Return to Bois Sauvage

Perhaps I have just read over it, but I don’t recall an explicit mention of (calendar) time in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The best I could come up with is about 2014, and that being based on Michael having been present at the Deepwater Horizon explosion which occurred in April, 2010, and it seems to have been not so long after, traumatised and unable to find work in the region, that he falls into drug addiction and related criminal activities presumably leading to a conviction and interment in Parchman. Kayla doesn’t seem to have been born when he leaves, so given that she is now three, this seems a reasonable enough guess.

A Dedeaux oak in Jesmyn Ward’s hometown of Delisle, Miss. The sight of such Leonie associates with Bois – and then she sees Esch and Skeet.

Which of course got me thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage and how it may have changed between Salvage the Bones, defined by Katrina in 2005, and the time in which Sing, Unburied, Sing is set. It seems to me, a lot can happen in what must be almost a decade, both to people and to place, and especially in a a very special fictional world that has evolved out of a very real one. Now of course even if I wasn’t wondering madly over this, Ward sort of invites one to do so with a neatly placed reference as they drive back into Bois at journey’s end, the road journey anyway. Leonie narrates:

Two people walk in the distance …a man, short and muscled…[leading] a black dog… next to him, a skinny little woman with …cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies…Skeetah and Eschelle…The siblings walk in sync…Esch says something and Skeetah laughs…

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” Bloomsbury paperback ed. p.197

To be deduced: Esch and Skeetah are in their mid-twenties now, and they are in Bois where we left them immediately after Katrina; with Esch awaiting a child, and Skeet still unreconciled to the loss of China. One wonders about the extended Batiste family, Daddy and the kids and their friends: who has gone and who has stayed? are they well enough? I hope so, for how I loved this chaotic troupe, and Leonie’s envious reaction “…jealousy twins with anger…”(ending with Kayla being severely slapped and a vague imagining of how different it may have been for her had Given lived) seems to suggest at least these two are doing okay. For Skeet, what times – good and bad – lay between that radiant white China and this black beast now on parade? Does the colour tell a story? Esch’s baby would now be almost ten (a Jason or a Rose?), and I dare to imagine, armed with Medea and the love of family, that she salvaged some good out of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, and that her fine, kind mind has been given the chance it deserved to bloom, that she is a good mother, and all the fathers Big Henry promised were there for her. Wearing still, and proudly, her wild crown atop her head makes me happy and gives me hope. (While Leonie’s maternal failures may more than irritate, that she sees a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” where others would see a “dishevelled mop” says much.)

Somethings we do know. The prevalence of cannabis and cocaine has been superseded by the scourge of crystal meth, oxycontin and god alone knows what else. White privilege spares not – just ask Michael or Misty. Prosperity is there alongside the desperate, and race defines as ever; in ways subtle and not so, and boundaries drawn accordingly – you can be up the Kill (where white folk live) or in the Pit (where the Batistes lived); transgress at your own peril.

Bois Sauvage has survived; not capitulating to the most powerful forces that Nature could muster, nor to the deprivations formented through mortal weakness and depravity. Against all laws of Nature, the Delta draws sustenance from the vast river of human waste salvaged as it flows from its history into each moment.

Sing, sing of …

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” pub. Scribner, 2017.

In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.

For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.

And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.

The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.

A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?

Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.

On Toni Morrison

A few days later and the tributes, and love, for Toni Morrison have no end! Amongst the many, Jesmyn Ward has contributed a longer piece at The New York Times. I have read in the last days so much in this vein from younger, a lot younger, writers – black, women but not only – who Ms. Morrison has touched and inspired, who have learnt her lessons on the power of language to pass on to new generations – beyond her literary greatness this too will surely be an enduring legacy.

And here is her 1993 Nobel Lecture – whereby that latter word can not adequately describe the beauty of her words and the narrative voice she chooses, and in audio to be heard as she delivered it twenty-six years ago.

That this should have been said a quarter of a century before an Internet gone haywire and a President equally so:

…The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…

 Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 13 Aug 2019.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

In life Toni Morrison pleaded with words – the words of her novels, stories and essays – for a greater human language that is universal in its embrace of the individual, the “other” – not in its “sameness”. It was not the cacophony of unintelligible sound that doomed The Tower of Babel, rather an unwillingness to share in the myriad of other languages – cultures, points of view. She says: “…unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction …We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

It was certainly the measure of this most remarkable life.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

Toni Morrison died on Monday. Another of those I discovered later than many – but what is late but the proverbial better than the never to have. I don’t believe she wrote her stories for me nor was she speaking to me, but I listened in just the same, and she stretched my intellect and took my imagination to places I thought unknown, and found places that were always there – a sameness to be shared. Her wonderful essays made me think about things I may never have thought about, and remember what I thought was best forgot.

Tributes are everywhere to be found, from the famous and not so, through all races (a categorisation that Morrison denied and embraced with rage and love in equal measure) and places, genders and generations. And because it is the younger amongst us that will take her the farthest in the passing of time – here is the young Nigerian writer, Chigozie Obioma, in The Guardian, and because I have spent so much time of late with her (her words at least) I quote here Jesmyn Ward in The New York Times, in words as poetic as befits the magnificent Ms. Morrison.

Toni Morrison wrote to us again and again, exhorting our beauty, making us grapple with our pain, reaffirming our humanity. Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together. She loved us when we prayed and sang and made love and danced. She loved us when we lied and sliced throats and disowned our children. She loved us at our best and our broken. She called us forth in her pages and made us experience and understand ourselves with kindness, with deeper knowing of all we had survived, all we had not, all we had made, all we had unmade, all we had become, all we could be. How she knew us! How she sang us to the world! And now that she is gone, how we weep for our Beloved!

Jesmyn Ward, The New York Times, Aug. 6 2019

City on the Hill

And now in the The New York Review of Books this adaptation (subscription required) from Marilynne Robinson’s first lecture. An interesting (and unusual) discourse, with as a starting premise: capitalism, as an economic theory at the very least misunderstood and often very well perverted, an altar worshiped upon by many and just as equally disavowed, as American as the proverbial whatever but with its historical and societal roots in a reaction against the brutality of the Poor Laws and conditions of pre-Modern England (and Europe) and the liberality borne out of an understanding of Scripture, based on love and generosity, dating from Wycliff.

This is me speaking here, wondering out loud: I wonder whether it was the secularisation of this liberal thought in the 18th century, and an intellectualisation that single mindedly focused on the useful and forgot about things like charity and love, that paved the way for, firstly, a brutal capitalism and then the backlash of theoretical Marxism.

On Reading Robinson

Though coming late to Marilynne Robinson, I was immediately captivated by her narrative form, the power of the characters and the moral integrity that rises above moralising.

Having written several posts during 2018-19 in respect to Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, I have taken the time to experiment a little and put together an edited collection; compiled in LaTeX and available in PDF from my Downloads page.

Liberalism and poverty

It has come to my attention that the second part of Marilynne Robinson’s recent lecture (embedded in my previous post) is now in essay (long) form, and as “Is Poverty Necessary?” the cover title of the June edition of Harper’s Magazine. Maybe you are lucky enough to get the one free piece a month – or even luckier and be a subscriber.

Now should you have listened to these lectures, you may agree that they really are quite dense in subject matter and meaning; especially the second part which harks back to the roots of classical economics at the beginning of industrialisation and the accompanying (and colliding) emerging political theories of liberalism, capitalism, marxism …I dare say I forgot some other “ism”s! In this respect I am very grateful to have some written words for guidance and more stringent study – at leisure if not pleasure.

Also, a podcast of a discussion with the editor of the piece (who is also the executive editor of Harper’s Magazine), Christopher Beha, is enlightening and presumably available to all.

The Hours MS

A favourite “day in the life of” if ever there was one, is brought to mind again with The New York Times reporting on the publication of a new reproduction of the full draft of what was tentatively titled “The Hours” and was to become Mrs. Dalloway. Absolutely beyond my modest budget, but an imagined treasure just the same!

Cover design Vanessa Bell, Hogarth Press, 1925.

Beyond the title, revealed (to me anyway!) is the metamorphose of Virginia Woolf’s initial idea of a grand post-war London narrative into a deceptively more modest work. The minutiose account of one woman on one day endures as one of the finest character studies in modern literature.

By the way, I’m collecting all things that come my way relating somehow to Mrs. Dalloway here, where links are also to be found to “The Hours” manuscripts held at the British Library.