The “Mired Sublime” of Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou
| September 24, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 05, Number 3, May 1995 |
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Paul Naylor
Department of English
The University of Memphis
pknaylor@msuvx1.memphis.edu
We are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented Diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world.
— Edouard Glissant
Edouard Glissant’s incisive sentence–which inaugurates a series of essays, first published in 1981, devoted to the possibilities and difficulties of a cross-cultural poetics–registers the rhetorical-political shift from sameness to diversity that structures so many of the current debates over multiculturalism. Although the Martinican poet and critic raises a familiar charge against the West, that it imposed rather than proposed sameness, I want to draw attention to the curative, utopian dimension of Glissant’s diagnosis. Diversity, while fundamentally fragmented, can be “achieved in a no less creative way” than sameness. And it is this curative dimension that opens up one possibility for a cross-cultural poetry and poetics: the representation of the moment, enacted in a text, when traditions cross paths, and sameness yields to diversity to achieve a more rather than less creative encounter.
American literature in this century has witnessed its own series of attempts to produce a cross-cultural epic poem capable of telling the “tale of the tribe”1–a tale including not only American but world history as well. This series of “world-poems” begins with The Cantos of Ezra Pound and continues in Louis Zukofsky’s A, H.D.’s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, Robert Duncan’s Passages, and, as I will show in this essay, Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou. Each of these works, in their own distinct way, holds out the possibility of a utopian vision created in and by poetry. Yet not all of these poems enact the passage from sameness to diversity that marks Glissant’s definition of cross-cultural poetry. Pound’s declaration in The Spirit of Romance that “all ages are contemporaneous” (6) has the unfortunate effect of reducing diversity to a transcendent sameness in the service of an all-encompassing view of world history, an effect all too evident in parts of The Cantos. As Mackey argues in his study of the 20th century American world-poem, “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems,” these poems allow for more diversity as we move closer to the present and as they begin to admit the impossibility of composing an all-encompassing tale of the human tribe. This admission, however, does not close the door on the possibility of a world-poem; on the contrary, it opens the door for the kind of creative encounter between cultures that Glissant calls for–an encounter based on the recognition of the irreducible diversity of the disparate cultures that populate the world. Nathaniel Mackey, I contend, achieves just such an encounter in his world-poem, Song of the Andoumboulou.
For the last ten years, Mackey, an African-American writer intent on exploring both sides of the hyphen, has investigated a remarkably wide range of subjects and forms. He has published two full-length volumes of poetry, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra; two volumes of an on-going work of epistolary fiction, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus’s Run; a major collection of essays, Discrepant Engagement; numerous articles on music, literature, and culture, and he has co-edited Moment’s Notice, an anthology of poetry and prose inspired by jazz. Mackey is also the founding editor of the literary journal Hambone, which Eliot Weinberger rightly calls “the main meeting-place for Third World, American minority and white avant-gardists” (232). Yet despite the wide range of subjects and forms his writing undertakes, Mackey’s work almost always gathers around the fact of song. The essays deal with Baraka and the Blues, Creeley and Jazz; the epistolary fiction is comprised of letters from “N,” a member of a jazz band, the Mystic Horn Society; and many of the poems are dedicated to musicians such as John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Jimi Hendrix, Pharoah Sanders, and Cecil Taylor.
For Mackey, song, a term that includes poetry, creates the possibility of what he terms a “discrepant engagement” between cultures. The phrase serves as both a title for his recent book of essays and as a description of his reading of the cross-cultural moment. Mackey defines the term in relation to
the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits. They call it the “creaking of the word.” It is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings “bass,” voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend. (Engagement 19)
Discrepant engagement, then, not only denotes a theory of cross-culturality; it enacts one in the structure of its definition. The crossing traditions of Dogon and Western cosmologies and philosophies of language allow Mackey to present a second crossing, one in which traditions of sense and nonsense, noise and word, encounter one and other. Mackey uncovers in this second opposition the cross-cultural moment shared by both traditions, although the judgment concerning that moment’s value is clearly not shared. This opposition animates most of Mackey’s writing and generates the cross-cultural recognition embodied in the moment of song.
Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou presents this illusive and allusive moment, this discrepant engagement, when two traditions of poetic cosmology–the Dogon tradition of West Africa and the American tradition of the world-poem–cross paths.2 For Mackey, the cultural judgment concerning the value of song coincides with the way a given culture reacts to the opposition between noise and word, with how much “creaking” a culture tolerates in its words. If we recall Mackey’s contention that the “founding noise” of language also serves to remind us of a tradition’s “axiomatic exclusions,” then it follows that a culture’s definitions of and judgments about noise have political as well as aesthetic implications.
Glissant offers a useful interpretation of the politics of noise he finds at work in the “jumbled rush” of sound that composes Martinican Creole. “This is how the dispossessed man organizes his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise,” Glissant contends. “So the meaning of a sentence is sometimes hidden in the accelerated nonsense created by scrambled sounds. But this nonsense does convey real meaning to which the master’s ear cannot have access” (124). The “scrambled sounds” of Creole hide meaning from the master; the dispossessed find a form of subversion in the noise ignored by those who possess, and they hide meaning most often in song. In Mackey’s work, song inhabits this ambiguous ground. In the words of “N,” Mackey’s “namesake” correspondent in his epistolary fiction, “Did song imply a forfeiture of speech or was it speech’s fulfillment?” (Run 160) As we will see, Mackey’s poetry and poetics offer a deliberately ambivalent answer to this question.
In Gassire’s Lute, Mackey describes the world-poem in light of Duncan’s understanding of Pound’s, H.D.’s, and Charles Olson’s initial attempts to produce such a poem. “The world-poem is a global, multiphasic work in which various times and various places interpenetrate. It is no accident, as Duncan sees it, that this sort of work began to appear during the period of the two world wars, a time when national divisions and hostilities were at the forefront. What he puts forth is a sense of the world-poem as a dialectical, oppositional response to the outright disunity of a world at war” (“Lute” III, 152). The world-poem, then, is by design a cross-cultural work. It seeks to represent in collage or serial form the “luminous moments,” to use Pound’s phrase, that transcend temporal and cultural boundaries in order to overcome the nationalistic tendencies that led to two world wars. Yet both the world-poem in particular and the practice of collage in general raise significant questions concerning the relation of the author to the material appropriated from other cultures. Does the author necessarily underwrite the values of all the sources on which he or she draws? Is the author claiming “mastery” over these sources, or does he or she attempt to set up a more dialogic relationship with them? And given the often unwritten strictures against overly discursive language in these genres, how does the author make his or her relation to the source texts evident? I am not suggesting that Mackey answers all of these questions directly in his version of the world-poem. There are, as we will see, potential incongruities between the material he borrows from Dogon cosmology and his own position as author; there are, for instance, incongruities between the Dogon treatment of gender and sexuality and Mackey’s that are not fully addressed or worked out in the poetry. Nevertheless, Mackey’s concept of a “discrepant engagement” between cultures allows room for such unresolved incongruities without undermining the worth of his project.
Furthermore, Mackey does address in Gassire’s Lute the general problem of authorship and inspiration in a way that sheds light on his understanding of the possible dangers involved in the authorship of a world-poem. Mackey’s book investigates the ways in which the story of Gassire’s lute provides a connection between previous instances of the world-poem and brings the subjects of war and poetry face to face with each other. But, more significantly, it also investigates the ways in which that story announces the cross-cultural moment in at least three of those poems–Pound’s The Cantos, Olson’s The Maximus Poems, and Duncan’s Passages–and the ways in which the modernist aesthetic governing the world-poem comes under fire. As Mackey informs us, Pound found the story in Leo Frobenius’ and Douglas Fox’s African Genesis and incorporated it in Canto LXXIV, so the story brings African culture directly into the mix of the American world-poem. Frobenius first heard the story when he was working with the Soninke of Mali, who inhabit the same region of West Africa as the Dogon (“Lute” I, 86-89). Gassire, the son of the King of the mythical city of Wagadu, following a fierce battle, hears a partridge singing the Dausi, an African epic song, and determines to trade his role as military leader for that of singer. He orders a special lute to be made but is warned by the craftsman that the lute will only sing if its wood is stained with the blood of Gassire’s sons. He is so entranced with the song of the Dausi that he willingly accepts this price, which leads to the death of his eight sons and the destruction of Wagadu.
For Mackey, the story of Gassire’s lute becomes a parable about the dangers of song and poetry, about the dangers of placing oneself in the path of daimonic inspiration at the expense of human life. “Taken seriously, the notion [of inspiration] complicates and unsettles what we mean by ‘human,’ since if we’re subject to such invasions our susceptibility has to be a factor of what being human means” (“Lute” I, 96). Throughout Gassire’s Lute, Mackey interrogates the possibility that the poets producing the various world-poems under consideration may in fact be susceptible to just such a danger. In particular, he cites Duncan’s analysis of “Pound’s refusal to look at the possibility that the ideal might be a party to what betrays it, ‘that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure, with the obscene–what goes on backstage'”(“Lute” III, 160). According to this line of argument, Pound trusted his muse too much; he refused to question the source of his inspiration and, as a result, was unable or unwilling to see the ways in which the sublime may be intertwined with the political horrors he sought to denounce in The Cantos.
Mackey contends that Duncan avoids this trap because his poetry exhibits a “willingness to question or corrupt its own inspiration” (“Lute” II, 159). I want to extend this argument to Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou and argue that he, like Duncan, courts a muse that makes this questioning an integral part of inspiration–a questioning that intentionally leaves both the poet and reader enmeshed in a “mired sublime” (Udhra18). However, unlike a number of postmodern poets and theorists, Mackey does not unequivocally dismiss the possibility of transcendence through, among other things, song. He contends that song can embody “a simultaneous mystic thrust. Immanence and transcendence meet, making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well” (Engagement 235). As we will see as we examine his world-poem, Mackey offers a revised notion of transcendence–a notion that incorporates the social and political realms and that not only protects against dangerous notions of inspiration and the reduction of diversity to sameness but holds out the possibility of a truly curative cross-cultural poetry as well.
Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou begins in his first book of poetry, continues in his second, and new sections have been appearing recently in poetry magazines such as New American Writing, Sulfur, and River City.3 Because of the on-going and open-ended nature of the series, Mackey’s poems are not easy to enter, nor are they susceptible to an authoritative reading since they too include a certain amount of “founding noise” in their form as well as their content. This difficulty is augmented by the fact that the Andoumboulou are virtually unknown outside of a small group of West African anthropologists. Even for the interested, information on the Andoumboulou is scarce at best. Mackey is aware of only two instances in which the Andoumboulou are mentioned–in the liner notes to Francois Di Dio’s Les Dogon, a recording of Dogon music, and in Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen’s The Pale Fox–both of which Mackey cites as epigraphs to Songs 1-7 in Eroding Witness and Songs 8-15 in School of Udhra respectively. In the first instance, Di Dio reveals that “The Song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits. For this reason the initiates, crouching in a circle, sing it in a whisper in the deserted village, and only the howling of the dogs and the wind disturb the silence of the night” (Witness 31). In the second instance, Griaule and Dieterlen place the Andoumboulou in the context of Dogon cosmology, wherein the Andoumboulou are the product of the incestuous coupling of the Yeban and reside in the earth’s interior. As a result of this coupling, the Andoumboulou “attest to Ogo’s failure and his lost twinness” (Udhra 1). As we will see, exploring the possibility of a reconciliation of this lost twinness animates the utopian dimension of Mackey’s world-poem.
Although these citations might not provide the reader with a great deal of information about the Andoumboulou, they do provide Mackey with enough inspiration to begin his series of poems. “What really bore most on my initial senses of what would be active in that sequence was the actual music, the ‘Song of the Andoumboulou’ on that album, a funereal song whose low, croaking vocality intimates the dead and whose climactic trumpet bursts signal breakthru [sic] to another world, another life” (“Letter”). Admittedly, an author’s comments on his or her own work do not provide a privileged interpretation of that work; nevertheless, Mackey’s gloss of his world-poem brings to the fore two issues that prove crucial for an understanding of the work: the centrality of song and the possibility of transcendence through song. First, note that the music rather than the mythology of the Dogon initially sparks his interest and that it is the blurring of the boundaries between song and noise, the “croaking vocality,” that catches his attention in particular. Second, note that this particular kind of song opens the poet up not only to the possibility of encountering the past (the “dead”) but to the possibility of encountering “another world, another life.” Mackey’s conception of transcendence should not be confused with either a Judeo-Christian or a symbolist conception; nevertheless, the possibility of transcendence animates his cross-cultural poetic project.
Although Mackey’s understanding of transcendence will unfold more fully as my argument develops, his desire to leave open the possibility of temporal or historical transcendence suggests ways in which his treatment of the Andoumboulou moves beyond a mere antiquarian interest in Dogon mythology. According to Mackey,
it wasn’t until I read The Pale Fox in the course of writing School of Udhra that I found out the Andoumboulou are specifically the spirits of an earlier, flawed or failed form of human being–what, given the Dogon emphasis on signs, traces, drawings, etc. and the “graphicity” noted above, I tend to think of as a rough draft of human being. I’m lately fond of saying that the Andoumboulou are in fact us, that we’re the rough draft. (“Letter”)
For Mackey, then, the song of the Andoumboulou is also potentially “our” song–the song of a form of humanity that is not quite finished, that is still in process of becoming more than it presently is. As we will see, the reconciliation of the “lost twinness” mentioned above becomes a central preoccupation of Mackey’s world-poem, and that reconciliation may suggest a way in which humanity might move beyond the “rough draft” stage of development. Thus, Mackey’s remarks on his world-poem not only raise important questions concerning our access to history and tradition; they also suggest the ways in which his series of poems may develop the kind of curative dimension Glissant calls for since they hold out the possibility of humanity going through another “draft” or revision–a revision that recognizes rather than reduces diversity.
The original “Song of the Andoumboulou,” as Mackey points out, is a dirge sung by the elders of the Dogon. His world-poem opens with this moment of lament:
The song says the
dead will not
ascend without song.
That because if
we lure them their names get
our throats, the
word sticks.
(Witness 33)
First, what are we to make of the verb in the opening line? If we listen to the version of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” recorded by Di Dio, the song does not “say” anything if we construe that term strictly. The song seems to explore the pre- or post-articulate terrain of chant and groan, whisper and sigh rather than a definite ground of meaning or direct communication. Yet the mood or tone of the song is unmistakably that of a funereal chant; I doubt many listeners, even those unfamiliar with African music, would take the song to be part of a festive occasion.
Both the recording of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” and the first two stanzas of Mackey’s poem, then, bring the listener and reader up against the opposition between word and noise that figures prominently in his notion of a discrepant engagement. So the initial cross-cultural engagement between the Dogon song and his own embryonic poem takes place on the contested terrain between word and noise. “There’s something, for me at least, particularly ‘graphic’ about recourse to that strained, straining register, the scratchy tonalities [of the Dogon singers] to which the lines ‘their names get / our throats, the / word sticks’ allude” (“Letter”). The direct connection Mackey makes here between the Dogon song and the lines from the second stanza of his first “Song” hinges on the hesitant if not inhibited act of expression. Nevertheless, while the “word sticks” in the singer’s throat, the “founding noise” of the song “says” something which both precedes and exceeds that word and which, furthermore, precedes and exceeds the singer as well. Perhaps, then, we can extend Glissant’s contention that the noise or “jumbled rush” of sound in Creole speech deliberately conceals meaning from the master to include the contention that the noise inherent in both versions of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” deliberately conceals meaning from an equally domineering master–the master of meaning who demands that all linguistic sounds make rational sense.
This extension of Glissant’s argument brings us face to face with the mystical element inherent in Dogon cosmology and in Mackey’s poetry and poetics. The term “mysticism,” like the equally troublesome term “transcendence,” is, for contemporary Western readers in particular, often overwhelmed by its Judeo-Christian connotations, and, as a result, the term needs to be used in a carefully qualified manner. W.T. Jones defines mysticism as the “view that reality is ineffable and transcendent; that it is known, therefore, by some special, nonrational means; that knowledge of it is communicable, if at all, only in poetic imagery and metaphor” (Jones 424). I want to add song to Jones’ list of the means by which nonrational knowledge may be communicable since the mystical moment in Dogon cosmology and Mackey’s poetry transpires in song as well as in imagery and metaphor. Furthermore, nonrational knowledge of the transcendent and ineffable nature of reality may not be communicable at all. Song, imagery, and metaphor can suggest or intimate that knowledge, but they cannot make it explicit or absolute. Yet song, imagery, and metaphor can make explicit their own limits and, via negativa, draw attention to that which transcends those limits. Thus, the dialectic of word and noise that comprises the discrepant engagement occurring between the Dogons’ “Song of the Andoumboulou” and Mackey’s is best understood as part of a movement that simultaneously reveals and conceals a reality that transcends any attempt to represent it in a strictly rational mode of communication. This dialectical understanding of the relation between word and noise, therefore, mitigates against hubristic assumptions about the possibility of an all-encompassing tale of the tribe. Yet it also leaves unresolved–perhaps intentionally, perhaps not–the potential incongruities between the author’s stance and those of the cultural materials on which he or she draws.
Song, imagery, and metaphor, for Mackey, come together in the tradition of lyric poetry–a tradition with close ties to Western romanticism and the claims for transcendence that accompany it. Yet Mackey’s understanding of the transcendent moment in lyric poetry cannot simply be equated with romanticism. The transcendent moment for a romantic such as Coleridge, for instance, allows access to the “infinite I Am” of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Coleridge 263). In Coleridge’s poetics, lyric poetry is one of the primary means by which one can transcend the finite, material world of the senses and move into the infinite, immaterial world of God’s presence. For Mackey, on the other hand, the transcendental tradition of lyric poetry allows access to “modes of being prior to one’s own experience,” to “[r]ecords of experience that are part of the communal and collective inheritance that we have access to even though we have not personally experienced those things” (“Interview” 48). Mackey’s conception of transcendence, then, is best understood in a sociological or historical rather than theological or metaphysical sense–as a human to human rather than a human to divine encounter. In short, Mackey offers a “horizontal” rather than “vertical” notion of transcendence. For Mackey, language is one of the primary means of attaining this moment of transcendence since “in language we inherit the voices of the dead. Language is passed on to us by people who are now in their graves and brings with it access to history, tradition, times and places that are not at all immediate to our own immediate and particular occasion whether we look at it individually and personally or whether we look at it in a more collective way and talk about a specific community” (“Interview” 54). Yet language is only one means of transcendence, and, due to the “founding noise” inherent in the word, it does not hold out the possibility of absolute transcendence.
An equally important means of transcendence for Mackey is found in human sexuality. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 1,” we are told that “the dead don’t want / us bled, but to be / sung. // And she said the same, / a thin wisp of soul, / But I want the meat of / my body sounded” (Witness 35). I read the lines in italics as pertaining to that which both “she” and the “dead” desire: to be “sounded” in song, not as disembodied entities but as beings composed of flesh. Thus, two themes that are truly cross-cultural, sex and death, meet in the act of song–an act that purports to take the singer and the listener beyond the limits of their own experience but not out of their own bodies in order to share the sacred common ground of generation and degeneration. As we move through Mackey’s poems, both of these themes take on mythological proportions to such a great extent that in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 7” “N,” the same “N” who is the protagonist in Mackey’s fiction, admits to having “been accused of upwardly displacing sex” (Witness 54). Understanding how this “upward” displacement functions in the poems will help shed light on the possibility of reconciling the “lost twinness” through the potential transcendence in sexuality.
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” is an extended instance of this “upward displacement,” and, as such, it deserves close attention. The following passage is from the poem’s first section:
What song there
was delivered up to
above where sound leaves off,
though whatever place words talk us
into'd be like hers,
who'd only speak
to herself . . .
(A hill, down thru
its hole only ants
where this
was. The mud
hut was her body.)
Embraced, but
on the edge of speech
though she spoke
without words,
as in a dream.
The loincloth, he
said, is tight,
which is so that it conceals
the woman's sacred parts.
But that in him
this worked a longing
to unveil what's underneath,
the Word the Nommo
put inside the fabric's
woven secret,
the Book wherein
the wet of kisses
keeps.
(Witness 39-40)
The first two stanzas set the scene of transcendence, which transpires in song and in the space between silence, “where sound leaves off,” and signification, the “place words talk us / into,” a place likened to “her.” Following a parenthetical element, “she” appears “on the edge of speech,” speaking “without words”–a condition reminiscent of the paradoxical way the song “says” in the first poem of the series. This passage implicitly brings together the issues of language, song, transcendence, and sexuality, but to understand how these concerns are explicitly connected, we need to consult what is perhaps the primary source for the study of Dogon cosmology, Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmêli.
Griaule’s book records his unique discussions with Ogotemmêli, a blind Dogon sage, which took place in 1946 and which still stands as the most intimate and authoritative account of Dogon cosmology available. Mackey signals the importance of these conversations for his world-poem by prefacing the first poem with an epigraph from the book. Yet not until “Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” does the full impact of Ogotemmêli’s narrative become evident. In his commentary on the symbolic import of the Dogon women’s clothing, Ogotemmêli tells Griaule that “‘The loin-cloth is tight . . . to conceal the woman’s sex, but it stimulates a desire to see what is underneath. This is because of the Word, which the Nummo put in the fabric. That word is every women’s secret, and is what attracts the man. A woman must have secret parts to inspire desire” (Griaule 82). Clearly, the last four stanzas of the section from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 3” cited above are a poetic paraphrase of Ogotemmêli, and the common thread that runs between the two passages concerns the essential role concealment plays in desire. But this concealment provokes hermeneutical as well as sexual desire since what is longed for “underneath” the loin-cloth is “the Word.” According to Ogotemmêli, Amma, the originary God in Dogon lore, created the earth from a lump of clay and, after fashioning female genitalia in the form of an ant hill, proceeded to have sex with his creation–an act Ogotemmêli calls “the primordial blunder of God” (17). This act eventually led to the birth of twin spirits, called Nummo (spelled “Nommo” in Mackey’s version), who determined to bring speech to their speechless mother, the earth. “The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions” and formed a loin-cloth for their mother. But “the purpose of this garment was not merely modesty”: the “coiled fringes of the skirt were therefore the chosen vehicle for the words which the Spirit desired to reveal to the earth” (19-20).
To the extent that mystical discourse simultaneously reveals and conceals the reality that exceeds rational understanding, then the connection between language and sexuality as potential media of transcendence becomes more apparent if we explore not only the role the image of the loin-cloth plays in Dogon cosmology but the image of weaving as well. For the Dogon, as Griaule points out, “weaving is a form of speech, which is imparted to the fabric by the to-and-fro of the shuttle on the warp” (77). As Ogotemmêli explains, “The weaver, representing a dead man, is also the male who opens and closes the womb of woman, represented by the heddle. The stretched threads represent the act of procreation”; and the “Word . . . is in the sound of the block and shuttle. The name of the block means ‘creaking of the word.’. . . It is interwoven with the threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric” (73). Thus, the image of weaving brings us in contact with the primary elements of Dogon cosmology and Mackey’s poetics. The word and its creaking (the “founding noise” upon which the word is based) are essential parts of the procreative craft which produces the clothing that provokes the desire “to unveil what’s underneath”–a desire never fully satisfied in and by song or poetry.
As I argued earlier, the form of the world-poem raises troublesome questions concerning the author’s relation to the cultural materials on which he or she draws, and Mackey’s use of Dogon cosmology here is a case in point: by granting the essentialist notions of gender and sexuality implicit in Dogon cosmology such a prominent place in his world-poem, Mackey risks an unsavory equation of Dogon notions of gender and sexuality with his own. The all too familiar representation of woman as the passive provoker of desire and of man as the aggressive unveiler of truth is not one with which I suspect Mackey identifies. And although Mackey does not address this issue directly in Song of the Andoumboulou in a manner that draws a clear distinction between his views on this matter and the Dogons’, he does, particularly in the recently published sections of the series, explore notions that are consonant with a more contemporary understanding of gender and sexuality. I will return to this issue later; for now, let me suggest that the reconciliation of “lost twinness” will prove to be bound up with a less essentialist understanding of gender and sexuality.
To return to the connection between language and sexuality depicted in Ogotemmêli’s account, this sexualized image of the origin of language has strong implications for the notion of poetic inspiration that underlies Mackey’s world-poem. Recall his argument in Gassire’s Lute concerning the dangers of an unquestioned allegiance to the all-encompassing claims of a transcendent source of inspiration and the ways in which such claims can blind a poet to the possible complicity between poetry and politics. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5,” which carries the significant subtitle “gassire’s lute,” opens with “she”–whom I take to be the same “she” encountered in Songs 1 and 3–warning the poet to “‘beware the / burnt odor of blood you / say we ask of you” (Witness 44). The demand for blood clearly alludes to the story of Gassire’s lute, but the important point here is that those that “she” represents, the “we” of the third line, do not necessary make the demand that “you,” which I take to be the poet, say they do. This subtle qualification situates the origin of the demand in the human realm of the poet rather than in the realm of “she” and “we.” Is it possible, then, that the poet can be accused of “upwardly displacing” the demand for blood in much the same way as he admits to “upwardly displacing sex”? Read this way, Mackey’s poem enacts the kind of questioning of the source of inspiration that he finds in Duncan’s poetry–a questioning that becomes increasingly prominent in the sections of Song of the Andoumboulou that appear in Mackey’s most recent book of poetry, School of Udhra.
The sections of Mackey’s world-poem included in his second book continue to investigate the possibility of transcendence, but the poems take on a more personal tone as they turn their attention to love as a potential means of transcendence, and, as a result, a reconciliation of “lost twinness.” The site of the investigation is also more personal in these poems since they take place, for the most part, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking:
Not yet asleep I'm no longer
awake, lie awaiting what
stalks the unanswered air,
still
awaiting what blunts the running
flood
or what carries, all Our Mistress's
whispers . . .
(Udhra 3)
With one foot in the realm of waking reality and one in the realm of dream, the poet awaits the whispered message that will allow him to ascend into the latter realm–a moment that occurs in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 10.”
In this poem the poet is again awaiting sleep as he sits “up reading drafts / of a dead friend’s poem” (Udhra 5). As sleep arrives, the poet envisions himself with
Legs ascending
some unlit stairway, saw myself
escorted thru a gate of
unrest. The bed my boat, her look
lowers me
down, I rise from sleep,
my waking puts
a wreath around the sun.
(Udhra 5)
The image of the stairway appears earlier in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 5,” when “she” informs the poet “that all ascent moves up / a stairway of shattered / light” (Witness44). In the passage cited above, “she” also plays a crucial role, although one that cuts against the grain of traditional expectations. Rather than being the vehicle of the poet’s ascent–which, for example, is the role Beatrice plays in Dante’s epic–it is “her look” that brings the poet back down into waking reality, an act that results in his celebratory gesture toward the sun. Thus, “she” appears to lead the poet toward an earthly rather than other-worldly experience of transcendence.
I suggest this earth-bound transcendent experience is the experience of love, “And what love had to do with it / stuttered, bit its tongue” (Udhra 9). Love, like song, testifies to the dimensions of reality that exceed articulation, that can only be hinted at in a form of discourse that draws attention to its own limitations. Throughout Mackey’s poetry and poetics, the phenomenon of stuttering stands as just such a form. In “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” his major critical piece concerning the transcendent possibilities of music and the representation of such possibilities in literature, Mackey argues that the “stutter is a two-way witness that on one hand symbolizes a need to go beyond the confines of an exclusionary order, while on the other confessing to its at best only limited success at doing so. The impediments to the passage it seeks are acknowledged if not annulled, attested to by exactly the gesture that would overcome them if it could” (Engagement 249). This interpretation aligns stuttering with mystical discourse, which, like stuttering, simultaneously eludes and alludes to that which exceeds articulation and transcends the “exclusionary order” of rational discourse.
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 14” (Udhra 12-14) offers the most complete rendition in the series of the connection between love, transcendence, mysticism, and the limits of language. In this poem, the poet confronts “what speaks of speaking,” which is “Boxed in but at its edge alludes / to movement . . .” Self-reflexive language, while “boxed in,” can nevertheless point beyond itself to the “needle of light” the poet “laid hands on.” Confronting this light, which I take to be the same as that found at the top of the “shattered stairway” mentioned earlier, puts the poet in a position in which, although “move[d] to speak,” he finds his “mouth / wired shut”:
Mute lure, blind mystic
light,
lost aura. Erased itself,
stuttered, wouldn't say
what
Although the elliptical grammar creates a certain amount of “founding noise” in this passage and makes any reading tentative, the subject of the verbs seems to be the light encountered by the poet. Read this way, the light effaces itself and leaves only a stuttering trace of its presence. Again, stuttering should not be seen as merely a sign of a failure to communicate but as a “two-way witness” to that which exceeds communication. Thus, both the transcendent experience and its object prove to be evanescent, which does not necessarily mean they are illusory; the fact that they do not endure does not mean that they never occurred. It does imply, however, that any representation of either the experience or the object of that experience as stable or eternal falsifies both.
As the poem comes to a close, the poet’s encounter with the “mystic light” causes a similar reaction on his part:
Saw by light so abrupt I stuttered.
Tenuous
angel I took it for. Took it
for lips, an incendiary kiss,
momentary madonna. Took it for
bread,
condolences, cure. . .
The first line signals the moment of transcendence in which the subject and the object, the poet and the light, share the experience of stuttering–one that is transitory at best. Note that the light is figured here in feminine form, as an angelic “madonna” whose message comes as a kiss that is “tenuous” and “momentary” rather than authoritative and eternal. Yet despite the evanescent quality of the kiss, it provides, among other things, a curative experience for the poet, an experience that reaches its apogee in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 15,” the last in the series published in School of Udhra.
At the beginning of this poem the poet moves “Back down the steps” (Udhra 15) of what I read as the “shattered stairway of light,” yet this movement does not necessarily indicate a movement from one world to another. As I argued earlier, Mackey’s notion of transcendence is best understood in physical rather than metaphysical terms. His reading of the moment of transcendence in Duncan’s poetry provides an equally revealing insight into the same moment in his poetry. According to Mackey, the point of Duncan’s poetry and poetics “is that we live in a world whose limits we make up and that those limits are therefore subject to unmaking. The ‘irreality’ the poem refers to is not so much a stepping outside as an extending of reality. This is the meaning of the cosmic impulse or aspiration, the cosmic mediumship to which the poem lays claim” (“Lute” IV, 194). For Mackey, song and love, both of which are anchored in the material realm of the body, are two of the means by which such an extension of reality occurs:
The rough body
of love at last gifted with
wings, at
last bounded on all but one
impenetrable side by the promise
of heartbeats heard on high,
wrought
promise of lips one dreamt of aimlessly
kissing,
throated rift. . .
(Udhra 15)
Unlike a traditional Christian conception of utopia, wherein the soul gets its “wings” only after leaving the body behind, the wings in this poem, which serve as a figure for the means by which the experience of reality is extended, are given to the “rough body / of love.” Note also that this body is bounded by the promise rather than fulfillment of transcendence. Furthermore, this promise confronts an “impenetrable” element that, much like the “founding noise” inherent in language, curbs any claims for an unalloyed experience of transcendence and leaves a “rift” in the promise that cannot, and perhaps should not, be overcome.
This scene of provisional transcendence is as close as Mackey comes to a reconciliation of the “lost twinness” that may move humanity beyond the “rough draft” stage of the Andoumboulou. And it also marks the point at which Mackey’s own notions of gender and sexuality may move beyond the essentialist notions of Dogon cosmology discussed earlier. Throughout the recently published sections of “Song of the Andoumboulou,” the distinctions between “he” and “she” merge into a “we” that:
would include, not reduce to us . . .
He to him, she to her, they to them,
opaque
pronouns, "persons" whether or not we
knew who they were . . .
("Song of the Andoumboulou: 18")
This “we” does not reduce to either “he” or “she” but to an inclusive notion of humanity that suggests an understanding of gender that views men and women as having their essence in collective rather than gender-specific pronouns. I am not claiming that this invocation of a collective understanding of gender resolves all of the problems raised by Mackey’s appropriation of Dogon cosmology in his world-poem; it does, however, point in the direction I suspect Mackey will continue to explore as his on-going world-poem develops and works its way toward a reconciliation of the “lost twinness” that marks the “rough draft” of a form of humanity that is still in process.
The curative dimension of Mackey’s world-poem, then, occurs as it extends our conception of reality beyond the “exclusionary order” of rational discourse–an order that has based its exclusions on essentialist notions of race and gender. What Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou attempts to cure us of is the desire to reduce the representation of diversity and difference to the kind of all-encompassing sameness that compromises some of the initial instances of the American world-poem. As Mackey argues, there is a troubling measure of American imperialism implicit in the very idea of a world-poem, which may indeed “reflect a distinctly American sense of privilege, the American feeling of being entitled to everything the world has to offer[.] It may well be the aesthetic arm of an American sensibility of which CIA-arranged coups, multinational corporations and overseas military bases are more obvious extensions” (“Lute” III, 160). The fact that Mackey’s poetry conceals as much as it reveals, like the loin-cloth in Dogon cosmology, stands as his attempt to quell the appetite of such an omnivorous genre, an attempt that situates us in a “mired sublime,” a sublime that offers us “no way out / if not thru” (Udhra 18).
Yet this result is no more to be overcome than deplored since, as Mackey contends, the “saving grace of poetry is not a return to an Edenic world, but an ambidextrous, even duplicit capacity for counterpoint, the weaving of a music which harmonizes contending terms” (“Lute” IV, 199). Mackey’s use of the musical metaphor of counterpoint here resonates with Edward Said’s use of it in Culture and Imperialism to figure his understanding of the dynamics of a truly cross-cultural encounter between peoples and texts. “In counterpoint,” Said points out, “various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work”–a counterpoint that “should be modelled not . . . on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble” (51 and 318). It is in this sense that the counterpoint in Mackey’s poetry between “founding noise” and articulate word and between African and American poetic traditions opens the way for the kind of creative cross-cultural encounter that Edouard Glissant contends marks the “massive transformation” that is shaping our present history. The hope the promise mentioned above holds out is that the new song this transformation helps compose will be more inclusive without being more reductive, that it will be a song which does not insist on resolving all the tension involved in a “discrepant engagement” between cultures, and that, as a result, it will be a song more consonant with this diverse world and those embodied in and by it.
Notes
* I would like to thank John Duvall and Tom Carlson for their careful reading of this essay, and Nathaniel Mackey for discussing his work with me in a friendly and helpful manner.
1. The phrase is Ezra Pound’s, although he claims to derive it from Rudyard Kipling. For a history of this phrase and of three American poems that attempt to tell such a tale, see Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
2. These are not the only traditions woven together in Mackey’s poetry; elements of European, Arabian, Latin and South American traditions also make their presence felt in the poems. Although an examination of all of these traditions would prove illuminating, such a task is too ambitious for a single essay.
3. Mackey has recently recorded Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25. This recording is available from Spoken Engine Co., P.O. Box 771739, Memphis, TN 38177-1739.
Works Cited
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Ed. Donald A. Stauffer. New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1951.
- Glissant, Edouard. “Cross-Cultural Poetics.” Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. 97.
- Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli. Trans. Ralph Butler. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
- Jones, W.T. History of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, Inc., 1975.
- Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- —. Djbot Baghostus’s Run. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993.
- —. Eroding Witness. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, I.” Talisman 5 (Fall 1990).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, II.” Talisman 6 (Spring 1991).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, III.” Talisman 7 (Fall 1991).
- —. “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War Poems, IV and V.” Talisman 8 (Spring 1992).
- —. “An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey.” Ed Foster. Talisman 9 (Fall 1992).
- —. School of Udhra. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993.
- —. “Song of the Andoumboulou: 18.” Poetry Project Newsletter #149 (April/May 1993).
- —. Personal letter to the author. December, 19, 1993.
- Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
- Said, Edward, W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
- Weinberger, Eliot. “News in Briefs.” Sulfur 31 (Fall 1992).