_______________________________________________ | | | RRRRRR IIIIII FFFFFF // TTTTTTTT | | RR RR II FF // TT | | RRRRRR II FFFF // TT | | RR RR II FF // TT | | RRR RR IIIIII FFF // TT | | | _______________________________________________ | RRRRRR EEEEVVV VVVIIIIII EEEEWWW W WWW | | RR RR EE VVV VVV II EE WW WWW WW | | RRRRRR EEE VVVVV II EEE WWWW WWWW | | RR RR EE VVV II EE WW WW | | RRR RR EEEE V IIIIIIIEEEE W W | ___________________________________________________________________________ CHRIS FUNKHOUSER ON NATHANIEL MACKEY'S RECENT WORK ___________________________________________________________________________ EDITORS: Kenneth Sherwood and Loss Pequen~o Glazier Version 2.1 ISSN#: 1070-0072 Winter 1994 ___________________________________________________________________________ Copyright (c) 1994. All rights revert to author(s) upon publication. Texts distributed by RIF/T or e-poetry@ubvm may not be republished for profit in any form without express consent of author(s) and notification of the editors, but may be freely circulated among individuals for personal use provided that this copyright statement is included. Public archiving of complete issues only, in electronic or print forms, is permissible provided that no access fee is charged. ___________________________________________________________________________ < C H R I S F U N K H O U S E R > Location and Dis - ghosts: Nathaniel Mackey's Recent Work _School of Udhra_. City Lights Books, 1993. 87 pp. $9.95. _Djbot Baghostus's Run_. Sun & Moon Press, 1993. 204 pp. $12.95. _Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_. Cambridge University Press, 1993. 313 pp. $54.95. (This review will appear in _The Little Magazine, Vol. 20_) "I an I alone/a trod tru creation" -Mikey Smith In Dogon mythology, the egg within which primordial events transpired was divided into two twin placenta, each containing a pair of twin Nommo, who were the offspring of Amma (the first personalized being). Each twin, spiritually, was composed of both male and female principles, though in bodily form was either male or female. In this tradition, earth got off to a bad start: in one placenta the male Nommo, Yurugu, became impatient for birth and forced his way out of the egg prematurely. He tore off a piece of his placenta and with it came hurtling down through space out of the primordial egg. The fragment of placenta became earth, though Amma's plans for creation had been seriously disorganized. The earth was now provided with only a predominantly male soul, which Amma recognized as incomplete and imperfect. Eventually the son recognized this impurity and realized he could not rule the planet without his twin soul. He climbed back to heaven to find her but it was already too late, Amma had handed over Yurugu's twin soul to the other half of the placenta and she could not be found. From that time he has vainly searched for her. Yurugu, returning to earth, began to procreate in his own placenta, that is with his own mother. From this wretched act there came into existence single, incomplete beings sometimes known as the andoumboulou. The twinning and tearing motifs we see in the Dogon cosmology provide one of the recurring themes throughout the writings of Nathaniel Mackey. In addition to some twenty-five "Song[s] of the Andoumboulou," eight of which appear in _School of Udhra_, there are other indicative passages in the "Outlantish" section _School of Udhra_: Saw satisfaction in a bed of yeses calling it eelpot. Steeped indignation. Threat. Rhythmic imprint. Wishful, whispered, "Be my twin." Calling it raw, too crude a truth to admit. Desperate. Unrequited. Thicketed rush which if we could we'd outrun... Called it caustic, luminous brew we sip wincing, seed finally free of its husk albeit broken, world an erotic inch out of reach The passage envisions a bonding ceremony, and a broken seed's release--ritual activity, an unlost pact. _Djbot Baghostus's Run_, the second installment of Mackey's ongoing prose work "From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate," begins with a letter by the protagonist N. describing a rehearsal of the Mystic Horn Society (N.'s band) in which the women in the band protest against the consideration of a male rather than a female in the group's search for a new drummer. Dressed identically, the women arrive at the rehearsal together and, before launching into a powerful duet, hand out cards to the men present proclaiming, 'Halve Not, Will Travel.' N., speculating on the scene unfolding around him, muses "...the card had said 'Halve Not.' Not 'have-' but 'halve': meaning, one took it, to divide into two equal parts, to share equally." N. continues, "To what extent, one wondered, did the preemptive concert and catechism rolled into one amount to an arraignment, a charge of inequality, a threat of succession." In this passage twinning and tearing motifs work both separately and together. Eventually the group finds a woman drummer named Drenette who, according to N., when responding to a romantic composition Penguin (a male group member) pens for her, "changed the rhythm he suggested to something more difficult, more complex, polyrhythmic. 'It's about splitting yourself in two,' she said." Parallel to the twinning and tearing metaphors run a series of images of location and dislocation throughout Mackey's work. "From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate" locates itself in African, Caribbean, Jazz and other cultures whose roots are largely ignored in the United States. The ongoing reports on the doings on N., the Mystic Horn Society, and Jarred Bottle (the band's phantom member) illuminate the music, ritual, and other communal aspects of these people in the music and other conversations between band members. Alternatively, there are definite moments where we read the enormity of the pervasive dislocation of that culture within the dominant culture. In a chapter entitled "Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Occasion," from his _Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_, Mackey describes the situation faced by many of those living in "third" world countries today: 'So on this ground,/write.../on this ground/on this broken ground,' writes Edward Kamau Brathwaite. These lines have to do with the Caribbean condition--fragmentation, dislocation, and so forth. The 'broken ground' is the island topography itself, the separation of the islands from one another as though they were remnants of some larger, sundered whole. It is also the ground of other breakages and a metaphor for such breakages--the broken, alienated labor of slave and descendants of slaves, the ecological breakdown or depletion of the soil due to decades of mono-crop agriculture, the break, albeit partial, with old world homelands, old world histories, old world continuities and 'coherencies,' the further breakage brought about by the collision of cultures under circumstances of enmity and coercion. These lines also have to do with writing, and if one calls to mind the Derridean idea that the very possibility of writing signifies and is indebted to a cosmogonic severance known as differance, one is prepared to understand 'this broken ground' in the way that Harris does. The Caribbean's brokenness participates in a larger-than-local problematic, the universal human predicament Harris calls 'cosmic frailty', an ontological estrangement or weakness the Caribbean writer, having no historically sustained 'coherency' as insulation or defense, is in a position to confess. The problem of large-scale emigration from the Caribbean, for example, the fact that every year an enormous number of West Indians leave home in search of economic, educational, cultural, and other opportunities abroad, is not simply a manifestation of the dependency situation peculiar to the Caribbean but is endowed by Harris, himself an emigrant now living in England, with suggestions of a universal condition of exile. In Idiot Nameless's 'Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile' in the _Eye of the Scarecrow_ then: The education of freedom...begins with a confession of the need to lose the base concretion men seek to impose when they talk of one's 'native' land (or another's) as if it were fixed and anchored in place. In this age and time, one's native land (and the other's) is always crumbling: crumbling within a capacity of vision which re-discovers the process to be not foul and destructive but actually the constructive secret of all creation wherever one happens to be. What Harris, Brathwaite and Mackey seek to employ here is an across-the-globe unification on several levels. We are asked to consider the cosmos, all the various peoples and cultures of the world, and many other foreign territories in the way weconceptualize our species and the way relate to the planet in order to ensure an on-going life cycle. Kamau Brathwaite, near the end of "Trench Town Rock" (_Hambone 10_), in a section called "Short History of Dis," writes "By now the Age of Dis. Distress Dispair & Disrespect. Distrust Disrupt Distruction." His statement reflects the results of a systematic oppression and violence inflicted on anyone victimized by racism, colonization, xenophobia, Christianity, and other forces which have contributed to the dispossession of people. The forcible removal of so many Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas was but the first disruption which affected following generations. Plantation and other slaveries, other racially biased atrocities have contributed to further cultural fragmentation and disintegration of African descendants. Certainly the type of work Mackey does is an intellectually based practice aimed at alleviating some of this disrespect by engaging the intensities which make up his cultural/historical and/or mythological background. Mackey's work points out the absences and blindspots both in the literatures to which most Americans are exposed in the educational system and in the culture at large. At the very least his poetic project raises questions about a poetics which has been rendered useless by entities which have upheld an under-emphasis on "third" world cultures and peoples. These are the organs of literature which Don Byrd describes in his essay "Learned Ignorances and Other Defenses" in _Sulfur 11_, whose function "is to choke intelligence with a kind of irreducible fluff, which absorbs attention in the fascination of stimulus-response psychology." N., in a passage in _Djbot Baghostus's Run_, criticizes "the patness of the 'shattered I,'" and derides the "currently fashionable notions of a nonexistent self" which has asphyxiated so many people involved with the studies in language and literature over the past three decades in Europe and North America. There are few writing poetry in English who surpass Nathaniel Mackey's level of sophistication with language, topical inclusiveness and lyrical musicality. At a recent reading in Woodstock, New York, Mackey was introduced as "the Cecil Taylor of poetry," but the opposite might also be said to be true, that Cecil Taylor could be called the Nathaniel Mackey of music. With some exceptions, there are few writers who have taken it upon themselves to attack, untune, and re/turn their songs while retaining an impeccable cohesion in their work the way both Mackey and Taylor succeed in using the chords of their craft. In "Alphabet of Ahtt," a poem from "Outlantish," dedicated to Taylor, a tension released is manifest Not without hope though how were we to take it as they yelled out, "Nathtess's melismatic ttah?" Not knowing why, we looked straight ahead, shrugged our shoulders, popped out fingers, we could dig it, "What's next?" Later in the poem the song is tightened and recontextualized: Made us wonder would it ever do differently, all but undone to've been so insisted on, anagrammatic ythm, anagrammatic myth... Autistic. Spat a bitter truth. Maybe misled but if so so be it. Palimpsestic stagger, anagrammatic scat In an essay in the 1992 issue of _Talisman_ devoted to the writings of Nathaniel Mackey, Aldon Neilsen explicitly declares that Mackey "...has begun the work of reading American poetic culture back through its African past." Indeed, Mackey's work explores and celebrates this culture's traditions and mythologies which have, over the past four centuries or so, been forcibly removed from their original place of standing. By and large, the ancestry Mackey engages today normally finds itself re-located, at best, only on the fringes of the conscience of the dominant culture which enacted this displacement. However, Mackey's tenses, like those of Charles Olson before him, "are never past but present and future." Again, from _School of Udhra_, Nut's belly bloated with stars corrupt with gods. Beneath our year's new growth of eyelids unlit eyes kept running come strumming the starlight, stroke night's watery locks Mackey's books are maps of a large region. In them, he transverses grounds of literal and figurative forests, fields, and sands he knows well. His work especially displays intricate knowledge of the desert-- its varieties, its mood, its resources. A literary bedouin, Mackey invokes and channels the desert dwellers who were, for their cleverness, the descendents of the spirits--the jinns--that inhabit the world. Mackey has also inherited a Bedouin's expertise over his camel--its needs and capacities, and the peculiarities and possibilities of each animal. Above, there is an example of Mackey's movement to stretch the boundaries of language ("Nathtess's melismatic/ttha?") while at the same time tying it to something earthly ("anagrammatic/scat"). In another passage from _School of Udhra_, the word play continues, as do the earthly images of bonding (twinning) and alienation (tearing): covered we were and by that touched "I-ness" to "I-ness," inward, wombed inducement arced into "us-ness," otherness, nothingness, Nephthys, Nut... Inductees into the academy of N'ahtt Those familiar with Mackey's work already know its particular and special place in literature of North America today. Defiant of any simple categorization, his vision is a hybrid of living ethnopoetics and musical and spiritual influences which are deeply rooted in a beleaguered but surviving African continent. These cultures, which inspired Jerome Rothenberg in the PRE-FACE of _Technicians of the Sacred_ to pronounce "Primitive Means Complex," are invoked and serve as inspiration to Mackey, whose most direct literary forbearers would be Brathwaite and Harris. In their revitalization the geopsychic space of Caribbean literature, Harris and Brathwaite have extensively engaged Africa's cultural diaspora. They are writers who recognize an ancestral landscape which involves, as Brathwaite writes in an essay called "Timehri," "...the artist and participants in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into the present and future." Above all, Mackey has absorbed the cries we hear in jazz and tribal music. Coltrane's and other's horns, Jamaica's Tuff Gong, and the wailings of aboriginal tribes all find themselves as revered ingredients in Mackey's work, growing out of the depths of rich and arid African soil. 1993 was a busy year for Mackey's readers. In addition to the anthology _Moment's Notice: Jazz In Poetry & Prose_ (edited by Mackey with Down Beat editor Art Lange; Coffee House Press, 1993. 373 pp. $17.50), new collections of his poetry (_School of Udhra_), prose (_Djbot Baghostus's Run_) and literary history/criticism (_Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_) were published. It is notable that all of the books, though technically from different "genres," collectively continue to form a dense sounding of Mackey's larger project which includes _Hambone_, the literary magazine he edits, "Tanganyika Strut," his radio program, and teaching at the University of California-Santa Cruz. In addition to its romantic and lyric qualities, Mackey's work is an immediate encounter with an intense blending of knowledges, mythology, poetic insight and histories from every continent. Borrowing a phrase which Mervyn Morris once used to describe the spirit of Jamaican dub poet Mikey Smith, Nathaniel Mackey is "a true revolutionary who has fought the struggle not with bullets or guns but with his own culture, with his own livity." Mackey's prolific labors, his conjugation of myth, mind, history, sound, nomadic text and awareness offer an integral projection and model of what a culturally imaginative and intellectually and devotionally informed poetics entails. Mackey's rebel stance is subtle but runs throughout the work, a voice which calls attention to discontent and unrest, mobilizing an erudite, up-to-date awareness of pervasive racial and cultural inequalities and injustices. An acknowledgement of the type of psychic training and slavery inflicted upon people today, an indication of their fear of a policed state, occurs at the beginning of a piece called "APRIL IN PARIS," subtitled "The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Aunt Nancy Version)" in _Djbot Baghostus's Run_. Jarred Bottle, sitting at a stoplight in Los Angeles at three in the morning, thinks of a quip he'd heard before, "Revolution would never occur in a country whose people stop for traffic lights late at night when there's no one else around." Subsequently, sitting at the intersection, defiantly "deferring to nonexistent traffic," Bottle constructs an exquisite ten- plus page journey of romantic ("...so tenuous a thread could be so binding made for a mystery only moans could address") and musical intrigue (he swears he hears the horns of imaginary cars playing the three chord melody line from Frank Wright's "China"). In the midst of his trance he reconstructs part of the meeting with Aunt Nancy (a member of the Mystic Horn Society), from which he was coming. His work, he explained to her, "would revolve around locale and dislocation, two terms of a continuing obsession he felt not so much prompted as dictated by." Jarred Bottled comes out of his spell, finally, when a policeman approaches him. The section concludes: The cops would ask him had he been drinking, ask what was the idea of just sitting there. He'd tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he was waiting for the red, yellow, and green lights to come on at the same time. "All this time," he'd explain, "I've been thinking about Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia I was actually headed for." The cops would have no idea what he meant. Nods to the Rastafarians--those followers of Haile Salassie who believe Ethiopia is Eden, and that blacks will eventually be repatriated to Africa--are steady in both _Djbot Baghostus's Run_ and _School of Udhra_. In a later rendition of "The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Lambert Version)," titled "AX ME NOW," Jarred Bottle dreams he is being interrogated in a cell in which newsreel footage of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia are being projected. He is about to speak when he hears the tenor sax of the Mystic Horn Society's Lambert emerging from a chorus in back of him. The description of the sound Bottle hears echoes the words of Bob Marley's dancehall hit "Small Axe" ("If you are the tall tree/we are are the small axe, sharp and ready/ready to cut you down..."): Any speaker worth his or her pocomaniacal salt, it seemed to go without saying, "tore" the language or, as he had lately preferred to put it, chopped it up. Jarred Bottle's lecture, that is, took him back to his adopted boyhood in Jamaica. Thus the projections of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. One of his most vivid and strongest boyhood recollections was the way news of it had fired people up in Kingston. Likenings of it to the crucifixion of Christ by "the said same Romans" rolled off almost every tongue. Lambert's low-to-the-ground inspection of hostile terrain, his pentacostal run, like-wise insisted on prophetic fulfillment, the eventual triumph of Ethiopia, small axe to Mussolini's tall tree. In "Amma Seru's Hammer's Heated Fall" (_School of Udhra_) is a place There, though if other than for reflection none would say, wondering, coming forth, where they'd come from, edgewise informant, small axe, tall tree... At the end of _Djbot Baghostus's Run_, there is another edition of "The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Penguin Version)," which carries title "E PO PEN." Jarred Bottle, twinning again, becomes Djbot Baghostus. Baghostus is literally interpreted brother (Ba-) of a ghost (ghostus). A grasshopper beneath his pillow speaks to him "from under it rather than on it, as if put there (eye of Amma, Ogo's food) by a Dogon diviner": "Tell them you're not from here. Tell them your father is a wealthy man, that he sang with the Ink Spots before they made it big but that nevertheless he's a very wealthy man. Tell the that's why he named you Djbot. Spell it out for them if you have to: d as in dot, j as in jot, b-o-t as in bottle. Tell them it relates to ink, eponymous ink, namesake ink. Tell them you're not from here, even that you're not really here. Tell them it relates to ink, invisible ink. You can never make too much of it. Tell them you're a ghost." Djbot's father, the "very wealthy man," reads metaphorically as the African pantheon, alive as long as any Greco-Roman tradition or myth. The "invisible ink" is an overt acknowledgement that this tradition is generally unseen by "them," or less discriminated against personages. The passage implies transformation, and suggests an empowerment derived from both the location and dislocation Bottle/Djbot has and will likely continue to experience. In order to read this work, prepare yourself to face a sometimes unfamiliar orientation and a matrix of references to which most readers with Eurocentric educations are unaccustomed; step into a self rooted in and derived from a people and culture suppressed by a systematically white supremacist literary politic throughout recent history. You will be impressed at the way Mackey is able to make the poetic intellectual and the intellectual poetic, or poetry. As Will Alexander recently said, "think of how many PhDs there are, then look how many Lorcas..." Nathaniel Mackey is one of few who qualifies as both. Somewhere Gertrude Stein said, "when poetry really began it practically included everything." Mackey's writing, which recycles such a theory of poetics, might be read as a communique to an angel of dust, an imaginary I-nity who embodies all that we are proverbially made of. In Mackey's utopian, mythical city of "Zar" (which, an epigraph tells us, is "just this side of far"), celebrated in and title of the third and final section of _School of Udhra_), we read of a militant, ritual fist held high, pushed on... and ...the guns of war. Shot god, bitter book turned real. There they might look but that their gone gaze grow there, taken, meaning made at whose expense, twinned or twinless... Twinless, torn within "Zar", and _School of Udhra_, come to an end with a poem called "Slipped Quadrant," which offers further advices and admonitions: Rich tense within we called it, would without end, seed within a seed sown elsewhere, somewhere said to've been known as Ttha. Wrought surfaces, putative soul, cheated heart. Shot body borne up to be looked at, learned from, one heretical moment's reprimand... Something a Sufi said in Andalusia. Something said to've been said before. Ominous music made a mumbler's academy, vatic scat, to be alive was to be warned it said... Mackey's "seed/within a seed sown elsewhere" is a continual seed, a transplanted seed, a seed of discontent, in favor of creating a better society, sown into American poetics. -Chris Funkhouser for Ayal al-batn & the Gabila