« indietro
MEENA ALEXANDER, Raw Silk, Evanston Illinois, TriQuarterly Books – Northwestern University Press 2004, pp. 96, $ 13.95
Last spring at the close of the academic year, Toni Morrison visited Hunter College. She read Love beautifully. And, with her characteristic blend of sincerity and poise, Morrison answered questions posed by members of the audience. One individual asked about the role of the writer in these times. The rest of us knew what the questioner meant: in the time of war. Morrison said that, in «these times, the writer gets to work». As with her questioner, the author did not need to explain herself. We understood exactly what she meant – that in these times, the storyteller, the painter, the poet, they do the real work of art: «art for our sake». Implicit in Morrison’s answer is the idea that literature is joined hipwise to politics and power; that speaking to her constituents about war and other manufactured tragedies is the task of the poet – especially in these times. In other words, she meant that poetry is not a luxury.
This exchange has stayed with me and it returned in a poignant way when I read Meena Alexander’s new poetry collection, Raw Silk (Northwestern University Press, August 2004). While my students wrote in-class final-exams on Audre Lorde’s brilliant prose piece, Poetry is Not a Luxury, I read Alexander’s recent poems. On behalf of my unsuspecting students, I pretended not to have been utterly moved, blinked away tears hanging on edge: it is not acceptable for the teacher to be found crying in class.
Poems like these perhaps ought to come with warning labels – «Do not read while teaching or when otherwise up-in-arms about national politics». And I say this not because of graphic content but simply in response to the lyric intensity of the poems, the affective thrust of the language, the object lessons. Langston Hughes once defined a poem as «...the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words» (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, p. 5). He was right, of course. I think both poets would agree that these poems – the ones that send you to the moon when you ought to be looking after your test-taking students – are the best kind. They are poetry – pure, simple, sublime.
From one such poem, the grand finale of an otherwise grand book – a dramatic stream of forty-six perfectly euphonic, rhythmic, rigorous couplets. It is called Fragile Places: «Tongues emblazon / the harpsichord of flesh, // close to a child in a wood house / where a bomb falls, // her arms and legs aflame, / a woman in a kitchen miles away // washing rice, who turns / and stops to write» (pp. 87-88).
In this piece, I recognized that voice familiar from Alexander’s work: a gentle, compelling voice imploring readers to see that which must be witnessed, to recognize what must be reconciled. Guided by that voice, I felt I’d been walked through some grave and vital scene. Some momentous, not then graspable truth buzzed quietly between the poems, a question perhaps – an idea, something I needed to find my own words for, a response I needed to make but couldn’t quite capture. In the fiery onslaught prompted by the poems, bereft of language to explain the buzz, the dawning sense of the work, I could locate the complementary emotion, however: outrage. And, I remembered – couldn’t help remembering – Morrison’s memorable words:«The writer gets to work: In these times: the task of the poet: performed».
That buzz between poems, that bordering, circling hum, this is the white matter of art – ‘white matter’: «whitish nerve tissue of the central nervous system»: in other words, you can’t see it or touch it but you know it’s there; and without it, you might even be dead. Literature stirs up forgotten inquisitions –interrogations once desperate that had fallen between the cracks of daily routine, nightly vigil. Poetry paints pictures of the problems we are able to confront in dreams alone. Raw Silk urges the ‘hearing’ called for by Muriel Rukeyser in these times decades ago. In 1949, from the rubble of Hiroshima and the killing fields of Buchenwald, Rukeyser concludes that the point, the ‘life’ of poetry lies in the fact that «[w]e wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along» (The Life of Poetry, p. 26). And poetry fulfills that wish.
I am tempted to go as far as suggesting that only poetry can fulfill that wish. Years later, from the endzone of an endless race war, in the aftermath of Vietnam and from the fringes of a politico-sexual life, Audre Lorde had her finger on Rukeyser’s point – on the white matter of poetry: «...for it is through poetry,» Lorde wrote, «that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt» (Sister Outsider, p. 36). I’ve been trying to find, to remember, to imagine the words that match the buzz of Raw Silk. What is it telling me that I already mean, that I already feel, that I already know?
Through metaphor and metonym, these poems ask the driven, lashing queries of a woman poet in these times. Set in diverse contemporary landscapes, they bear witness to the shocking realities of a world manifestly organized, dramatized and traumatized by militant politics and power, national and paranational – by war, here there everywhere. Part 1 is set in Manhattan, September 11th 2001. Part 2, New York City, Afterward. In Part 3, it is Rome where ancient history and contemporary violence are contemplated side by side – suicide, infanticide and a war in Iraq straddle «a stone / Giotto painted» (p. 54). Part 4, the final section – it is India, the poet’s birthplace; the state:Gujarat, Gandhi’s birthplace;the time:February and March, 2002 when upwards of 2000 Indians were killed, raped, mutilated or rendered homeless in one more episode in the continuing communal violence that has plagued South Asia since partition in 1947. This collection enacts a migratory sweep across the globe. America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia –mothers, children, soldiers, leaders, poets, philosophers – fragile places in a fragile world at war. Also from Fragile Places, a stanza notably dislocated: «A chance encounter / dissolves the separate things // we make out of our lives, / as if the wreckage of war / / concerned us not a jot / and love were a painted concertina // played in underground passages, / in the metros of Manhattan, Paris, // Delhi, Kolkata where platform walls / bear a poet’s drafts blown big [...]» (p. 86).
Poetry is rendered politically useless – almost – a question raised and refused in poem after poem: «Nothing is changed / by the strength of reflection // and everything» (p. 85). Along the indices of form and content, the collection educes a number of other questions, the most important being: What does content call for in terms of form? What form, what language can bear the violent content of a world at war – the petrifying force of arms besieging Iraq, a place rendered fragile even before the present onslaught, the force of smart bombs that can take down Al Jazeera and the city of Baghdad in one astonishing sweep, and, even worse: in the face of a legion of former allies now challenging that very aggression?
What metaphor can take the place of all that? What voice can breathe, what form embody these times? This is a question for which Alexander provides a number of intriguing answers, solutions suggested through not only allusion or direct reference to poets spanning centuries and continents, but by means of conversations with Lorca and Gandhi, a quasi-dialogue with Kant. These exchanges – dotting the collection from end to end – suggest the need for solidarity amongst poets of different times and places in order to realize poetry of war. The collection further proposes that representing and remembering these times requires a transformation of traditional forms and tools provided by literary history. Raw Silk testifies to the need for poets to remain in discourse with forerunners while, simultaneously, experimenting with and ultimately recreating their politico-literary lineages.
A remarkable example of such experimentation, enacted repeatedly here, is the transition from compression to expansion. The poems do not settle into one or the other spatial character, but move back and forth between them, and in short succession. In a series of lyric meditations on war and other large-scale violences, that action works well: it is a figurative trauma that hints at the tension between the compressed, enclosed self and the wider social compact. Perhaps more importantly, the movement also mimics the long, slow, deep breathing of a dying person, the belabored contractions of lungs and hearts that will soon shut down. And poetry is breathing, after all.
We perceive this action, for example, in the way poems differ noticeably in terms of location and space – whether occurring in one or many locations, whether highly private and individual or highly social and dialogic – as well as in single stanzas featuring dramatically dissimilar line lengths or lines that grow shorter as a stanza progresses, enacting a kind of inverse retrenchment. A significant moment exemplary of this effect is in the dramatic shift between Parts 3 and 4: figuratively speaking this is the transition from the American war in Iraq to the recent massacres in Gujarat. Not only does the setting change at this point but we are joggled too by differences in form and content: the voice of a commanding orator, the long heroic line, the expansive spatial sweep and the rhythm of consistent tercets in Triptych in a Time of War, the poem closing Part 3 (pp. 64-67), are all abandoned in favor of short, mostly two foot lines, a small lyric time and space, and the sinuous flow of one unbroken stanza, as in Red Bird the poem opening Part 4 (p. 71). In Triptych in a Time of War, for example, observe the line length and progression of the stanza: «The boughs know this cracking free of winter / in the cemetery where Forugh’s body lies, / so too the Dove of Tanna. // It takes flight from the eastern wall of 365 Fifth Avenue / and settles on the ziggurat of Ur / by a crater where a bomb burst» (p. 67).
From the same poem, witness the epic language, the national poet’s voice, here: «You have come to a high room / in search of language that could tell of love / of love alone, uncumbered and to search for it, as for justice...» (p. 66). And, soon after: «So turning bits of wisdom – do not hurt, do not cut / love in all the right places and the wrong. / There is no fault in love» (p. 67).
The poet speaks to her nation prescribing love. Here, the shot is extreme long – big problems in a vast field that require that long line, that wide brush, that resolute, wise voice. Here too, in the first quotation, is the arc of migrancy as we move from metropolitan New York to the plains of Iraq, to Italy and India.
In contrast, the first poem in Part 4 reads: «The shed where they raped / the women is far away. / Far away the flung bones / piled in the shape / of a cross» (p. 71).
Small words, fewer syllables per line, the voice is far more personal, the moment far more lyrical. Red Bird is followed by Amrita featuring little stanzas and sections and the same tiny speculative canvas (p. 72-74). And, the third poem in Part 4, In Naroda Patiya, reads: «Dark eyes / the color of burnt / almonds, face / slashed, lower / down where her belly / shone / a wet gash» (p. 75).
The compression here is even more dramatic than in Red Bird and Amrita. The poem seems to occur in a continuously smaller time and space, it becomes tighter and more suffocating. A poem one must crawl through, like trenches or the rubble of a fallen home, that eventually narrows into the smallest possible linear unit: one beat, half a foot: «shone». And, as with the first two poems, individual words are reduced to monosyllables: «Dark eyes», «a wet gash». The form of the poem: a cocoon. The poem itself: terrified, traumatized, turned inward.
Stanza lengths modulate but very short lines of between two and five syllables continue through this final section until the second to last poem, a sequence called Letters to Gandhi. Notably, the poems advance, metaphorically, from inside to outside, finding their way out of the tiny, lyric points sketched above back to a more spacious terrain, only after a lengthy address to a key figure. Gandhi – a regular visitor to Alexander’s work – now the muse of raw silk and other tattered objects. The first epistle to Gandhi, Lyric with Doves, continues the form and features characteristic of Part 4, but as the letters advance, lines and words become longer, increasingly complex and polysyllabic. From Slow Dancing: «Dear Mr. Gandhi / please say something / about the carnage in your home state» (p. 78).
And, in Bengali Market, also from the Gandhi sequence: «Listen my sweet, for half of each year, / after the carriage was set on fire / after the Gujarat killings, / I disappear into darkness. // In our country there are two million dead / and more for whom no rites were said. / No land on earth can bear this. / Rivers are crisscrossed with blood» (p. 81). Note the longer lines as well as the paradox: while the speaker threatens a disappearance into darkness in fact she is ‘coming out’: for it is not the persona that will disappear, but her addressee. From the start this speaker has occupied the closeted lyrics of this closing segment; soon she and her muse will trade places. From the last poem addressed to Gandhi, Gandhi’s Bicycle (My Muse Comes to Me): «Sometimes I dream he’s hidden / in a cupboard with three doors / where he’s also stashed his bicycle» (p. 83). This epistolary sequence ends in a double enclosure: Gandhi is not in prison, he is not speaking publicly, he ‘hides’ in a cupboard with a 3-part door, a ‘triptych’ of his own, his vehicle grounded. Gandhi is domesticated; he’s not going anywhere. Defeated? Perhaps disillusioned would be more apt. But while Gandhi may be in retreat, the poet and her final poem resurface on the epic stage – the nation, the world, the wars – one last time.
Fragile Places enacts the search for a language for times like these but the poem does not resolve the difficulty of that quest nor conclude it. This final poem is a question, an inquiry into the capacity for a writer to represent these times, to find a language that can stand up to the might of mass violence, to generate a poetry of war at all. In the poem, a speaker arrives home only to be besieged by the material reality of war: so many hurt bodies, so many dead and dying, raw, beaten, broken. And it is that which is left open, undone, unredeemed and unreconciled: at the collection’s close, bombs explode, bodies are undone, and a speaker invokes a muse: Sankara speak to me – the last line of the poem and the text (p. 88). The search continues. One effect of this movement, and in my view the single most important effect of Raw Silk, is that the fragile places of the collection become the fragile place of the body. Object lessons appear in the form of wrists, bones, stones, statues, cloth, straw, ash, bombs – «fleshly fragments», a «jog of hair», a «splintering mole», an «arrow roiling the eye» and skin «wet with smoke» (pp. 85-87). Indeed, the great lesson of Raw Silk is in these objects, these human parts and dressings, this human history, which, in the end, lay strewn, unfixed, bloodied by the bomb blast that closes Fragile Places: «Tongues emblazon / the harpsichord of flesh, // close to a child in a wood house / where a bomb falls» (pp. 87-88).
Alexander takes us back to the body wounded by war saying: love better, love everywhere –«in all the right places and the wrong» (p. 67). And that is the buzzing chord of Raw Silk for me. While the search for a poetics of war is questioned, answered, and reopened finally, the body terrorized by political violence is this collection’s ultimate interest – its first concern, its community, its constituency. Again echoing the aforementioned Langston Hughes, Fragile Places and Raw Silk as a whole call for recognition of the reality of human destruction in these times, also his times. Hughes’s definition of the poet and her function seems apt: «A poet is a human being», Hughes wrote, and «[e]ach human being must live within his time, with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country... Hang yourself, poet, in your own words... Otherwise, you are dead» (Ibid). Indeed.
In the end, what is most important about poetry for and in these times is not line length, prosody, or rhyme, enjambement, caesura or other creative interruption – it is the white matter of poetry, the questions it asks and answers and asks again thus illuminating, as Audre Lorde argued, that which is already known but too easily forgotten. On a beautiful spring day when the sun was shining in New York City and the children were dying in Baghdad, Palestine, Israel and Darfur, Toni Morrison reminded my fellow Americans and I that bearing the conscience of her nation is the writer’s work – it is her job, as Rukeyser said, to tell us «what we have been meaning all along», to substantiate Lorde’s maxim: «poetry is not a luxury». Not today, not ever, not especially in these times.
Meena Alexander answers Morrison, Rukeyser and Lorde through the series of powerful reflections on war and violence comprising Raw Silk – this poet goads readers toward yet another hearing, one urged by that great American mother, Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1945 – in times very much like these – Brooks called her readers to «[hear] in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim / killed children» (Selected Poems, p. 4).
Maureen Ruprecht Fadem
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