FIELD REPORT: a tongue touching other teeth: on Négritude and Zionism

November 13, 2010

I’ve been a bit obsessed with the secret passageways that exist between worlds and words and their worlds. Within the phenomenon of translation, conjured worlds collide and combust and new galaxies are formed where once were only words.  One meaning becomes three: the original meaning, the meaning in the new language, and a third meaning (to me, the most complex and nuanced) which is those two words forever locked in an embrace of argument and seduction. As though they are lovers locked in a train berth, embarked on a claustrophobic yet hormonal cross-continental journey.

Perhaps this “conjuring” phenomenon is most pronounced when the actual words that are undergoing the riptide of translation themselves carry a message about being caught between worlds. Form follows function, and instead of paralysis, catalysis occurs.This awkward, unfamiliar space of clumsy linguistic cross-conversation allows relationships to form outside of the typical channels of exchange. What is acceptable for discussion in one language is taboo in another. Sudden intimacies take place. Doors and windows snap open to mystery.

For the native tongue, a second language requires a tongue touching new teeth. A reshuffling of the shutter, where the scene is the same but the frame has changed.

Technically, of course, a word is static on a page. But as an evocative, invoking spell, words provoke a newly-cleared space inside the brains of their readers – wherever we are dispersed throughout time and space.

Of course, this is the original genius of written communication – the first shamanic makings of coded marks. Strikes on a surface that carry an imbedded meaning.

And for the reader – to be off alone and wandering in a fractured universe and then suddenly to exist in relationship to other brains through the magic of consecutive arrangement of dots and lines on a surface. Zeros or ones, Cyrillic or Kanji. Regardless of the petty methodology of hoodoo, the reader is networked to a conjured world. A virtual reality.

In translation, this is particularly powerful because two real-world worlds – who would never otherwise have much in common – can be brought together in a mystical collision. For instance, Hebrew and Martinique French/Creole.

How seemingly more further apart could they be?

And yet through this underground railway of poetry we find a secret conversation between the formative manifesto of Négritude and the formative manifesto of Zionism.

Two of my favorite long form lyric poems are “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” written in French by Aime Cesaire in 1939, and “In the City of Slaughter” written in Hebrew by Chaim Bialik in 1907.

First, I physically travelled to Martinique in search of the land of Cesaire, and then, I physically travelled to Eastern Europe in search of Bialik.  And it was in the ditches at Dachau where the two truly colluded and collided.

Separated by race, religion, language, culture, country, nationality, geography, and century, the writers themselves have little apparently in common. Within their poems, the narrators are both young men – members of a violently persecuted community who have left the tormented homeland in search of education, freedom, and a viable liberation strategy. As narrators, both have returned “home” to bear witness to atrocity in their homeland – this time as artists and activists and insider-outsiders. As writers, the poems marked a radicalizing turning point after which they took on prominent and powerful roles as political figures.

The manifestos are achingly gorgeous works of language. Both poets are what I’d call Atrocity-minstrels. rage-innovators. They are not witness but agitator. As Cesaire writes, “Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.”

The sheer beauty of their language serves to accentuate rather than obscure the true horror of what they tell. Both have a meticulous obsession with plants and flowers that thrive at the site of atrocity, miraculously unafflicted in the midst of murder.

At first glance, the poets themselves had only those attributes in common.  But translation can build a subway that can save your life. When something that is taboo in one culture can be spoken of in another, that is liberation. When one culture has already born witness to a phenomenon that is about to afflict another culture – that is a warning, and it can bring survival.

My first clue about this strange “survival subway” between worlds came through a hint in their poems: their language about flowers.

I’ve read these poems on a monthly basis for decades, yet somehow never noticed their poetic collusion in anger against botany. Until.

I was standing at the execution range at Dachau and noticed the thick purple pelt of violets blooming in the blood ditch – a trench dug by the Nazis to create a small creek of blood. Drawn to the iron from the Jewish blood that drenched the soil, this was still their source of fertility a full sixty five years later.  Like diabolical candied violets in a Parisian shop window, thirsty for human blood. Tiny botanical vampiric monstrosities.I knew the general human consensus would be that I should feel a warmly redemptive comfort that in a place where inhumanity and death etcetera etcetera there was still the pulse of life etcetera etcetera and be vaulted into a bittersweet forgiveness etcetera etcetera but what I actually felt was blinding rage against these fucking parasitical violets, and I would have happily damned all the violets in the universe could it, would it, have meant some actual, tangible relief to those whose blood they ate.

In my mind, these two poems reared their heads. Twin lions. This rage against the flowers in a blood soaked soil.

It felt to me there was no possible way that two people could write about flowers in this way without some connection to one other, without there being a message, some coconut telephone of resistance and survival within and despite the considerable distance between late 19th century Hebrew and 20th century Antillean French.

“Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay / The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead,” writes Bialik, and “Marshes of putrid blood / trumpets absurdly muted / Land red, sanguineous, consanguineous land,” writes Cesaire. 

Finally, my search yielded an answer that surprised me – or rather, my own ignorance yielded to new knowledge that brought a considerable surprise.

“I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions,” says Cesaire’s poem. Indeed.

When Cesaire was writing his book, the French colonies in the Caribbean were still under colonial rule by France, and that meant Vichy, France. And it meant considerable Nazi activity within these islands, and eugenics activity, and a sudden influx of exponentially enhanced, exceptionally powerful, newly muscular, and deeply enfranchised oppressions against a black population that was already drowning in a perhaps bottomless well of oppression.

The Cesaire – the founder of Négritude– in direct conversation with Bialik – the foundational Zionist activist!  Across time and space, a world conjured whose commonality is a certain kind of european genocide, a certain way in which the white european gestalt brought death, catastrophe, atrocity and annihilation to all other cultures in its path. The beauty of self-communion, of tasting new teeth and finding the words the same but different.

It is unimaginable to me that Cesaire could not have been speaking with Bialik – amongst others – when he wrote this piece. He writes in the face of a common oppressor, and the bridge is walked between worlds.

He writes:

Leaving Europe utterly twisted with screams
the silent currents of despair
leaving timid Europe which collects and proudly overrates
itself

As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be a jew-
man
[…]
the famine-man, the insult-man, the torture-man you can grab
anytime, beat-up, kill–no joke, kill–without having to account
to anyone without having to make excuses to anyone
a jew-man
a pogrom-man
a puppy
a beggar

but can one kill Remorse, perfect as the stupefied face of an
English lady discovering a Hottentot skull in her soup tureen?

A phenomenal subway stop on this underground railway.

When the trains that run across the surface of the earth provide no path to freedom for either party, it is an underground railroad, a second map, a superimposed method of travel, that holds the hoodoo for liberation.

Again, Cesaire writes, “And my special geography too; the world map made for my / own use, not tinted with the arbitrary colors of scholars, but /with the geometry of my spilled blood, I accept.”

This is why we write.

With our spilled blood, we accept.