Juliana Spahr
On Kamau Brathwaite
talk for Poets House series on literary predecessors, fall 2005

 

"Before we begin, we haffe discuss SYSTEMS," Brathwaite writes in Magical Realism. And that is where I'm beginning. This is really a talk about influence disguised as a talk about Brathwaite. Sorry about the false advertising. It starts with a small personal anecdote.

A few years ago I did an on campus job interview at a big state university in the west. At the job interview one of the poets on the faculty came up to me and said what it is with you guys and the I? I looked around for the guys and realized it was just me. Who, I asked, were these guys? And she said, oh you language poets. Perhaps this story is one of the stories behind when I was asked to give this talk by Poets House on a literary predecessor, I decided on Kamau Brathwaite. Although I am under the influence of language poetry, I am clearly not a language poet. This moment got me thinking about how debts get constructed without one's permission, how they get constructed along gender/race/class/nation lines. Ignoring age, I look most like a language poet. But my I comes not from language poetry's contentious relationship with lyric subjectivity all that much and more from poets like Brathwaite, who load the I with position even though the position I load most is colonizer, not Brathwaite's colonized (can I joke here about the Rastafarian I and I?). What I mean by Brathwaite and poets like Brathwaite is a diverse poetry that has yet had no obvious name foisted upon it by critics. It is characterized by a local attentiveness in the face of globalization, by an attention to how the local shapes the language, by a political and formal attention (not one or the other but both) to experimentalism, by a respect for culture combined with a well honed critique. I've been working with David Buuck on a forum on these poetries for the journal boundary 2 and we somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously called these poetries "vernacular cosmopolitan." This is an emerging literary tradition that has been hard for US critical establishments to understand because it twists all the categories. Every term we came up with to describe it was an oxymoron, a literary joke. This poetry, this vernacular cosmopolitan, is locally aware but it is happening in many different locals. It is a poetry written by people from different nations who often write in different languages, often languages formed out of the way imperial English so often touches local languages. It is a poetry that often directly challenges the idea that the avant garde and the experimental is a European invention.

So when Poets House asked me to do this talk where poets talk about their literary predecessors, I thought how on most days right now when asked whose work I like the most, I answer Kamau Brathwaite. I answer this because it is true. I adore his work. I adore its sweeping visions. Its attention to how the unequal economic exchanges of colonialism shape our concepts of beauty. I appreciate its attention to alternatives of pathos, truth, and all those other big classical ideas, I appreciate how it uses lyric to critique. I appreciate its attention to how language shapes us. But also I answer this question this way with a certain testiness about what literary predecessors are allowed and what ones are not allowed in US literary cultures. Not only do Brathwaite and I not share gender, race, nation, nor age, but even our languages of English are different. And our literary establishments tend not to want to have to acknowledge how literary influence is way more complicated than gender/race/class/nation because to acknowledge this throws into question a whole lot of claims of uniqueness about a wide variety of western literary traditions.

But I should back up a bit also. When people started to ask me this question, when was it? In college maybe? I answered Gertrude Stein for many years. And then, in graduate school maybe?, I answered Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. And so while this talk is about Brathwaite, I want to also suggest a Stein-Cha-Brathwaite triangle of tradition. This my current unholy trintity. So this is the story of how I come to claim writers such as Brathwaite as a literary predecessor and it as much a story about modernism as it is about anything else. (The working title for the longer project that some of this work comes out of is How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Modernism.) And it also is a story about why poets need to be critics and why critics need to be poets. I could not tell this story, a critical story about influence, unless I was both a poet and a critic.

The story goes like this… I learned in school that the literary avant garde was formed around 1913 when Gertrude Stein published Tender Buttons (or I learned that it was in 1908 when Marinetti proclaimed the beginnings of futurism or I learned that it was when Virginia Woolf said "On or about December 1910 human nature changed,". . . ) thus beginning an aesthetic revolution that desired to break the constraints and narrow minded values of bourgeois culture. These writers did things that were unique, unprecendented, exceptional, revolutionary, and they were all Anglo or Euro.

I packed a version of this story in my suitcase, I packed the Stein version, and took it to a job teaching introductory literature courses at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. In one course, an introduction to poetry and drama, we read Antigone, Shakespeare's The Tempest, his sonnets, Stein's Tender Buttons, and Hawaiian playwright Alani Apio's Kamau. The texts that I chose were somewhat accidental, a combination of meeting the requirements for the course (a Greek and a Shakespeare), works I had taught before (Tender Buttons), and one that I wanted to think more about (Kamau). I had taught Tender Buttons many times before. It should have been easy for me to talk about its linguistic sparklers, its atypical syntaxes, its redefinitions (and I am sure this potential ease is what motivated me to include it on my syllabus this first semester at a full time job).

Yet in this island of competing and complicated identity claims in the middle of the Pacific, students were suddenly forcing me to reread Stein in new and exciting ways. They should have been resistant. A grumpy older colleague told me they should have been resistant because they have no respect for literary traditions and thus cannot appreciate an avant garde deviation from it. And a younger lefty colleague told me they should have been resistant because Stein was not like them, the gender/race/class/nation argument. And I suppose they were somewhat resistant. But not as either of my colleagues expected. They read Stein from their local context. One argued that Tender Buttons illustrated the Hawaiian concept of hakalau, of looking peripheral or astray. Another argued that it was written in a form of pidgin, a European pidgin. Out of this I realized that Stein's childhood spent learning many different languages-she claims to have learned how to speak in French and German before learning how to speak in English-and her adult life in voluntary exile had more to do with her writing than I had previously realized. But I also realized that what I had been seeing as "new" or "innovative" or "experimental" techniques in avant garde modernism and in contemporary writing were actually, as my students kept patiently pointing out to me, very old instead of very new techniques, the same ones used in the literatures of many cultures with closer ties to orality. It was their patience that made me begin to think about what I was missing by not listening to those who point out how dramatically imperialism and colonialism changed not only the colonized but also the colonizer when I thought about avant garde modernism.

Living and teaching in Hawai'i dramatically changed the way I look at things. It was if I was in a version of They Live (the John Carpenter film in which the main character puts on some special sunglasses and suddenly realizes that the entire world is ruled by an alien elite) and had been forced to put on glasses that made me see the forces of colonialism and imperialism beneath the everyday business suits, or literary practices, of those around me. I could have at this point abandoned my interest in avant garde modernism, but instead I became interested in what this new view might teach me about an old interest. I began to think of Tender Buttons as perhaps another work written about the moment when European culture was also forced to put on colonialism glasses, to think about the legacies of globalization. The "newness" of the avant garde, its so called revolutionary aesthetics, no longer looked like a break when I put on my student's glasses but instead looked like an attempt at dialogue with other traditions about the transformative aspects of language--a dialogue that was at moments attentive and respectful and at other moments appropriative and dismissive.

This is the time also when I asked what writer did I like the most that I started to answer Brathwaite. Although Brathwaite's work is clearly located in another ocean, his work felt to me as if it was getting at something that my students were getting at at the same time.

Basically, I was learning to rethink the map of literary cultures that I had been taught in graduate school. The map that I had been taught had the avant garde squaring off at the borders against various national literary conventions. But when when I looked at poetry through my students eyes this map no longer made sense. My original map showed only a horizon line where the avant garde's use of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on squared off against the national literature's conventional language use. Now I had to add a vertical axis where one end represented community exploration and the other end self exploration.

But what drew me first to Brathwaite though were his comments about T. S. Eliot. Brathwaite in his pivotal study "The History of the Voice," a history of what he calls "nation language," or literature written in the Creole of the Caribbean, attributes the introduction in the Caribbean of "the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone" in contemporary poetry to T. S. Eliot in "The Waste Land." When I first read this, I found it shocking. I could not make a peace with Eliot's work. Eliot was clearly to my graduate school literary critic in training in the 90s brain the stodgy poet. The anti-Semitic poet. The male tradition poet. The Anglophile poet. Even the Christian poet was a problem for me. The list could go on and on. Eliot was in the other camp. Almost off the radar. If there was a choice of modernist poets to be made the choice was Stein and Pound and I had chosen Stein. And I especially had trouble making peace with Eliot's use of the colloquial voice which always felt elitist and patronizing, how could a poet such as Brathwaite, a poet whose work is so community-centered, so politically astute, so eye opening? And how could he say this in "History of the Voice," the essay where he patiently explains the development of an anticolonial literature and argues that Caribbean literature needs to throw off the iambic pentameter and replace it with the rhythms of the hurricane? Why at the very moment he is defending the uniqueness of a Caribbean tradition does he turn to Eliot?

But I realize now that Brathwaite is getting at something about how influence is messy, full of friends and enemies, unexpected, aleatory, independent, underground, uncontrollable, often something that even the author his or herself might not want if asked, something that avant garde modernism at its best moments is also suggesting. And from this I went back and relooked at avant garde modernism.

One of the most obvious things that can be said about the literature of avant garde modernism is that it is one of those moments when language becomes a question. At a certain moment after the turn of the century a certain sort of writing-let's say a writing that rejects realism and turns to fragmentation, repetition, disjunction, and polyvocality, let's call it avant garde modernism-becomes crucial to a certain small yet international group of writers who happen to be writing mainly in European cities. Suddenly, this group becomes interested in language's disruptions and sees these disruptions as a part of both literature's aesthetic pursuits and intellectual provocations.

This interest in language is not just literary. The turn of the century to the beginning of World War II is the era of Saussure's separation between the signifier and the signified; the era of Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language are the limits of my world"; the era of Franz Boas's declaration that "the study of language must be considered as one of the most important branches of ethnological study." One of the things that can be said for certain about the complicated twentieth century is that many cultures moved from assuming that the way they spoke is natural and/or ordained and/or just plain right and began to question instead how language shapes their cultures, their minds, and their arts. Some of this relentless dwelling on language is political. Some of it is not. But regardless, language in the twentieth century becomes (and remains so to this day) unusually contested. It comes to be seen as un-natural. And this view is pervasive.

This has a lot to do with the times, as many critics have pointed out. In literary studies, the tendency has been to see the avant garde turn to language as something that is an aesthetic representation of what it means to be modern, of what it means to be in a world full of new technologies like film, the assembly line, Greenwich Mean Time, and the submachine gun. In some of these readings modernism gets figured as merely a series of uncomplicated attempts to represent a new consumerist world. But the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II is a peculiar and intense time. And this moment in which writers and philosophers first turn to language is the same moment that the British and French colonial empires are at their most extensive and the same moment that the cultures of the colonies begin to become visible in the cities. Raymond Williams notices this when he writes about the "new social and economic and cultural relations" that "had much to do with imperialism: with the magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures." The period before World War I is a time of accelerated globalization, a time of an unprecedented flow of goods and capital, a time before passports (as Williams points out), and a time of an unusually large amount of immigration. Many commentators suggest that this was an even more dramatic time of globalization than the one we are in now.

Again: "Before we begin, we haffe discuss SYSTEMS," Brathwaite writes in Magical Realism. He continues, "where we comin from in this cosmos, where we are in this hip hop loop/approach/attitude. the SYSTEM (we familiar w/ it now from Computers) determines yr (prob unconscious) SELECTION of materials/thots/ideas/xpress-ions/even the ARRANGEMENT & AESTHETICS of these ideas/thots/images etc (like priv NORTH rather than SOUTH, WEST rather than EAST, UP rather than DOWN, WHITE rather than BLACK, STRAIGHT ROADS rather than LANES, PLUPERFECTS rather than CONTINUOUS TENSES, DIALECTICS rather than DIALECTS, etc. etc.)."

It is an attention to systems that is also in Stein's suggestion in Tender Buttons that we act as if there is no use in a center. To act as if there is no use in a center is to see that Europe is no longer the center because the cultures of the peripheries have their own centers. To act as if there is no use in a center begs the question of origin and of influence. It means venturing into the world with a shared, even if asymmetrical, concern in the disruptions of the world. It means to act without equilibrium. And to be more interested in making things with others than in finding the answer. (Stein's reputed death bed words-"What is the answer? No. Never mind, what is the question?"-echo here.) Or in the language of deconstruction that is to come after (and one could say most likely out of) the revolution of Stein's and Joyce's words, and parallel with many of Brathwaite's words, it is a Derridean acceptance of the center as not having a natural site, a fixed locus, and instead having an infinite number of sign-substitutions. Or in the language of post-/anti-colonialism, it is to acknowledge, as Argentinean critic Walter Mignolo's work encourages, how "colonial situations imply a plurality of traditions (instead of an 'ongoing natural one')." Or in Dipesh Chakrabarty's words to act as if there is no center is to "provincialize Europe," to open "up the possibility of a politics and project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and subaltern peripheral pasts." Or as Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío's first calls it, it is "modernism" and part of a crisis, "a universal crisis in literature and spirit that began around 1885." And when Brathwaite calls forth Eliot, he is recentering in order to provincialize, to use Chakrabarty's words, the literature of empire. He is localizing it. He is doing what fellow Caribbean critic Édouard Glissant does when he reads Faulkner not as a Southern writer but as a writer who "wants to draw attention to the stunning and apparently impossible connection, which in poetics we call the Relation, between all these people . . . caught in the systems trap." These critics and writers are doing a peculiar sort of reclaiming, a provocative sort of writing news paths for the literature of empire. They are making me rethink influence.

It is Brathwaite's Middle Passages that might be the most helpful of his many works when thinking about systems and maps. Middle Passages is an all out assault on various systems traps. It moves through the Atlantic joining and connecting resistant cultural traditions. It movingly manages to get at the complexity of global and local relations in the contemporary world. When I teach this book I like to have students bring in their laptops with their wireless connections and sit down in groups and look up all the places and names in the poem that they do not know and thus recover together a lost tradition. I made a list once of the things that I felt we had to know in order to begin to read this work and my list began like this…

Nicolas Guillen
Jack Johnson
Kid Chocolate
Muhammad Ali
the Mau Mau
Emmett Till
Che Guevara
Steve Biko
Patrice Lumumba
Columbus
Damballa
Henry VIII
Leo X
Joan of Arc
Tom Dent
Anne Walmsley
Duke Ellington
Bessie Smith
Ivie Anderson
Sonny Greer
Pamela Mordecai

This is just the first thirty five pages. And already we've been back and forth across the Atlantic an uncountable number of times.

When I insist on reading avant garde modernism and thus the experimental contemporary as made by imperialism and colonialism, I am not arguing anything really all that new here. Such arguments are the backbone of Williams's posthumously published The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. And yet how far can one go with this? I want to suggest further than is often assumed. Essentially, I want to listen to Frantz Fanon when he writes that "Europe is literally the creation of the Third World" and I want to argue that this statement might help in understanding the disjunctions of the primarily Anglo avant garde more than materialist readings that relate modernism to consumerism and popular culture.

Let me be clear here though. I do not really think that avant garde modernists such as Stein were writing to explore alliances between dominant and subaltern histories. I turn to Brathwaite when I want that analysis in my poetry. I'm not going to bother looking for it in avant garde modernism or language poetry. And I do not want to suggest that avant garde modernism's obsessive turn to disruption is innocent or revolutionary. The turn to fascism by Pound and others has been well documented. And as a whole, avant garde modernism is relentlessly defiant to any one political position. It can be known, as the early twentieth century itself, only through its entanglements, its refusals to be anything less than the chaos that created it. At moments, I am assuming a sort of haunting rather than a self-declared willed influence. I am deliberately keeping those big words of colonialism and imperialism up and to the front here in order to make it clear that I am not telling a story of utopian cross cultural exchange that ignores the asymmetries that haunt colonial and imperial contexts. I read avant garde modernism as an old reaction to a new, or changing, world. It was, I feel, an unavoidable reaction. To continue to write as if the national traditions that had so pivotally formed the literature of the nineteenth century were still fresh must have felt absurd to anyone interested in anyone who felt that writing had to somehow capture what it was like to walk down an urban street at the time. And I think similarly for writers of our now. To act as if language poetry is the only recognizable predecessor, I am thinking about Mark Wallace's post-language formulation but it extends beyond this to numerous critical studies and late night conversations in bars, is to ignore the complicated legacies of modern poetry from all the parts of the globe. It is to mishear the devoted internationalism of avant garde, or experimental, whatever term you prefer, practices.

So what I really am doing today is less talking about a literary predecessor and more using Kamau Brathwaite to talk some about the systems and its systems trap, about how as a writer our influences get named. I want to admit to some of my own anxieties about appropriation. I've written some on this anxiety and how I spent my time in Hawai'i trying to figure out the rules for writing in order to attempt to avoid appropriation. My rules ended up being endlessly complicated and constantly in revision and were things like I would set no story or poem in precontact Hawai'i; I would never claim that I understood Hawaiian spiritual traditions or claim to be an expert on Hawaiian culture or that I knew what form of sovereignty would be best. And I do think that colonized people might need to keep their stories and their forms fresh so they can use them for the revolution.

And so lets just assume that appropriation is negative (although it is interesting that when you look it up in the OED it only mentions around areas of art the positive use of appropriation, such as reworking so as to provoke critical re-evaluation). And lets just say that influence is positive, is the act of having another person's work infuse and inspire while appropriation means claiming it as one's own, as private property and falsely selling it that way. And I want to suggest that understanding a distinction between these two words is crucial if we want to understand how literature is evolutionary, collective, full of complicated, and luminous communication that is as difficult as our political times.

Often, I feel, it is tough for critics to understand the difference between the two. If one does a quick read of the work that discusses the European art movement that we call Primitivism one quickly realizes that more of it complains about how Picasso appropriated rather than explores how Picasso was unable to avoid, under the influence, in dialogue with, etc. Yet the idea that Picasso was claiming the forms of African masks as his ideas and that he felt he could fool a European audience into thinking that this work was all his own is absurd. It is as if our readings of Picasso are caught. Because at the same time, on the other side, there has been a strong, equally absurd, tendency to argue that Picasso was a break with bourgeois national culture, a unique force, an exception not shaped by elsewheres. Both these sides are strangely similar despite their antagonisms. Both preserve purity; both assume that purity matters; that politics comes from purity. It is certainly safer to say that avant garde modernism arose in resistance to bourgeois European culture instead of that it arose out of dialogue that was forced on European cultures by the colonies. And that when the intrusion of elsewhere shows up to say that it appropriated, or used, ideas owned by African sculpture rather than that it shows how African influences might be whether anyone likes it or not an undeniable fact of twentieth century European life. Just like it is safer to say that writers of my generation are post-Language. It lets Europeans and European Americans continue to have made the avant garde. It keeps yet another story of origins intact. It argues yet again that culture spills out of Anglo culture, not spills out of and into it.

So I think what I learn from Brathwaite's Eliot and from not only Middle Passages but from all his books is that empathy is a lot about putting one's self in one's place with the ideas of others in an improvisation that does not belong to any one avant garde or any one experimental tradition. (I keep thinking here about how often Brathwaite uses eulogy to put himself in someone else's place as in his poem "Stone" about Mickey Smith and in "Kumina" in the just published Born to Slow Horses). James Clifford in his writing on "ethnographic surrealism," his defense of this putting one's self in one's place with the ideas of others, tells a story about watching a film on cricket and colonialism. He mentions that in the film is an umpire who is "calmly influencing the game with magical spells. He is chewing betel nut, which he shares out from a stash held on his lap. It is a bright blue plastic Adidas bag. It is beautiful." Clifford concludes from this, "Perhaps an acquaintance with ethnographic surrealism can help us see the blue plastic Adidas bag as part of the same kind of inventive cultural processes as the African-looking masks that in 1907 suddenly appeared attached to the pink bodies of" Picasso. His observation that creative practices refuse to follow the rules of polite society is one that seems frequently to be overlooked in studies of cross cultural contact. But it is by understanding how Eliot could learn from what he was calling at the time "primitive poetry" and then how Brathwaite could learn from Eliot and then how people like me could learn from Brathwaite that literature becomes not a superfluous aesthetic project but one of the ways we talk with each other.