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History and Language: Two Considerations
-- Published by 11 September 2001, the Response of Poetry (website) --
1. Racism, Violence Against Others, & the Dwarf Who Understood the Language of Action
I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety, and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war. I reflected on the ingratitude of the whites when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests, and everything desirable around them; and recollected that all this land had been ours, for which I and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our graveyards from us and removed us across the Mississippi.
-- Black Hawk
After Black Hawk's death in 1838, his skeleton was kept on display as a curiosity in the office of the Iowa Territory's governor.
-- Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
From the very beginning, racism was built into the US's nation-building process. In fact, the United States of America could never have become a nation if it had not pursued a race-based policy that eventually resulted in the extermination of the majority of the continent's indigenous population. July 4, 1776 was not only the day the colonies declared their independence from Britain, it was also the day that, in effect, they sentenced the American Indian to death. From the earliest colonists' first expropriation of Indian land through the confinement of the shrunken number of surviving Indians on impoverished reservations in the twentieth century, the history of the continent's take-over by Europeans has been a history of white arrogance, broken treaties, policies of humiliation, and the construction of a "democratic" nation whose foundation was built from the corpses of the Indians killed in order to steal the land without which we could not have built our towns and cities.
If the Declaration of Independence was a white power document that boded ill for the continent's native inhabitants, other of the nation's founding documents also provided ways to include racism in the structure of American life, so that every institution, custom, and political assumption would be informed by a racialized world view. When, thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution was made law, blacks were defined in Article I, Section 2 of that law as a fragment (three-fifths) of a human being. Wholeness, or the idea of the complete human being, was reserved for whites. The part that was "missing" from blacks was not specifically designated. Whatever that part supposedly was, however, its absence left blacks bereft, in the law's eyes, of the very humanness that characterized human beings. This reduction of blacks to human fragments was the flip side of the mythicization of the new nation's white inhabitants as the planet's vanguard of democracy and Christian values. Blacks' supposed inferiority was the standard whites used to prove their own superiority; white arrogance needed black misery in order to thrive. Consequently, law and custom were used to strip blacks of their dignity and to construct in their place a new, utilitarian black designed to suit white needs. By law, slaves were not allowed to marry, take legal action against whites, learn to read, refuse commands made by their masters, or in any way exercise the freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Such laws' purpose was not merely to curtail the range of black behavior. The laws' purpose also was to "invent," through the humiliation and deprivation that accompanied the laws, a being who could be easily viewed not as a being, but as property. In this way the black stolen from another continent was transformed (in whites' eyes) into a mindless subhuman without the same sensitivities that "real" humans -- i.e., whites -- possessed. This subhuman's destiny was not only to serve white appetites, but also to magnify, through her/his own denigration and lack of freedom, the glory of whites. Because of the white view that blacks were less than whole, beating, raping, torturing, overworking and putting to death such creatures was not a moral issue for the society which enslaved them. Psychologically, black inferiority was the foundation upon which white supremacy was built. Socially and economically, the slave system was a machinery of moral codes, attitudes and laws engineered to deflate blacks into soulless collections of muscles and sex organs capable of performing endless physical labor and of producing offspring destined to perform future physical labor.
Such racial dehumanization has parallels in other historical episodes of mass suffering perpetuated by a supposedly superior race. When in Mein Kampf Hitler proclaimed "Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord," he spoke with a zealousness reminiscent of the New World's white settlers' belief that it was their God-ordained mission to gain dominion over the new continent. What Nazi zealousness meant for the unwanted, particularly Jews, is well known. Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany, wrote about his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. A Haftling or prisoner in Auschwitz, the number 174517 was tattooed on Levi's left arm. According to him, the camp was not only "a gigantic biological and social experiment" that included technology for streamlining mass executions and cremations, but it was also, through the use of forced labor and constant rituals of humiliation designed to destroy inmates' humanity, "a great machine to reduce us to beasts.". This industrial experiment in the destruction of the human will, of the transformation of human beings into inhumanly treated brutes, is the connection which links the Nazi concentration camp to the US slave plantation. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief and Hitler's right-hand man, would have been at home as an 18th century colonial Christian minister breathing fire and brimstone from his Georgia pulpit as he praised the glorious activity of brutalizing blacks in the New World.
Fortunately, not all the New World's white inhabitants would have liked Rev. Goebbels' harangues.
Benjamin Lay, a white dwarf with a humpback, lived in a colonial village. One day in this village a respectable family's young son was kidnapped. Concern and panic swept through the town. Little did anyone know that Lay was the kidnapper. Finally, after approximately one day of mounting community anxiety, the dwarf returned the child to the distraught family. When he did so, he told the mother and father, "Now you know what a horrible thing it is to lose your child. Possibly this will give you some idea what it's like for African parents whose children are taken from them in order to be made into slaves."
Lay, an anti-slavery Quaker, had made his point. But did he have the right to distress the village's residents and the parents of the kidnapped child in order to make the point?
Primo Levi deals with a different, but related, issue. Levi says the highly orchestrated dehumanization and barbarity of the concentration camps was so beyond the scope of the normal, that normal language cannot give adequate expression to the camp experience, and therefore "a new, harsh language" must be created in order to express what is, in normal language, inexpressible.
Benjamin Lay can be viewed as a man who attempted to begin, through his action, the process of inventing "a new, harsh language" that would express the slave experience to those incapable of or unwilling to comprehend its horror.
Lay's was the language of action.
Slaves themselves experimented with a variety of survival tactics: passive resistance, low-key sabotage, periodic participation in violent revolts, and the creation of an African-American alternative culture. As the slave system developed, consciousness of oppression permeated every aspect of black life, providing even apparently simple lullabies (sung by black nannies to their masters' children) with an ideological character. In the following slave-era song, for instance, the "lambie" symbolizes the slave-mother's child, whom she is unable to care for because she is forced to tend her owner's child, to whom the song is being sung. The lullaby's bitterness is subtly reflected in the comparison between the two children, one a protected white child of privilege, the other a black outcaste, naked and vulnerable before the world's brutal forces.
Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep little baby, When you awake, you will have a cake And all the pretty little horses. Way down yonder Down in the meadow
There's a poor little lambie, The bees & the butterflies Pecking out his eyes, The poor little thing cried Mammy. Hush-a-bye, Hush-a-bye
Go to sleep little baby. When you wake, you will have cake, & all the pretty little horses. It is difficult to imagine language twisted more effectively into the expression of an anguish that seems inexpressible. What equivalent word-experiments, surrealisms, subject choices, etc. must be explored in order for today's US poets to develop a language worthy of describing the realities we face?
2. Sept. 11 and Aftermath: History and the Languages around Us
Following Sept. 11, 2001, the poet John Pawlik posted on the Melic Review's website discussion board a number of commentaries on the terrorist attacks and the bombing in Afghanistan.
According to one of Pawlik's posts, other nations envy the US because they consider us the beneficiaries of good fortune. Although a US citizen who immigrated here from Europe years ago, Pawlik wrote this particular post in the voice of a non-American. As he later said, he adopted this stance in order to more effectively make the point that citizens of other nations view the U.S. enviously. He wrote -
I don't think you Americans will ever be liked whatever you do. Much of the world sees your wealth and power not as a consequence of democracy, talent and/or effort but of extreme good fortune; you Americans were and are very lucky. As such, you are envied, resented, even hated, and there's pleasure in seeing you falter if not fail . . .
So long as your life is good, you will never be loved.
Pawlik's analysis of America-envy is, of course, in some ways correct. But it's also limited. His overemphasis on the rest of the world's envy of the US is like saying Sitting Bull disliked white settlers because he thought their shirts were nicer than his; maybe he did like their shirts, but he certainly had other, far more profound reasons for disliking the settlers. Similarly, people in different parts of the world possess more profound reasons than envy for distrusting or disliking the US.
Let's discuss some of those reasons. We can begin with the Middle East.
The Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s was a direct result of the US's 1953-54 participation in the overthrow of Iran's legitimate government and its replacement of that administration with the pro-western Shah of Iran's government, which became notorious throughout the world for its brutality. The reason for this CIA-sponsored coup was that the existing government threatened to nationalize British Petroleum's (and other Western companies') oil holdings.
Middle Eastern tensions also have been caused by the US's avid support for an Israel that, as most Muslims in the region know, was originally described by Herzel, the so-called father of modern Zionism, as an "outpost of civilization against eastern barbarism." Given this aspect of the Zionist vision, i.e., the view that Islam is a form of barbarism to be held in check by an Israeli-Western alliance, it isn't difficult to understand why the US, which is Israel's largest military supplier and foreign aid doner and its staunchest ally, suffers from chronically low popularity ratings in the region; this unpopularity isn't due to envy, but to the fact that the US has given Middle Eastern Islamic communities little reason to trust our good intentions. On the other hand, we have often shown them the Ugly American side of our face by displaying a decades-long hostility toward Palestinians' demand for a new homeland in repayment for the fact that it was their land that the Western colonial powers took in order to create Israel.
In addition to the oil/Islam/Palestinian questions, another regional sore point is the widespread belief that the US's interest in political hegemony in the area outweighs any humanitarian goals Washington claims to possess.
One frequently given example of the opportunism that lies behind the US's stated humanitarian goals is Washington's attitude toward biological weapons. The recent anthrax fright in the US has given Washington ample opportunity to proclaim its hatred of such weapons. However, what Washington has been less likely to discuss over the last two decades is the US's role in the development of biological weapons internationally. Take Iraq as an example. The building blocks for their biological warfare materials were supplied to Iraq in the 1980s by US (and other western) companies like Tanox Biosystems and ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) with government approval. Although the US government knew that the 1972 Geneva Conventions Regulations prohibited selling or experimenting with biological warfare materials, the government found it easy to circumvent these restrictions just as long as the selling and experimentation was performed by non-government businesses, even if those businesses received some of their direction from the government. Another factor that contributed to the government's willingness to look the other way with regard to Iraq's interest in chemical and biological weapons was that at the time Iraq intent was to use the weapons against Iran, which the US then viewed as a greater threat to US interests than Iraq. Consequently, the US pursued a policy of boosting Saddam Hussein's stature in the region so that he could counter Iran's regional power. Only after Hussein's usefulness to US regional policy declined did the Pentagon develop an anti-Iraq strategy, which was primarily designed to make sure that no power in the region -- in this case, Iraq -- was strong enough to jeopardize the US's commitment to retaining sufficient access to the area's oil supplies. But by the time the US became anti-Iraq, it was already too late: the chemical and biological weapons that would eventually play a role in the development of gulf war syndrome and the illness of US soldiers following the 1991 conflict were already in place.
As if such goings-on weren't bad enough, in the decade following the gulf war between 500,000 and one million Iraqis died as a result of the US trade embargo against Iraq. Although in the US many people rationalized this policy as somehow necessary, for the populations of Middle Eastern countries justifying the deaths wasn't so easy. From their perspective, the US, which repeatedly had stated during the Gulf War that it had nothing against the Iraqi people but only against Saddam Hussein, was in fact killing Iraqi civilians with trade sanctions in the hope that the infliction of such suffering would eventually spur Iraqis into rising up against Saddam Hussein. It hasn't worked.
The Middle East is only one region. Throughout the world, there are other non-envy-related reasons that make people, sometimes whole populations, suspicious of US power. Millions of Latin Americans dislike the US because of its history of supporting murderous dictatorships in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Caribbean. In India millions of poor peasants resent the agribusiness-fueled Americanization of subcontinent agriculture which has resulted in millions of small landholders losing their fields as the giant-farm mode of agriculture is pushed aggressively by US business interests. In the Pacific, US collusion, from 1975 on, with Indonesia's military presence in East Timor helped provide the foundation for the death of between one-quarter and one-third of the East Timorese population during the last quarter of the 20th century. The US's initial motives for supporting Indonesia included desire for free military use of waterways near East Timor, an interest in controlling possible offshore oil findings, and Washington's commitment to build a Cold War alliance with Indonesia's anti-communist government. Even long after the Cold War, during the 1999 Indonesia-orchestrated slaughter of East Timorese following the population's pro-independence vote, the US honored its relationship with Indonesia and only later, when international outrage concerning the mass murders continued to grow, did DC cut off relations with the Indonesian military. But this was a mostly symbolic gesture, since the US (a) refused to declare sanctions against Indonesia and (b) remained aloof from requests from the Vatican, Australia, New Zealand and other nations to intervene in order to save the East Timorese from further slaughter.
Whatever position one takes on the issues just mentioned, the facts render somewhat foolish Pawlik's claim that the main reason for anti-Americanism is that world citizens view Americans as "very lucky" and that because of this view we are "envied, resented, even hated." The rest of the world isn't quite so empty-headed as such an evaluation implies. If many world inhabitants distrust the US, it's not merely because they think we're a bunch of lucky duckies. It's because their analysis of global events indicates to them that the US too often uses its power to dominate other populations and to control the globe's resources.
Meanwhile, here at home, spectacle replaces analysis as all attempts to critique the post-Sept. 11 world in a way that includes a comprehension of what others on the planet feel about what is going on are marginalized. Memorial services, patriotic concerts, the proliferation of new flag products (shirts, hats, bandanas, midget flags, giant flags, etc.), companies designating one day a week as Patriotism Day, new War Update sections in our daily newspapers, TV news programs showing endless video footage of the war's progress, constant reference to the American people's goodness - each of these is an understandable reaction to the terrorist assaults, yet, woven together into a single ongoing expression of nationalistic emotion, these responses become part of a specialized environment that maximizes conformity and stifles--through a growth in the national community's sense of its own righteousness and infallibility--expressions of dissent. Such pressure is more troubling today than it was a half century ago because the methods for introducing it into our lives' most private arenas are more abundant now than ever before.
Look at the 1991 Gulf War as an example. One propaganda spectacle from that period should suffice to indicate some of the culturally complex methods that shape our thinking and emotions.
On Superbowl Sunday 1991, while Frank Gifford and his colleagues announced the game on ABC, their play-by-play commentary was spliced with live war-updates from the network's top newscaster, Peter Jennings. After awhile it was impossible for the viewing audience to tell which was the main attraction: the game or the war. But in reality, the question was irrelevant, The truth was that ABC had created a new kind of event: a hybrid form of entertainment that switched effortlessly back and forth between the "pastime" of real blood being spilled in a real war and another pastime, the football game's the highly disciplined athletic violence. An amazing simultaneity had been achieved: the crowd's roar was like a split-personality screaming in 2 voices at once -- one voice cheered on Baghdad's obliteration, the other shouted for running back Otis Anderson as he plunged off-tackle toward MVP immortality.
This display of athletics and patriotism was reinforced by a Disney-influenced halftime show that featured, among other things, a young child, surrounded by a chorus of other young children, singing, "You are my hero, you are everything I want to be" to US service people in the Gulf. As the boy's sweetly-warbled song turned the Florida air into an oozing goo of patriotic emotion, upbeat images of US military personnel periodically flashed on the tv. All this activity led up to a special live message, projected on the stadium's giant screen as well as on televisions across the nation, from President Bush. In his message, the president extolled the virtues of fighting a war in which goodness (i.e., the US) would triumph over evil (i.e., Iraq). As halftime ended and the 2 teams prepared to resume their battle on the field, fans waved flags and a patriotic jolt better than any crack high swept through the stadium crowd and the nation's millions of TV viewers. When the kickoff occurred, somewhere in the Middle East an Iraqi target was blasted off the face of the earth by a high-tech US weapon. The crowd cheered.
Events like the 1991 Superbowl raise politics to the level of pure spectacle. Such events -- with their efforts to induce a trance-like national pride, and their emphasis on the wholesomeness of the military mentality and the moral purity of those in power -- are not confined solely to the US and are not without precedent in the past. An example: Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, the German film that is a classic of Nazi propaganda, includes many of the same elements that the 1991 Superbowl/Gulf War extravaganza included. Riefenstahl's film is alive, not with apparent hatred, but with the apparent power of goodness. Triumph is a feast of the images of such goodness: blond young men smiling and expressing male solidarity, buxom women working hard for the national good, a feel for the middle-European beauty of German cities and countryside, and a nighttime political rally -- at Nuremberg -- that, with lit torches and an almost churchly atmosphere, seems, not like a mundane political event, but rather like a futuristic mass in honor of everything mysterious and noble in the galaxy. The film's purpose was to create in the hearts of "good" Germans a sense of grand national destiny, a euphoric awareness of their historic mission to reorganize life on the planet in the name of a higher good that only they, among the world's peoples, were capable of comprehending. Nazism's deepest realities -- racism, hatred of democracy, its belief in the usefulness of genocide -- were hidden in the film behind images of happy nuclear families and individuals devoted to traditional values. In the end, those romanticized traditional values killed 6 million Jews and millions of other people.
Just as Triumph of the Will obscured the details of Nazism's character as a hate philosophy, so the 1991 Superbowl spectacle obscured the details of the US elite's political/economic ambitions with regard to the Middle East. It also hid some of the war's dirtier details -- for instance, the US government's willingness to expose its troops (and then to deny it did so) to chemical and biological weapons, and also the Pentagon's policy of killing Iraqi civilians as a way of trying to force the population into removing Saddam Hussein from power. Such a burial of the details shouldn't surprise us. Like Riefenstahl's film, the purpose of the 1991 Superbowl spectacle was not to provide us with objective war-related information while the game was going on, but rather to manipulate people emotionally. Adopting techniques similar to the ones used in the pro-Nazi documentary, ABC and the White House employed wholesome-looking images for the purpose of instilling in the viewer a grandiose sense of national superiority. All of this is part of the "language" of our identity.
Our environment is a language of images and symbols. We mock, but nonetheless are formed, by the language of the political speech - "speech" as in a multimedia thought- and mood-shaping event. Men or women, who play the part of virtual-reality creations designed for the purpose of reading concepts they don't understand from Teleprompters, are our modern sages. They speak with the same "eloquence" as does the poet who accepts the existing language, with its built-in biases and assumptions, without question. "Normal" language constantly declares the danger of "deviant" language - i.e., any unpopular dialect or mode of questioning/describing that is considered beyond the bounds of conventional cordiality or an "appropriate" level of seriousness.
Languages are all around us. How daring are we as poets in plumbing their depths?
Top | Publications Page | Home Interview with R. Bohm / Abalone Moon
In your poem "Now," the persona, even though part of the action, describes the events in an almost journalistic manner. In "Spirit Force," the persona describes an unorthodox character who emerges as a rescuer, apart from the fighting, who is nonetheless centered in his role of medivac.
How do you connect the persona in "Now" to the character created in "Spirit Force." Are the two visions connected in any way?
Let me start with the "Now" poem. What you refer to as the narrator's journalistic tone has to do, I think, with the narrator's psychological state. Emotionally and physically exhausted, he's incapable of over-describing or rationalizing what he sees. He can't bring himself to say more than, "I see this. Now I see that. Now I . . ."
Of course, such a listing of apparent facts can at first glance seem journalistic--as if the speaker's reporting on things as opposed to being involved in them. But if we stop thinking of writing styles for a minute--of poetry versus journalism or whatever--and just think of the different ways people confront what's in front of them, then it's fairly clear, I think, that the narrator's tone entails a resignation to, if not a total acceptance of, the specifics of what's right before him, the corpse. And so the poem begins with him talking about the details of the corpse's appearance. Rather than resisting this depressing sight by thinking of something else or turning away, the persona instead gives up any hope of escaping from it and therefore surrenders to it.
Implicit in this giving up, there is a lucidity, not a calm lucidity maybe, but still a lucidity. In other words, for this moment at least, the narrator's capacity to see clearly is directly related to his being defeated--defeated by what he sees, by his weariness, by everything going on. There is no escape for him. There is only this now. He lives in it. He itemizes it. He is wedded to it. He is it. There's nothing else, nothing more, only this.
Ultimately, though, there is more. This "more" has to do with the clarity of the narrator's seeing, a clarity which sets in motion a train of thought, a reverie. By not turning away, by risking the disorientation of looking straight at what's there and being open to the potential meaninglessness of it all--by doing this, the narrator's heart and mind say yes to what is and to the damage done to them by what is.
When this kind of thing happens to us, there is, from that point on, I think, a shift in the mind--its conditioning and predispositions are gone, at least for awhile. As a result the mind then follows its logics wherever they might lead, even into apparent illogic. No attempts at censoring or moralizing or fitting the experience into prefabricated boxes are made. It's almost as if the mind's in a state of meditation, all focus, no resistance.
What this means in terms of the poem is that the poem moves casually, with little harping on its destination, toward a feeling, either momentary or more deep-rooted than that, of suicide or total exhaustion or despair or something similar. Whatever happens at the end of the poem isn't exactly defined, but there's a mood there, a provocation to thought, that is, I hope, quite clear. The reader has to take it from there.
I hope this describes at least some of the psychology in "Now." But what you really want to know is how this relates to the medic in "Spirit Force."
In response to that, first let me say I think your question hints at the possibility that these two people represent different personality types or maybe different worldviews. That alleged difference can I guess be summed up in this way: the "Now" narrator's so-called journalistic way of expressing himself makes him seem, at least on the surface, more inclined to observe than to act, whereas the medic seems to possess a life-force quality that's rooted in an inclination to just dive into existence without restraint. Although there's some truth in viewing the characters this way, it's not how I view them. I see something else. This "something else" is where I have to begin.
I see commonality between the two men. The somewhat eccentric but nonetheless heroic medic is no more of a world-banger, no more "involved" in life, than the other poem's speaker, and the other poem's speaker is no more observant than the medic. Look at it this way. Picture the medic and then imagine what he has to observe, what he has to report to himself, in order to successfully navigate the fire zone and save the wounded man. He has to pay attention to the placement of friendlies in the area, he has to identify the locations from which the enemy's fire originates, he must determine the elephant grass's height and how much it might impede his movements, he has to choose the best angle from which to approach the wounded grunt, he has to dodge gunfire and hand grenades and maybe land mines, and on and on and on. This man is observing and filtering an abundance of data in a matter of seconds.
Now picture the speaker in "Now." He and his platoon come upon a dead fellow grunt. The speaker mentally enters into the fact of that corpse with the same intensity that the medic displays in entering the fire zone when rescuing the man whose leg was lost. The speaker's engagement with the corpse, his surrender to its thereness and to the hopelessness that the corpse's mutilation represents to him--this act entails as much involvement in life as anything the medic does. So, you see, I don't at all accept it as a given that "Now"'s narrator and the medic in "Spirit Force" are by definition opposites.
Although their commonality might not be clear at first glance, I hope that readers, after thinking about the poems, will sense the commonality and then appreciate it for what it is: two individuals' shared inclination to immerse themselves in the realities of which they are a part. As a writer, I can't stay away from this type of theme. It's like in one of William Carlos William' early poems--actually, a turning point poem for him--in which he enters into "the filthy Passaic river" and the river in turn, he says, "enters my heart," eddying dirtily and with its foul smell into him while strangely revealing to him "the beginning of days."
That's it, the only type of baptism I believe in. This is why I'm preoccupied and amazed by the ways in which people immerse themselves in what is and change themselves in the process. Of course, also amazing but in a different way, are the methods we adopt in our efforts to flee such immersion-- flee it because, in a doomed and fruitless craving to avoid pain, we delude ourselves into thinking we can hide from reality.
We can't.
I'm glad that you explained the similarities between the two personae because I felt that there was a very germane connection between the two. In your poem "Now," the characters burn huts in a small village. The end line of the poem is "Finally, only a sniper's bullet or a tripwire away, tranquility's within reach." What does the word "tranquility" mean to the persona in this poem?
Well, I've already said a lot about "Now," but this question about the end is a good one. The calm or peacefulness hinted at in the poem's last lines, the ones you just quoted, is first and foremost a wished-for conclusion to pain. It's not just death itself that has gotten to the speaker but also what it has triggered: the mind's spasms as it sees things differently; for instance, the "paddies' senseless green" and a wound "as dark as a myna bird" whose language is like "the endless yakking of dumb or desperate men "
So, there's this suicidal impulse, an impulse rooted in the speaker's resignation to the fact that the war--the reasons for fighting it, etc.-- no longer possesses meaning for him. Or at least not the same meaning it once had. The speaker's experiences have opened him up to a new insight: a sense of people's helplessness in the face of forces beyond their control, not just in the middle of the war but also back in the states in the deadening routinization of people's daily lives. It is this feeling, among others, this sense of bleak ploddingness, that results in his mind straying toward the image of "Bonnie punching in at the transistor plant / on Rt. 110 back home."
So, you see, the tranquility mentioned in the poem's last lines is ironic in that it's not the kind of tranquility we usually think of. Instead, it's the dreamt-of tranquility that the potential suicide fantasizes about as he or she watches meaning drain from the world.
But there's another, more subtle and tangential, aspect of tranquility in the poem too. This aspect has to do with the unique calm that comes from resigning oneself to an unromanticized reality. There may be a desolation in the midst of this calm, but it nonetheless has something going for it: it's a turning point. Only now can one begin the work of reassembling the shattered spirit and healing the mind and heart. Would you talk a little about your poem, "Winter Note to Adriana," about its meaning to you?
Well, if I was successful, the poem's about a certain poise in seeing, a state of mind that's more interested in grasping things as they are than in imposing itself on them. In other words, it's about seeing clearly, specifically that aspect of seeing clearly that strives to overcome the tendency to simplify multiplicity in ways that obscure reality. "Winter Note" is pretty straightforward, I think, in the way it talks about how the search for an ordering principle in things is often an attempt to flee a "wildness" that "panics us."
But it is precisely this wildness, this unfetteredness, this apparently chaotic interconnectedness of things, that the speaker views as order. This is why he accepts the fact that "Completely beyond logic, / the tree exists" and why he describes the tree's pandemonium of branches as being "like thoughts in a mind that meditates / on everything at once." The narrator's vision implies an interrelatedness between all things, including himself and others. There's also an insinuation here that the very "disorder" in nature that can panic us can also, if we accept it, guide us to a higher level of seeing.
In "Excursion," as in many of your poems, the persona is alone. How do you relate this character to the personae in your poems dealing with your other themes, including the major theme of war?
Well, many speakers in my poems are motivated by types of uprootedness or dislocation. As such, they either try to overcome isolation or to describe powerful, and often psychologically contorting, connections to the world. "Excursion"'s speaker is an example. Aging, he recalls an ex-lover or wife. In the process he experiences loneliness but also a kind of at-oneness with the world when he sees "a clearing where what the grass has to say / is massaged by sunlight into silence." Of course, this can also be a death image, which complicates it a bit.
Anyway, you're right, the lone speaker plays a key role in my poetry. The reason for this is simple: no matter how much our voices may ultimately connect us to others, the act of speaking at its most basic level is about a reaching out from the point of our individuality, our aloneness, to the world beyond us. In this sense, remaining faithful to a particular voice's details or a particular mind's thoughts is an obsession with me because it's the only way I know of rooting a poem in reality. Thoughts and actions don't come out of nowhere, they arise from the combustibility of a particular personality in relation to a range of forces that are often beyond that personality's control. I try to get at this fact in my poetry.
Part if doing this, I believe, lies in not censoring myself in terms of subject matter. This is why as a writer I immerse myself as much in the physical and psychological violences of war as I do in the weird engineering of the horse nettle in the spring field, or why authoring a poem about someone in crisis means just as much to me as describing fox prints in the snow or a sax riff in a city park or the collision between races or how an IMF decision in America results in the mass planting of eucalyptus trees in India--trees that drain water from farmfields and as a result the farmers organize and rip up the trees. Conflict and unity of all types--between peoples, between humankind and nature, between different ways of seeing, and so on--are what I'm drawn to. The range, the possibilities, between those two poles obsesses me.
In your poems many of the personae are rooted in time and place, and also there is a quality in many of your other poems of a wandering through different times and places. How do you feel these different aspects are connected in your poetry?
I think I just gave part of the answer to this question a few minutes ago in the stuff I said about using voices and personalities other than my own in certain poems. Those voices and personalities are related to what you said about rooting poems in time and place.
But the other part of your question, the part where you talk about sensing in some of my work "a quality of wandering through different times and places," this aspect of what you've asked is something I haven't talked about yet and I'm glad you've given me a chance to say something about it since, at least to me, it's an important issue.
There's no writing about a thing or an event or a mood without saying something about it's texture. And texture isn't just about something's feel--it's about the combination of things that create that feel. Take textiles as an example. If we say about a certain material that its texture is coarse, we mean that the material's various threads or strands are interwoven in such a way as to produce that coarse feel.
It's the same way with a moment's or a personality's texture--various threads of experience, emotion, history, etc. contribute to the "feel." What this means to me as a writer is shown, at least a little bit, in "Reception."
At the poem's beginning the speaker enters a dusk village about which he says, "I lived here once. Now I don't." Then we find out that the previous day the narrator's niece was married somewhere nearby and that now, in a brief while, a reception is to be held for the newlyweds in an abandoned pump factory and that, because the narrator must attend the reception, he can't remain in the village he has just entered.
As a result, the narrator prepares to go to the unused factory which is characterized, he says, by "the fertile presence / of the absence of drill presses and lathes."
In all these images--the village, the factory, etc.--the present is everywhere inhabited by, and given additional depth by, the past, which means that although a real landscape is being described, it isn't just depicted literally but is also shown psychologically and historically in terms of intersections between different time periods and so on. Later in the poem, even more strands are woven into this texture when hints of the war in Iraq become part of the weave, as does a sense of historical movement from generation to generation.
Additionally, in the course of the poem the very meaning of "reception" undergoes, I hope, an evolution. The title refers to the party being held for the newlyweds, but also to the speaker's reception into the village where he once lived but now doesn't. And another aspect of the reception idea is the speaker's movement through an environment that stimulates in him a need to be receptive or open to reality's fullness.
I think the types of goings-on, and the vision that underlies them, that I just described as occurring within "Reception" are reflective of why you sometimes sense in my work "a quality of wandering through different times and places." The way I look at things, moments and persons are never static; instead, they're sites of endless activity--they are crossroads where the mental and historical traffic is always hurtling this way and that between now and then or between one phenomenon and another. The only way to get at this reality, this teemingness, is to give voice to the different time frames, locations and so on that coexist within particular moments and psyches.
For me, such simultaneities lie at the very heart of meaning, are meaning. Of course it's sometimes equally important to boil things down to a split second of focus in which a fragment of reality, seen simply and clearly in itself without reference to other things, burns with such lucidity in our minds that nothing else is needed for us, at least briefly, to comprehend the world. That's another pole of meaning.
This range--from the thing in itself to the moment as the site of innumerable simultaneities and interactions--I guess this is ultimately what I'm after in my work--in addition, that is, to some of my more obvious goals like confronting in my poetry all subjects, including political ones, without fearing the disapproval of those who promote the bland, conformist writing that characterizes too much U.S. literature these days.
Thanks for taking my work seriously enough to talk with me about it.
Top | Publications Page | Home From Indochina to Iraq and the Destruction of MeaningA veteran's thoughts on the eve of a new war
-- Published by Green Party Newscenter --
Almost half a century ago, Larry Fries wrote how chemical weapons could create a surreal cocoon of safety in the midst of a landscape that, although once alive with crops or wild growth or people, now was a site of silent emptiness. A mile on either side . . . Safe is nothing growing. A US soldier in Vietnam, Fries saw firsthand how the military industrial complex promoted the use of chemicals like agent orange and napalm on a so-called enemy society. By turning Vietnam into a laboratory for conducting chemical experiments in obstacle removal, the US armed services taught grunts like Fries the military efficiency of killing not only enemy soldiers but also the very land they lived on. Such devastation¹s totalistic character eventually resulted in millions of Vietnamese dead, a nearly destroyed ecosystem, and untold numbers of US soldiers years later suffering and dying from chemical weapons-related illnesses. But not only were people and land destroyed, so was the very meaning of things as the gap between "seems to be" and "actually is" expanded. We seemed to be a democratic force fighting for the Vietnamese people¹s political freedom but what we actually were was a mass of armed invaders who slew the very people we were supposed to liberate. Such an experience of the war led Fries to understand how the powers that be forcibly morphed ordinary words into disguises for ominous realities. Giving an example of this, Fries wrote: Peace is tons of napalm falling. A gamble where it lands. The idea that scorching sections of the world with napalm is a pro-peace activity is the type of linguistic reversal of meaning that George Orwell depicted in his novel, 1984, in which the Ministry of Truth was the agency in charge of disseminating propaganda and lies, and the word "joycamp" meant forced labor camp. Orwell would have understood exactly what Fries meant when the poet wrote with melancholy sarcasm, "Peace is tons of napalm falling." According to Orwell, the purpose of mainstream language in a society run by an over-powerful state isn¹t to facilitate communication but to reinforce the state¹s world-view and "to make all other modes of thought impossible." In such an environment of corrupted significations, previously stable meanings transform into each other in unpredictable ways. Consequently, moral incoherence reigns ¬ e.g., peace equals mass destruction. The status quo's assault on what Orwell called non-desirable modes of thought doesn't necessarily mean outright censorship. For the status quo's purposes, it is sufficient that there be a gradual narrowing down of meanings so that language's capacity to undermine authoritarianism, alienation and oppression is weakened in an evolutionary way over time. When language's power shrinks in this way, society's subgroups often seek out non-verbal languages that they believe express their frustrations and aspirations better than the dominant language does. Such non-verbal languages inevitably begin as outlaw vocabularies ¬ multiple tattoos, body piercings, spiked hair, baggy pants, overly extravagant gold chains, slam dancing, mass gatherings of dissenters, etc. ¬ that are screams against the falsity of existing language, wisdom, and political morality. We're at a stage like this now. The appearance of meaning-seeking black-masked anarchists among us is one symptom. The antiwar movement is another. Mounting numbers of U.S. citizens are grasping the insanity built into much U.S. political dialogue. On March 17 Bush proclaimed about the coming assault on Iraq that "a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world" because "when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror" it is appropriate that the US rise to the occasion by leading a global army against the foe. Bush spoke these words in a solemn imperial tone designed to emphasize his speech's sobriety. Yet for all of its imperial seriousness, much of the speech was ludicrous. Bush's contention that he was about to lead "a broad coalition" against Iraq was an unabashed fabrication, given the fact that the US's attempt to create such a coalition had ended only hours previously in fiasco and defeat in the UN security council, thereby sentencing Washington to start a second gulf war with only a tiny fraction of the support it had in 1991 for the first gulf war. Even more absurd was Bush's depiction on March 17 of Iraq as a formidable power in possession of alarming amounts of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. In reality, the US isn't preparing to invade Iraq because Iraq is militarily strong and therefore a danger to others in the world. Rather the US has targeted Iraq for the exact opposite reason: because Iraq, after its defeat in 1991 and its subsequent social-economic deterioration as a result of more than ten years of economic sanctions, is one of the globe's feeblest military countries and can't possibly defend itself against the US. Iraq's military weakness lends itself to the achievement of Washington's three main goals: (1) a victory that results in greater US control over the region's oil supplies, (2) a victory that establishes the US as the sole military power capable of policing and shaping a "reborn" Middle East and (3) a stage ¬ i.e., Iraq and its people ¬ upon which the US can send the rest of the world a message: look in shock and awe at the apocalyptic destructiveness of our weaponry and forever after be on notice that any nation or dissident group that dares to mess with us runs the risk of total obliteration. This of course is the language of empire building. When Bush stared into the camera on March 17 and announced about Saddam Hussein that "the tyrant will soon be gone," the president earned no credibility as an honorable warrior. On the contrary, his cockiness was more akin to the demented self-congratulation of a fake Romeo whose biggest love-conquests have come about after using rohypnol, the date rape drug, on his victims. Neither love nor peace is an activity that the criminally aggressive admire. As Bush has already shown, if in order to get satisfaction he must rape the Iraqi people and ignore the majority of world opinion in doing so, he will do it. More could be said about Washington's war policy, but further commentary can be postponed until Bush¹s and his compatriots' trials as war criminals. Right now we must take to the streets in massive expressions of democratic dissent. Top | Publications Page | Home Beyond the Sentimental to the Real
-- Published by The Pedestal Magazine --
1 Regarding the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, one woman interviewed on television remarked, "I've been reminded of how fragile, and sacred, life is. I realize now how important it is to be good." When asked to specify what she meant by good, the interviewee couldn't do so. Adyakkilakkamma, a 13th century woman poet from India, wouldn't have been comfortable with such vagueness. She insisted that our sense of the sacred isn't distinguishable from the specific actions that are impelled into existence by that sense. In fact, she proclaimed, there is no sacred sense at all unless it is incarnated in some type of "doing." Unimpressed by claims of spirituality that weren't evidenced in a willingness to participate in a life-long rough and tumble engagement with the world, she wrote
Remember:
the real meaning of the saint's speech emerges only through action. Devotion with no action
gets you no place - it's like trying to use a piece of straw to hold up a wall that's all of a sudden collapsing. 2 On Sept. 13, two days after the terrorist attack, a man of European heritage attended a meeting. Of the 8 people there, one of them was a woman he knew. She was from India. During the course of the meeting, the subject of the terrorist attacks came up. Having heard the night before on television that Osama Bin Laden may have been involved, the man now said angrily, "All foreigners should be killed for this."
"What?" the woman replied. "So you want to do to them what you call them uncivilized for doing to you?" She was the only immigrant in the room. And one of only two women.
The fellow responded, "Well, they started it."
Tartly, the woman snapped, "I don't care who started it, you're wrong, because if you keep talking like that soon people will start killing foreigners, including me, in the street."
The man answered, "But I don't mean you when I talk about foreigners. You're not a foreigner; we all know you."
If anything, this made the woman angrier. "What you just said is the fucking stupidest thing of all," she told him, losing her temper. "I or somebody else won't get killed just as long as we personally know you, but if we happen not to know you then we get our asses kicked! Great! You're not supposed to respect people's rights only if you know them. You're supposed to respect their rights even if you don't."
The woman was correct. The man with whom she argued was capable of feeling solidarity with the New York and Washington D.C. dead and their families, but not with a wider range of people. In spite of the fact that immigrants and people of color were included in the terrorist death tolls, this man primarily viewed the U.S.'s plight as one of us against them, with the "them" representing darker skinned people from certain parts of the globe, as well as their immigrant "allies" here.
This man, and other people like him, consider themselves respecters of life. One of the proofs they give of this respect is the sadness they feel about the victims of the terrorist attacks. But this sadness is not a pure or simple sadness. It is a sadness with a political dimension. It is an emotion that announces "I am a good American" as much as it reflects a feeling of loss.
Except for the families and friends of the killed and wounded, most of us simply will not grieve for the dead and injured the way we would grieve for our own family members and friends. This is understandable and there is nothing wrong with it. But we should understand what it means. What it means is that our talk about "tragedy" and the "grief we feel" is highly symbolic. It has little to do with the personal grief that most of us have experienced at one time or another, the kind felt this week by the friends and loved ones of the dead and injured. The grief the rest of us feel in the attacks' aftermath, although real to us, is a more general kind of grief, a form of nationalistic self-definition in a situation in which we don't know what else to do, other than unite through shared feelings.
3 In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the country is shaken by emotion. Some people respond to this by suggesting that we must now have no bickering among ourselves, that it is time for the ultimate unity of group sadness, that "stridency" and "debate" aren't what we need, but rather a unified decorum of grief. To question this so-called decorum is to risk being called self-centered, someone who doesn't feel the appropriate respect, even reverence, for the group's grief.
At a time like this, it's easier to give into mass emotion than it is to try to think clearly about what's going on. Not surprisingly, the first thing that happens when mass emotion becomes our guideline for how to behave is that we start resenting the dissenters, the ones who say, "Wait a minute. Shouldn't we stop for a while and analyze the situation?" But mass emotion wants no analysis. It wants the self-congratulation, the self-righteousness, of its collective grief. It does not want to be disturbed. It wants to establish itself as the only allowable etiquette of the moment. It wants power.
4 Unlike most nations in the world, the U.S. has never been invaded. Therefore, the terrorist attack has a special meaning for us. Startled and confused, we wonder: How could this happen? We've been fortunate. In the past, we've been able to consider our soil safe.
But we only have to look at our history to realize how possible such an attack was. In fact, a close examination of our history shows us that the continent was once before the victim of an even larger scale, more violent invasion. Armies, mercenaries and land-grabbers piled onto the continent from Europe, killed most of the indigenous inhabitants and terroristically took over the land. That we in turn would one day suffer a terroristic attack wasn't a physical impossibility; after all, the continent wasn't in the past and isn't now immune to outside penetration.
Of course, this analysis doesn't mean the Sept. 11 terrorist attack was justified. It just places our anger at that attack into context. And in fact, the details given above are quite relevant. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, once said that only a country like the United States, which had stolen all its land from other peoples (the native tribes), could think it was a good idea to take the Palestinians' land and create Israel out of it in partial recompense for crimes that were committed, not in the middle east, but in Europe.
Since the Palestinian question stands at the center of many U.S differences with the Islamic world, Toynbee's remarks are not foolish. They should be meditated upon.
5 In his poem "An Eye, Open," Paul Celan (1920-1970), both of whose parents died in a concentration camp and who himself was compelled to do road labor in Moldavia during WWII, says - does not stand in its way, the lash
does not count what goes in.
This eyeball about which Celan writes is the enemy of our current Mass Emotionists. They view it as a thing to be hated, to be stomped to jelly beneath their feet. To see with a focus in which nothing is allowed to stand in the way of clarity, this is a sin to the Mass Emotionist. With the same rage that the white supremacist Aryan Nation member feels toward the black and the Jew, the Mass Emotionist loathes Celan's open eye, the unprotected eye ("the lid / does not stand in its way, the lash/ does not count what goes in") that risks its health in order to see.
Clarity of seeing, of thought, is bad. "Go to the back of the class," the Mass Emotionist teacher says. "You are not one of us. You are not well-behaved."
And so the isolation begins. The isolators think of themselves as pure and nice and very sensitive. "We are isolating the deviants for their own good, as well as for the group's good" the isolators say.
6 In the "Instead of a Preface" section to her poem "Requiem," the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) spoke about what it was like to stand in line day after day outside the Leningrad prison where her son was locked up during the Stalin years.
The section reads as follows:
"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once someone ‘recognized' me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard of me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?' And I answered, ‘Yes, I can.' Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face."
Some U.S. writers naively like to think they are brave like Akhmatova -- this woman who described what wasn't supposed to be described, this poet expelled from the Soviet writers union because of her poetry and attitudes. But many of these writers are self-deluded.
Unlike Akhmatova who did not fit in with her own time's conventional mass emotions and who challenged those emotions in her own way, our current mass emotionalists wouldn't challenge the status quo, even a status quo flea, unless the flea was in chains. Such writers, although they take great pride in their sensitivity and so-called intelligence, will do little to jeopardize their safe position within the herd.
They want the poetry world to be a playground sandbox in which fathers and mothers stand over their children, making sure that the children follow the rules for "nice" talk. This pleasant or "correct" way of talking is the new language (a language that prioritizes "nice" fantasy over "bad" reality and so-called good manners over probing interrogation) the taste-makers want poets and others to adopt.
Anyone who loves poetry, or clarity, or decency rejects such an approach. Language is one of the swords referred to symbolically when Jesus, the Christian holy man, proclaimed, "I have come not to bring peace, but a sword."
The sword of clarity. Of focus. Of speaking out against zombie patriots who thrive on the sale of cheap emotion during difficult times.
7 When all the bodies are finally counted in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on NYC and D.C., the death toll will be in the thousands. It's impossible to know this and not grieve for the dead, the injured, and families and friends left behind. As a nation we won't recover quickly from this tragedy. The question is: Will we recover at all?
According to the president, Colin Powell and other cabinet members and government officials, we are preparing to strike back at the terrorist acts' orchestrators. This is not surprising. But who are we planning to strike back at? And are we certain they're the correct targets? And additionally, are there things we should know as a nation before striking back? We certainly need to know more than that members of Congress, most of whom we usually view cynically, are capable of singing America the Beautiful together on the Capitol steps. A public relations event like this - one designed to remind us that we having nothing to fear since Congressional members are "democracy's leaders" - is not a good reason to do anything, let alone go to war.
Of course, we don't have to wait for a formal military operation to be launched against Afghanistan or Iraq (or whatever other country we choose to punish) in order for the nation's retaliation to begin. It has already begun.
* Gunfire shattered windows in an Islamic Center in Dallas.
* In a Chicago suburb hundreds of angry predominantly white citizens marched on an Arab neighborhood in an effort to "punish" terrorists. Police arrested protest leaders in order to protect Arab Americans from violence. Across the country, numerous incidents have been reported of "Arab-looking" taxi drivers pulled from their cabs and beaten up.
* On Long Island in New York, an enraged man attempted to run over a Palestinian woman in a parking lot. This was one of scores of incidents nation-wide involving the harassment of Muslim women who were identified as such because of their veils.
* In a Philadelphia suburb, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer pulled his gun on a Palestinian clerk in a 7 & Eleven and threatened him with racial slurs in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
* Some people say that such incidents aren't important because they pale in comparison to the number of dead and wounded from the terrorist attacks. Such people themselves have a terrorist mentality: they would sacrifice the innocent because of an event or issue that they claim is "more important" than crimes against certain individuals.
At a time like this we must be wary of those who would preach love of country above all else. Such claims too often entail secret agendas for targeting "outsiders" who for decades have been viewed as "unsanitary" or "backward" or "dark" or "barbaric" or simply not trustworthy by the majority community. Those discriminated against in such a manner are of course just as clean, forward, civilized and trustworthy as anyone else, sometimes more so because their wider variety of experiences as immigrants and/or outcastes has given them a reverence for life that many U.S. citizens, especially those who are white and better off, have lost as a result of having grown too used to possessing a more commodities-saturated lifestyle than most of the world's citizens.
9 This is a time to stand up and be counted. It's relatively easy to say "I grieve." It's more difficult, in a society which has traditionally displayed little respect for Muslims, to stand in solidarity with those very Muslims. And this is exactly what we should do. Poets, who like to consider themselves language experts, should reject the easy emotionalism of saying what's popular and instead use their communication skills to show respect for the Islamic way of life and an open-mindedness toward other, non-U.S. ways of looking at the world and global conflicts.
Such understanding, more than any missiles, will diminish terrorism long-term.
I'll end these notes with an excerpt from a poem, section 7 of "Qur'anic Meditations." The section is a meditation on Sura 19, verses 15-25:
I can't think straight,
Top | Publications Page | Home All Roads Lead to Fallujah
-- Published in Newtopia --
1. What Movement?
2. Progressive Ignorance of the Real World: An Example |