American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  FROM In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy

  Decomposition as Explanation

  The time of the composition is the time of the composition.

  GERTRUDE STEIN, “Composition as Explanation”

  1. There are always rotten bones and desiccated skin and bloody expectorations and pus and decomposition to think about it when it comes to locating the mind in the enveloping steam of the body that has lost the temptation to exist or that has been crushed by the ceiling that has crumbled from atrophy and has left the bodies it crushes to fight with and against history for a bed and a toilet and a floor amid the overpriced ruins of a civilization starving for collapse, dying for decay, opulent with bodies that have no choice but to piss all over their legs.

  2. Everything is the same except decomposition. I see my body the way I see my bank account. Diminishing. There are small children who live on my block and eat glass. They eat egg shells from the garbage. They eat nails and the wood from the house that was destroyed after it was foreclosed and its occupants decided to bury themselves underground. They were waiting for an eviction notice when it occurred to them it was better to live in mud than in a world filled with dollar bills that had lost their value. They were living under the porch then they were living in the front seat of the excavator parked in the alley. They were eating their clothes, they were eating the cable television bills they stole out of mailboxes. They stand outside the CVS pharmacy and peer into my brain as I pick up my sleep medication. I haven’t slept for twenty-three days. I am engaged in the act of translating one voice in my head so it can be understood by another voice in my head. An agent of the literati suggested my tongue would be a more useful pedagogical tool if I dipped it in Trader Joe’s teriyaki sauce then chopped it into pieces and shared it with a table full of children who are learning the art of poetry. Have you heard the one about the boy who found a hanging corpse in front of his window? The children in my dreams are screaming: “everything is the same except decomposition and time, decomposition and the time of the decomposition and the time of the decomposition.”

  3. To decompose is one thing, to know you are decomposing is another thing. To know that everything you have ever composed is decomposing is yet another thing, and there is another thing which is to know that the body and the breath and the thought and the thing that does the thinking and the voice that does the translating of the other voice inside the voice inside the thought inside the thing which does the thinking: to know these things are decomposing, well, it’s like making love to an incurable body that will only eat cardboard sandwiches. A Dionysian cloud is trying to assert the existence of others in my mouth. There are boils and masks and historical failures hiding behind the masks. There is a child’s mouth and it is stuffed with money. The child is bound to a chair. I see this on the ten o’clock news. There is a win, a quick win, and the child is bound to the chair waiting for the data to be calculated. Is it possible to eat myself, the child says, the moment the money is taken out of his mouth. The camera zooms in on his lips. There are tiny green specks and cultural fibroids and the camera focuses in on his eyes and inside of them is a website devoted to video clips of people who commit suicide. The time in the decomposition is indistinguishable from the erosion of the mouth. It is indistinguishable from the erosion of the dollar bill. It is indistinguishable from the verb “to sink.” We are all sinking in the mud. It is the only way to calculate our data, our bodies, our data-bodies. Our lovers are data-bodies. We need them to quantify our existence.

  4. In the beginning there was data. There was bubbling and murmuring data and later there were quantifiers of this data which was a subset of universal data and now there is either quantifying or there is faith. There must be calculation and a robust administration. There is a mathematics of decomposition. By this I mean death and the absence of time. There is a song we sing to our children. We sing it in our data palaces, we sing it to the decomposing bodies that cannot be contained by their frames, we sing it to the leaking carcasses, we sing it to the murmuring ghosts, the murmuring revolutionaries who transformed into bureaucrats once they achieved the destruction of the means of production. There is a song we sing to ourselves when we have no one to calculate our data. We sing:

  5. A ghostly day in data town we start to sink we start to drown suddenly there were starving bodies there and in ghostly data town the facts were rising everywhere.

  6. It is a problem for the child with the money in his mouth. He is tempted to exist. It is a problem for the body that eats nails and cardboard sandwiches. It is tempted to exist. It is a problem for the body that laughs at its inability to determine where one life starts and another life ends. It is a problem for the translator who translates the voices inside his own head so they can be communicated to others. A man walks into a bar and the bartender says why are you gagged, why are you choking on dollar bills. The man can’t say anything so the bartender hops over the bar and begins to pull the dollar bills out of his mouth but they keep coming and coming and finally after ten minutes of pulling dollar bills out of the man’s mouth he pulls out the man’s tongue and next there are lungs and the man’s intestines and the bartender twirls an intestine above his head like a lasso and the man who had the money in his mouth whispers I would like a vodka martini and a round for all of my friends. The bartender twirls the intestines then lassos an immigrant who just walked into the bar looking for work. The bartender captures the immigrant and forces her to wash dishes forever in a kitchen filled with steam and rodents. There is the decomposition and then there is the distribution of skin, the distribution of bones, the distribution of money, the distribution of blood, the distribution of wood and nails and cardboard sandwiches. I have to go now. I just got a text message from my lover, my data-body. My noodles have just arrived. Let me eat before my voice dies: a slaughtered pig’s death on this page.

  7. Let us conclude at the beginning. There is really nothing that makes a difference to the decomposing mouth. It rots in public and asks us to rot inside of it. There are mouths that throughout the history of words have been decomposing. Really everything is the same except the vehicle for decomposition. The train carried the Jews along the river Jordan. The African slaves were transported by helicopter along the Danube. The Jews and the Africans were pieces of meat waiting for the murmurs of the proletariat to subsume their bodies. Decomposition is a thing that decides when it is to be done. It is impossible to distribute your data to bodies when the vehicles for delivery are decomposing. But when the vehicles are not decomposing it is not impossible thus what is quantifiable is what can be composed which is the key to what can be decomposed for nothing changes except decomposition the decomposition and the alchemy of the quantification of the composition of the decomposition.

  8. And then. There is now. The stupid stupidity of tomorrow.

  Illinois

  Correlé, correlé, correlá

  por aquí, por allí, por allá,

  correlé, correlé, correlá,

  correlé que te van a matar

  VICTOR JARA

  and the bills are life or they are evaporating

  and they throw fresh bills at us when we speak or they beat us and take away our bodies

  it is private, mystical money

  they pay mystical entities to print money now

  they pay mystical entities to resurrect money now

  they pay mystical entities to eat money now

  they pay mystical entities to raise the value of rice three hundred percent

  and to scrub the remains off the bath tubs when the fathers and mothers drown themselves because they no longer know what it means to buy rice

  they throw private money at us and ask for liquid and light sweet crude and the quantifications of the murmurs of our toddlers

  they cover our bodies in silicone gel and probe us with tools made out of mercury little things made out of steel little things with lenses and data chips and there are bodies that sit far
away from our bodies and they see what’s going on in there they want to know what the value of our blood is our skin our hair the eczema cracks on our legs

  this wiggling probed body is a kind of dance party for the amount of liquid we hold in our mouths

  last night I dreamt I was on The Millionaire Matchmaker I was not the millionaire and I was not a bachelorette and I was not the matchmaker I was the space between these things the beautiful air that made possible love between ugly men and women from different tax brackets it was me who made this happen I dreamt of this and there was a grenade strapped to my beautiful eczema leg

  but there is no one there to support me when I am cornered by the stale breath of the authoritative body who wants to know how I have benefited from the outsourcing of my form and content, my mind and body, my skin, my legs, my mouth

  I do not know how to say that I have been shocked my legs have been privatized my fingers removed for austerity I don’t need my hair anymore don’t need both eyes really don’t need five pounds of body fat reduction reduction reduction innovation reduction reduction

  funny these infusions of foreign blood it’s like there’s no goddamn difference between “you” and “me” anymore

  they open the door to the theater or maybe it is an arena they store us in

  cold air comes in through the alley and the girls eating cardboard sandwiches scamper inside like rats

  the authoritative bodies hook us up to needles attached to the wall

  our bodies feel warm when they hook us up to the meds

  and they say here drink this juice it will make you want to try on designer clothing forever

  and to speak forever about television commercials (CLICHÉ) while thinking about killing white people who twist through mountains in luxury sedans to escape the lives they lead primarily on the internet

  and we do this we ride luxury sedans through imaginary hills

  and in one clip I pick up a tree trunk and throw it like a baseball at the home of a man who really loves his insurance policy

  as if it is life or deathfulness

  and then they show me a video of my father getting his hand hacked off with a saw

  and they want to know how I feel

  how do you feel little boy little boy little boy you stupid Hiroshima-Dresden-obsessed Jew

  you feel better now that your daddy’s entitled to health insurance?

  it is water we want and not juice

  but who owns the water

  it is impossible to know who owns the water

  no one can track down the bill of ownership for the water

  and where are the trucks with the bottles of water

  and the bodies crammed into them

  they are like life or evaporating words in parentheses

  not enough breath to finish the words

  a nation of words stuck in parentheses

  the words roped up like atrophied bodies

  the toddlers in my mouth the rotten bills the light sweet crude—

  I do not own my mouth

  I want to know who owns my mouth

  but it is impossible to find the papers

  they rumor my mouth is owned by a conglomeration of suits in Malaysia, Germany and Singapore

  are there Qataris are their Saudis are there Chinese who own my mouth

  I need an identifiable destination to mark on my lips

  so that when they dissolve they will go to their appropriate owners

  they split up the bodies they send them around the world

  this way no one will know who we belong to

  there is a thing called evidence and a thing called love

  I see it squirming in the village

  have you heard the one about the mother who lost her baby to the bank

  she straps a grenade to her leg, steps into the Bank of America and blows up her leg

  the customers are warned to watch out for their bodies

  before she blows up her leg

  and they run out the door (except for the suicidal ones)

  and her leg and the money go up in flames

  this is in Illinois

  (negative twenty billion!!)

  the security guards at the bank have been replaced with soldiers carrying Israeli Uzis

  the woman with the grenade strapped to her leg

  I hold her in my dreams

  she is singing a song it’s called run run they are going to kill you (or buy you)

  on her back is a tattoo of a guitarist whose hands they cut off but the tattoo is more than a tattoo it is an identity that forges in through her skin and into the blood she does not own anymore

  {walk quickly they’ll beat you and pay you and love you}

  the teller at the bank runs into her car and shuts all the windows

  she wants those who watch her

  to believe she has air conditioning

  she does not have air conditioning

  she can not afford a car with air conditioning

  it is an August afternoon in Illinois

  she turns on the ignition pulls into her garage and lets the fumes fill up

  at which point the authoritative bodies take me away

  they think I am the woman with the grenade on her leg

  but I am not the woman with the grenade on her leg

  all the women we know carry grenades on their legs when they go into the Bank of America

  it is to protect them from CEOs

  but son I’m not lazy

  I swear I will do just about anything

  for rice and blood and water

  and the hepatitis vaccine

  and to have the lice removed from my hair

  and the fleas sucked out of my skin

  FROM The Performance of Becoming Human

  Let Light Shine Out of Darkness

  I live in a body that does not have enough light in it

  For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light

  Once, I walked around my city on a dying morning and a decomposing body approached me and asked me why I had no light

  I knew this decomposing body

  All that remained of it were teeth, bits of bone, a hand

  It came to me and said: there is no light that comes out of your body

  I did not know at the time that there should have been light in my body

  It’s not that I am dead

  It’s not that I am translucent

  It’s that you cannot know you need something if you do not know it is missing

  Which is not to say that for years I did not ask for this light

  Once, I even said to the body I live with: I think I need more light in my body, but I really did not take this seriously as a need, as something I deserved to have

  I said: I think I need for something blue or green to shine from my rib cage

  Other times when I am talking about lightness I am talking about breath and space and movement

  For it is hard to move in a body that is so congested with images of mutilation

  Did you hear the one about the illegal immigrant who electrocuted his employee’s genitals? Did you hear the one about the boy in Chicago whose ear was bitten off when he crossed a border he did not know existed?

  I want to give you more room to move so I am trying to carve a space, with light, for you to walk a bit more freely

  This goes against my instincts, which are to tie you down, to tie you to me, to bind us by the wrist the belly the neck and to look directly into your mouth, to make you open your mouth and speak the vocabulary of obliteration right into your tongue your veins your blood

  I stop on a bridge over the train tracks and consider the history of the chemical-melting of my skin

  Once, when I poured a certain type of acid on my arm I swore I saw a bright yellow gas seep out of my body

  Once, my teeth glowed sick from the diseased snow they had shoved into my mouth when they wanted me to taste for myself, to bring into m
y body the sorrows of the rotten carcass economy

  Once, I dreamwrote that I found my own remains in a desert that was partially in Chile and partially in Arizona

  Was I a disappeared body, tossed out of an airplane by a bureaucrat-soldier-compatriot or was I a migrant body who died from dehydration while crossing the invisible line between one civilization and another

  I was part of a team of explorers we were searching for our own bodies

  In the desert I found my feet and I put them in a plastic bag and photographed them, cataloged them, weighed and measured them and when I was finished with the bureaucratization of my remains I lay down in the sand and asked one of my colleagues to jam a knife into my belly

  She obliged

  But when the blade entered my skin it was as if my belly were a water balloon

  Water shot into the air

  My skin ripped into hundreds of pieces and I watched as the water covered the feet of my colleagues who were here to document their disappearances and decomposition