Reading Wesleyan Press by Ian Baran, Yorkville LibraryFebruary 10, 2016

Bright Felon

Bright Felon by Kazim Ali

Bright Felon contains the extreme beauty that one can get out of the English language, which is not to say that it is hyperbolic or trying, but put simply Kazim Ali can give us a travel journal in poetic form that presents us with meditations on history, family, politics, love, and aching. 
 
With each poem title being a place, Paris, New York, Cairo, Corsica, Rhinebeck, and ending at Home, we are brought into Ali's life, a life that we are bound to connect with, the hum drum, the ups and downs, the minor thoughts that accompany our walks to a coffee shop. A sea of images flow before our eyes as the narrator makes his way through the cities, landmarks like Inwood Park, Marble Hill, Dia Beacon, pyramids, Washington Square, landmarks that draw us further into Ali's resonant poetry. He speaks of sexuality and religion in brief meditations, almost as if sifting out only the beauty in each.
 
In the back, there is a quote that says "what it means to live the life of an artist" and while I agree with that, I'd take it a step further and say Ali achieves in writing what it means to merely live a life, at least through the eyes of someone living in the Western world. Whether Ali's representation of life is exactly how we love or feel on a daily basis, he is able to purge his own dialogues to find a basis for us all to connect, regardless of our own internal beliefs. 
 
Landscapes come and go, "Cities are like my deck of cards, one line after another, one thing and then another disappear." Questioning how we receive what is history, is it a static notion, or one cemented into our fixtures, bound to be unchanging and linear he asks, "What made history into a building?/When only the outside of the structure was the same and the inside had long since been refurbished into offices with drop ceilings and fluorescent fixtures." 
 
Ali does not stray from the blunt political though, he writes of bombings and of destruction o war, and the frustration we feel, when we are against such malicious destruction and powerless to stop it. Calling out President Clinton in his 1993 bombing of Baghdad for a planned attack that as far as history knows, was never being planned. A painter died, a daughter blinded, a husband died. This is the true victims of most of history, horrific and needless death. All of death has a face, and yet we are so far removed from that picture.
 
Ali has written an immensely beautiful book, one that I will come back to and read as I travel within life. He is altogether professing a wisdom that we only hope comes from poetry, but rarely does. In all, Ali has crafted a must-read.
 
"I am on very bad terms with space very bad terms with time. So what" "Attack on Morals"
The title itself, Solar Throat Slashed, already mystifies the poetry that is put forth in this book by Aimé Césaire. At once, violent, dark and yet cosmic, the title does everything to create a visualization of passionately charged words and meaning, with an insistence upon death, violence and the world within a galaxy. For if we slash a throat, we kill a voice, we destroy meaning, and it is in this context that I think of the meaning of this surrealist poet's collection. 
 
We learn from the introduction that this text, is the complete original edition with all of the poems unrevised and newly translated, retaining the originality that this text first sought, Césaire had cut out and revised a number of poems, with his political interest rising.  

Though black and living in France, from a country under colonial rule, these poems are not necessarily explicitly political and are not tackling the issues of the day, but the poems are revolutionary and a flash of lightning in and of themselves. They are image after image that flash before your eyes, tear open your insides, and transport you to the cosmic trenches. Rather than a political manifesto, these poems are filled with magical, sometimes spiritual journeys that blends past and present.  In "Velocity" Césaire begins "O mountain oh dolomites bird heart under my childlike hands/oh icebergs oh ghosts old gods sealed in full glory" and ends "my dear let's lean on geological veins" Which shows his emphasis on geography as a metaphor, the world as a whole is contained in his poetry, all his words connecting our images. He is successful in transcending the locale, for a more effective poetry that is based on representation.
 
This is not to say that Césaire was ignorant to the world's issues, quite the opposite, and we get glimpses of that in the poems, such as Césaire still recognizes the present day and problems within the world. In "Mississippi" "Too bad for you men who don't notice that my eyes remember/slings and black flags/that murder with each blink of my Mississippi lashes" "Too bad for you men who do not see that you cannot stop me from building to hill fill" As in  "Apotheosis" where he writes "Something shall always fall a police informer a sacristan a telephone pole a clove"
 
Another poem that is slightly different than Césaire's others is "Blues" which is an aching, beautiful poem, and though shows Césaire at some of his least explosive, he writes with force and yet without forcing here and is able to revive an almost mystical sense, through a connection with the poem.   "Aguacero/beautiful musician/unclothed at the foot of a tree/amidst the lost harmonies/close to our defeated memories/amidst our hands of defeat/and peoples of a strength strange/we let our eyes hang/and native/lossing the leading-rein of a sorrow/we weep." 
 
In To Africa, he writes, "Peasant strike the soil with your pick hoe" ... "there are elemental waters singing in the bends of the magnetic circuit/the hatching of earth's little shoes" In a way, Césaire's poetry hearken back to days of poetry being royal, but instead uses this royalty to diffuse meaning, and to disparage a colonial world. While Solar Throat Slashes is not explicitly political, it is a poet brandishing his pen in establishing his voice and Césaire's is an important one, back then and currently. Let's end on a line from "Chevelure" where Césaire says "are like these discordant words written by the flaming of the pyres over the sublime oriflammes of your revolt"
 
Moten really hits hard when he writes poetry, and just like his book in another blog post, this one is exceptional and comes with a high recommendation. The book itself is large in comparison to most poetry books, or books for that matter, and at 75 pages is packed with music, rhythm, analysis and theory, not to mention poetry. 
 
In some ways Moten uses words to form a collage, while purposeful in his wordplay, he also tries to portray a sense of improvisation. Moten challenges, while keeping his poems full of energy and passion. In it he blends vernaculars, and creates a hybridized political spark, that leads you on. And this is what The Little Edges is concerned with, the edge between audience and poet, the edges of reality and an existence made for us.
 
Moten reaches out to history and to figures to keep his momentum going forward.  He juxtaposes words and phrases to capture the moments of magnitude, that pass by so easily. "We care about each other so militantly, with such softness, that we exhaust ourselves" And then in "Your body is a mixing board" "Come take a listening walk and admire your hand twisting. The listening is in watching how you move to/touch in sounding, brushing up against your friend, to see how his position sounds" he says making his rhythm and words stand out to the different sounds, the different poems and meanings we can have. Our body as a mixing board, would relate to our ability to change ourselves, to fit in to one position with a person or person(s) but to also be able to change ourselves, to style ourselves differently. 
 
Like most of Moten's poetry, you need to look deep or you might miss the many references he throws at us, to mix poetics, art, resistance, and letting our guard down to live. In many instances he references music, in this one he draws on the music of Cecil Taylor,  "So now let me say something about what I want/from Cecil's music or about the way that music tells me what I want." Yet, in "Test" he gives a passage from Hannah Arendt's On Violence and a Newspaper report on what happened inside a stranded New York City subway system, and then follows with this heartbreaking notion of the everyday "this is how we never arrive, infuse what we surround to not remember. every day we cross from slave state to slave state in the barrack cars." ... "our breathing empties the air with fullness and we're in love in a state of constant sorrow" You can't beat Moten's verse. 
 
Fred Moten resists being held down and continues to resist through his poetic and his non-fiction work. He can be blunt as when he makes you reason with yourself, "What gives you the right to love black music, this irruption out of and into catastrophe?"  or he can be subtle in his care "Listen to the sound in one another's skin. Preserve the sound/through membrane and water, to find our form in corresponding." His resistance and refusal goes beyond the explicit political landscape and encompasses our everyday lives as well. It is poetry like this that I like best, that you have to work for and engage with, almost let the piece be an improvisational piece for your life. For this, we can only see how our own lives inhabit forms of resistance, both outward and inward desires. 
 
 
The Great Camouflage

The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent by Suzanne Césaire

Writings of dissent perfectly captures these 7 essays by Suzanne Césaire, was an important part of the artistic resistance that formed Tropiques, the journal created by Aimé Césaire, Rene Ménil and herself. Tropiques was their effort in fighting the French colonization of Martinique, and also added all three writers into a canon of not just Caribbean literature, but world literature. It was their way of creating a new literary history for Martinique which would be continued by Glissant, Chamoiseau, Bernabe.

In this book we get the seven essays that Césaire wrote for Tropiques, plus essays and poems about her written by those to provide an invigorating and all around biography. In her essays, Césaire is able to articulate her vision of connecting the Martinican reality with Surrealism, historical discourse, decolonial resistance, but also the building of a new, different literature, which was varied and against a European literary mindset.  

Her seven essays, focus on civilization, on surrealism, on esthetics, on the individual within the scarred world. For instance, her essay on Breton, focuses on love. "Love beyond all conventions, reclaims its place among the great elemental forces: Love, Mad Love." she analyzes in Breton's poetry. Her concern with love is the "integration of the human with the cosmos" and it is this love that manifests itself into freedom, in which all versions of the self is connected into an almost universality. No time restrictions, no permissions, only a direction to further our ability to realize freedom. 
 
In the Malaise of Civilization she responds to the question, why is there no originality, no works of original creation from the blacks in Martinique to which she powerfully lambasts that racist thought into a short, but concise polemic that strongly goes over the after effects of slavery, as well as a post-slavery that sees blacks assimilated into the European world rather than a creation of a new self. As Césaire states though, it is not solely a return to the past, "It is about the mobilization of every living strength brought together upon this earth where race is the result of the most unremitting intermixing; it is about becoming conscious of the incredible store of varied energies until now locked up within us."  Finally, what is it to be a Martinican and what it can mean. With a powerful force she says "This land, ours, can only be what we want it to be."

One can tell Césaire has a wit and desire to fight by educating, through the synthesis of theories, of the avant-garde into accessible starting points of knowledge. The Vichy regime banned Tropiques after seven issues, because of its want to be a revolutionizing force, to change people's perspective into one of being empowered by their Martinican self, and to break away from and yet appreciate tradition almost two-fold. Break free from the European tradition and bonds, seek out the past selves, and blend them into one with the present self. One reading Césaire has many different directions to go after Césaire and in this sense she only needed seven essays, though one is left wondering, what would happen if she had written more. 
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