The perpetual ideal is astonishment - 07/05/2020

Untitled Malangatana Ngwenya (1967)

When I started out writing these weekly dispatches of the places where poetry and politics (may, can, should?) meet - I didn't really know where it would take me and what I would cover. I was wary of drawing tawdry or glib connections between poets, artists or political movements who are patently historically impossible or making links that felt over-drawn. I've had some great responses to these emails - as much agreement as disagreement, and it's that engagement that I want and welcome. The title of this series is paramount - 'Really, I know nothing' - none of us do, and that's the point.

In Matt Colquhoun's brilliant Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher (Repeater Books), he explores the concept of 'community' in Mark's work, and how a 'digital psychedelia' can emerge from a fractured space such as the internet. He recalls the dispute between George Bataille and Jean-Paul Satre over Bataille's book Inner Experience, and how Satre's barbed review of the book and denounciation of Bataille as a 'mystic who has seen God', reiterated the argument of the book. Bataille's response was '(I was moved)'.

Bataille's argument in the book is that human experience is shared but unshareable - we all experience it but its essence is not communicable - the ontological question of to be leads us to question our own being but also everyone else's, and it is here that community 'both finds and fails itself'. 

It is thus only through questioning the very foundations of our lives, that we truly communicate with one another. So Sartre's attack (today would take the form of shitposting or sub-tweeting) merely proved Bataille's point, and he welcomed the criticisms and Sartre's description of "the movement of my mind, based on my book, emphasising [its] foolishness from the outside, better than I could from within”.  

Going Ben Enwonwu (1961)

The recent anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which brought down the dictatorship of Caetano, gave me cause to revisit the work of artist Malangatana Ngwenya. Whilst the revolution brewed domestically, its roots were international. The revolution actually began in the anti-imperial struggles in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea - struggles that would continue well beyond the days of the Carnation Revolution. Ngwenya was a member of Frelimo, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique and was detained by the Portuguese authorities in 1964, three years before he created Untitled. Unlike many artists who flee their homeland, Ngwenya stayed, documenting the nation as it found its form. The flow of the legacy of colonialism in his work captures the awkward compromise that poet Derek Walcott (as we shall see) considers in his poem A Sea Change:

I will share the world’s beauty with my enemies
even though their greed destroys the innocence
of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent
as much as he is in a fresco, and he in all his
scales and venom and glittering head is
part of the island’s beauty; he need not repent.
--

It was fortuitous then, that I happened to find my copy of White Egrets, one of Derek Walcott's last collections of poetry, tucked into the dust jacket of my copy of Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things. The titular egrets play such an interesting role throughout the collection, a collection of wandering grief and eulogy, a poet knowing his time is waining. The egrets represent something ancient, something as indifferent as history, 'profiled in quiet to adorn a crypt', these 'pharaonic' birds circle 'praise or blame with the same high indifference as yours'. In Cole's short chapter on Walcott, he notes the sense of epiphany that colours White Egrets, this 'astonishment' that seizes our poet, before he puts them on the page in front of us:

'the page of the lawn and this open page are the same [...] an egret astonishes the page [...] we share one instinct, that ravenous feeding my pen's beak, plucking up wriggling insects like nouns and gulping them, the nib reading as it writes, shaking off angrily what its beak rejects, selection is what the egrets teach'

The egrets operate as observers, a 'white, immaculate' presence against the backdrop of 'last century's crime'. History lingers in 'The Spectre of Empire' 'like the bookmark in a nineteenth-century novel' (Walcott is a master of metaphors), stalking the 'Conradian docks' reflecting how:

The things he cherishes now are things that bore him,
and how powerlessness contains such power.
The costumes that he wore, and the roles that wore him.

The character that colonialism plays in this particular poem is really powerful and makes me feel a similar way to how I feel when I look at Ngwenya's work. Untitled as a composition feels very flat, a shallow space of flattened hierarchy, and the cartoonish element of it almost makes it feel slightly hellish, chaotic. You feel the agitation of colonial rule and the reduction of all to one category of the oppressed, the gnawing fangs of oppression. These fantastical figures could well be the Portuguese authorities.

Enwonwu's piece Going from the same decade as Untitled offers a different critique of colonial rule, a rejection of the trend of abstraction of the era, using instead representational imagery to capture the direction of Pan-Africanism. Enwonwu was part of the Négritude movement of the time, and father of the movement Aimé Césaire has a poem dedicated to him in White Egrets, raised in Martinuque, a 'maître among makers', where sea birds act as 'beacons to distant Dakar'. Going captures the essence of Pan-African solidarity and vision, which instilled in the painting highlight how the movement transcended national borders and boundaries, intimately linking places as far away as Martinique from Senegal.

The refrain that I feel is pertinent in the context of this email is from the seventh stanza of the titular White Egrets poem, where Walcott observes the egrets on the lawn and their 'purposeful silence, a language beyond speech'. This is one of the greatest challenges of poetry and the greatest poems are those that bask in the knowledge that a language beyond speech is impossible. The egrets remain as a reminder, that when 'you, not they, or you and they, are gone', history will continue unperturbed. This is something I've covered a lot in these emails, a broken historical materialist record, but Marxism knows no bounds (am I Sally Rooney?).

As poets such as Walcott, and poems such as 'The Spectre of Empire' remind us that ghosts linger, histories are instilled in the landscapes and in the traumas of oppression and exploitation. The best poets are vessels through which these histories flow, and Walcott is one of the best. If we have any chance of giving voice to the inner experience Bataille was so interested in, it is by interrogating the very foundations and injustices of the world outside of us; 'there cannot be inner experience without a community of those who live it':

'This, then, is “where” community is located [...] in the movement outside oneself, which falls in love, dies, laughs, cries, mourns, celebrates, suffers.'

And surely, this is what poetry has the potential to do?

I've quoted a lot from other poems in White Egrets, so I'm going to share a poem from this collection called The Lost Empire. I really recommend the whole collection if you're interested.

The Lost Empire

I

And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.
Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:
Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.
The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy’s shirt
like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.
Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags
fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis
went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,
with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj
to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about
again, the tasselled cortege, the clop of the tossing team
with funeral pom-poms, the sergeant major’s shout,
the stamp of boots, then the volley; there is no greater theme
than this chasm-deep surrendering of power
the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes,
red tunics, and the great names Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore,
dust-dervishes and the Saharan silence afterwards.

II

A dragonfly’s biplane settles and there, on the map,
the archipelago looks as if a continent fell
and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap
to Moule à Chique, bois-canot, laurier cannelles,
canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees
echo the African crests; at night, the stars
are far fishermen’s fires, not glittering cities,
Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,
but crab-hunters’ torches. This small place produces
nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers
on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens
a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us
merely receiving vessels of each day’s grace,
light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.
I’m content as Kavanagh with his few acres;
for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea’s lace,
to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.