Writing While White: Thoughts on Writing Race as a White Poet

When I think about writing (across) race as a white poet--using a non-universal example of two white poets writing about injustices against African-Americans--Reznikoff of legal cases from early in the 20th century, C.D. Wright during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. I am profoundly skeptical about categories, but am trying to engage discussions being held at Harriet blog, and also here, Claudia Rankine's site, jacket2 and the blog posts that follow, as best I can within the limitations of the question and this form.


Tenets:

I want lyric, but I want lyric responses, not poems.

I want the poet to create the conditions for feeling, thinking, but not to offer her own directly.

I want the truth, but believe the only way to tell it is slant.

I want a poem less about any category than about histories of categories.

I want a poem that both honors boundaries & questions them. One before the other.

I want a poem whose intimacies reside & grow out of their distances.

I want a poem based on facts, not limited by them.

I want a poem that takes language seriously, points to our misuses of it.

I want a poem that makes the reader call herself to action.


Two Examples:

Charles Reznikoff: "Negroes"; and under Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "Negroes"

C.D. Wright, One with Others, Copper Canyon, 2010.


Charles Reznikoff:

Several white men went at night to the Negro's
house,
shot into it,
and set fire to his cotton on the gallery
his wife and children ran under the bed
and as the firing from guns and pistols went on
and the cotton blazed up, ran through a side door
into the woods.
The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the
house of a neighbor—
a white man--
and got inside.
He was followed,
and one of those who ran after him
put a shotgun against the white man's door
and shot a hole through it.
Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,
for five of the men who did this to the Negro
were tried:
for "unlawfully and maliciously
injuring and disfiguring"-
the white man's property.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen writes:

"Reznikoff allows the irony of America's racial injustices to foreground itself in these pieces, as in this one, which makes no comment on the fact that there were no charges for destroying a black man's property or for assaulting him and his family."

Reading Race" White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (U of Georgia P, 1986)

C.D. Wright:

"Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for 'insubordination' or a 'derogatory' letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer." (3)

What Reznikoff and Wright do in these poems (among other things) is to point at words. They don't point at the words themselves so much as at how those words are being used in particular historical contexts. Reznikoff's quotation comes from the legal case itself; read out of context, or in a more appropriate one, words like "injuring" and especially "disfiguring," suggest bodies, faces, human features. The brief line, "the white man's property," with which Reznikoff concludes the poem, echoes a time when black men were white men's property during slavery, and on the deep and unjust irony that the law will prosecute for destruction of a white man's property, but not a black man's body/figure. On re-reading the poem, the word "justice," cannot not be read with the reader's own quotation marks. A disfigured word re-figured by the reader.

Likewise, C.D. Wright points to the words "insubordination" and "derogatory" by placing them in quotes. These quotes un-veil (by paradoxically clothing in marks) misuses of the words by the school system.

The other day I was in a meeting to discuss the Ph.D. prospectus of a writer from Nepal who writes in English rather than in his native tongue. His writing was too intensely personal, he said, to work in his first language; instead, he chooses to write in the language that offers him distance from his subject and from the face that appears over his shoulder when he writes (read father, read culture). One committee member advised him to look into what might happen if he were to engage the fireworks in his native tongue. I am jealous that he can choose. But not all choices are between languages; some come within a single one. What Reznikoff and Wright have done is to write poetry not in a "native tongue" of feeling and lyricality, but in a "second language" of distance. They don't avoid feelings, but they instigate them in others. They trust their reader to translate back. They also trust themselves to see clearly, not through the damp lenses of passion or anger, instantly gratified.

[I've written elsewhere on being a white poet in Hawai`i; I've tried to complicate the notion of "whiteness" beyond what's inscribed in an essentialist category. One should perhaps add lines of modifiers to any reference to a poet by race or gender . . . I'll leave those modifiers to the poems themselves, which inevitably modify, indeed transform, our categories if we do well by our readers.]

"Grounded by Humbleness": Okana Road, The Murder of Percy Kipapa & Mark Panek's _Big Happiness: The Life & Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior_

[The intersection of Hui Iwa with Kahekili Highway in Temple Valley, windward O`ahu]

Shortly after my husband, son and I moved from Hui Iwa Street (the makai side of Kahekili Highway) to Hui Kelu Street (on the mauka side) in early 2001, I bought a bicycle. When I ride to Kahekili Highway, which was named after the Maui chief who ruled O`ahu for nine years and killed its ali`i, I have very different choices to make. If I turn right, I head toward Valley of the Temples cemetery; beyond the cemetery, off Kahekili, are bedroom communities for people who work (mostly) in Honolulu. To the right is where my daughter's soccer team practices, her teammates' parents solidly middle class, standard-English speaking, at least in the semi-public world we operate in as we watch our daughters practice. Kahekili dead-ends at the Likelike highway, which goes through the mountain toward Town and provides easy access to H3, which also heads through the mountain, toward Pearl Harbor. If, on the other hand, I turn left at Kahekili, I ride quickly away from the suburbs and into Kahalu`u, rural O`ahu. I ride toward my son's baseball practice, where many parents speak strong pidgin; I overhear conversations about trying to kill the pigs that are eating your yard, about the miseries of the Castle High School baseball team. "They goin' chrow you nutting but curve balls," one coach tells my son, "aftah you hit one ball lidat." One day I talked to a prematurely wizened woman who told me she had wanted to adopt children, but her past, you know. Her cell phone rang, her reaction electric. Her son, just back to the USA from Afghanistan, safe.

When I first began riding my bike heading north (to the left), my goal was to reach Lulani Street, which goes quickly upward, arriving at astonishing views of Kualoa and Mokoli`i or Chinaman's Hat; on the other side of Lulani, I would turn left and return to Kahekili via Kamehameha Highway along the ocean, catching many of the same views from sea level.
At the intersection of Kam and Kahekili, I'd note a 7-Eleven to my right, the Hygienic Store across from me to the right, and directly across the highway a huge banyan tree sheltering a small group of people seated on folding chairs. I'd turn left, and return home on Kahekili's right shoulder, Ko`olau mountains to my right.

To get to Lulani, I rode on a section of Okana Road. Okana runs parallel to Kahekili Highway; from it you see highway traffic zipping past. But Okana Road is a different world from that of the highway that sits so close by. It's country. "Keep the Country Country" bumperstickers refer to roads like this one. The gulch between the roads is often muddy. Sometimes I see mostly teenage boys, but also parents and kids on motorcycles and four-wheel vehicles, riding as fast as they can in circles through the dirt and mud. A year ago one of them was killed when he drove into Kahekili Highway by the bus stop, on which someone still hangs flowers. His name was Kimo. Beside the road I often see abandoned cars, child seats, tires, all manner of trash left for someone else to pick up. My bike often scatters hens and their chicks; sometimes a rooster will crow loudly, then fly up into a nearby tree or run into the brush beside the road. There are a few small single-wall houses; in the carport of one I often see men sitting, drinking beer, talking story. They wave, I wave. There's always a lot of dirt on the paved road; it turns to mud in the not so occasional downpours, such as one I got caught in yesterday afternoon.

So, while Okana Road began for me as a route to another street, it quickly became a primary focus of my rides. I began to turn right at Ahuimanu and Okana Roads, rather than the usual left. (There's a map of the area here. No surprise that it comes off a realtor's site.) To the right there is less evidence of Kahekili Highway's proximity, though you can see the local sewer plant through the yards of houses to the right. (The smell moves toward Kahekili, where I catch it on the way home.) To the left are driveways, some of which disappear into the trees, others of which lead quickly to houses. Some of the driveways are gated (old gates, not fancy ones, like you find in Lanikai). Dogs bark, roosters crow (up the road a ways is a well-fenced house whose property is covered by dozens of rooster hutches; the decibel level is very high). Up a rise and down and then to the left the road goes, past houses, a lot full of containers, boats, industrial equipment and plants. It ends in a cul-de-sac where a group of nice houses sits, looking back down the road toward a mountain vista.

Okana Road fascinates: from its narrow asphalt you witness astonishing beauty. But lower your eyes and you might see a thin woman lean into a car briefly then dart away, or a low-riding Honda rice rocket sitting by the road with men sitting in it, waiting with their engine on. Across Kahekili, on Ahuimanu, just yesterday (Sunday), we saw a man and a woman facing off, a chain link fence between them. She screamed profanities at him; as we turned toward my son's baseball game, a police car turned toward the altercation. Like so much on this island, the beauty mixes with dissonance, the stark sense that something is amiss, though you cannot say quite what as you ride your bike, only stopping to take photographs or a quick drink of water, then continuing on. And, like so much on this island, the road has inspired a song, Natural Vibrations' Jawaiian "Okana Road," which celebrates fellowship, the growing of plants (the lyrics say taro, though one wonders), briefly mentions the ugly, intrusive Water Supply building at the corner ("Who the hell / Told you put that pump station in our yard") and then ends with the traditional (to Hawaiian mele) naming of places on O`ahu's east side.


For some reason (a recent adoption? soon-to-be trip away from home? not yet bike-riding on Okana Drive?) I do not remember the murder of Percy Kipapa in May, 2005 on Okana Road. He had just come from a stop at the 7-Eleven across from the Hygienic Store. Even more strangely, I don't remember the trial of his murderer a year later, a trial that was covered diligently by local media. So it was with a strange sense of a missing memory, one that ought to have firmly lodged there, that I read Mark Panek's new University of Hawai`i Press book, Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior. I am grateful for this book for many reasons: it is at once a loving elegy to the author's friend, a history of Windward O`ahu since statehood (1959), an incisive piece of investigative journalism about land and water issues, development, and the crystal meth (ice) epidemic of the 1990s and 2000s. That epidemic struck all of Hawai`i--in fact, it struck many places like Hawai`i, where rural dreams run dry and the only way to make a living is to leave, join the military, hope to make it as an athlete--but it struck Kahalu`u particularly hard. It is also a book about Okana Road, about an area I know, however superficially, from the seat of my Specialized bike.

Panek's book is much more than a who-done-it, or even a why-was-it-done to this good man; Big Happiness (the title translates Kipapa's sumo name, Daiki) is forensic in its examination of root causes for the desperation that afflicts so many, its manifestation in the abuse of crystal methamphetamine. Percy Kipapa comes across as a man with a loving family--one that fought the loss of the family's land since the Mahele of the mid-19th century--who was recruited as a sumo wrestler due to his athleticism and his size (nearly 500 pounds). He lives in a community of windward O`ahu that fought hard to get back water that was being directed into development on the leeward side, once agriculture (sugar and pineapple especially) left the island. But he also lives in a community under constant threat from money and developers. The Japanese boom of the 1980s was particularly dangerous for what Panek calls its "addiction" to golf. Reaching back to a study commissioned just before statehood, Panek discovers that windward O`ahu was targeted for the same level of development that has occurred in Kapolei. According to Rev. Bob Nakata, a local minister (with whom I've waved election signs many times) and one of the real heroes of this book. It's worth quoting Nakata in full, because the scenario he describes would have altered the windward side completely, utterly: "They were going to dredge it all out . . . So this strip of low-lying land was going to be the wharfs and heavy industry. At the edge of the lagoon that was created for flood control there would be a twenty-acre sewage treatment plant. Hotel resort in this valley, hotel resort over the fishpond . . . He`eia Kea Boat Harbor was going to be four times bigger than that Ala Wai. Hawaiian Electric was going to put a power plant there, and oil barges I guess would have come into the boar harbor. The He`eia meadowlands were to be a golf course. The He`eia fishpond was to be a fancy marina. I think the point where He`eia State Park is, somebody wanted to put a fancy restaurant and I don't know what else is up there. There were going to create an artificial island in front of King School. Oh yeah, the piece that I'm forgetting : Temple Valley? That's where the oil refineries were going to be. It was wild!" (267)

Wild, indeed, but the land grabbing and planned developed had been a constant stress on Windward residents since at least the Mahele. Panek patiently follows the history of Kipapa's family, and its fight across generations to save their land in the Waikane valley. According to Place Names of Hawai`i, by the way, "kipapa" means "place prone (corpses slain in the victory of O`ahu forces over those from Hawai`i in the 14th century). Some fights were won by Nakata, the Kipapas, and others--fights over water, for example. Some fights were lost, like the one over the H3 highway that now traces its way along the edge of Ha`iku Valley and then goes through the Hirano tunnel and down Halawa Valley toward the stadium. The stadium is currently being refurbished, but much of the labor has been brought into the state from places like the South so as to avoid local unions. Just another symptom of the narrowness of Hawai`i's economy, and the very few opportunities there are for people here, especially if they don't have a college degree. Percy Kipapa may have spoken fluent Japanese, but he was one Castle grad. And he did not want to work for a Japanese company in Waikiki, showing tourists a good time.

One of the other fights was lost nearly before it was adequately engaged, namely the fight against crystal methamphetamine. When I see people under the famous banyan tree next to the Hygienics Store, I suspect they are ice users. When I see the woman reach into the car and dart away, or the guys loitering, their engines on, on Okana Road, I think of ice. But now I will think of Percy Kipapa, who got caught up in the drug before anyone knew how dangerous it is, stayed off it while enduring horrible conditions as a sumo fighter in Japan, and who returned home to so few opportunities, began using again, and was murdered by a "friend" with whom he'd done the drug for at least a year and a half. Panek details the struggle by advocates of drug treatment to get money; he also shows how resistant the then governor, Linda Lingle (R) was to providing it. She who said bluntly, "treatment doesn't work," despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

I don't want to say too much about the book, which you should read. But I do want to say something about Mark Panek, who got his Ph.D. from my department several years ago, and is now an associate professor of English at UH-Hilo on the Big Island. Mark never took a course from me--he was into fiction, biography--but we talked quite a bit about baseball. At playoff time, he would wear a full body Yankees uniform, and strut about the halls (Yankees fans do not know how to walk like normal mortals). He was a warm and open person, despite his baseball flaw. As he recounts his friendship with the local sumotori, and his cold calls on local friends of Kipapa's, calls that inevitably ended up in long conversations, I can see that his manner--friendly, humble, sincere--so unlike that of a Yankees' fan, really, stood him in good stead locally. While he is a character in his own story, friend to the victim and his family, past and present biographer to sumatori (his book on Chad Rowan/Akebono was published by UH Press in 2006), he never intrudes. A good deal of the book is in Pidgin (or HCE), as Panek has transcribed his interviews faithfully with Pidgin speakers. My favorite linguistic moment in the book comes at Percy Kipapa's funeral, where Akebono sits in the front row. "I turned to see Chad sitting in the front row, that troubled look not having left his face." What does Panek say? "'You get one for Hawaiian?' I asked Bumbo."

I love that moment because that's when Panek shows himself to be a Pidgin speaker, too. Raised on Long Island, a graduate of Colby College in Maine, Panek has managed to create a career for himself out of a love for Hawai`i and Japan, Hawaiian and sumo culture, and a familiarity with culture here that most academics (especially those from elsewhere) never come close to possessing. His book is a valuable contribution not just to the history of Hawai`i, but also to explorations of masculinity, like Chris McKinney's The Tattoo, which is also situated in part in Kahalu`u, and is mentioned several times in Panek's book, or like (the more hopeful) Ty Tengan's Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai`i. But it could not have been written so faithfully without several decades of local literature, steeped in Pidgin, or research by Hawaiians, local Asians, and white academics alike, research that often approaches or becomes advocacy for a Hawai`i left more to its own determination than that of developers, the military, or the drug dealers.

Panek knows from the beginning that he is, as Bob Nakata tells him, "writing the history of the community," that he bears a responsibility as a writer. Charles Kekahu tells him, "So you gotta word 'um to the point where everything's still beautiful, it's just . . . that we missed it somehow." He adds, in a passage Panek must have taken to heart, "this story has a meaning and it has a purpose, and it was real life." This is a necessary book. We can thank Mark Panek and UH Press, and beyond them Percy Kipapa's family and community members quoted extensively in the book. Panek wrote it, but the community offered it to us through him. It's an alliance worth celebrating.


[from the far end of Okana Road--to the right from the Ahuimanu Road intersection]

You can see a set of my recent photos of Okana Road via facebook's public link, here.
A good interview with Mark Panek on this book can be found here.

Mom report: April 26, 2011

Is the heart of poetry a stillness? At the telephone's other end, I'm here and then she's not. Just shut up and listen! Jimmy Stewart yells on her television.

--Have you eaten, Mom?

--No.

--How's the weather?

--

--Are you there, Mom?

--

--I love you, Mom. I love you, Mom. I'll call back soon.

--26 April 2011

[Increasingly, I find that two projects, Dementia Blog & Memory Cards, converge. And how could they not, since at their centers are concerns with memory & its loss? So here is a memory card that riffs off a line from Clark Coolidge in The Crystal Text, that is also a report on my mother.]

[Here is a site where you can find information on Alzheimer's, including a new report by the Alzheimer's Foundation on Baby Boomers & the disease]

King Lear enters _The Little Prince_

[After the social worker who visits my mother once every two or three weeks wrote to say she'd been showing mom a pop-up version of The Little Prince, I ordered one. Over the past few days I read the book, which is as gorgeously made as it was written by Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, alongside King Lear. And then a small character with a yellow scarf came to tell me the story of how King Lear entered the little prince's world . . . Much language is taken from Ste-Exupery and Shakespeare. The mistakes are all mine, as we say in acknowledgments.]


It took me a long time to understand where he came from. King Lear, who asked so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones anyone else asked him. It was things he said quite at random that, bit by bit, explained everything. For instance, when he first caught sight of an airplane . . . he asked: "What's that thing over there?"

When told that the plane had fallen out of the sky, he asked what planet it was from.

"Of course," he said of the airplane, "that couldn't have brought anyone from very
far . . . " And he fell into a reverie that lasted a long while. Then, taking a sheep out of his pocket, he plunged into contemplation of his treasure.

"You see me here, you gods a poor old man
As full of grief as age, wretched in both."

Something about his daughters was amiss but he would not draw them, nor even the castles they lived in. Another, I suspected, was houseless, wandering in a foreign (oh hard-to-spell!) land, exiled in more than word.

Lear liked the fox and the flower, but not the drunkard or the vain man who looked only and ever for approbation. He was vain, but he was also wise like the fox, lonely like the flower; his sense of place was a dark planet ("cerebral and dark," according to Netflix) on which he propped himself, bare and unforked. The drunkard and he could have talked story: what is it about shame? I'd have asked them, but neither drunk nor King could look beyond his bottle or word hoard. For a demented man, Lear sure seemed to carry around a lot of language. Paranoia's a fertile muse, but she also enters the drought years, rendering earth a cracked slab unbefitting to a sovereign's looping locution.

But the master sees himself not so. "Here I stand your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man." He cannot count the stars, nor possess them, because he owes them his jangled moods, his love of piercing light, his debt to eyes that stay in his head. Sad news about his buddy Gloucester: the dead holes in his head, the failed (if ably assisted) suicide, the inability to die even when you or he ordain it. If to be sovereign means you get to choose, then neither Lear nor his friend are so.

Enter the lamplighter. We more than suspect he's Edgar, playing another's self (ragged beyond nounship), cold in the vog of a farther micro-planet. He cannot not light his lamp; his lamp cannot not go out in the dark. Does Gloucester know this? Gloucester cannot see, but Edgar is a more than able narrator. "Father, for you are that, this planet's always on the limn of darkness, save the man who cannot sleep for lighting the lamp."

Lear abhorred snakes, took refuge on mountaintops. He fancied himself a thinker, unprovoked by daily needfulness. But the snake kept slithering, and two daughters passed notes from desk to desk, conspiring havoc. They were not flowers, at least not those he wanted on his nightstand. So many thorns, as if they needed protection from him. From him? He was just a sojourner, a man who gave things away, making inheritance while the sun shone on his white beard.

The railroad seemed one way out, though it hardly crossed the planet borders without enormous slings. Bad engineering made them slingshots, and trains transgressed the very skies, bearing screaming children, angry commuters, releasing coal as acidic rain in tunnels between stars. Don't tell the businessman; he might become more generous with his constellations.

Lear got off at a distant station. No one worked in the building. A water fountain had died long ago. The filing cabinets were full of old teaching aids: How the Pilgrims Came to Plymouth Rock, The Pioneers in Wagons, one with a picture of a sad chief. This did not seem right, nor did it satisfy any thirst he had. He left the station and its paper heaps and walked out into sand fields. A pilot appeared, accoutered in cap and leather flying bag. He too was lost.

There was a happy ending, at least for a time. Using dowsing sticks, they found a spot, unmarked by stone or twig, dug until they reached a vein of water. They drank from the same bucket, sharing more than the cold water. But then the daughters came, and their retinues, and their resentments, even the youngest one's recovered love. There were swords and bitter words, nothing water could wash away, not yet. Only the pilot escaped, muttering something about ripeness, about extremity, about trumpets. He took with him what memories there could be, left the stage a motley fool. What Lear had not already forgotten, forgot Lear.

And no grown-up will ever understand such a thing. Never.

























[See Old Women Look Like This for more experiments in which very old people are put in children's stories.]

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #2: Adam Aitken's TONTO'S REVENGE

Available May 1. The second in a series of 12.

Tonto's Revenge, composed of poems written by Adam Aitken during his term as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, is something of a Thai-Australian version of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poet, masquerading sometimes as Tonto, sometimes as Charlie Chan, meets a Sheriff; they face off over everything from tourism to nostalgia to departmental hiring. Along the way, the poet meets the Rabbit Lady of Honolulu, laments the death of Danno (James MacArthur of the original Hawai`i 5-0), and gathers in many of Honolulu's voices off buses and from the city parks burgeoning with homeless persons. "You want to shout Fuck Tourism," Aitken writes, "but that would be nostalgic.”

Adam Aitken is a Thai-Australian living in Sydney, where he teaches Creative Writing. He was born in London and as a young child he was schooled in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He has lived, worked and travelled widely through Asia and Europe, and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tinfish, Drunken Boat and Jacket. This is his fifth collection of poems.

from “The Day Danno Died (In memory of James MacArthur)"

The day Danno died

some old senators

and heroes of Pearl Harbour

last surviving ones

cried. They knew Danno

had done a lot for these islands.

The day Danno died

someone’s father entered

Harry’s Music Store

and bought his son

a Ukelele.

At Smiley’s Nails

someone mentioned in passing

that Danno had died.

Somehow, at Jimmy’s

Television Sales & Services

the owner thought

TV will never be the same,

now that Danno’s died.

Send $3 to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744 or order with credit card via tinfishpress.com (2checkout). Better yet, subscribe to the full series of 12 chapbooks we're putting out in 12 months, for $36! The first chapbook, Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, is still available for $3 or as part of a subscription. Each Retro Chapbook is designed by Eric Butler.

Mother report: April 16, 2011

--This is Susan, Martha's daughter. How is she doing?
--She's had a bit of a cold, but she's ok. Just had lunch.
--Is she up for the telephone?
--Yes.
--[It's your daughter, Martha; she's on the phone.]
--Hello mom! How are you, mom? Did you just have lunch?
I hear you have a cold. Are you there, mom?
--
--
--[It's your daughter, Martha, she's on the phone. Say hello.]
--Hello. (breathy whisper)
--Hi mom, how are you? What have you been up to?
--
--
--[Hello.]
--I guess she's not up to talking today. I'll try back tomorrow, ok,
in case she's feeling more like it.
--OK, sorry. Good-bye.

Springtime (in London) is for Alzheimer's

When is jet lag a lag, and when is it more a loop, like a scratched cd, or the mind when it's called upon to navigate the differences in time zones? It's from within that loop, or outside the time to which I've been assigned (8:43 a.m. Hawaiian time) that I'll write about my trip to London, April 5-12 (or 13th, if you include the flight lag on the last leg from Los Angeles). Kind of a flight log of lag. Stop me before this gets too silly. And forgive the errors, as they are induced by over 48 hours of travel in one week across a cumulative 22 time zones. Or so.

I went to London to attend the New Cultures of Ageing Conference at Brunel University on April 8 and 9. (The "e" in Ageing has a similar power to set my brain in a loop, so from now on I'll write "aging," which will ease my American mind.) The conference was smaller than most I attend, but also more interdisciplinary, incorporating oral history projects, reading group reports, histories of aging in England, demographic frenzies, discussion of organization and management, an "argument" between Will Self and Faye Weldon, and afternoon panels on literature. The focus was on narrative, but there were at least some calls for ruptured ones.

Which brings me quickly to a pivotal moment during my visit in Ealing with Giles Goodland and
his family, when Giles handed me a book by B.S. Johnson, entitled House Mother Normal, published in 1971, shortly before the author's suicide. I'd been telling Giles about my dissatisfactions with linear narratives about Alzheimer's. And suddenly I realized that this was the book I should be talking about, a book that belonged to Giles, a book I could not possibly read that evening and talk about the day after. The day after my talk, during which I mentioned my encounter with B.S. Johnson, a graduate student from Paris-Diderot, Karen Zouzouai, delivered a paper on Johnson's novel. A day after that, I bought Johnson's Omnibus from the London Review Bookshop at Russell Square. Two days thereafter I read the novel on the plane from London to Los Angeles. It's an astonishing text. While I'm still not capable of doing it justice, I want to begin to say why.

I find a paragraph by Frank Kermode that says it best, but only if you reverse its field, transposing Kermode's negatives into positives like a wide receiver running behind the quarterback and heading up the other hashmarks. Because what I find valuable about Johnson's House Mother Normal is its refusal to trump up a linear narrative about residents of an old people's home. Instead, Johnson offers us the residents themselves, each telling the same story, some in sentences, others (the ones with Alzheimer's) in words only, strewn across the page. So here is the regressive Mr. Kermode:

His [Johnson's] basic error arose from his belief that the truth of narratives was incompatible with the usual way of presenting them: that is, in books which by their very technology insisted on a spurious sequentiality. At the same time, he thought that the neglect of all manner of various typographic opportunities, long since exploited by Sterne and now shamefully ignored, was another enemy of the truth. That the material structure of books can affect their contents is of course true. The use of the codex in preference to the scroll made for a decisive difference between the Gospels and the books of the Hebrew Bible; the codex made easily available relationships between pages remote from one another, and these books, with numbered and turnable pages, may have influenced the writers and probably affected the early course of the new religion.

Johnson, it seems, was a fiction writer obsessed with "truth," one for whom the form of "realism" was not realistic enough. It was in the interest of telling the truth, getting at something authentic (a word I distrust, but seems right in this context) that he experimented, and it was his experiments that renders him a "forgotten writer," or--for this reader--simply an unknown one.

One of the moments in his book that provides access to the ways in which he enacts memory and forgetting is in the renderings of a song the nasty House Mother (hardly "normal") through the memories of each resident. Sarah Lamson, whose narrative is fairly straightforward (realism as a marker of an intact memory), records the first stanza of the song this way:

The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And brightly welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we'll be,
What matters most is that we're free:
The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long. (11)

"She is in her happy place," a nurse once said of my mother and her colleagues at Arden Courts. The myth of happiness is one held most firmly to by those who are witnesses to their relatives' decline. At Brunel, the elders would often intervene to point out that things were not so good, that old age was not simply an era for dispensing wisdom. That old age hurts.

Two residents later, Ivy Nicholls renders the song this way:

Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And di-dum welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we've done,
What matters most is that we're errrr (55)

By the time we get to George Hedbury, whose words are scattered across the open field page (ironically denoting a shutting in), we read:

No matter if the future's dim
keep right on and suffer hymn (143)

A final resident, the aptly named Rosetta Stanton, whose tablets are least recognizable as language (in the sense of language as a communicative vehicle, in any case), repeats nothing of the song, although her author (who comes out as such near the end of the book) does put sounds like "addurno" in her mouth (13), perhaps to remind us of the problem of the lyric post-Alzheimer's.

The nefarious "House Mother" gets many of the lyrics wrong, herself, proving the emptiness of her own propaganda. She shifts Lamson's "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and see it through" (11) with the ever more cynical and deliberate, "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and screw and screw" (187), which is what she does with her dog while the horrified residents look on, attempt to enunciate their disgust. That the House Mother's narrative is most tidy, most linear, spoken with the most clarity, most "in control," is only one of the ironies Johnson employs. The real truths, we sense, are on the pages that remain entirely blank (as with Rosetta's) or on which a fractured language scatters in islands.

Frank Kermode, in reviewing the biography of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe, can barely bring himself to summarize the argument about House Mother Normal. "Coe argues that this makes the book ‘richly polyphonic’. The House Mother has the final word: she describes herself as ‘the concoction of a writer’ – another sop to Johnson’s conscientious objection to making things up." And so the arch critic demeans an author for trying to "get it right," because getting it right is so damn difficult. Earlier in this same review, Kermode the curmudgeon wrote it thusly: "Johnson was very serious about these innovations, but they kidnap the notion of experiment or estrangement by making it appear that the violation of narrative order in the interests of what he thought of as truth must be blatant. In fact these tricks simply prompt one to ask what the point of this sort of innovation really is. They distract attention from the novel, the true interest of which is independent of them." In the interest of his own version of "truth," Kermode asserts that the novel has a form divorced from forms, that it does not contain "tricks." I'll stop before spilling more bitter beans, but you'll see where I'm going--or, more importantly--where B.S. Johnson went in his forensic investigation of the "home" and its residents.

My only problem with the novel is that Johnson moves so quickly from early or non-Alzheimer's into late-stage Alzheimer's. Missing is the stage where there is a lot of language, but little coherence; this was the stage I discovered here in my mother's home. (It might otherwise be termed the Modernist stage of Alzheimer's, as conceived by Gertrude Stein.) And his presentation of the House Mother's narrative at the end, which confirms all our suspicions about her perversity, offers perhaps too much sense to us, as if to close down the questions and to show us the awful answers, lest we not know. But these are quibbles. What is beautiful about the book is the way it illustrates the absolute necessity of the experimental in the face of Alzheimer's extremities.

Once the conference ended, I went on a two day traipse through London, finding old friends and inventing new ones (that sounded right, so I wrote it). The sun was shining and the English were getting sunburns. On the top deck of the red buses, young Sikhs were wearing traditional turbans, while negotiating cultures with American teeshirts and diamond stud earrings. The voices sounded in myriad tongues; no one spoke in a single language, but words danced in and out of Punjabi, English, African French, English, Hindi, English, Polish, English. Much as I love taking photographs, I would also want recordings of these voices, for that is the London I heard as I looked out if its bus windows.


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Jacket2 is now out, published by the indefatigable Al Filreis with a staff of brilliant editors, including Sarah Dowling. It's all worth reading (and grows over time, rather than according to the usual schedules), but please check out the Pacific Poetries section, which I edited, and the introductory essay, which includes my usual Tinfishian spin (away from identities and toward conversations between them--if that sounds paradoxical, it is).

Eileen Tabios's marvelous project, Poets on Adoption has also launched, here. My offering is here. One of the many virtues of this site is how various are the perspectives offered by adoptees, adopters, and birth-parents.

Memory Cards from my latest series will appear in Eleven Eleven, among other venues. I've almost finished the Lyn Hejinian series, wondering where to go next, and thinking a lot about why nearly all the writers I've riffed off of are white (Albert Saijo being the only exception so far). Something about meditative poetry, the poetry of abstraction, as more possible (or, indeed, interesting) for white poets. To write about later, when the lag is o'er. And without assigning too much identity to their and my identities . . .

The next Tinfish Retro Chapbook is by Adam Aitken, called Tonto's Revenge. Announcement soon, here and elsewhere.