“We will produce no sane man again.” “Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?”—this is Emmanuel Levinas’s question—“whether one can at the same time know and free the known of the marks which thematization leaves on it by subordinating it to ontology. Everything shows itself at the price of this betrayal, even the unsayable” (Otherwise Than Being, 7). “This kind of speaking / doubles the unspeakable.” This ontological subordination is rendered explicitly historical by liberation theologist Enrique Dussel. “Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro,” he says, echoing Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s “Vomito Negro.”* In the peripheralized existence of the conquered, the bilious retchings of the Cogito affirm the centrality of the empire of Being. “Being is; beings are what are seen and controlled” (Philosophy of Liberation, 6).
[M]odern European philosophy, even before the ego cogito but certainly from then on, situated all men and all cultures—and with them their women and children—within its own boundaries as manipulable tools, instruments. Ontology understood them as interpretable beings, as known ideas, as mediations or internal possibilities within the horizon of the comprehension of Being (3).
The ego cogito is canonized as an assertion of centers and metropoles, in the calculus of a metaphysics of Being, an ideological countenance structured into a knot of presence-knowledge-language-law and its subsidiary fleet of orbiting satellites, “nature” and “culture,” “self,” and “other.” “Ontology,” writes Dussel, “the thinking that expresses Being—the Being of the reigning and central system—is the ideology of ideologies, the foundation of the ideologies of the empires, of the center. Classical philosophy of all ages is the theoretical consummation of the practical oppression of peripheries” (5). This peremptory formulation forces a conclusion : global history is a canontology. Canontology—the canon or rule of Being—is artificial respiration, a life-support system : history as a prerogative of the West can be thought of as a comatose patient kept alive by a battery of hookups, an administrative milieu in which what is administered are prescriptive dosages through “state-of-the-art” apparatus linked to a vegetative function. History, as a canon, ensures that only certain people are beneficiaries of its life-support system. History is a mode of production, a technocracy that artificially sustains certain populations at the expense of other populations. But under the protocols of administrative rationality there is not even the ceremonial record of ritual sacrifice to remind the dominant community of the terms that underwrite its persistence.
In the canontology of the vomito negro, Césaire finds that “my total is ever lengthened by unexpected mintings of baseness,” “and our limbs vainly disjointed by the most refined tortures / and life even more impetuously jetting from this compost”—this compost being “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.”
And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human pulse stops at the gates of the slave compound [portes de la négrerie]; that we are walking compost hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton and they would brand us with red-hot irons and we would sleep in our excrement and they would sell us on the town square and an ell of English cloth and salted meat from Ireland cost less than we did, and this land was calm, tranquil, repeating that the spirit of the Lord was in its acts.
We the vomit of slave ships
We the venery of the Calabars
what? Plug up our ears?
We, so drunk on jeers and inhaled fog that we rode the roll to death!
Forgive us fraternal whirlwind!
~
Drunken start, drowned
Atlantean root, repeated
whisper. Namesake,
undersea
rift rearisen. Blocked,
butchered brother. Baja
mar.
Flatted A. Long ah re-
peating after itself.
Ba …
Broken body. Bartered
parts.
“Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger,” Césaire declares. “But who misleads my voice? who grates / my voice?”—the voice of the alter-ego, the supervisory voice-over analyzed by Césaire’s fellow Martinican Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Mask. From this precarious margin of misconnections emanates Adrienne Rich’s powerful question:
If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks
what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message from the sunken slaveships?
The bottled message, in Nathaniel Mackey’s diasporic traceries, resorts of necessity to anagrammatic redirection, the historic violence of that registered in an “Alphabet of Ahtt”:*
anagrammatic
ythm, anagrammatic myth …
Autistic.
Spat a bitter truth. Maybe misled but
if so so be it. Palimpsestic
stagger,
anagrammatic
scat.
Edward Dorn chronicles the palimpsestic stagger of westward migration slumping into spiritual ennui:
No one
has loved the west I came into, this is not
a Shulamite maiden, nor does anyone care to whisper
this far into our ear, the allegory does not exist, the marriage
will not come who would marry Simplot or Anaconda
I warn you world of good intention the birth of Mohammed
will be fought in this neck of the cut-off world
and moved on, any new blood will
turn to an unnumberable plasma
we could still walk into the banks
and demand the money, but the usual sadness
—we have been preceded, there is
nothing so lame and halt as lateness.
In the extremity of this condition the only response to the fact of “The North Atlantic Turbine,” as Dorn calls it, is the thesis that “Only the Illegitimate are beautiful”—a variant on William Carlos Williams’s Elsie, “expressing with broken // brain the truth about us.” The Illegitimate are the disaffiliated, unassimilable populace (the Appalachian faces of Walker Evans and James Agee, the dustbowl migrants, the hollow-eyed immigrants of Ellis Island, the silicosis victims of Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead”) that is a “minority” in the rhetoric of the good life, but in America too often a “minority” in a different, pejorative, usage—the convalescent human wreckage of minoritarian afterthought, tended by the nurse who “blows with her every skill on the spirit’s embers still burning by their own laws in the bed of death.”
Rolled a
joint with gunpowder
inside, struck a match,
whispered, “This is
what history does.”
Said, “Above sits
atop its Below, each
undoing the other
even though they
embrace.”
The twentieth-century corollary of the vomito cogito of the Middle Passage is the holocaust, or “khurbn,” the Yiddish term favored by Jerome Rothenberg since it has less connotation of ritual slaughter.
THOSE WHO ARE BEAUTIFUL & THOSE WHO ARE NOT
change places to relive
a death by excrement
victims thrown into the pit & drowning
in their ordure
suffocating in the body’s dross
this is extremity
“this is extremity this place / … where the warm flux inside the corpse / changes to stone.” The only recourse—which Rothenberg adopts in open defiance of Adorno’s remark that after Auschwitz poetry was impossible:
“practice your scream” I said
(why did I say it?)
because it was his scream & wasn’t my own
it hovered between us
Where shall the scream stick?
What shall it dent?
Won’t the deafness be cracked?
Won’t the molecules be loosened?
Are you listening? We need the scream to leave its mark …
In a grammar of “let” recalling Christopher Smart’s madhouse poem Jubilate Agno—along with the propositional logic of the calculus (that vectorial afterimage of Nazi “experiments” on human subjects)—Rothenberg summons a profound sense of the utmost brutality as all too familiar, uncannily so.
Let a great pain come up into your legs (feel it moving like the earth moving beneath you)
Let the earth drop away inside your belly falling falling until you’re left in space
Let his scream follow you across the millennia back to your table
Let a worm the size of a small coin come out of the table where you’re sitting
Let it be covered with the red mucus falling from his nose (but only you will see it)
Let the holes in his body drop open let his excretions pour out across the room
~
Write this. We have burned all their villages
Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress
Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket or tears or an X