D.S. Marriott: Incognegro
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2006; paperback,
112pp, £9.99/US$15.95; isbn 9781844712618)
It may come as a surprise to many readers
to learn that Incognegro is D.S.Marriott's first full-length
collection, given that he has been publishing small pamphlets and
broadsheets since the mid-eighties. This book can be thought of
as an authoritative selection of his output to date, and contains
a number of radical revisions of previously familiar poems (a few
poems retain little more than their titles in common with earlier
versions) as well as many deliberate omissions. Though
always a highly distinctive, often auratic voice, Marriott's earlier
output seemed to align itself with the 'Cambridge' poets
(this collection is dedicated to Andrew Crozier), and the poetry
appeared only implicitly preoccupied with questions of racial difference
or black inheritance/disinheritance. John Wilkinson could report
in a review of the pamphlet Lative which appeared in Fragmente (1993)
that 'knowledgeable readers . . . have been heard to deplore
the lack of any trace of black identity in his verse.' More
recent poems have more overtly taken up issues of black cultural
history in the UK and in the US (where Marriott now spends much
of his time), and in the intervening years Marriott has produced
an academic study entitled On
Black Men which sees all black acts as caught up within a reaction
formation to a racist iconography submerged in the collective unconscious.
Is it a price of such rigour that any object of analysis must appear
completely self-entrapped? Poetry may be better equipped to dream
through but out of trauma and as such offer a more negotiable set
of traces even where no formal solution can be voiced. These poems
seem bent on creatively challenging the ways in which blackness
can be framed, limited or represented. The collection's title
(which should not be too narrowly identified with the eponymous
poem in the book) is not the poet's own neologism, but is Afro-American
slang for a person of African descent who doesn't acknowledge their
own heritage, and carries with it connotations of a random or unrecognisable
hybrid culture, or even a resistance to that descent. It can also
be read as a white behaving like a black, though a more immediate
white equivalent exists with the word 'wigga' which is used
in 'Ice-Cold' ('and
wigga thomas' crazy ass / is mind-whipped by the waves'),
a poem which chimes black oppression and forced exile with an internal
ice ('colder, much, than the iron bars holding them'). Metaphors
of racial difference pervade this poetry, and although the austerity
of the writing forbids any consoling or aestheticising self-irony,
and so steers close to counter-essentialism, it is not reductive:
the element of 'cognition' also hinted at within the book's
title signals a persistent preoccupation with matters of truth,
knowledge, naming, nobility, sacrifice and ignorance within which
the strife of black/white imagery remains more largely inscribed,
shadowing a contaminated universality but glimmering with never
wholly denatured horizons:
'among white images dining on catatonic
nigger dolls
as we fade with the small hours, return with the dark night,
formidable friends' ('For Invisible Black Vampyres')
'The whole is full of light and obscure
night
together, both equal, since neither is for sake
of courtesy, and neither is for sake of snow.' ('The Steerage')
'and why this monumental impossible
light, black again?' ('Names of the Fathers')
'Watching the sun sink into the soulful
dusk,
and snow falling on the Avenue.' ('Falling Snow')
This dark/light imagery can also modulate
through less symmetrical gradations, so that blinded differences play
off their mutual alienation in terms of the heavens or the earth:
'We could sleep together again but
we won't,
colours become blue, a chaos of the polestar and our darksightedness;' ('Shot')
'memories of myself and the people
I have loved,
without greenness in nature, or greenleaf to behold' ('To
a Summer Fire')
For this reader, it is the poems derived from the 1992 Lative pamphlet
which remain the intriguing core of the present collection. The
title figures Marriott's fascination with philological and classical
culture: what are the entrances and exits of western high culture,
what are the modes of staying in or being locked out, or what is
it to sound out any common territory already become alien, but
which cannot itself be appropriated in any programme of subversion
without a strongly rivalling re-assimilation? The betrayals of
high culture as roads to empowerment are Marriott's way in, but
they also represent the ambivalence of his own participation, selective
but not freely selective: blackness amid a global diaspora is already
spaced out by white verticals, not simply as a false universalism
but as truths however self-subjugating or corrupt less subject to any
easy or total displacement of their already hybrid burdens. This predicament
adds a further weight to such restlessly speculative poems as 'The
Wandering' or 'The
Binding'. The term 'lative' evokes issues of
goal and location, belonging to a class of 'local' case endings
which also include the locative and the separative.
'A Disputation on Pentecost' when it first
appeared was notable for its ceremonious, auratic language, full of philological
memorialising, and seemed to emanate more from the world of Geoffrey
Hill than the received thesaurus of protest doled out to black poets.
The poem sounds like the dramatising of the voice of some beleaguered
medieval hermit or wandering liturgical voice with its anguished-familiar
address to a still-trusted father figure:
Father, kindled fires are no memorial being human:
nor the sower sown: remiss harmonies are three-pointed stars;
In the poem as it appears now, the plangent bisyllable
of 'father' is
replaced by the crisper 'Max', a reference to the East Anglian-based
German writer W. G. Sebald and his book The Rings of Saturn in
particular, with its regionalisation of East Anglia as negotiating
both sides of the North Sea or 'German Ocean'. Sebald's
concern for social and ethical marginality is now addressed by
an ethnic marginality:
'Max, I am leaving today. Don't forget me.
Outside, everybody's shouting . . .
as I turn to you once more, and vaunt the good way;'
In the revised version there is a greater
assimilation of what the poet (in private correspondence) has called
'the contamination of the contemporary', so that the 'auratic
debate' between two writers, with their different takes on what
is contributed and what played out in matters of distance and separation
is worked through in leaner terms of a contingent, glancing address,
recognising the process of writing poetry itself as an enabling
frame by which the sense of aura itself reproduces the mass contentions
of modern culture. Here blackness might hover over a catastrophe of
being, while a darkened sight may actually get to see further than
deception or illusion, opening a way to sacrifice as a viable mode of
risk or decision.
'Max, here is no consummation, there no return.
we are in exile from the pity,
in utter isolation from the flesh of our fathers' loves.'
Though counter-sacral, trails of ritual complexity linger within
such a numinous leave-taking of presences: only the presences themselves
confer the power of an active abandonment, so that 'from the pity' begs
to be understood in a strong sense of agency, and the patrilineal privilege
of 'our fathers' loves' is a complicitly racial and
maternal fleshly naming of the love-objects.
A number of relatively more recent poems like 'Herons'
and 'Notebook of a Return' include doubled-columned prose sections, where
the eye compulsively skips across the page breaking the linear sequence
(as surely intended). Though opposed to any oracular privilege, it
still retains the solemn ethos of a proof-text or sacred writing:
The blacks say silence will be
our last witness as we sail into
nothing. Not thunderstorms or
tempests, but a sound of incom-
pleteness strange and reawaken-
ing on the rim of the ear.
The prose's own justified rim breaks up (perhaps
inviting some sort of twist) the word 'incompleteness' in
what is no lack of formal resource: whatever happens to 'incompleteness' is
not more enacted than the stretching out of 'reawakening' across
the line of another turn. The opening line hints at a more radical
reversibility: 'Silence
says blackness will be our last witness . . . '
This is a collection which requires continual rereading and the patience
to follow up unfamiliar or compressed allusions, as material in one poem
is modified or reassembled in another, amid a palimpsest of earlier survivals
and underpinnings from within each individual text, so that the poetry's
speciation of exile is also a matter of its own internal separations
from itself, with sudden juxtapositions of bleak but full-bodied survivals
from earlier textual states. At times the language invests in a
violence to the point of high ritual glut, offering us, rather like the
stage of a Jacobean tragedy, a language no longer the pure representation
of action but a prolonged internalisation of the bitter stroke. At
which point the language can no longer remit action, but retains immemorial
injury as a repressed tradition voicing a cry opposed to its discursive
translations within cultural memory.
Is there any possibility of redress in terms of aesthetic
or spiritual restitution in this work? Might it introduce a wider
cultural and so shareable predicament or is it locked up in the
supercharge of an intransigent fate already denied any ontological
status? Though Marriott's poetry certainly offers us no hope of
any 'normative' reclamation
in terms of what it can tell us it knows, it constantly moves us
out to the hinterlands of what it does not yet know or can never
know again: a recurrent imagery of rain, sea, ice, and snow abounds
in these poems (perhaps derived from Celan via the earlier work of J.H.
Prynne) which does keep open the possibility of an invocation from
within the human trammel of injury towards a reserve of the non-human
not simply functioning as identity projection or instrumental imagery.
Lacking this, historical injury would remain not just strictly incorrigible
but exactly reproducible within a closed transmission of counter-purity.
This may be what the generously contaminated hieratic rhetoric of Marriott's
poetry leads us to hope can be diverted though not allowed to return
to invisibility, within a violence which is not a violence of repetition:
'Gravitating about it to this ground,
gelid flights teem white and black, grey and brown;
in whose salient air all our soliloquies meet,
are censored, and restored as constancies
for much that lies dead in us the dead lie round in kindness'
('The Binding')
Copyright © Peter Larkin, 2006.
All quotations are copyright © D.S.
Marriott, 2006.
