by Roy Scranton
of all ned
s story no more
than eleven whenhe ran a
way to sea notthat far from the lisp
of ma
ma papa he too had
heard of a seam
of gold so
broad & so
wide in an ageof lust what
are we
to do but lust
let
us wed then ruth
when the ship setsme d
own on landagain and
be done i am a new
man sift the airfor enemies
of my soulthey are many sh h
hush can you not
hear the plea swe were deaf to
how tomend this i am
god s agent hereon earth our ruleis
just andwe
must butto err so far
from reasonit is a leaky tale i
recite it holds no water with
map and windrose and lamp
to see themby we set
sail crates
of portginwinebeercider
& water there were2
There are two basic conceits to this kind of writing, and three basic reading practices for approaching it. The two primary conceits of conceptual writing such as this are, first, that the ideas structuring the work as a whole are more important than the formal construction of particular phrases, sentences, sections, et cetera, and, second, that aesthetic effects are more usually found in moments of contrast, juxtaposition, disjunction, unexpected repetition, and isolated fragments than in any sense of symmetry, suspense, coherence, wholeness, order, or measure. As Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman write in their theoretical manifesto, Notes on Conceptualisms, “Conceptual writing mediates between the written object (which may or may not be a text) and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated.”3 According to Place and Fitterman, in conceptual writing “prosody shuttles between a micro attention to language and macro strategies of language, e.g., the use of source materials in reframing or mixing. The primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode.”4 What they mean is that while traditional “micro attention” strategies of close reading may be useful in particular instances, these should be balanced with a consistent attention to the work as a work in relation to its contexts—questions about who the language is for, what it is supposed to represent, who “owns” it, and how it circulates within culture.
With our sample from Zong!, for instance, we might track how the “u” phoneme/grapheme shifts from “ruin” to the close pairing “strum/lute” then to the ambivalent “sum,” in English the word sum meaning the result of addition, an accounting term, in Latin sum, pronounced “soom,” resounding back to “ruin” phonetically but looking like “strum” and meaning, of course, “I am,” then shifting through “lust,” “ruth,” “hush,” “just” and “must,” all terms resonating within a narrative of racialized slavery, the historical framework of the British legal system, and post-structuralist literary theory critical of the concept of narrative itself. At the same time, much of the work’s power, even in this moment of micro-reading, comes from attending to Zong!’s intervention as a work of language or conceptual poetry insisting on a moment of “reality” beyond language that language can never fully contain or inscribe (as Philip insists, the story cannot be told), yet constructed through the explicitly political transformation of nineteenth-century British legal language into affective representations of individual and collective suffering.
The best ways to read such a work are by skimming, free-associative close reading, and allegorical reading. Skimming provides a sense of linguistic atmosphere, a feeling of lexicon and grammar that offers a thin and mutable affective experience. Words never signify without affect, not only in their connotations but in their syntax, and skimming helps make that affective valence accessible across broad swaths of text. Free-associative close attention to specific phrases takes the text as a kind of machine for producing a reader’s own creative response, opening the text into a form of dialogue. Reading allegorically, on the other hand, means thinking about what the text means in relation to the world, and specifically what the text represents or speaks of in its coded ways. Place and Fitterman begin their manifesto with the declaration that “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing,” and define allegory as follows:
The standard features of allegory include extended metaphor, personification, parallel meanings, and narrative. Simple allegories use simple parallelisms, complex ones more profound. Other meanings exist in the allegorical “pre-text,” the cultural conditions within which the allegory is created. Allegorical writing is a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said directly, usually because of overtly repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the message. In this sense, the allegory is dependent on its reader for completion (though it usually has a transparent or literal surface). Allegory typically depends heavily on figural or image-language; Angus Fletcher’s book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode argues that this heightened sense of the visual results in stasis.5
Straight narrative reading (“reading for the story”) doesn’t work that well with such poetry, nor does formalist appreciation. Consider our sample from Zong! While the story of the Zong is marked by an allusion to the biblical tale of Cain and Abel and briefly elaborated through an individuated narrative (“ned / s story no more / than eleven when / he ran a / way to sea”), these narrative gestures scatter into the dispersed language of the poem and cannot be clearly reconstructed. There are no “characters” as such who might personify values or with whom we might sympathize. As well, many of the typical reading strategies taught in English courses—historicism, psychoanalytic reading, Marxist criticism, reading for race or gender—are often not very productive or helpful with language and conceptual poetry, because these strategies rely on formal qualities, hermeneutic depths, and thematic interests which such poetry typically disavows.
Poetry in the traditions of concrete, language, and conceptual poetics, whether the dense abstractions of J. H. Prynne or the typographic experiments of Christine Wertheim, are made within a tradition of “avant-garde”–coded art practice that takes an explicitly ideological position against three concepts fundamental to capitalist art, which is to say art as commodity production. Those fundamental concepts are identity, transmission, and pleasure. An art object as a commodity must be branded, it must be able to circulate, and it must have use value. Conversely, art objects in the modernist experimental tradition resist identity, resist circulation, and resist being entertaining or instrumental (a poem should not sell you a Coke). It is in doing just these things, of course, that they assert their value as art objects, as objects definitionally beyond the sphere of capitalist production and thus available for exploitation, thus inspiring capitalism’s future conquests by bodying forth the eternally promised desideratum of the always new. Art for art’s sake has always been capitalism’s spirit, even as its makers have always insisted that the role they are playing is capitalism’s conscience. But conceptualism knows this, and turns its own ideologies inside out with strategies that many people find difficult or disagreeable. While offering work that attacks the idea of individual identity, conceptual poets brand themselves as consumer objects. While offering work that resists reading and retransmission, they often make their work freely available. While eschewing instrumentality, they make deliberately didactic works that offer pointed ideological, political, and moral criticisms of contemporary society and art production. Beginning from the choice between aestheticized politics and politicized art offered by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Wo
rk of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the very choice we face every day in a social world wholly given over to the suicidal self-consumption of its own grotesque nihilism, certain practitioners of conceptualism have decided to insist once again that art is, necessarily, political.
Zong! is an interesting example of conceptual poetry for several reasons, not least because it operates at the intersection between Benjamin’s two choices. It is clearly politicized art, in that it manifests a critique of narrative power, institutional history, and the reproducibility of an event. At the same time, it is a work of aestheticized politics: by insisting on the traumatic unintelligibility of human sacrifice as an originary historical moment, Philip valorizes and calls into being a political community formed around that sacrifice. In Zong!, Philips works to keep alive a collective identity—a political identity—through the memorialization and consecration of the death of representative members. Hence her focus on constructing names for the murdered slaves out of Gregson v. Gilbert, names that were never recorded but which she writes into her text, e.g., “Bomani Yahya Modupe Jibowu Fayola.”6 Hence her otherwise inexplicable fictional attribution of the work’s origins to oral history: the cover of the book says the story was told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, a name Philip has invented to invoke the authority of direct physical (genetic) transmission. As critic and scholar Evie Shockley wrote in the online poetry journal Jacket2, “Zong! enacts a critique, but also effects a catharsis or, more accurately, works through a problem that lies at the intersection of the emotions, the psyche, and the soul, if such a thing can be spoken of in the twenty-first century’s secular spaces.”7 It is precisely at this intersection of mind and body, word and thing, nation and sacrifice, history and blood, that Zong! does its work as tragōidia.
Or as Philip herself writes elsewhere (in an essay titled “Wor(l)ds Interrupted”):
is zong! perhaps a ritual work masquerading as a conceptual work mirroring the act of stripping away the spirit of the african mask or carving leaving only the form the work masquerading as something else while doing another kind of work this is how african spiritual and cultural practices have survived the hostile societies of the afrospora it is how certain indigenous cultural practices survive the present day christianization and islamicization in africa
there is very little space to speak of the ritual function of poetry particularly as it relates to a work like zong! it comes out of a particular historical moment that is the kya kya kya kari basin a moment that extends into the present is resonant am tempted to say redolent with aspects of ritual and spirit i think of zong! as doing a form of soul work for those who died unmourned i think of the impossibility of ever knowing what happened the impossibility of making whole that which has been rent asunder i think of writing in the face of the yawning chasm of oblivion that was the lot of africans . . .8
The key sentence here is: “I think of zong! as doing a form of soul work for those who died unmourned.” With this, the truth of Zong! is revealed: its effort to insist on the incomprehensibility of the event does not work against identity, but insists on the event’s ontological reality beyond language. Zong! does not critique the story of the Zong, but reconstructs it, honors it, consecrates it. It is not a “not-telling” at all, we realize. Zong! performs the truth of collective identity, specifically racial identity, by ritually reenacting a moment of violence as a sacred origin. It turns a murder into a sacrifice. It is a gospel.
4. Desecration
I woke the morning after Victory Day to find Moscow silent and seemingly empty, haunted now by the absences of the teeming crowds, late drunken celebrants, and uniform-clad kids who had filled the streets the day before, as the day before had been haunted by great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers seventy years dead. On my morning run, I weaved through unmanned metal detectors guarding entrances to vacant plazas. Back at the university dormitory where I was staying, the campus was deadly silent. I had dinner plans to meet a friend of a colleague, a German historian working on the question of how Ukrainians in the 1950s remembered World War II, and took advantage of the quiet morning to work on my presentation for the conference. In the afternoon, I went out to a nearby Coffee House, a Moscow chain, for a cappuccino, one of the few things I could reliably depend on being able to order without confusion.
While I sat outside in the glorious May sun sipping my foamed milk, I checked in on Facebook and scrolled through my Twitter feed. I soon found a string of tweets posting a story from the London Review of Books by Seymour Hersh. It was a story about a CIA coverup, Obama administration lies, the construction of narratives, and the need to define collective identity against an excluded other. It was a story about Osama bin Laden. It was a story about a body.
Hersh’s basic story was that the Obama administration constructed most of its narrative about the Osama bin Laden raid out of lies in order to obscure and efface the facts of the case. Hersh argues that what really happened in the Osama bin Laden raid was not at all like how it was portrayed. Whereas the government claimed to have found bin Laden through interrogation and spycraft, Hersh’s informants say bin Laden was being held by the Pakistani secret police in Abbottabad and someone connected with the Pakistani secret police told the US about this fact. Whereas the US government claimed to have sent a highly secretive special-operations team into hostile territory without the knowledge or permission of the Pakistani government, to capture bin Laden if possible or in the last resort to kill him, Hersh’s informants say that the US government worked in collusion with Pakistan’s, which made sure bin Laden was left unguarded the night of the raid, and that there was never any question of capture, that the American SEALs went in that night to commit state murder. Finally, whereas the US government claimed to have flown bin Laden’s body out to sea, where it was properly buried in accordance with Islamic ritual, Hersh’s informants say that in fact bin Laden was dumped unceremoniously out of a helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains. According to Hersh’s story, the Obama administration made up its cover story on the fly to protect the Pakistani secret police and American-Pakistani relations and to glorify American spycraft and military heroism.
I read Seymour Hersh’s troubled and troubling account with wonder but no surprise, with skepticism about Hersh’s reliance on so few sources but no faith in the official narratives as they were told, and with a feeling of disappointment and dread that had become familiar over the past decade as revelation after revelation of US government torture, surveillance, assassination, bald-faced lies, illegal aggression, and bad faith exploded into the public sphere like so many canisters of toxic gas, spreading neither clarity nor accountability but only nausea, moral poison, and obscurity. I knew that like Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, Seymour Hersh would be pilloried in the mainstream press and probably targeted by the Obama administration, his report would be attacked ad hominem by media jackals questioning Hersh’s character, integrity, and sanity rather than dealing with the substantive issues raised, and the report would be dismissed as a scandalous mire of hearsay rather than taken seriously as a piece of investigative reporting by the same journalist who broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Hersh and his report would be derided, then forgotten, much like the other numerous revelations of government incompetence, skullduggery, and evil we’ve been granted since 9/11 and forgotten with a vengeance, since Hersh wasn’t only telling Americans a disagreeable truth (that our leaders and high officials are lying buffoons) but also taking away from us one of the few sacred symbols of national pride we had managed to salvage from more than a decade of frustrated military adventurism: the mutilated body of our superhuman enemy, Osama bin Laden.
I remember when the story broke that bin Laden had been killed. College students all over the country joined together to shoot off fireworks, sing patriotic songs, and wave American flags. Fans at sporting events burst into chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Major broadcast networks interrupt
ed their scheduled programs with live feeds of celebrants screaming and hooting in Times Square, near the ruins of the World Trade Center, and outside the White House. For a brief, blazing moment, a nation usually defined by bitter political feuding, racial strife, and brazen class inequality came together to celebrate its unity over the dead body of an Arab. Whether the moment was glorious or grotesque depends, I suppose, on your point of view. Ismail Haniyeh, for example, a senior leader of Hamas and at the time the elected prime minister of the Gaza Strip, told reporters: “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood.”9
Whatever you thought about the war in Iraq, then coming to a close after eight years of mistakes, lies, profiteering, and blood, or the war in Afghanistan, a grim confusion then in the midst of an ambiguous drawdown, and whether or not you agreed that the appropriate response to the news was a crass display of idiotic jingoism, most Americans would agree that bin Laden’s death was a good thing, and most Americans would feel that his killing was a kind of justice putting paid the crime of the 9/11 attacks. As the mythology around the bin Laden killing was spun, spun, and glammed up by talking heads, government officials, cryptofascists, and Hollywood, the highly trained, prodigiously equipped and supported assassins sent in by the US to murder a crippled, diabetic, middle-aged man came to be portrayed more and more as stoic knights in holy armor, cyborg cowboy warriors fighting evil in the demonic shadows of the desert night. From the Riefenstahlish film Zero Dark Thirty to Lea Carpenter’s literary adoration of masculine power Eleven Days, American culture makers told and retold the moment’s narrative of American glory, a story of white techno-righteousness overcoming the brown-faced devil and his heathen legions.
For Seymour Hersh to then come along and say that bin Laden was trapped, unguarded, unarmed, and handed over to the SEALs for slaughter, for him to tell a story wherein it wasn’t American prowess that conquered the devil but rather the devil’s own weakness, for him to remind us that Osama bin Laden wasn’t a devil at all but a man, in a world of men and women, and that the men who killed him were only men as well, and for him to assert that we didn’t give our enemy a proper burial but treated him with the savagery and disrespect for human life that we insisted were the very essence of his character, the very qualities that distinguished him from us, well—Hersh was desecrating a holy truth.