In early June I ran into the lovely Eléna Rivera and she
asked me what poetry I’ve been reading and I told her about Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, a book I’ve had on my desk and near my bed since it came out. In
Darkness, Morrison takes Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899),
specifically the Signet Classic mass paperback version and in an interesting détournement,
erases much of Conrad’s excessive, soaking wet colonialist and highly gendered
discourse and world view, and thus returns the world, the earth, to itself,
absent “man” that long stand-in for “the human.”
Conrad’s Marlow explains how as a boy he had “a passion for
maps” and eventually “a hankering” to visit “the biggest, the most blank” continent,
Africa (223). Marlow admits that it “was not a blank space any more….but [then
asserts that it] had become a place of darkness,” where “earth seemed
unearthly” (256). Of Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, Chinua Achebe writes that it situates Africa “as a metaphysical
battleground devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the worldly
European enters at his peril.” Here Kurtz encounters and becomes part of “The
horror! The horror!” Heart of Darkness
uses exquisite language to unfurl a problematic tale, one that exemplifies a
claim about Marlow’s storytelling style: while
the yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole
meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut[,] …Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning
of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze (220).
Heart of Darkness
communicates much about the time in which it is written, telling us little
about Africa and the Congo and more about “the outside,” the tale and its
teller and the world in which he lives, revealing western colonialist fantasies
and the deployment of real violence fueled by those fantasies and the lust for
power and pillaged resources.
Morrison’s intervention, her erasure, rewrites the novella,
unmaking its colonialist, gendered discourse.
What’s left you might wonder.
Reader, something amazing! In her erasure, Morrison has accomplished something akin to what Richard Feynman suggests is the feat performed by the scientific imagination: “One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a strait jacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is."
steam silence” (90),
“sunshine
rotten
air” (37),
and “dusk
rising
to swell” (131).
Darkness, light, shadow, and ivory, in their dislocation from the initial first-person plural and then third person narrator, are unmoored from their 19th Century cultural frameworks, and come to mean otherwise. But, because Morrison’s source text is Heart of Darkness, this isn’t quite accurate. Her aim doesn’t seem to be to erase the history and context of this language (as if that were possible or, even, desirable), but rather her Darkness both marks these things and to some degree, if momentarily in the space of the pages of her book, returns darkness to the earth as an unvalenced force, a fact. The text exposes the rich and threatened natural world that is overshadowed, overwritten, run over by human beings. So fraught with its racialized symbolics, Heart of Darkness, has always been about the white men it is focalized around. Who knew there was so much of the natural world in Conrad’s text? Morrison’s excision of the human, the specific subjectivity of the white western man (who is, of course, in Conrad’s text juxtaposed with African men and women—both white and black)—underscores the excessive presence of this subjectivity in Heart of Darkness. Morrison’s Darkness offers another possibility, “rose,
wilderness
lightless
sunshine” (98).
But let me be clear, Darkness does not paint a rosy
portrait of an earth liberated from the human.
The book closes with an earth
hanging in the balance, “black bank of clouds, tran-
quil waterway
earth flow overcast sky—
immense darkness"
offering both a kind of hope (“tranquil” and “flow”) and a
glimpse of the unknown future (“overcast” and “immense”).
At the same time, her text makes present our current
predicament:
wilderness
withered;
consumed
Ivory?
mud
bursting
tusk
ground
fossil,
fossil
fossil
(81)
The book is so powerful in part because we cannot help but
be reminded of our own rapacious desire for ever more fossil fuels and our
disregard for the land that produces them. Additionally, it is impossible to
talk about this text and to ignore the recalcitrant ways in which racism
persists, particularly in the wake of the murders of TrayVon Martin and Oscar
Grant, and so many unnamed others.
I love Morrison's Girl Scout Nation, about which you can read here on xpoetics, yet when I first opened Darkness, I was intrigued but not
sure I would find enough there to keep me reading these painterly pages, words
in a font that appears sometimes blurry, edged and shadowed from the brush marks
of the white-out or liquid paper. But the text has a power, a momentum in the
beauty, dare I say, melancholy that emerges in the midst of this “profound
stillness,worn,
hollow,
night flicker
tiny flame” (80) where “dark eyes look out
creatures
deep catch
of breath” (126).
The earth –“loose of the earth/ earth to pieces”—and all
its creatures are , in fact, as always in some places more than others,
vanishing, under erasure, on the brink. It is as if we glimpse it most powerfully
precisely at the moment when it seems as if it is slipping away.
Whatever the battles raging right now on Facebook and on the
Web and in publications and at parties and readings about conceptual writing,
here is a work that locates itself in the company of such writing. The verso of the title page of Darkness informs us that “pages 3-8 were
enacted as a 30-foot wall painting as part of the Not Content event curated by Vanessa Place and Theresa Carmody at
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 2010” and that excerpts are
included in I’ll Drown My Book, an
anthology of women’s conceptual writing. This text, like M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (mentioned in Bedient's essay cited below) is rich
with affect, moving. Each takes source texts that document and enact
problematic discourses, discourses that have real and lasting material effects
on people, on the planet. These authors use their source texts, perform critical interventions in these texts, and create
out of them something wholly new. In its own way, each tells a story that
cannot be told. What is earth without human beings? How might it speak? What
did the slaves thrown overboard for the purpose of collecting insurance money
experience? Who can tell this history? How can not telling tell?  |
| from Not Content |
All of this is complicated. And “conceptual poetry” and “the poetry of affect” too are complicated, hard to reduce so that on one side there are “life values” and on the other “emotionally neutral methods.” (see Calvin Bedient’s “Against Conceptualism."). I don’t find much in this glib give and take between Vanessa Place and Ben Fama: Authors on Artists: Vanessa Place Talks with Ben Fama about VanessaPlace, Inc. except careerism. But there’s lots to feel passionately about in work like Zong! and Darkness. And really, we do know that labels and categories are often applied after the fact, and only partially useful, and often misleading.
“cry, a very loud cry, soared slowly in the opaque air”
(67).
Sources:
Achebe, Chinua."An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness in Three Great Tales. New York, Vintage Books.
Feynman, Richard. The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1964.
Morrison, Yedda. Darkness. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2012.
Check out Yedda's website here.
