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Hurricanic (Re)Visions: Interstices, Relation, and Creolization in Kamau Brathwaite's Ancestors

Kamau Brathwaite

Nation Language

Sycorax Video Style

Macro-Interstices

conceptualism

Micro-Interstices

Difficulty

Word-Breaking

Performance

  • Remediation
  • Hypermediacy
  • Replacement

Leo Bersani

A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience. Experience may be overwhelming, practically impossible to absorb, but it is assumed—and this is especially evident in much encyclopedic fiction—that the work of art has the authority to master the presumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material. This may sound like an unattackable truism, and yet I want to show that such apparently acceptable views of art’s beneficently reconstructive function in culture depend on a devaluation of historical experience and of art. The catastrophes of history matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function, is enslaved to those very materials to which it presumably imparts value. (Culture 1)

Typography

The most interesting exemplars of digital poetics to date have tended to be what I have called elsewhere differential texts—that is to say, texts that exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one.

“Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.” (13)

I come to Sycorax during my Time of Salt: death of Zea Mexican 1986, loss of Irish Town Library of Alexandria 1988, murder by Kingston gunmen 1990…just look at the dread frequencies of these catastrophes. My writing hand becomes a dumb stump in my head…I mean I can’t write or utter a sound or metaphor. But Sycorax comes to me in a dream and she dreams me a Macintosh computer with its winking io hiding in its margins which, as you know, are not really margins, but electronic access to Random Memory and the Cosmos and the Iwa. And she dreams me these stories […]—and show me how to find jo to write them out on the computer. And the two together introduce me to fonts and the fonts take me across Mexico to Siquieros and the Aztec murals and all the way back to ancient Nilotic Egypt to hieroglyphics—allowing me to write in light and to make sound visible as if I am in video. She abolishes, as I say, the traditional margin and the boundaries of books and publishers don’t like that—just as they don’t like Sycorax and her sons Mike Tyson and Caliban. (Dawes 37)

Kamau Brathwaite

Joyelle McSweeney

This style revels in the freedom from canonical deportment viz. typeface, font size and stanza shape made available by writing on a word processor. So what does Sycorax Video Style look like? It’s rarely left justified, it’s anti-elegant in shape, it features the abrupt appearance of symbols and icons (for example, a picture of a mermaid), and it allows surprising breaks and redirections in the flow of the verse. What makes the style so thrilling in Ancestors is that it allows the poems of the original volumes to lose their Eliotic smoothness and occur gesturally, in a sort of animist real time. Reconceiving the poems in Sycorax Video Style also allows Brathwaite to louden up the “dub riddims and nation language and calibanisms” in which the original works were written (McSweeney, “Recovered”)

Johanna Drucker

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no erogenous zones (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. (Barthes 10)

New Directions

The visual line strains the literary authority with its vulgarity, its crudeness, its fleshiness which pollutes the material of pure language. Of which there is none. Refusing to stay “in line,” creating instead a visual field in which all lines are tangential to the whole, which is, in turn, created as a figure from their efforts, their direction, their non-alignment.

[…] Not a nice poetic line, carefully controlled and closed. Instead, a haphazard line […] fulfilling itself by brute force of its physical reality. (Figuring 140)

2001

Ancestors

Roland Barthes

Caribbean Discourse

Forced Poetics: “created from the awareness of the opposition between a language that one uses and a form of expression that one needs” (120)

Free Poetics: "any collective yearning for expression that is not opposed to itself either at the level of what it wishes to express or at the level of the language that it puts into practice" (120)

I propose the term inner book to designate the set of mythic representations, be they collective or individual, that come between the reader and any new piece of writing, shaping his reading without his realizing it. Largely unconscious, this imaginary book acts as a filter and determines the reception of new texts by selecting which of its elements will be retained and how they will be interpreted. (Bayard 82-3)

Pierre Bayard

Grammatical completion is not a requirement for syntactic resolution. Always at every point. Privileging the fragment, impact of the break…deliberately not recuperable into a linear form. Disintegrating the defining boundaries, limits by which the line identifies. Not in attack against the uni-linear, but diffusing its focus, and entity/identity—the surface which should support the representation spreads it…Detached from its context, the support route becomes a network, fraught with the uncertainty of choice. (Figuring 140)

Johanna Drucker

Gilles Deleuze

Bajan (Barbadian) Creole

  • 17th Century
  • Slavery
  • Pidgin
  • Creole
  • Creole Continuum

Barbados

We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogenous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed […]. They do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language, though many of them are linked to minorities as a sign of their vocation. What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize this language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation. This exceeds the possibilities of speech and attains the power of the language, or even of language in its entirety. This means that a great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. (Deleuze 109-110)

Oxford University Press

1977

Mother Poem

1982

Sun Poem

1987

X/Self

We haven’t got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. It is that kind of situation we are in. (Voice 8-9)

The poetry of X/Self is based on a culture that is personal—i-man/Caribbean—and multifarious, with the learning and education this implies. Because Caribbean culture has been so cruelly neglected both by the Caribbean itself, and by the rest of the world (except for spot/check an catch-ups via cricket and reggae), my references (my nommos and icons) may appear mysterious, meaningless even, to both Caribbean and non-Caribbean readers. So the notes…which I hope are helpful, but which I provide with great reluctance, since the irony is that they may suggest the poetry is so obscure in itself that it has to be lighted up; it is so lame, that it has to have a crutch; and (most hurtful of all) that it is bookish, academic, ‘history’. Which therefore makes my magical realism, the dub riddims and nation language and calibanisms appear contradictory: how could these things come from a learned treatise? The impression, in other words, is that I write the poems from the notes, when in fact I have to dig up these notes from fragments, glimpses, partial memories (it would take a lifetime to track them all down), and the only satisfaction I get is the fascination of watching the counterpoint emerge of ‘fact’ versus the ‘fiction’ of the poetry… (X/Self 113)

Kamau Brathwaite

The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.

Kamau Brathwaite

We in the Caribbean have […] plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish. We also have what we call creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors. (Voice 5-6)

Without the publishing house you can’t really have a literature. (Dawes 24)

by Steve Halle

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