the insistent line beginning each trill of depictions: "At the end of daybreak..." Anticipation stemming from invoking daybreak (the beginning of a new age) but just as insistently deadened with the loom of the end. With this line, Cesaire seems to create the particular atmosphere of the colonized land to which he returns. It is a doomed land, with an omnipresent danger of eradication (volcanoes will explode, the waters will rake the island, and nothing will be left for the birds to pick at).
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of Cesaire's "A Tempest," there are few stage directions but one overarching adjustment is: "Ambiance of a psychodrama. The actors enter singly, at random, and each chooses for himself a mask at his leisure." I see a similar effect in the opening pages of the poems, that anarchic placement of faces. On the first page, the cop's descriptors are renegotiated (lousy pig, flunky of order, cock-chafer, evil grigri, etc.), then in rapid succession there is Antilles, the martyrs, the aged life/poverty/silence, etc. The speaker is strangely detached from these descriptions, perhaps because it is a return and therefore a disillusionment/disassociation, which gives the cinematic scope of a voice-over panning rather than actually walking through and describing the town. Both of these qualities in the speaker give the opening pages that atmosphere of a deadened land while also implicating the body in relation to other bodies and the town.
The animality of the town inhabitants ("grave animality of a peasant," "you lousy pig," "hyena/panther-men," enact an effect of colonization that Cesaire points out in his Discourse on Colonialism: "The colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the
habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an
animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal." In this "boomerang effect" of colonization affecting both perpetrator and victim, I think of Homi Bhabha's colonial imitation and mimicry. For those not in last semester's translation workshop, where we read this essay, this comes from "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in his book The Location of Culture, pp.85-92 : "I want to turn to this process by which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and 'partial' representation rearticulates; the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence." The degeneration of selfhood into animality (and degenerating through the boomerang effects of mimicry and loss of identity) in such an aftermath of colonization is a strong theme in this collection of poems.
Just to close, the most exciting part of this book was when the language began to break down and self-negotiate - "Words? Ah yes, words!....Who and what are we?....voum rooh oh / voum rooh oh.... But who misleads my voice? who grates my voice?" (pages 22-26 in my version).
Pt. 1 ''poetry equals insurrection''
ReplyDeletei'm re-reading a couple of Cesaire's 'manifestos', :Maintenir [uphold, keep up in hand] la Poésie, and Poesie et connaissance [knowing]. For him (as evidenced in these writings) it seems that his path into surrealism was based on his apprehending of the Image as a vehicle for intrication; it feels reductive to attempt to describe this (forgive my clumsy language), but essentially: upon arriving at the nucleus of an image all things Re-Become possible. The energy of judgment entails with it an energy of limitation, of flattening. As a counter-balance, it is (my translation) "via the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the image which up/over-turns all law and thought, that 'man' might finally break through the barrier". And it is at this point where the organically paralleling impulses of Surrealism (capital S) and Cesaire's work find spiritual/intellectual/political shared space (common ground). "There is no more A in image A: you for whom so many raspberried laughs//are a flock of tame lambs". In this 'image', the word I translate as 'laughter' could easily be reef, and it bounces into sweetbread with the invocation of agneau (=lamb) so closely tied to it. This Purposefully activated disorientation, for Cesaire, generates an ultimate gesture toward the source, toward ultimate truth: a complete incorpration by the Poet of interior and exterior at once.
A couple of dregs pulling up (paraphrasings):
--a poet is the offspring birthed from man (who is inferior and does not flower) and tree (superior and rooting and profounding). Result: poet's birthright is savior of humanity. Thus poetry is a blossoming, a vertiginous distention; the ''grandest'' of it moves from the human into the cosmic.
--richness of the image irrevocably twinned with the poverty of judgment
Cesaire seems to be frictioning against the "I" in a way paralleling Artaud's frictioning; a leaning-into-'I' in order to desecrate, mutilate, transcend, escape, and implode it; in order to incorporate a true all-ness. Here he describes what he considers to be the raison d'etre of the Poet-as-conduit of ultimate truth:
"to defend oneself from the social via the creation of a zone of incandescence, below which, on the inside of which, flowers the unheard of flower of the "I", in a terrible secure-ness. To strip material existence from everything in the silence and high frozen fires of Humor; that it might (via the creation of a zone of Fire) that it might (by the creation of a zone of frozen silence), Conquer via revolt the most evident piece wherein the Self self-sustains[...] [And we poets] hear/understand, loyal to Poetry, the need to uphold its livingness: livingness like an ulcer, like a panic, images of catastrophes and of freedom's fall and deliverance, devouring endlessly the liver of the world."
Pt. 2
DeleteIn this same essay Cesaire grips onto and re-returns to Breton's "it is not fear of madness that will force us to put the flag of imagination at half-mast". The Native Land being returned to is not merely physical, but spiritual, imaginary, psychic, emotional. The absolute re-fusion of a schismed self. The Ultimate-ing Acknowledgement of the many schisms, the incorporation of schisms
the incorporation of between-spaces,
the obliteration of judgment's guardrails, of the System's, of Patriarchy's, of Oppression's limitations.
Madness---the same madness opened-into by Artaud and Alllllll our near-and-dears---Re-Becomes the vehicle to liberty. YAAAAY!!!!
DISCLAIMER (all of these quotes have been my translations, take 'em with like 50 grains of salt each)
DeleteThanks for all this translating!
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteA violent light, seen from a black hole. “I accept” …
Delete“And my special geography too; the world map made for my own use, not tinted with the arbitrary colors of scholars, but with the geometry of my spilled blood, I accept […] I accept, I accept it all” … (pg 43)
To consider geography and self, self-as-geography … "special geography" ... Constantly turning … Where is the speaker's agency? I, at least, experience an agency in the speaker's confident fluidity of self, as complicated / deepened by the natural environment. A "metaphysical I," to turn toward Lasky / Madison's poetics.
“And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human pulse stops at the gates of the barracoon; that we are walking compost hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton and they would brand us with red hot irons and we would sleep in our excrement and they would sell us on the town square and an ell of English cloth and salted meat from Ireland cost less than we did, and this land was calm, tranquil repeating that the spirit of the Lord was in its acts […]
I hear coming up from the hold the enchained curses, the gasps of the dying, the noise of someone thrown into the sea…the baying of a woman in labor…the scrape of fingernails seeking throats…the flouts of the whip…the seething of the vermin amid the weariness…” (28)
To consider the screaming of centuries alchemized into the form of a dove, rising in “motionless veerition.” To consider salvation from time and its contents. To consider torture within the temporal, systemic, colonial, festering. The absence of relief or resolution.
To consider movement from a many-voiced screaming to a singular, personal transformation. The screaming still echoing:
"From staring too long at trees I have become a tree and my
long tree feet have dug in the grund large venom sacs high
cities of bone
from brooding too long on the Congo
I have become a Congo resounding with forests and rivers
where the whip cracks like a great banner
the banner of a prophet
where the water goes
likouala-likouala*
where the angerbolt hurls its greenish axe forcing the boars of
putrefaction to the lovely wild edge of the nostrils." (18-19)
I say “to consider” because I’m not done considering, and don’t want to write anything conclusive here.
For me, the major resonance within and after reading this bookpoem is the multiplicitous dynamism between landscape and self-scape/interiority, self-assertion (not dissimilar from "Third Millennium Heart," but also incomparable), fluidity of self, self-mastery.
To consider the endless implications/resonances of “acceptance,” and the movements toward self-assertion therein:
"and far from the palatial sea that foams beneath the suppurating syzygy of blisters, miraculously lying in the despair of my country […] Suddenly now strength and life assail me like a bull […], now all the veinlets are bustling with new blood"— (pg 43-44)
re: Trish-- "upon arriving at the nucleus of an image all things Re-Become possible"
DeleteYeah. There's a lot here--the text of the Cahiers dilates, billows, contracts, sheds, bleeds, spills, shits, soi-même, partout, nulle part. Somewhere I read/heard that Césaire wrote this in France, just after having returned from his first return visit to Martinique since his departure to attend lycée in Paris. This contextual framing--the idea that this poem took its inscription from the afterburner of the experience, at the distance of remove--is interesting to to me because it scratches at the question of the space/situatedness of the text—how do the movements of “returning” and remembering condition the possibility of the poem?
I go to the text. Repetition serves a multifarious and vital purpose in building, charging, and evacuating the poem at turns. “At the end of the small hours” (reading the Berger/Bostock translation published by Archipelago; I see that the Eshleman/Wesleyan version has this refrain as “At the end of first light”)—this intonation structurates the entire poem, ebbing, mutating, recurring, figuring what it frames as the dregs of a night, the traces left at a temporal and existential limit. And later and throughout, the rhythmic “voom roh oh” incites a series of magical acts that calls into the poem charmed snakes, conjured dead, physical transformations, transubstantiation, flight—only to be halted by the “filthy remnant of a world” that literally obstructs the speaker’s voice, “stuffing my throat with a thousand bamboo hooks. A thousand sea-urchin needles.” (38)
I’m drawn to and repulsed (meaning a sense of being determinatively occluded from the “meaning” of the text) by the corporeality of it. Kim gestures toward the instance of the text breaking down and self-interrogating:
“Words? We are handling
quarters of the world, we are marrying
delicious continents, we are breaking down s
teaming doors,
words, ah yes, words! but
words of fresh blood, words which are
tidal waves and erysipelas
malarias and lavas and bush-fires
and burning flesh
and burning cities…” (40, Berger translation)
This transmutating materiality of the language, here signified, and in other locations of the text *enacted* by operations such as repetition, accumulation, rhetorical opacity. Language here leaps clear over its typical assignation as denotative/descriptive and burrows into the flesh, working into it: “I break open the yolk-bag / that separates me from myself”
And we’ve said so much, and there is so much more, but I’ll leave it here, propped open...